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KickStarter Xenonauts - XCOM-like set during the Cold War

ArchAngel

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Bought this game last week. It's a cool remake but i don't like certain features. I can't believe the fucked up psionic system. The dev wants the player to drop all weapons every round? What drugs does he take?
And the other thing is the railroading. You're expected to play the game a very certain way or you will be broke, i.e. fast radar bases and fast air superiority. No other way possible.

Is there a 100% safe way to capture a bigger ship? Those fucking aliens drop grenades down the teleporters, when i gather my men there. Don't know how i can counter this shit.
You have two shield guys with lots of AP and good reaction score. You make sure to send them first to scout. Always scout with one guy ahead while having others behind in groups.

Psi works in a way that closer you are to the Psi dude easier they can control you. It is pretty nasty. You are not supposed to drop the weapons, just don't play missions with Psi race. Just bomb them from sky and do land missions with others. Use tanks for Base missions if they got Psi base commander. YOu cna usually get your tank all the way to last room.
 

Jarpie

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How representative is this review of Xenonauts?

from steam:
First off, air combat is great - I mean, finally - this has always been a very important part of these games and it irked me that XCOM 2012 pretty much ignored it. Here it's way more important, plays better, and has a much better consequence spiral.

I wanted to like this game - I have hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in the original X-COM games. I've finished TFTD on superhuman ironman. I've played a ballistics only UFO Defense... I even made my way through XCOM Interceptor...

♥♥♥♥ this game though - and for one simple reason - the Aliens always know where you are. And this isn't the X-COM: EU type of alien squadsight where if they see one troop, they can see all your troops. This is where if you are within range of an alien, even one that's never looked outside the UFO, it triggers a special AI. This is the kind where if you have a wall between you and an alien, the alien will be facing you through the wall.

Remember how in TFTD there would be those little closets where aliens would get stuck because of a pathing bug? And to kill that last alien you'd have to either eat up its reaction fire with rookies or blow through the walls from another direction? Well, this is half of the aliens in this game. And you can't blow through the walls. UFO breaches, depending on the layout, are either brutal or tedious. Most of the time the aliens will just sit behind the door in their command center, full TUs, waiting to reaction fire as soon as you make a move. And that's nothing compared to alien base assaults.

Jesus effing Christ - the beginning of the assault are fun - about a third of the aliens on the map will make their way to the LZ and try to push you out. The next phase is classic XCOM - carefully make your way to the control room, removing opposition as you go. The last phase is just mind-numbing tedium - 1/3 of the aliens in the base are sitting in a single room, barely moving so they can keep their TU high for reaction fire. Problem is that there's something like a 60% chance that if they hit your fully armored guys, they will kill you in one hit. They, on the other hand - take 3-5 hits, on average to take out. Now, add in the lovely 'Dread' effect and half your team will have 30% of their TUs removed. Just 'cause. It's like they combined the worst parts of all the XCOM games - Alien PSI spam, Lobstermen Bullet Sponges, XCOM 2012 projectile/cover dynamics, Apocalypse AI camping - and they put it all into a single room.

Then we can talk about LOS issues - they are everywhere. The number of times I have gotten shot (or have shot) through a wall is ridiculous. Or aliens shooting through solid obstacles from the fog of war. Or sitting in the middle of a roof and having an alien along the wall of the building be able to hit me. How about trying to throw a grenade over a knee-hgh wall, only to realize that you don't *throw* grenades so much as you fire them in a direct line from your chest.

Moving past the map issues, the way ballistics work is just broken. In the original X-COM, you shoot a bullet, it will fly in a straight line until it hits something (Wall, scenery, alien, back of your team mate's head) or it goes off the map. It's simple, it worked - your accuracy percentage was your chance to hit a target at 20 tiles, that accuracy determined the size of the cone the bullets leaving your weapon would travel. The game didn't care what you were shooting at, just put the bullets in that cone and they did what they did - whether it was boring a hole through a house or taking down a floater. Here, you have a) a chance you'll hit the alien (XCOM 2012) and b) a chance to hit anything in the way. (XCOM 94)

Let's say that you're shooting at an enemy with a LMG. There's a bale of hay between you and the enemy, but you know that your LMG can shoot down that hay bale if you get 2-3 shots into it. So, you force target the alien and the first 3 rounds of your 10 round burst do indeed destroy the obstacle between you and the bad guy. You expect to see the 7 remaining bullets proceed to kill or even just supress the alien on the other side. Unfortunately, the remaining 7 rounds just *poof* disappear, stopping where the hay bale used to be because that chance to hit an alien is determined before the first shot is made. That's the XCOM 2012 binary hit / miss calculation ♥♥♥♥ing everything up. Even if you have a clear path between you and the alien, the bullet will still disappear at the alien's square and you'll get a *miss* text pop up over the alien's head. It won't continue past them on these occasions, possibly hitting the explosive barrels on the tile directly behind them, just another *poof*. That game said you had 95% chance to hit that alien, and even if your bullet had perfect dead-center trajectory, that 5% will kick in and eat that bullet.
 

