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I have been reading everything and i think these features would form the best game: YES - to a single main unattackable base. This would house ALL personell, including soldiers, scientist, engineers and other possible specialists. This base will be mainly responsible for power management and other, global upgrades. YES - to multiple (possibly infinite ) secondary bases which house radars, hangars, laboratories, workshops, possible generators, and all other, "real" tangible buildings. These are attackable bases and aliens can and will be able to attack them. Making them small, operatable bases with interesting building layouts, eg. being able to place corrdidors, and defensive structures in addition to the main buildings will make for more interesting decisions. Secondary bases are essential if you want to get any research, manufacture or other project done. It houses hangars for the aircraft which are essential to shoot down UFOs, and the planes have real range limitations ( at first - similar to X1 ). Since they are small players should be expected to place at least 2 - 3 right at the start, maybe make one science and one engineering base preloaded for the player to place at the start of the game. YES - to location specific boni/mali for secondary bases. One country can give a scienc bonus, and an aircraft range mali. YES - to boni for specialised bases, eg. building 2 workshops beside each other grants a +10% work efficiency and total work space - for each additional workshop. When scientist/engineers/specialists are working in a secondary base they are physically transfered there. This means the omnipotent teleporter array will have to leave a port open to that specific base - which consumes energy. Energy is mainly transfered from the main base, but smaller generators can be build in that specific base to relieve some of the stress, but only in that local base. The open port can only be filled with energy from the main base. More about that in the image below. If a base gets attacked, you will get asked whether or not you want to send in a team to defend your secondary base. YES - to global personal and storage. The main point of having more than 1 dropship is to have a bigger gang roaming around. X1 had the problem with your rooster actually being distributed over physical bases, which led to a lot of micromanagement, but having a single main base housing all your soldiers, and sending one team to defend a base, while having another one doing a small crashsite is not different from having 2 dropships - just with the added bonus of easier management, global soldier selection, item management, and equipment screen. YES - to possibly infinite dropships, or rather open teleporter arrays. Each open teleporter spot requires energy, and needs to be open as long as the ground combat is out there and fighting. So if you want to send out another team through the teleporter ( and also guarantee a way back in case of abortion ), you will need to pay the additional energy for each and every team. To avoid exploitation of the system, rerouting power can take between 24 - 48 hours ( so you cant just quickly power down something else to get a triple team ). And dont give me that "But why cant we send another team to the same mission ?" crap. X1 didnt allow for 2 chinooks to land in the same mission, and there wasnt an explanation for that either. Here is an original idea: I would like for ground combat missions to take up actual time. So lets say every turn is 10 minutes on the geoscape. You play for 12 turns and the mission takes up 2 hours. Once its finished you get teleported back to "when the mission started" and the geoscape will have an icon with "Team A fighting Crashsite - 3". You can resume normally, while already knowing the result of the fight. In this time you can potentially take on another mission, as long as your teleporter has enough energy. This idea would include the ground combat mission day - night state to change accordingly to the real geoscape time, eg. you can start fighting during the day, and after some time it starts to dusk. Now to the side/top view issue. In this setup i wouldnt mind it running either way. If you have confidence in your engine providing a good vertical firefight than make everything a side view. If you are not, than keep the fight horizontally and make the secondary bases with a top down view. The main base can be a side view, it looks quite good that way.

In that case then, more dropships plz. If it's going to be possible to have a global pool with unlimited access to all bases, would it be possible to use bases as a launching point for dropships? So that you give up part of your satellite base as a place for a dropship and crew to be sent through. That would add a new dynamic to placing satellite bases, you're not only thinking of where to put them for air coverage, but where to put them for dropship coverage as well.

There was a game in these series of alien invasion ( UFO Aftermath ) , that had a ground level combat, and then you would enter the underground complex to destroy the alien base, could not this idea be used in the defence of the xenonauts base or bases??

