[Idea] Xenonauts 'Second Wave'

Off of another discussion thread:

With the modular mod system now in place with XCE, it's possible to implement something akin to XCOM:EU's second wave options. That is, small mods which change specific parts of the game that can be used - or not - by players to change their play experience more or less radically.

Putting these together wouldn't actually be a lot of effort. Indeed, many of these options would be very small (e.g. making aircraft non-recoverable). With this in mind, I thought it might be a good idea to collect some ideas regarding those things people would like to see. For example:

- More aliens in missions.

- Non-Recoverable aircraft.

- Increased/Reduced cover penalties.

- 'Marathon Mode' (increased research, manufacturing times and slowed-down alien progression. Although that might be quite big).

- Flat TU costs for weapons

- Disabled/Nerfed psionics (although XCE has a good fix for mind control now).

Etc.

So, thoughts and ideas?

I would be VERY keen on the marathon mode :-)

Should actually be really easy to do. If I hadn't been busy last night I'd have probably done it. I think all it would need is:

- Double the alien ticker values to spread the alien invasion out more

- Double the time to maximum UFO spawns

- Halve the funding damage done by alien events/alien bases

- Halve the funding bonuses from shooting down UFOs (this and the last point stabilises funding changes for a double-length game)

- Double research and manufacturing times

- Double base facility building times

- Double the cost of buying/building things

- Double starting cash

- (Maybe) halve soldier growth rate.

I think that covers everything. Maintenance should stay the same because that scales automatically with game length. Recovery times for soldiers and aircraft should stay the same because the duration between alien waves is the same (there's just twice as many in total). I can't think of anything else I've missed.

There's a small few issues, though:

- It's impossible to increase hire cost of personnel without also increasing their maintenance costs. The hire cost is pretty small so probably doesn't matter too much, but maybe a small increase would be warranted there.

- The requirements for research items aren't doubled, which means strictly speaking you will be able to start research projects slightly sooner than the equivalent time in the vanilla game. This could be compensated before by adding a small premium on top of the increases research times (e.g. increase them by 120% rather than 100%).

- Certain parts of the game are already a bit grindy having to do the same UFO types repeatedly (this is especially true of the early game). I'd therefore maybe be inclined to make some use of the dynamic UFO feature around the edges of each wave block, and maybe scale the early game to make it shorter than double (maybe go for 50% rather than 100% longer for stuff associated with the first two months so you're not stuck grinding small scouts forever).

So here it is already...

I would really like to see the aliens adapting their tactics more with more Xenonauts encounters.

For air combat they could start bull-heading Xeno aircrafts like they do now. Then after some obvious failures they should change their tactics, becoming more and more counter-acting to players playstyle. If behaviour coding is too complex, some pre-set tactics can be used that will be picked at random and only the more successful will be used further. It could also be a behaviour change during ongoing air combat, for instance if a Foxtrotts is kiting one fighter around it should veer of and select another target.

For ground combat something similar would be great and in my opinion much more important. I guess finding tactic routines wouldn't be that difficult but when which version should selected - map style, day/night, number of Xenonauts, do they bring a vehicle and so on - will be tricky.

Come we now to something completely different...

For geoscape/funding I can imagine some priority settings. For instance, if a certain region is constantly under attack it should be given a priority and additionally money spilled out if this is answered. Otherwise funding punishment.

Therefore terror misions and alien bases should be even more important, also on lost regions as this will cause reputation loss of the other regions. Maybe a bonus/malus money system for how fast an ufo or a ground mission is tackled may be possible.

With an additional bonus/punishment money system the original funding behavious stays untouched, just an addon calculation.