Dalthius

It's called "polish". Why rush and put out an ok product? Wouldn't you want to have the best quality you can? I understand there has to be reasonable time and money constraints, but don't put out a skeleton product. If you do, this game will quickly fall by the wayside. As is, the Extraterrestrial games have more depth than Xenonauts. No,you can't afford the artwork and time involved in flashy graphics, but you CAN make this a far superior game than the clones out there by creating depth.

I miss the days where the word "details" was a good thing, not a curse words. More and more I see games cater to the console crowd...I certainly hope this is not one of them. There is a great opportunity here to make something better than an X-COM clone. Ranks, medals, training, specialization...all these things give the player a feeling of ownership. You've got a troop that you've had since he was a rookie, named him, watched him grow from a rookie to a non-commissioned officer, a leader of men...he's hardened, grizzled, won medals, there's a running tally of how many and what type of aliens he's killed. He was wounded, maybe he has a purple heart (or equivalent), heck maybe he even has a minor stat reduction due to his wound (ok, I can already hear several powergamers moaning in the background). He inspires his fellow troops. He has a story. But it's not just him...all your recruits have a story to tell, and it's told through stats and records, and your own imagination. The game should SUPPORT your imagination; please, please do not make this nothing more than "line up 12 faceless troops against X amount of bad guys", rinse, wash, repeat. There is a great opportunity here to really turn this into an impressive, AAA title instead of just another "clone".

Is there any way to change the ranking system? The idea of having a team full of "Commanders" completely breaks immersion. I imagine this is at least partly the reason why X-Com utilized numbers of soldiers to dictate how many of each rank were available. Military operations are far more organized; i.e. squads, platoons, etc, with a corporal or sergeant leading a fire team, staff sergeants or equivalent NCOs leading squads, so on and so forth. Having Commander Bob, Commander Joe, and Commander Alex all on one team seems...odd?