I have like the top down aspect of the last games, with multiple bases, but I would have wished that their was a little more variety with the choices of buildings. 1. Storage buildings could be general, and ammunition, that are keeps separate. 2. Living facilities could be upgraded as the game progressed, 3. Research facilities could like wise be upgraded and diversify, as new technologies are discovered. 4. Manufacturing plants could also be upgraded, as in research, and new plants could be built, to make new weapons and devises. 5. Power generation, looks like it will be in the next base infrastructure, and that to could have a number of upgrades. 6. Aircraft hangers to provide for the number of different types of craft. 7. Internal defence, such as sentential posts to combat invading aliens, gas filled corridors, and airlocks, to name a few. 8. Medical facilities for advanced healing and regeneration. Possibly bionic upgrades in the later game. 9. Training Facilities, to improve skills, with weapons types, and leaderships bonuses. 10. the Command centre, and HQ These are just to name a few, but it would need a larger base tile model to incorporate it. Just a thought!!

Hey, Been quietly watching the progress this time around, but I felt I should voice my cents in this topic. On Single-base setup Single-base setup is simple and works beautifully. Has problems, like said base defence. Some ideas: - Leave base defence out completely: Instead focus on aliens' terror affecting your funding etc. and choices and consequences between having to choose between simultaneously placed missions' adverse effects. Like what Xcom2 TNG did. Some brutal civilian defence missions etc. - Add in base security as a factor: Deploy security forces in various place of your base, maybe have some security buildings etc, automated defences etc. Then handle it more like tower defence in Realtime 2D, with a more statistical approach. This could btw be very good for both Single- and Multi-base... - Ground level Base Defence only: If players engage base defence, make the defence mission only on ground level. This way you could have a map with large outdoor sections and some inside sections. The layout need not exactly match the side-view, you can add whatever to make it more interesting. You could randomize the base defence once per game - or just stick with the one premade. could be good, for more tactical and better thought-out invasions... - Rare, but meaningful Invasions: With a single base, alien invasions should be very rare, because losing one base means losing the game, while with multi-base setup, it might not... Rare invasions would support hand-made and more carefully considered levels, as opposed to randomly generated. Sure the coolness aspect of seeing your own layout in action is lost, but that feature really only works if the other features of multi-base management work really well. - Support Staff and random events: Now this would be something new in this genre: events that occur within your base that you have to resolve via a simple narrative choice-driven interface. I'm thinking events in games like Stellaris, which are drawn from pools of events. Different events require different solutions, e.g. a reactor is breaking down so you need to assign some engineers, and then you find an alien infestation lurking in there and need to assign some security to take care of them, maybe losing some staff in the process. Or a conflict between your chief engineer and one of your soldiers forces you to sack one of them etc. Maybe even add some new support staff to maintain the base. With proper pacing of events it could make things more interesting. Anyway, anything to make you care more for the people in your base is better. Could also work well with arbitrary RPG stats and traits on the random staff, maybe one guy is especially good at killing bugs, so you want him to be your exterminator, while another excels and boosting morale and resolving social conflicts. On Multi-Base Setup I think that If you're going to do multi-base, make sure you get a fresh spin on it, instead of just re-iterating with some - albeit welcome - simplifications. - Make base locations unique: I love the nuclear missile silo in the side-view. Why not have access to nukes?! Why not make each base location unique in the sense that they each provide something extra for you. And make number of base locations also limited. There would be many options to consider between randomized and static base locations, but most importantly this can give you important game design leverage to give players meaningful decisions - that's what made X-COM TNG such a successful franchise IMO. You could even have unique story sections related to each base, maybe some sort of small quest in order to get the special facility operational 100% - Make basic base grid unity much smaller: Allow building corridors, to manufacture really unique layouts; choke points, security checkups, otherwise just beautiful layouts etc. In addition with the unique base effect concept, you can add rubble and junk that needs to be cleared, or just unbuildable areas. Special Effects could be static base tiles that can't be removed, influencing how certain places could be built. With Power as a requirement, you could even go as far as add Power Nodes that need to be placed manually, to improve distribution of power between Power Plants and facilities. - upgradeable facilities: Facilities could use some upgrading mechanics. Especially with base invasion, I could easily see some room for base upgrades between security and efficiency - maybe something else as well. Maybe upgrades could be unique modifiers that need to be chosen from a certain list, but you only have room for few - again adding another layer of choice. - Multiple dropships: Yes, if multi-base then this. You could also do several spins on this as well, maybe add some massive troop carriers, and some lightning fast but smaller ones, for stuff that require rapid responses for less-threatening missions that still have adverse impacts you'd like to avoid. Also, not all missions need be combat missions. There can be mission that require investigation and some small narrative-based decision-making. Maybe you don't really know the threat unless you go there or scout around etc. Maybe even some kind of black ops missions that allow you to sabotage enemy, without engaging, with some risk of getting into combat. This would also support in having crafts with more roles. --- Yes, I realize what I suggest all requires more work, some a lot, but those opinions were thrown out in the name of making the game feel better with some new interesting twists in this department. Overall, I will vote for single-base setup because doing the multi-base proper this time around would take a ton of development time, and I'm afraid a half-done version would just reduce the overall quality of the game. Of course, if you guys have the muscles and the bucks, then do it! Just don't screw it up, and for frack's sake give it a new, fresh spin Cheers! PS. Also realized I haven't checked the demo in a while, so i should probably play a few rounds with it...

