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Near the end of every XCOM-em-up, there's a phase where you can take on the final mission but there's still stuff to do. Research, filling out your soldier's skills, building equipment. Typically there's no real pressure to take on the final mission early. In X-COM: UFO, you can handle the invasion pretty readily by the time you can take it on. In XCOM:EU, same thing. XCOM2, there's an achievement but no real reason beyond that. In Xenonauts, so long as you're blowing up the battleships instead of clearing them, you're golden for just filling out the list of things to do. The alien invasion can wait, even in OpenXCOM and X1: Community Edition. My question is, is this a good thing? You want to balance the game around the final mission being available before you've run out of stuff to research and things to build. Players reaching the end of your content before the end of your game is rarely a good thing, but.. Should we have an incentive for finishing the game early? Different endings depending on how well you were able to complete the final mission? A granularity to the fate of humanity and a golden ending for doing everything right, quick, and saving as many as you can? What if the aliens achieved milestones as they researched you? At some point they could develop a virus that would likely wipe out 90% of humanity if it were released and so stopping them before that happens or coming out with a tech later on to counter the virus is an easy example. Perhaps psionics against humans is something that gets better over time as more and more mindstates are learned such that some human leaders or others in power are 'permanently' under the alien's will even without active measures, so ensuring that counter-psionics is put into place as early as possible and setting up key people to assassinate/replace control key humans in missile silos around the world are something that has to be done over time if you want a better ending. Perhaps never capturing a singularity generator means humanity will have to go to the stars the hard way instead of immediately being able to flee across the void. But I don't really know if that's a good thing. For the challenge, it's great. In Breath of the Wild, you were always able to go straight to Ganon and end the game; you'd get the worst ending for it but boy was it fun to be able to just take on that challenge. Perhaps Operation: Endgame can run on a similar system. Where you're allowed to take the final step almost as soon as the game begins but with no knowledge of what you'll find, no means to do anything but kill and destroy whatever you see, and see what ending you get as a result. But if you wait, if you study and research, you learn that you have to destroy certain key generators, dispersal systems, and communications arrays; capture the Preator in a specific room that will get locked away and hidden by a psionic shield (where killing them results in less ability to prepare for the future and never understanding the true purpose of the invasion); and learning of a way to get your soldiers out alive rather than sending them into a literal suicide mission. Do people want that kind of granularity? Saving the Earth quickly would be an achievement in itself, but you'd essentially be incentivised to either go as fast as possible or hold off until there's nothing left to do. How you appease the middleground people who don't want to capture every memory and do every shrine, yet still want to try for the 'true' ending? Obviously this method provides the much needed consistantancy of challenge for the final mission, where it slowly becomes easier the further along you are but never becomes a cake walk unless you're only doing the bare minimum objectives. Inverted difficulty is always an issue when balancing these games. Edit: For theming, this can be something you do after capturing your first UFO. Just take it to zip off into space and land on their mothership/moonbase/whatever with six guys who will 'save the world.' They'll be ready for you. So one easy to see step of Operation: Endgame techs would be to disguise your arrival. Another would be to just have a bigger UFO with more people to send. Another would be to have your own ship so you have a way to leave once you're discovered. High grade missiles to take out certain components that you'd otherwise need to clear internally. EMPs to take out some of the robotic units nearer the outsides. Ect. Learning new objectives is where difficulty goes up. Learning new techs is where difficulty goes down.

I've always thought that the organization's name was X.E.N.O. or Xeno, and that its members were the Xenonauts, although I have to agree that they are not meant to travel with/through "xeno" (as the construct would suggest; see astro/cosmo/spacenauts, and argonauts). Perhaps this explanation was introduced by the Crimson Dagger novel?

Multi tile units would be great but, for expediency maybe we should leave that to the modifiers, so we can get the game in a working condition first!!

I strongly suspect this will require a bit of support from the Community Edition team if it is to happen, because the pathfinding may not support it by default and there's also some game logic issues that have to be worked through - e.g. where does the vehicle spawn if it is too big to spawn in the dropship, where is it stored in the base, etc? I'm sure modders can come up with answers to those questions easily enough, but someone needs to tweak the code to support the new functionality and that's where a Community Edition coder will be needed.