sser

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He's correct in that many aliens will procedurally wander around looking for combat while a small group will hole up and you'll have to root them out. You'd still get a few aliens wandering around inside the ship, but ultimately the ship-captain and his little retinue of officers would usually stay in the control room. Whether or not that's fun is pretty subjective. I didn't think that was all that different from the original X-Com, personally. The real issue is that not all terrain is destructible. X-Com at least let you burst into the sides of UFO's, but Xenonauts inexplicably and unbelievably runs a 2D waitressing game for an engine so it couldn't handle stuff like that.

I'm not quite sure on his ballistics talk, though. Didn't personally see any of that.

LOS is an issue at times. It's always going to be an issue with square grids. I didn't think there was anything grievous with Xenonaut's handling of it compared to other games.
 

Ironmonk

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I don't remember exactly which mod, but it included explosives so you could breach the hull... if I'm not mistaken, it was included on the Community Edition.
 

ArchAngel

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That review is overreacting. I did notice a bit of line of sight issues and that is it. I never had problems breaching ships. When you learn to have two guys with shields and good reaction score and keep them in front to eat fire breaching is not hard.

Two things that really irritated me was how Psi works and how you play the game with low number of troops compared to Open Xcom. Enemy commanders can take over any of your guys, those guys act immediately and you got no defense vs it because your troops cannot train for PSI and cannot train for PSI defense.
Low number of troops makes it so losing 2-3 makes some missions already super hard while at some times your troops don't have OP shit like in new Xcom. So you cannot have 4-6 rookies to scout for you that you don't care if they live or don't but must play superslow each mission saving TU for reaction fire and that is boring and takes forever. Think of how nuXcom before EW with Meld was played but worse.

Also unlike Open Xcom you don't swim in money for a very long time and losing troops hurts financially.
 
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The aliens definitely know where you are if you are in close range to them. When breaching UFOs you'll have instances where you can skip 50 turns without an alien poking its head out, then you move 1 square forward and the next turn the alien opens the door to shoot you. It's somewhat counterbalanced by all of the extra tools you have (shotguns/pistols give a huge bonus to reacting so that you can always get the first shot, flashbangs and suppression fuck up aliens good and prevent reaction, shields provide lots and totally OP amounts of buffer health for normal/alien varieties respectively, combine all 3 to win). Because of this you'll quickly learn a kind of "script" to invade most of the UFOs by that removes most of the danger.

Base Assaults are incredibly easy if you are walking around in power armor with LMGs. Otherwise they are a challenge.

He's right that HP is fairly bloated at higher difficulties. It's not a huge deal with most enemy types but one very specific type gets a high amount of percentile regeneration which makes the HP bloat ridiculous when you are facing the top-rank aliens all behind strong cover.

LoS issues are weird. There's definitely some issue with elevations acting like you wouldn't expect them, but at least there's no seeing through wall bugs that I've noticed. There is an explicit feature that when next to a wall you'll have a better FoV around the wall and be able to shoot oncoming enemies before they can shoot you.

I've not noticed his issue bullets disappearing. You can totally fire at an enemy behind cover that greatly reduces your chance to hit, destroy the cover, then the rest of the shots nail his bitch ass down. This is pretty much what late game power armor LMGs do, just run around leveling things.
 

Jarpie

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Bought Xenonauts for five bucks, the horrible eyesight of the soldiers is pissing me off.
 

ArchAngel

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I guess I get to be the first one to post this awesome news: http://www.xenonauts2.com/
GOLDHAWK INTERACTIVE CONFIRMS XENONAUTS 2


Xenonauts 2 entered full production at the start of this year and is currently slated for a 2017 release.

We are planning a full announcement for the game in the next couple of months that will be complete with a website, concept art, the universe lore and our full vision for the gameplay. However the excitement created by the imminent release of XCOM 2 has also generated interest around our plans for the Xenonauts franchise, so we felt this was a good moment for us to confirm that we are working on a sequel and release a few high-level details about the game.

Xenonauts 2 will not be a chronological sequel, rather it will cover similar events taking place in an alternate timeline – an alien invasion occurring in a Cold War-era Earth. This means humanity does not start with the advanced alien technology unlocked in the first game, and we also have the freedom to subtly alter the story, setting and enemies in order to make a more interesting sequel.

