We are back at it boys! It’s time for round three of the Xenonauts 2 Early Access Beta. The game is now feature complete according to the developers. We have also entered milestone 2, which has extended Xenonauts 2 in several ways. I’m a bit unsure about the 180-day limit since I haven’t reached that far yet in my current playthrough. Hopefully, that block is now also gone.
What is new, you might ask, well, I will explain my good sir. One of my main issues in the last article regarding Xenonauts 2 has been fixed. The campaign pacing was way too fast. Now the early-game has increased considerably. You will have to fight the Cleaners a wee bit longer, which makes them a larger part of the game, and also smoothest out the early progression.
The sub-machine gun used by the Cleaners is now a weapon you can capture after successful missions – if you haven’t blown them all up, that is. It’s lighter than the rifle but does less damage. Good for recon units, perhaps? Armors have been changed to include a heavy and a light variant, instead of this being part of the module system. The heavier armor is unsurprisingly heavy (takes more time-units to wear) but increases the armor rating. It also gives you a penalty for aiming. The light version has no penalties at all, except that you will go out into battle with less protection. Don’t come complaining when your favorite soldier ends up with a smoking two-diameter wide hole in his chest, just because you wanted those three-plus points in accuracy!
When it comes to the air aspect, there have been a few changes here as well. Now you equip your fighters much like your regular ground troopers, which translates to equipment (like autocannons & missiles) being much more rare – as in not being infinite. You will have to build the equipment yourself, piece by piece on an individual basis. I like this change since it increases the tactical options dramatically in the air and general decision-making when it comes to running the base. Your engineers will however be a bit more busy, but that’s why they get paid the good money, right? Or I think they do, at least.
Other than that there is now a tutorial that works fairly well. I recommend going through it at least once for story reasons. There are also ways to increase the damage against specific alien races, depending on how many corpses you have collected. After you have accumulated a certain amount of bodies, the engineers will then test various weapons on the remains. This will eventually give you a damage boost, on the respective race you have tested out. So, don’t go and blow up all the aliens, even if tempting, as you will need the bodies for science.
Last but not least, there is now more type of missions. From Xenonaut agent rescue, doing ambushes to V.I.P extraction & more. From what I have played so far these missions have been a great addition to the game that truly spice things up. They also give bonuses, like the agent rescue one, since if they survive the ordeal, the agents will join your cause. There isn’t much more to discuss right now. It’s time for me to get back to the grind – to see if I can force through the 180-day limit. I will report back if I do. Until next time.
Thanks for reading.
/Thomas
Addendum:
While I managed to go over the 180-day limit, the new limit is sadly set to 200 days. That’s way too little when you want to defend Earth some more. So, with that, I will probably let the game rest for now until the 1.0 version hits the street.
Tom's Gaming Blog 
For your future rounds may I suggest doing a sort of comparison between the Xenonauts 2 Geoscape behavior and systems versus both Xenonauts 1 and specially compared to the Original XCOM.
I’ve found that the Xenonauts’ Geoscape implementation becomes a lot more predictable and its “hidden patterns” are easier to spot, kinda braking the illusion and the immersion of “playing against a human like intelligence behind the aliens”.
Additionally, in Xenonauts I see no negative repercussions for the Aliens as Xenonauts have successes against the alien forces. There doesn’t seem to be a complex enough simulation for the alien forces’ logistics and resources just like there is for the player, and so it feels like a random number has to roll and some other semi random numbers so aliens spawn again.
In XCOM 1, if you were very successful against the aliens at first, you could release delay their advancements in terms of bases, weapons and numbers. On the other hand if left unchecked long enough the aliens could steamroll the player. That sort of extensive simulation of the impact of the player’s actions doesn’t seem to happen in Xenonauts’ Geoscape. These huge differences regarding each campaign’s timings (as for when and where the aliens would throw certain things against the player) based on the events happening on the Geoscape level feels a lot more arbitrary and set in stone in Xenonatus compared to XCOM 1.
An example of this is the fact that I’ve had campaigns in xcom 1 when:
– I won the game before even having to fight ethereals on earth.
– Some of my campaigns never spawned the smallest UFO or at least I was never able to detect one near my starting bases until they no longer spawned.
– Some campaigns had an incredible amount of terror missions while others barely had them.
– I some campaigns I couldn’t get to certain alien stuff required for XX research and therefore I had to win the game without XX alien weapon (the stun launcher or the blaster launcher most likely).
– Going through a whole campaign without ever even seeing XX alien race (most likely Chrisallids or also other weirder subraces).
Those are just examples of how random and unique each campaign could get in Xcom 1, while in Xenonauts each new campaign feels the same the only difference being which Xeno soldiers survived each campaign but that is it).
Perhaps it could help the xenonauts devs to look at the open source code from OPENXCOM so they can figure it out how exactly was the XCOM geoscape simulated (Codewise).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good stuff, and I agree, even if I like Xenonauts as it is. But yes, it becomes predictable. Especially the first one, how they always come and attacked in waves, basically at the same time each month.
It would be cool if battles had more of an impact as you pointed out. Have you tried leaving this as feedback on the Xenonauts 2 forum? Chris often goes through the forum and responds to stuff.
LikeLike