Xenonauts V1.04 Released (Stability & Small Difficulty Update)

Xenonauts V1.04 has been released onto our main branch. This update fixes some more crashes and also tweaks the difficulty of the game on the lower difficulty settings. It will not break save games. We had not been planning to make further balance changes to the game, but there was enough player feedback about the Easy / Normal difficulty settings being too hard that we decided to make an exception. More detail at the bottom of the post. FIXES:

• Soldier Equip screen crash bug is fixed.

• Fixed some very slow loading times for ground missions.

• Loss screen should actually display now when you lose the game, rather than freezing up (for real this time).

• Final mission no longer crashes when your brave soldiers escape.

• Fixed a crash associated with the Fury interceptor.

• Fixed a crash with Heavy Drones exploding at the edge of a map.

• Aliens should now attack secondary bases as well as primary bases.

• Shock batons no longer show a tiny shotgun picture in the ammo slot.

• Some mis-set tiles (impassible damaged doors etc) have been fixed

• Some Xenopedia / strings typos fixed.

BALANCE CHANGES:

• Funding damage caused by UFO activity now scales with difficulty - 0.5x on Easy and 0.75x on Normal.

• New UFO types now appear at roughly the same speed on all difficulty settings.

• Alien Bases now have a 100% chance to be discovered after 5 days, rather than a 20% chance every 5 days.

• Air Superiority UFOs are back, so the funding damage caused by Ground Attack UFOs has been turned down.

• Funding events now appear twice as often, but do half as much funding damage.

• Airstrike values for UFOs have been increased somewhat.

• Alien Alloys recovered from shot-down UFOs has been increased somewhat, but the funding received from a successful mission has been reduced.

• The funding received from each national block has been reduced slightly.

The biggest balance change is to the strategic game on Easy / Normal difficulty - it is now harder to lose funding nations as the UFOs do less relations damage. We've also set the times at which new UFO types appear to be relatively similar at all difficulty level - this didn't really make the game harder, it just made it longer and more tedious. We're hoping this change will improve the experience for newer players. The other funding / airstrike changes are intended to roughly even out. We felt that the rewards between airstriking and a ground mission were too wide, forcing players to "grind" UFOs (this was also caused by a persistent shortage of alien alloys). We think these tweaks will give the player a bit more choice on whether they really need to do yet another Scout crash site or can just airstrike it and move on.