I have equally just signed up to the forum to reply to this thread, because breaking a sweat trying to respond to various threats is challenging, but makes it a much more rewarding (if sometimes frustrating!) gaming experience. Having only one dropship makes absolutely no sense to me, although I understand that's how the code has now been written (although I thought it was always a better idea to have multiple, even with just the one base), I don't mind having to kit out multiple squads - in fact, one of the things I loved about Xenonauts 1 is that you always felt like your soldiers were expendable and easily killed, so you never relied on any one soldier too much (at least I didn't, was always leveling up rookies alongside more experienced squaddies). In XCOM, when you lose a few high-level team members everything just breaks down and you feel like you have to start all over again just because of that. Unlike Mister Maf, however, I don't like the idea of making pools of staff global, at least not from the get go - if you want to do that, make the "stargate" a researchable project at the very least, and perhaps even a building for bases. Considering the low tech you start with, it makes zero sense to have teleportation gates at will. I've voted for multiple bases, I like having the choice and I always thought it was cool how the bases in defence missions were exactly how you built them - thanks for for letting us have a say on this!

Signed up to the forum just to reply to this thread because this is really important to me. One of my favorite features of Xenonauts 1 is the ability to send out multiple dropships at once to respond to multiple threats at the same time. It makes absolutely no sense to me in the XCOM reboots that you can only respond to one threat at a time when you have enough soldiers to cover everything. The global manpower pool is fine; just stick an alien-looking teleporter gate in the hangar on the base maps once you build your second base so players understand what's going on without breaking suspension of disbelief. I like having to manage everything separately but understand why people would rather it be global. But for the love of the stars, please allow sending out multiple simultaneous dropships.

How about taking the best of both worlds. Keep with the single base and current single drop-ship mechanics, but allow that base to be customized in a top down fashion. The "side view" would give a summary of every level (and wouldn't have to have specific side view art, though there could be some dynamic aspect to it based on what the level contains if desired, i.e. if a level is mostly hangers, then there would be a hanger summary background art that is loaded for that level), and each level could be customized in the top-down approach. The base would start with a depth of 1 and one 6x6 building grid to customize. The second floor (depth = 2) would have a cost to dig it out, which would then open the player up to another 6x6 building grid to customize. Each additional floor would have a higher cost associated to it, to help balance the added floor space. That would make an interesting mechanic with base defenses too (if possible) to have a multi-level fight. i.e. as your base depth grows, the player could keep the important structures in the deeper floors and replace upper floors with defensive structures and the like. Side View: ------------------------------------------------------ Ground ----------- Level 1: Floor Summary ------------ Click on the level to view the floor plan (Floor plan would the current top-down view) ----------- Level 2: Floor Summary ------------ " - Button to start construction of next level -