Akavit

A little more playing and I discovered that on the farmland map, this is only an issue with the tall grass. It keeps burning forever as far as I can tell. The wheat fields burn out quickly.

Burning grass seems to slow the game dramatically. If dozens of tiles are on fire, it takes a long time to transition between allied movement and player movement. It's a long hang where clicking on anything does nothing. Right after the hang ends, the fire will spread to adjacent tiles and the player's turn starts. Not sure if this is a Community Edition issue or an XDivision issue.

Must have been the result of a bad decision by some Yahoo in corporate. Anyhow, I've got my old tag back so thanks.

All sorted out. Downloaded GoG's version 1.65 and got myself setup with the latest release of XDivision. Thanks.

Perhaps. Or it may have ended up looking like the new XCOM which looks a little too shiny. Sometimes I reduce the color saturation on the monitor to compensate for shiny games.

I can't see hardware being an issue anymore. Computer performance advances seems to have slowed down somewhat a few years ago so it's no longer necessary to upgrade to a new PC to play most new games. My 6 year old system has handled everything up to Divinity: Original Sin with no issues. I prefer 3D games since the well-made ones invariably offer better gameplay. X-Com was great in it's day but Silent Storm completely blew it away in terms of destructible environment and tactics. It takes a 3D engine to pull that off because it's too hard to create complex environmental interaction in 2D. Shadowrun is a fun game but not a great turn-based combat game. Without the storyline and RPG elements, combat would have become repetitive very quickly. X-Com style games rely heavily upon a good ground combat system for their success.

That would be good. I modded Xenonauts 1 to have increased LOS which helped a lot with this. Longer ranges meant fights started sooner and required more suppression fire to keep the enemy pinned so the squad could get new positions.

2D isn't going to save anyone time or money unless a lot of the animations are removed and those remaining are reverted to X-Com choppiness. Xenonauts 1 was handicapped by its 2D engine and the need to build endless sprites. In fact, I believe a lot of good content was cut out because every new weapon and armor added meant creating a huge number of sprites to support them. Smoothing out the animations would exponentially increase the number of sprites required and burden the development team with even more work. 3D models are much, much simpler to work with once they're created. Want to change the color of combat fatigues depending upon terrain? Just re-texture a single model with six new camo patterns and it's done. A good graphics artist could wrap it up in a day. Try doing that in sprites and you'll end up rendering tens of thousands of new 2D images then entering the data for each image into sprite sheets. Last thing I'd want to see is the staff occupied by the need to focus on labor-intensive sprites instead of working on new and improved gameplay features.

The best part about X-Com was the destructible terrain and the only reason I purchased Xenonauts was to obtain a game with improved UI that offered similar tactical play and didn't require DosBox. For me to buy Xenonauts 2, it would have to substantially improve in this area. A proper physics engine (Silent Storm or Sui Genaris for example) would be a big plus. I did not buy the new XCom because it appeared to offer no improvements at all in the environmental portion of the game. Bullet holes, penetration, fires, flammable objects (not just explosive objects), impact, flying debris and other environmental effects would be fun. For its time, X-Com did an excellent job of making combat and the environment interact with each other. New games should be able to do a lot better. Divinity: Original Sin had some success in this area. The move to 3D would be a welcome one. People have compared early 3D games like Neverwinter Nights to late 2D games like Baldur's Gate II but that's an unfair comparison. It would be more fair to compare Neverwinter Nights to Wasteland 1. The difference between modern 3D games and Neverwinter Nights is as big as the difference between Baldur's Gate II and Wasteland 1. 2D games also lose the ability to take advantage of many dynamic features and rely upon clever scripting to mimic things like bullet collision and lighting effects. As for what annoyed me the most about Xenonauts? It was a toss-up between short LOS or the fact that the game barely managed to surpass X-Com's gameplay in the area of environmental impact. But the latter problem was likely the result of development being hog-tied by the 2D Diner Dash game engine. It's obvious that Goldhawk isn't going to make that mistake again.

If the OP is still on the fence after a month, here's a reason to buy the game: Gog has it on sale for $17.50 right now. GoG's 30% sale on Xenonauts

I don't know what the oldest strategy game is but I did play a turn-based western gunfight game on the Apple II a couple times. Must have been around 1989 and it was copyrighted in 85. Pretty advanced for the day. heh [video=youtube;MyBSH6aq17M] I had fun though I didn't get much chance to play it.

Korean spam bot? As far as greatest turn-based games, I'd give second place to Silent Storm. It was a great game with many mechanics yet to be surpassed by new games but it did have a major few flaws (unpatched grenades anyone?). Alpha Centuri takes first place as the more I play it, the more I realize how carefully all the different elements of the game mesh together. It feels like it has a real ecosystem and economy for the game world where every action a player takes has a tiny effect across the whole planet. I also have Hammer and Sickle which uses the Silent Storm engine and that should be a great game with improvements over Silent Storm but the scenario designer was ignorant. Every mission starts out with your squad face-to-face at point blank range with the enemy. Stupid and boring and a good way to take the fun out of what should have been a highly enjoyable game.

Mine just showed up yesterday as well so it must be normal for USA delivery. Unpacked it but haven't sat down to look at it yet. So now I've got 3 digital copies of the game and one DVD as a byproduct of participating in Kickstarter. Looks like some people might be getting Christmas gifts.

I haven't played vanilla so I can't be certain it's not an XNT thing but all soldiers have a chance of being alive at the end of a mission if they are on the dropship. The ones that are knocked out with stun damage can be revived in battle with medkits and keep on fighting.

It is definitely built around taking casualties. You can lose an entire squad and still come back for another fight. However, this doesn't mean that each squad member isn't important. They are - especially the experienced ones. Losing them is bad but not game over bad. Losing an entire squad and the dropship is even worse but that's still recoverable in many cases. I mostly avoid save-scumming except for those annoying friendly fire incidents where my men shoot each other in the back at point blank range while aiming for aliens far away so that means I have to take precautions to avoid excessive deaths. Almost everyone gets a med pack and I try to pull all downed soldiers back to the dropship to the point of taking small risks in the process. The team and mission however, are more important than any individual soldier. Sometimes one gets cornered by several aliens and gets left to die while the rest run to the chopper. Though I try to carry wounded back, sometimes it's just too dangerous and I'll abort the mission and leave them behind.