We will cover our planned gameplay changes in more detail in our full announcement, but we have these broad areas of focus:

  • Game Engine – using Unity3D will give us a much more capable platform for development than our previous engine, so expect fewer bugs, improved performance, better modding support, etc
  • 3D Graphics – moving from 2D sprites to 3D graphics will improve visual fidelity, but will also be valuable for gameplay – it allows for things like rotating cameras, vastly improved animation, physics objects, accurate projectile tracking, etc
  • Ground Combat – we will be retaining the Time Unit combat system, and will enhance the interface and giving the player additional tactical options: destructible UFOs, better use of terrain verticality, human psionics, etc
  • Geoscape – we want to add a lot more strategic choice for the player with regards to the research tree and how they choose to expand their organisation (there was definitely too much strategic railroading in the first Xenonauts)
  • Air Combat – redesigned to be turn-based and to feature larger numbers of combatants, with the goal of making it a less frequent occurrence but more tactically involved when it does happen
  • Aliens – we are visually and mechanically redesigning all of the enemies, and creating a more intelligent and challenging foe by developing gameplay systems that allow the aliens to respond and adapt to your tactics and technology
Some of the issues in the original game were caused by our lack of experience / lack of early funding, whereas others were caused by the constraints remaining faithful to the design of a game dating back to 1994. The experience and income we have accumulated from the development of Xenonauts mean that we can make a sequel that significantly improves and expands on the first game – and this time we can be more innovative than before.

The community that came together around Xenonauts was an invaluable asset through the development process and we will be making every effort to keep them involved with the sequel. An Early Access phase will allow players to snag the game at a discount and shape the development process with their suggestions and feedback on the alpha builds, but this will probably come a little later than it did for the first game – people expect more from Early Access games these days! Anyway, we’ll give more details about our plans when we put out the full announcement for Xenonauts 2.

Thanks for reading – if you are interested in hearing about Xenonauts 2 when it is announced, please join our mailing list below!
 

Darth Roxor

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Game Engine – using Unity3D will give us a much more capable platform for development

borealesad.jpg


so expect fewer bugs, improved performance

szzANHn.gif
 
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This could be the first and only time I will be ecstatic over a developer switching to Unity. Even that will be superior to the joke engine they were using before.
 

LESS T_T

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Quotable quote from the quotable figure:

"Xenonauts, however, I think it's really, probably the only game since the original X-Com that is really tried to recreate, I guess, the gameplay of the original X-Com. [...] I would recommend it if you haven't played it. It's worth try." - Julian Gollop
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
But in all honesty, Xenonauts copied the gameplay, it didn't recreate it. Its basically an X-COM clone with better sprites and a couple of new features here and there.
Not that that is bad of course.
 
Self-Ejected

Ulminati

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Also new air combat, new weapon type and suppression mechanic.

In general, the geoscape felt a lot different in xnauts. Multiple UFOs and having to let some of them go was a rarity in x-com but the norm in xnauts.

It's hard to recreate the original x-com gameplay without copying a lot of it :p
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yeah and really the game's awesome, no question about that but I do hope that eg Gollop in his new game will try a couple of new things and not just stick to the successful formula!
 

ArchAngel

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Yeah and really the game's awesome, no question about that but I do hope that eg Gollop in his new game will try a couple of new things and not just stick to the successful formula!
New things like pod system, 2 action system, no inventory? Things like that?

Or even you are one of the idiots that think PoE improved upon IE formula by their "new things".
 

oneself

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Yeah and really the game's awesome, no question about that but I do hope that eg Gollop in his new game will try a couple of new things and not just stick to the successful formula!
New things like pod system, 2 action system, no inventory? Things like that?

Or even you are one of the idiots that think PoE improved upon IE formula by their "new things".

Nah bring on JA1.13 combat system. Let me crab move backward while looking forward.
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yeah and really the game's awesome, no question about that but I do hope that eg Gollop in his new game will try a couple of new things and not just stick to the successful formula!
New things like pod system, 2 action system, no inventory? Things like that?

Or even you are one of the idiots that think PoE improved upon IE formula by their "new things".

Nah bring on JA1.13 combat system. Let me crab move backward while looking forward.
I don't know what "new things" I would like exactly..but I would like something new though. Thankfully I only pay to play not to think of stuff too :p

But indeed a more JA2 approach for example would be perfect
 

GarfunkeL

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Insert clever insult here
Ability to roll sideways while prone.

Ability to take a side-step while keeping your weapon aimed ahead.

Ability to enter/exit through broken windows.

Ability to climb to a roof and fall down if shot.

Ability to aim at different body parts - head/torso/legs is enough - and having it actually have an effect.

Ability to sneak, walk and run.

Ability to spray bullets at an area instead of aiming at a point and this actually having a suppressive effect at all characters in the vicinity.

