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Now that X1-style air combat is coming back, I'm going to give it a try with an open mind, but I'm in the minority (I guess?) that thinks the X1 minigame was bad, I'd even call it the weakest part of the game. The tactical part of the minigame was negligible. Several types of engagements only had one way to play them at all. For squadron engagements, the only ones with any tactics involved, there were also few different things you could do. Bait with a fast plane, use one plane to get behind the UFO - options, yes, but very few. The replay value was low because you'd figure the tactics out after only a few engagements. Instead, your success would be determined by mechanical, twitch-based skill. The pause button wasn't tactical, you didn't really use it to think - it was a twitch button, as you should pause at the right moment to correctly time your rolls or missiles. In a few scenarios, you wanted to make quick, tight turns, which meant many fast and reasonably precise clicks. At the same time, you could master engagements so you would always succeed in a particular scenario. My favourite example, albeit not the only one, is two Condors vs a Corvette. The four missiles from the Condors will kill the UFO, but the Corvette will have time to fire its cannon once. So the engagement has the following success formula - just let your Condors fly towards the Corvette, pause when it fires, roll the targeted Condor (or both), unpause. Corvette down, Condors unharmed 100% of the time. Simple, formulaic, gets boring the 3rd time you have this engagement. And none of this was really related to the game's strategy layer. Airplane ammo was free and unlimited, so if you could use superior tactics to spend one missile less, that had no effect on anything anyway (I hope in general X2 has the time to do something more interesting with the economy). Then there's the problem that making the X1 minigame more difficult would mainly be on the account of additional reflex/speed requirements more than tactical thinking. Like I said, I'll approach the X2 real-time combat with an open mind, but I would have preferred to see the turn-based approach evolve.

I want to point out what people havent pointed out yet. Some people call for the player to have more involvement in the minigame, some call for less. But the most important point is that the complexity of the airgame doesnt exceed the concentration level you need for the Ground Combat. The needed concentration level for the airgame is skilled based, and skill greatly varies from player to player. Skill is a pyramid, there are a lot of people with less skill, and few with great skill. In order to capture the most amount of people the minigame has to have the least skill requirements possible. The question after that is progression and accessibility of difficulty. The progression usually involves the player getting harder and harder challenges in order for them to increase their skill. But the accessbility of the skill level in an X-Com game is horrible. I can join a Starcraft 2 game and the matchmaking gives me an opponent around my own level, but if the skill requirements for the current UFOs is beyond my level i cant go back to easier ones. The result being that the player might loose a 6 hour campaign and has to restart the game, then invest another 5 hours just to get to the same point again. If i loose a Starcraft 2 match to a better player than i learned a lesson which is around my own skill level, my rating drops and next time i will get assigned a less skilled player. Lost time: zero. The minigame becomes the skill bottleneck for the whole game. If you make the game too hard you loose out on the base, and if you make it too easy you will get critique from veteran players. Putting 2 competing skill based games into 1 game is usually not good. One throttles down the other. The usual solution for that is autoresolve. Autoresolve removes the hurdle which keeps the player from getting to the content they actually like. A nice picturesque autoresolve feature ( better than X1 ) is your best bet to avoid people getting tired of the minigame they dont want to play. You can do a lot with autoresolve. Randomise damaged UFO parts, randomised damaged aircraft parts, result range, failure rate, etc ... . Autoresolve lets you focus on the parts you want to show off in your game, without having to worry about a second skill based game throttling down your playerbase.

