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Hi, Been around since the original X-COM (and before). I really like turn based tactical games but my daytime work as a Software Development Manager takes too much time so I did unfortunately not read about Xenonauts until the GOG giveaway. Love the game and have pledged in the Kickstarter for Xenonauts 2 now. Really looking forward to it! Playing the Tech Demo (and yes I understand it is an alpha), I realized that the soldier panels are way too small for me at least (and thats only on 1920x1080). I was looking for a UI-scaling option with no luck. For me the vertical bars representing health / action points etc are too small. Especially the action points bar is very important when planning your moves. Did some quick edits to show what I mean: 1 - The way it looks now in the tech demo: 2 - The easiest "fix" - Just scale up the soldier panels 3 - OR change them a bit putting the bars horizontal for more granularity. And for example add the name as you often want to select a specific soldier.. 4 - EDIT: Added another one with flags and "compressed". Maybe a bit bloated... 5 - EDIT: A final one after discussion in this thread with TU on top as that really is the most important one and soldier numbers for shortcuts. Did this one "mid turn". Ibra next in line 6 - Final cut with background for the names and flags on the same row as the gun Good luck with the game!

I guess it is the place to propose features, so here I go. But I have to say that I am french, so pardon me if my english is not perfect. I think the field operations system is a good idea. It adds more interraction on the geoscape level, and gives more strategic possibilities. One cool feature could be added to this system. If hunted, field agents could be not always killed by aliens, but also kidnapped. Then, agents could (or not) evade and come back to ATLAS base, but there would have a chance they would have been brainwashed by aliens (damn). The effect could be that during a mission, the soldier could rejoin ennemy side. Imagine it's your Rambo that have been kidnapped, then he returns, claiming that he escaped to alien jails and torture chambers. you're quite suspicious, but it's your best soldier and you lack of manpower. So you send him on mission. You keep an eye on him, fearing he has been brainwashed, but he kills aliens, you success the mission, and everything seems ok. A few missions later, you are breakthroughing (guess this word exists) in an alien ship. Your shields soldiers enter, fallowed by your Rambo and his massive shotgun. Sadly, it is this time he decides to betray you, and when the ennemy turn starts, he becomes hostile and kill one of your shield soldier (thanks). Then a sebillian charges in and unloads his massive weapon, wounding badly an other of your men. It will leave no choice but to kill the traitor (ultimately, we could imagine capturing him and unbrainwashing him, but it makes treasons system less severe). But it could be a real evasion too, and nothing will never happen. Your Rambo would still be a proud soldier of the Xenonauts An other possibility would be to send a brainwashed soldier on field operation. Then, a major event could happen, like his deffection and a major relation loss in the region. Finally, with this system, why not add a scenarised mission where you would have to confront and kill a full squad of your former soldiers that have been abducted, and that did not escape, with there actual skills, and top tier equipement (ouch). It would be emotionnaly shocking to the player to have to fight and kill his former men, and it's in the thematic of X-2, with aliens prefering using humans to self destruct themselves. So, it 's just a little proposition, hope you liked it ^^

Well - I can agree that the flags are really not "relevant" - but I just finished playing through XCOM2 and in my head the soldiers are "Kobe - the sniper from Japan", "Jojjo - the heavy weapons guy from Sweden" etc. Having said that I agree that it can be in the soldier detail panel below when selected - but there it does make sense for many I think for that "bond" to the soldiers. When you look at some sniper the name "Aerts" may not connect - but with the flag from Belgium next to it you remember who it is... For me at least that works very well for adding immersion in some strange way. But - I did another proposal for the sake of it. Don't want to get rid of the names as it just becomes a bunch of numbers otherwise. Zlatan, the sniper from Sweden will not get number 4 every time so with two snipers in the team they become very anonymous... Often in XCOM2 at least I always knew that Jojjo (the heavy weapons guy from Sweden) carried some special grenades etc - so you want to find him and not the other guy. With the new proposal below I removed the M16 icon that takes way too much space. Just did some quick "icons" for infantry with chevrons, bullets for heavy, circle for shotgun (not happy with that) and crosshair for sniper. In 10 minutes so yes they are there for the idea And with this proposal there is even less space for the name - but I would like the option that XCOM2 has with "nicknames / callsigns". That way you can have a nickname limited at 8 characters and call them "Jojjo" or similar (he had a longer real name I don't remember). Edit - adding the way it looks right now in the Alpha below for comparison...

