dstar

And I would object. Human vision is not limited to 45-60 degrees; it's much larger (my peripheral vision is something on the order of 160 degrees) -- but that's not important. What's important is that as soon as we see something in our peripheral vision, we turn to look at it. Even if it's only for half a second. Effectively, we have a much larger field of vision than modern games allow for without distortion.

Something that should be a key rule: No mission should be an inevitable strategic loss, where it doesn't matter whether you take it or not. Here's the thing: perfect play by the AI is almost never conducive to good gameplay. You need the AI to make mistakes. In a perfect game, the AI would make fewer mistakes as the difficulty level increases, until you're essentially playing against a human who is better than you are. If you can manage that, I know a lot of universities that would like to offer you an honorary degree.

It might make sense to make the healing percentage based? After all, in the real world, the healthier someone is to start with, the faster they'll recover from an injury.

I have a problem with %-based TU costs, based on the real-world -- look at what some pistol shooters can manage; they can pull off five or more shots in the time it would take an average shooter to pull off one. It might work if there was a way to reduce the % cost of a specific weapon type (and possibly shot type, e.g. aimed, snap, burst, etc) as a soldier leveled up, allowing a soldier to pull off multiple times as many shots as they'd manage if they didn't have that ability. Although thinking about it, these are people who can shoot multiple silver dollars out of the air in a second or two.... Maybe in addition to being able to reduce the % cost of firing a weapon, the amount that any given soldier can increase a stat is randomized -- and hidden. Especially if, after a certain amount (possibly also hidden) of increase, some sort of action (time in the gym, etc) which only has a percentage chance of increase is the only reasonable way to increase the stat -- say, time in combat only has a fraction of the chance that dedicated action has. Do you stick your soldier in the gym for a non-trivial amount of time, knowing it might not actually help, or do you give up on any real chance of their speed/strength/whatever increasing, and just hope you get lucky and they don't get shot?

Out of curiosity, what's the status on Mac/Linux support? The FAQ said you hoped they would be supported but couldn't guarantee anything, but that was a year ago; has anything changed in either direction? (I have a vested interest, as my primary machine is a Linux system, and my daughter will be horribly disappointed if I take my windows machine back.)

I was going after a downed medium UFO, had only seen one reaper (I'm pretty sure, anyway) and killed it without being attacked, when one of my soldiers(who had never been closer to 3/4 of a screen away from the reaper, with the UFO between them) turned into a zombie when I ended my turn. I thought I must have somehow forgotten about another reaper (although I couldn't see how, and even if I had I thought zombification was instant), shot the zombie, then shot the reaper that spawned from him. When I ended that turn, another soldier -- the closest soldier to the one that zombified, which may or may not be relevant -- turned into a zombie. At that point I decided something must be wrong. I believe the only mods I have are the ones recommended with CE (I'm playing on linux, so I had to install them manually). I have saves if you want them.

If you end up looking at the Paranauts idea further, I strongly recommend reading Charlie Strauss's Laundry novels if you haven't; they're a cross between the Mythos and a spy novel/technothriller, with a good dose of 'dealing with British Government beauraucracy thrown in, leading to things like this (from a formal committee report): "If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals — or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link — will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains." What's not to love about that?

Just to throw something out there in the 'entirely blank slate' category, I'd love to see a cross between X-Com and the Cthulhu mythos... the Great Old Ones are returning from beyond the stars to eat our brains, and we're trying to stop them. I've never quite figured out what the strategy layer would be for that, though. The most important thing you can do as far as the UI is make the font size configurable; my wife's eyes are not very good, so she read the text even on a 23" monitor. As far as the air combat goes... I really dislike reflex games in my turn based strategy game. I don't have the reflexes for them, which is a major reason I play turn based games. I'd buy it. In addition to the font sizes and the air combat, it would be nice to see a deeper tech tree. I like the way researching Alenium explosives automatically upgrades things; it would be nice to have a lot of the earlier techs work like that, giving the sense that your techs are frantically jury-rigging things to get them working. E.g., adding alien alloy plating to existing armor as soon as you've researched it, before you've actually designed new armor. Jury-rigging a plasma cannon for a vehicle out of several captured alien rifles (after all, if you're mounting them in a turret ergonomics aren't a problem), with the downside being that it's time-consuming to replace the ammo (multiple turns, perhaps) and a chance of the weapon simply not working. I'd also like to see the same approach taken in regards to your soldiers; the military has never been shy about giving its soldiers performance enhancing drugs, and I certainly can't see that changing if we're being invaded by aliens. Having to upgrade your not just your equipment but your soldiers themselves to keep up with the aliens would be a very nice touch (and not in a 'balanced' way that doesn't actually make them better than a non-enhanced soldier, either -- I'd like to see the endgame enemies such that a fully experienced and equipped set of non-enhanced soldiers are going to get steamrolled).