That would be a good start.
 

Mazisky

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Also, decent visuals. There are lot of 2d low budget or old isometric games that look better than Xenonauts
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yup yup all good points. I also would like some "spicing up" of the strategic Layer (not sure how though) and maybe ... some randomization/variation in reasearch.

In all these games I find that after some playthroughs I tend to pick research kind of automatically. And that affects how you play ie that research needs this guy captured so O do that first etc etc

One of the few things that I believe were really good ideas in nuXCOM 2 were the experimental stuff where you'd get random results every time. Of course it was implemented in a very gamey way but that idea could be expanded upon
 
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Ulminati

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At the start of every game, each Alien race is assigned one special doodad from a pool of 4-5 per race. The others won't appear, and thus can't be researched. Have a couple of follow-up techs requiring one of several doodads to reach. So if the sectoids have doodad A, B or D, you get access to the gun that is strong at close range in an AoE. If they have doodad C, E or F, you get the sniper rifle that is good vs heavy armour. That'll shuffle your tech tree for you.
 

Konjad

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Guys, I need help, because the game is too complex for my simple mind.

1) How do you stun an alien? My objective is to capture an alien, but I see no way of doing so. I don't think I am able to equip my happy group with appropriate weapons.
2) How do I tell my soldier to turn around while remaining on the same tile? I've completed a lot of missions, tried various mouse movements and clicks, pushed everything on my keyboard and could find no option to do that...
 
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Guys, I need help, because the game is too complex for my simple mind.

1) How do you stun an alien? My objective is to capture an alien, but I see no way of doing so. I don't think I am able to equip my happy group with appropriate weapons.
2) How do I tell my soldier to turn around while remaining on the same tile? I've completed a lot of missions, tried various mouse movements and clicks, pushed everything on my keyboard and could find no option to do that...
1) Stun batons & Gas grenades. Or if you haven't researched them, multiple Flash-bangs to the face.
2) R-click to look in direction of mouse cursor.


Cost for my help will be half a sack of potatoes, or the equivalent in brofists.
 

Konjad

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EVERYTHING in this game is crappy. The first jarring thing is air combat. While in theory very good, it's just too bugged. About 5-10% of my air fights end up in my and enemy aircrafts circling around each other forever at the same spot, and if I try to move my plane it's an obvious suicide, so I can either do that or alt+F4. Other than this annoyance air combat is fine as it is, however, it's much better to just hit autoresolve and spare yourself some irritation from time to time.

The next extremely annoying thing is a field of vision of soldiers. It seems they are are incredibly shortsighted to a point they can't see anything over 10 meters away and miss targets that are five meters away by fvkking miles. The best tactic is to run at enemies to stand one meter away from them as in melee fight and then shoot them because otherwise your dvmb feggit t4rded soldier will miss or even perhaps kill one of the other squad members shooting in a wrong direction by a 90 degrees. In addition, while the player is walking around the maps almost blindly, aliens always know where the player's units are. Even if they are on the other side of the map they already see you. So skreew you if you wanted to use a short vision against the enemy.

The next thing is that aliens just love "camping". A bunch of them will just sit in their aircraft with a closed door (so far I did not find a way to just blow upthe whole aircrafts with those t4rrds inside) and wait for you. If you run a soldier over there, they will murder him and close the door. In consequence you just put a bunch of soldiers around the door, run with one tw4t through the fvkken door and get him shredded due to aliens' reaction fire and then shoot everything inside with the rest of the squad. Every fight same tactics. It's repetitive and boring.

While your guys can't shoot anything 5 meters away, aliens seem to have better aim, but that's not even very noticeable. What is very noticeable is that sometimes they shoot from twice your vision or through walls which are impenetrable for your guys. Ultimate trolls.

It's also funny to see a fully armored combat vehicle to explode into pieces after a "bullet" from the enemy's gun hits it. It looks like a tank exploding after being shot by a gun. Why, what I don't even... either don't put such vehicles in the game if they seem too powerful or make them very expensive, but why put such a vehicle only to be as easily destroyed as a random soldier? Especially when the vehicle takes 6 slots, meaning you could put 6 soldiers on its place? Sure, it has a very powerful gun, but so what if it gets destroyed withing a few rounds.

The game also crashes like crazy on Linux. Loading new map... crash. Air combat... crash. New round... crash.


I do not recommend this game to anyone. It's a waste of money, time and nerves. If you like old XCOM/UFO, then just play them or go ahead with the modern casualized version that is XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within, which is still a great game on its own. Try out the Long War for more fun. But for your own good stay the heck away from a tvrrd that is Xenonauts. I wasted money that would buy me a few sacks of potatoes or some burgers, do not make the same mistake.
 

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