If I remember correctly, rushed end game was because of budget reasons. There simply wasn't enough time or money to test, balance and polish the game beyond corvette. I'm sure Goldhawk won't make the same mistake with X-2.

I would love to play a game that would force me to think of the issues you raise. I wish these questions weren't just in textbooks or magazines but in the movies we watch and the games we play. It would provoke some deeper thought, and uneasiness. The last game I played that had an echo of what you write about was Neverwinter Nights. I remember that game would do stuff like put suffering civilians in your path, making you feel duty bound to assist them, potentially sacrificing your own objectives on your own quests, and then give you the option to demand or request payment in return after the assistance was rendered. I would generally ask for something in return for the aid, gear in the game is expensive, you have to pay for stuff. If you wanted too, you could play the game like a savage and steal/kill from everyone you came across. If Xenonauts 2 made me ponder hard choices like turning to crime in order to fund a war, or gain some advantage, I would remember it forever, such games are very rare.

Next on the list: Claymores?

UFO series also has prone, and it is quite detailed because it calculates LoS and LoF in 3D. And XCOM apoc has prone too. But I agree, having standing and prone is good enough for Xenonautes 2. It keeps the posture system simple while still presenting an interesting tactical option. I'd prefer complexity be spend on other aspects of the tactical game.

I'm not keen on putting the flag in the minitab; it's not critical information by any stretch of the imagination. I also don't consider the name important - and even if you do, the problem is the lack of space even if you're using a small font like in your attached image (and trust me here, people don't like tiny fonts!). The name "Ibrahimovic" might be 10 letters long but three are "I"s, which are much thinner than any other letter. I think you'd struggle with some of the longer Russian names etc in that setup. I suspect something like Skitso's first image will be close to what we go with. It's usually pretty easy to remember which soldier is which from their number and weapon I think, and being able to hover through them to get additional info (like you could in X1) means you can find a precise soldier easily with only slightly more effort. One that is worth noting from mazex's update design though is the way the TU bar is at the top and seperated out from the other bars. The remaining TU of a soldier is probably the single most important thing to display and right now we don't do a great job of that.

How about this: the minitabs are minimalistic on default, and when mouse hovering, it displays more info? Minitab could also be removed while details are displayed so there's no duplicate information on screen.

Chris, in terms of X2, you could think of this "squad cohesion" mechanics as the other side of the stress mechanic. You have stress that soldiers accumulate from fighting in general, and traumatic events in particular. Squad cohesion could essentially be a factor in the stress mechanic - soldiers are more likely to trust other soldiers that they've already fought together with. Send a soldier on a mission surrounded by familiar faces, and they are less stressed by the combat. Have 6 people fight together for the first time and everyone is more stressed.

@Chris In Xcom2, you can assign soldiers to a squad. When a mission briefing screen pops up, you may select soldiers to this mission individually or select a squad to the mission. All the available soldiers (i.e. not hurt and not in training) of this squad will appear as selected and ready to be deployed, after this you just hit a button and they go to a mission. Some details of this mechanic: - A soldier must be assigned to only one squad - On the mission deploy screen, after selecting a squad, you may remove individual soldiers from this specific deployment if you feel like not taking them (Or in long war, if the squad size will affect the infiltration time, making the mission harder) - Soldiers that belong to a squads CAN be individually hand picked to go on missions with other squads (In this case, if their own squad needs to go on a mission, this soldier will be shwon as unavailable) - A squad has something called "Squad Cohesion". Soldiers that are deployed several times with the same squad configuration get very small bonuses (i.e. +2 Accuracy, +2 Morale) on after some deployments. These bonuses increase with time, but a squad with relevant bonuses is something not only rare but also only appears on mid/late game. Also, any change to the squad (removal or addition of new soldiers) changes this variable, if it is someone completely new, the cohesion will suffer, if it is someone they know, cohesion may suffer less or depending on the case it may increase. In Vanilla Xcom2, this feature is not obvious, but a mod called Squad Cohesion brings this variable to light. I hope I have shed some light to it. I'll even add this mechanic to my post because it really is something I missed during X1 gameplay and didn't remember until now.

