Great news for all X-Com fans as Xenonauts, the spiritual successor to X-Com, has hit its initial Kickstarter goal in just three days and will be funded. Truth be told, that goal was relatively low ($50K USD) and there are still 28 days left. Since the Kickstarter hit its goal, Goldhawk Interactive will also be putting female soldiers into the game, and providing a Mac and Linux version of the game too. Awesome, right?

Those interested can back this project up by visiting its Kickstarter page. Goldhawk has also revealed their stretch goals for Xenonauts’ Kickstarter:

$75,000 – Hire a Level Designer – we will hire a dedicated map designer to add more variation and randomisation to the maps!

$100,000 – Indoor missions – these would be missions where combat squads are sent into large buildings or into underground bunkers to clear out an alien strike team.

$140,000 – Soviet Town terror tileset – the current terror tileset is an American town. To fit with the Cold War theme, we’ll put in an alternate tileset for the Soviet bloc countries using Soviet-style architecture.

$180,000 – Military Base tileset – this tileset would allow us to put military terror sites in the game, where aliens have attacked a military base and you are sent in to deal with them.

$205,000 – Tileset-Specific NPC Allies – we do have friendly AI soldiers in the game, but only one type. This would add different variants – police on the Industrial tileset, farmers with shotguns on the Farm tileset, mujahedeen with AK-47s on the Desert tileset etc.

$230,000 – Motion Detector – This would be a one-hand soldier item that, when equipped, will display a coloured overlay on the battlefield to show any AI movement in previous turn within range of the soldier holding it.

$255,000 – Memorial Screen – This would be a tab on the UI which allowed you to view a list of all your dead soldiers, including the location and time of death, their portrait and number of kills etc.

$280,000 – Vehicle Combat Experience – soldiers level up with experience, vehicles do not. This would allow vehicles to increase their stats (not armour / health) by a maximum of 15% with combat experience.

$305,000 – Pilot Portraits and Callsigns – at the moment, the aircraft are just aircraft. This would give each aircraft a pilot portrait and a callsign, so they seem less expendable. These pilots will not level up with experience.

$330,000 – Proxy Grenades – These are fun. This would add a secondary fire function to all advanced grenades (Alenium grenades upwards) that allows them to be used as proxy grenades.

$355,000 – Tall Grass – There’s waist-high grass in X-Com. This would put it in Xenonauts too, complete with the ridiculous (yet amusing) fire mechanics from the original.

$380,000 – Human Psionics and Blaster Bombs – We’ve removed these from the game due to balance reasons, and we will not put them in Xenonauts. This stretch goal would bundle the game with a developer-made mod that allowed people to put them back in.