It's unlikely we'll be revising the designs of the aliens significantly, other than creating new variants of the existing ones with additional armour etc. In an ideal world everyone would like the designs for the aliens we make, but art direction is quite subjective and therefore it's difficult to "fix". That's quite an old image though, and there have been a few tweaks since - the Sebillian armour is less purple now, for example. The reason these changes were made is because the original Xenonauts was (rightly) criticised for having aliens that did not look particularly alien and all looked very similar to one another. That's because they were all humanoids with similar proportions and only slightly different appearances. This is problematic for the player in gameplay terms - e.g. if it's not immediately obvious that an Andron is a robot, the player won't know that trying to suppress it is a bad idea - but it also just makes the game less atmospheric. Hence our new designs being a bit more obviously different from one another ... but this does come at the cost of our aliens being less realistic than before. The Firaxis XCOM is not a very helpful point of comparison here though, as we were making a spiritual successor to the original X-Com from 1994. The aliens in that were weird as hell - the Sectoids have MASSIVE heads, the Ethereals are just floating orange robes, there's even just a floating pink kidney as one of the aliens. Strange looking aliens have been an expected feature of the genre since well become Firaxis made the first XCOM. (EDIT - ignore me, the little Psyon is in the original image.)

Thanks for the thoughts. Yeah, the first two points are already somewhat addressed by our new 3d engine ... and the third point is something we really should add in, even if it's a toggled visual mode so it's not always displayed.

Not wanting to derail a feature discussion thread so I'm opening a new thread here. A few differences. A new game is constrained by a vision and theme to maintain a consistent identity. All non-optional features it provide will be forced upon all players and must be explained, balanced, meet players expectations, not too tedious not too hard no death trap etc. The dev also needs to balance limited resources. Mods are less constrained by these factors. Mods actually have more design freedoms. Instead, mods are more constrained by technical issues. Some features are easier done in a new game by the dev team for this reason. Equipment addon and locational damage for example. Some features, like adding fragments and refining research tree and item/event triggers, are likely to involve more planning and balancing than coding, and in my eyes are better fit for mods. Then there is the issue of UI modding which I tried to raise but seems to be ignored. If you are a modder, I have a recent example. I just modded a game's resource loading engine to cuts its work by perhaps a factor of 10. Players are crazy. A quick hack on two low-hanging cpu bottlenecks, arguably easier done by a mod since a mod can be less stable. In other words, I can move faster than the dev. Everyone happy. But there is a whole tree above it. I didn't systematically rewrote its dependency management, and I can't feasibly make it load files asynchronously. The later, another factor of 10, would mean rewriting the initialisation code of every single data structure and the whole loading pipeline, and should absolutely be done in the development stage rather than by modding. Something a developer could have done before it is too expensive, instead of features that can be done in a later patch or by a mod. If you are not a modder, don't worry. It is hard to tell. Sometimes even to coders.

Hey solver.. As i said, i throw those ideas here and there.. there is 3 steps that we can have those ideas and devs, you and us will put those when it's fit.. I never want or force devs to add something to hinder their development progress.. Step 1: Development Phase: Ideas could be used at game itself and could be added/softcoded in the way.. Step 2: Mod Support: Ideas for things which not be used at base game but not big to give much time to code.. probably more softcoding and richer options which game already got.. Step 3: X2:CE: Crazy new things which even the devil not imagined.. Note: I gave up for bigger units as the main game won't have any, i will just go for "big creatures/mech armors which fits to 1.5 tile" trick, if i can add new units to the game.. and dogs.. there should be dogs.. people will fight harder to save civillian dogs rather then humans.. who cares human anyway? :)..

I don't understand. The 3D one looks less comical to me simply because it's actually more alien looking. The other is a five fingered human with grey skin, big eyes, and a weird head. It also looks like they're wearing cotton-spandex to a certain extent and even have a belt. 3D alien has this insectoid look to it that, even though weirdly has fingernails, clearly has non-human hips, mouth(s), and cartilage armor beneath their skin.

Able to end an alien invasion at first day looks like a Hollywood scenario. If you could end it with 6 brave people with standart weapons, then I would laugh to that invasion. I think it should be impossible to reach to the end boss with earth tech. I like to play as long as I want. It gives you the sandbox feel. Even xcom 2 countdown got very harsh reaction from gamers. I am against cool downs but possible early ending is fine for me. I would like to have more then 1 step to the ending, not just one mission. If you fail it, you should able to escape and game should continue.

That is a good idea! I always enjoyed gunning down lone sectoids that dropped their weapons in panic.

Have you considered bringing alien morale events back? I think they worked just fine in the first X-Com, and they provide the opportunity to give some of the alien personalities a visible gameplay effect beyond just flavour text.

Yep, we need cool xenonauts if we need to stop alien invasion with some guys.. I think if he was an xenonauts, all those enemies would survive at the end anyway :)..