Yeah, been missing the numbers. I'd love to have additional info when hovering cursor over minitabs. Something like this: You could also add the nationality like in the community edition. I kinda liked that. There could also be status symbols like bleeding, stunned, mind controlled etc.

Glad you like it! Yeah, the TU reserve system really doesn't work that well unfortunately. It's only in the game because it was in the original X-Com, but right now the fact that turning costs TU means that it's very hard to use effectively. I do actually have a solution to all this that I will likely test out in some experimental builds during the beta and Early Access period, but I suspect the changes will be too radical to make it into the final game. Basically it involves removing the TU reserve entirely, and setting all weapons to have set fire costs for fire modes - e.g. a Snap Shot always costs 20TU and an Aimed Shot always costs 40TU, no matter what weapon you are using. However not all weapons are capable of doing all the fire modes - you can't Aimed Shot with a shotgun, or Snap Shot with a sniper rifle. You can then optionally remove the TU cost for rotation, which means you always know how many TU you need left for an action. Or you can keep the TU cost for rotation in and just do some simple maths. This does mean however that you have to limit the TU gain of experienced soldiers heavily, otherwise they become far too strong as they can fire many more shots than inexperienced soldiers can. In that system you'd probably set it up so ALL soldiers have 100 TU per turn, but experienced ones gain benefits like reduced reload cost and increased accuracy and perhaps lower movement costs per tile etc.

I concur that switching from horizontal bar to vertical bar will improve the display. Not all three bars need to be horizontal; I think the TU bar is most important.

... I will be happy to see even the minimal implementation: current "Ctrl-Shift" feature displays not just accuracy from chosen position, but also the number of possible shots of the chosen type plus the number of "excessive" TUs (left after you make those shots)!

Have you guys ever heard of Xcom2 "Grimmy's Morale Mod"? His description kinda says it all: "We Darkest Dungeon Now" It really takes the morale factor (i.e "Will") and enhances its importance. Not only now your troops will begin to fail when friends drop or things go south, but if the combat takes too long, they morale will wear out (even by enemy missed shots. Who likes to get shot, eh?) and become a real issue. Coupled with S.P.A.R.K.S that isn't affected by morale (And become THE most important troop in long engagements) and by rookies with low morale that will panick real damn quickly and sometimes you will have very interesting scenarios in your hand, and by interesting I mean "GOD DAMMIT ROOKIE, I WAS COUNTING ON YOU TO SAVE MY MAJOR!" and things of the sort.

So an update on this - the C4 is already in the game, and it's now a "remote charge". Basically you lay it in an adjacent tile and you get a detonator that allows you to trigger it at any time during your turn. The idea is that you can lay it up against the wall / UFO hull, set up your men, pass the turn, then trigger the explosives at the start of your next turn and charge in with everyone having full TU. Although I'm sure people will find plenty of other uses for it :P

Another thing to consider is the tile based nature of the world. Small changes to vision cones can generate some really bizarre situations where you cannot see some places you would assume you could. Narrow cones are the worst, especially if you can only turn your character in 45 degree increments. There will be areas right in front of you that you will NEVER be able to see despite there being no logical reason why that would be the case.

I usually found as soon as I had access to mind control the game became quite trivial. See alien, control alien, drop own grenade at feet of alien etc etc. I actually prefer not to have it and for the aliens to have a watered down version as it was just too powerful with too little risk to the user in the OG. I am not however completely against having access to psi powers, or even mind control, if it can be made an interesting tactical option instead of either insanely frustrating or boringly overpowered. For example maybe mind controlling an alien doesn't give you full control but does make it see other aliens as enemies and your troops as allies for a turn or two. It could then act accordingly.