Once you reach the mid-game there are helmets that offer reduced protection, but grant an Accuracy bonus to the wearer. What this means in practice is that you can customise your soldiers for their role more than was possible in the original Xenonauts.įor example, each suit of armour has a light and heavy variant available so you can opt for more protection at the cost of more weight, but the light variant of the end-game exosuit also provides a TU bonus. The new modular armour system (explained in the Research thread) has much more robust support for stat modifiers than we had in X1, so pretty much any item can be used to positively or negatively modify the stats of the soldier carrying that item. This change only expands the inventory system, it doesn't take anything away from it! The backpack and belt are still fully functional and if you want to load your soldiers up with lots of additional weapons and ammo like you could in the first Xenonauts 1, you can still do that. With the new system it's very easy to see which units have which items and using a secondary item only involves a couple of clicks. Same if you wanted to get out a stun baton and stun an alien it usually involved a lot of needless backpack interaction. In X1 if you had an injured soldier it was pretty annoying to have to open their backpack to see if they had a Medikit, and if they did then you'd have to drag it into their primary slot and use it, then open the backpack again and move it back into the backpack and re-equip your primary weapon.

This is a usability change more than anything else. This slot is limited to small items - pistols, melee weapons, medikits, etc. The soldier inventory system now works much like it did in the first Xenonauts, except units now have an additional 'secondary weapon' inventory slot (they can carry an item in their secondary slot even if they have a 2-handed weapon equipped in their primary slot). The simplifications we made to attributes and the inventory proved pretty unpopular with players and the skill system was difficult to visualise (there's already a ridiculous amount of information on-screen on Soldier Equip screen), so we decided to move back to the X1 setup with a few carefully chosen additions. Our plans for these units have also changed over time, with the original idea being to give them simplified attributes and inventory system and then add a skill system on top of that. Your soldiers and vehicles are the brave heroes that face plasma-death in battle against the aliens every time you run a mission.

Xcom 2 change soldier stats