Xenonauts 2 - December 2024 Update

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A development update for Xenonauts 2:

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Xenonauts 2 December 2024 Update!

It's the end of the year and time for our monthly Xenonauts 2 development update. A fairly quick one this time, though, as I'm currently on holiday!

Milestone 5 Release:
The biggest news this month is that we released the initial Milestone 5 prototype on the Experimental branch on the 13th December. Although we did a lot of internal testing prior to releasing the prototype, it still ended up being very unstable (probably because we were still adding new features right up until release).

As the studio closed for Christmas on the 20th Dec, we then worked long hours to try and get the prototype into a more stable state before the holidays. After five hotfixes (including a festive Christmas Eve update) we managed to deal with most of the critical issues, leaving the prototype in much better shape. However, we're already aware of a number of bugs that we need to look at in January.

We'll also be adding a lot more content to Milestone 5 next month - as mentioned in previous updates, the initial prototype contains quite a lot of placeholder assets that we need to finish or replace before Milestone 5 is released on the standard branches.

Thanks once again to everyone who has taken the time to report bugs or give us feedback. If anyone wants to offer further thoughts, please do!
UFO Delegation:
One change in Milestone 5 proved controversial, which was the "UFO Delegation" feature. Basically, this is triggered after completing two Crash Sites of a particular UFO type, and it gives you a permanent monthly funding increase - but also imposes an Operations Point cost if you complete further Crash Site missions of that particular UFO type (there is a lore justification for this, but for the sake of brevity I won't explain it here).

We introduced this change because the player shoots down a lot of UFOs during the course of the game, and unfortunately there's two opposing (but equally valid) playstyles regarding the Crash Sites produced. The first group of players will happily fight every single tactical mission that spawns on the Geoscape, which can easily be 30+ Crash Sites over the course of a single campaign. The second group of players is happy to fight one or two Crash Sites of a particular UFO type to see the new content and unlock the associated research, but find it repetitive to do more than that.

It's extremely difficult to balance the game to account for both these playstyles, as it either ends up too easy for the people who like to complete every Crash Site (as they have way too much money / resources) or too tedious and grindy for the people who prefer to complete only one or two per UFO (as they're forced to complete every crash site to avoid money / resource shortages).

The delegation system was our attempt to support both sides by reducing the potential rewards for fighting lots of identical Crash Sites - players can still do it if they choose, but they gain less of an advantage than they did previously.

We've already listened to community feedback on this point (the Operations Point cost was previously a Panic penalty) and we'll continue to do so. Much like we added options for people who wanted to disable turn timers on tactical missions, if necessary we're prepared to add an optional "extended" mode that fully removes delegation and is balanced around the player completing every Crash Site.

However, this won't be possible until the game balance for the "normal" campaign is locked for final release in Milestone 6, as keeping an additional game mode updated while balance is still in flux would take up lots of development time.

So if you see people getting upset about this topic, please point them at this post. I think most people will find the new system an improvement overall, but we'll continue to support those who would prefer to play without it.

Conclusion:
That's everything from me. The first of us will be back at work on Thursday and we'll be back to full strength on Monday 6th, so expect the patches and updates for Milestone 5 to resume next week.

I'd like to close by thanking everyone for your support during 2024 - this game genuinely wouldn't be possible without our community. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and have a happy New Year!