I think this has helped highlight the problem I have with X1's system: there are none of these decisions. X1 has a fairly clear rock-paper-scissors style approach to air combat. Foxtrots are UFO killers. They are very effective in that role: with weapons of the appropriate tier, they outmatch UFOs they are facing in range and firepower and are never in danger except where there are escorts. Condors and Corsairs are escort killers. They are also very effective in that role and easily destroy escorts of the tier which match their weapons. There is therefore no "choice" about what kinds of aircraft or weapons to use as described in the quote: sure, you could use an aircraft outside of its designated role, but there's no reason to do that unless you don't have the right tool to hand. And the trouble is, you almost always do. It's pretty easy to keep pace with aircraft weapons, since there's no cost to upgrading them beyond the research. Aircraft themselves are a bit harder to keep pace with since there is an additional cost beyond basic aircraft but never in a way I've ever noticed as being problematic. At worse, then, you might have to fight with the wrong tools if aircraft are already committed/resupplying. This contrasts with games I've played which mod in manufacturing requirements for aircraft weapons. This delays air power development both in terms of resources (weapon upgrades now cost money and salvage) and in terms of time (you need manufacturing capacity to make them). As such, with no changes to the weapon stats, the player is usually behind the vanilla air power curve due to lack of time or resources or both. Behind the curve, aircraft are more evenly matched with UFOs and require more work to come out well: Foxtrots don't always out-range their targets; escorts die slower and are more likely to score hits; total damage capacity is lower so you need to deploy weapons more selectively against escorted UFOs; etc. In turn, all this leads to taking more damage, meaning you're more likely to have aircraft out of action, and therefore not have optimal squads for dealing with threats and requiring you to "make do". To put all this another way, vanilla X1 air combat might just be a bit too easy to offer much tactical engagement, at least once you know what you're doing with it. This is what makes it routine: it's easy to always have what you need; so if you didn't, the air game would become more varied because you need to make do with what you have rather than what you want or need. So notwithstanding anything else, if X2 is going to use the same RT system, I'd argue that some consideration needs to be given to how it can be made more challenging or at least how the player can be forced out of using the same approach every time for routine success. (I think costs for equipment are a good solution to this, since the player can compensate by investing resources in air technology, but I doubt it's the only or best solution).

It's this one, I think: Some great ideas there indeed.

I regularly check these forums but rarely post; this thread’s title did make me take notice though, because I’ve been thinking along the same lines for a while. I bought into the earlier bold ideas for X2, and although they may have eventually proven to be unfeasible, I do feel a bit disappointed every time something is “rolled back”. Still, I’m sure Chris and co. will make something awesome. I suggested some ideas a while back for X1 that didn’t make the cut, but in the spirit of positive contribution, will throw them into the hat again My main idea is to have a new mission type where you’re exclusively controlling local forces. The situation could be something like an allied military bunker is under attack by aliens. There’s not enough time for the Xenonauts to get there, but there’s a radio link set up so you (the player) can command the local forces. Imagine controlling a large team troops armed with basic weapons (rifles, shotguns etc.) against a horde of Reapers. It could lead to great Aliens-esque missions. The odds of your team all getting wiped out are high, but in contrast to regular missions, it’s not a game over / rage quit situation if that happens. There are a lot of ways in which you could use this kind of a premise. Maybe if your troops hold the base’s hanger for x turns, then your main Xenonaut troops turn up as reinforcements and take the fight to the enemy. Or if the aliens take the radio room then you lose contact and it’s mission over. Basically, I think this could be a way of mixing up the gameplay as a sequel arguably should, and adding more variety in a way that hopefully isn’t a huge burden from the development side of things (i.e. it would use existing assets such as character models). Separate to this, secondary mission objectives that crop up unexpectedly (e.g. rescuing a civilian and carrying them back to the chopper) would add more variety to core missions too. I made a huge list of options in a forum thread what must have been literally years ago, but can’t find it now!

Hi all, I’ve started this thread to flag up something I feel is being overlooked in current discussions about improvements to the game. More Mission Types and Secondary Objectives have been mentioned before but don’t seem to be getting the attention they deserve. More Mission Types and Secondary Objectives seem to me to be a (relatively!) simple way of adding a huge amount of variety to the game – far moreso than new tilesets, which Chris has explained are “EXTREMELY time consuming and expensive to make – they’re the most expensive component of the game by some distance.” Here are some ideas for what could be new Missions or Secondary Objectives. These have been taken from other threads and aren’t all my own ideas – I’m not trying to plagiarise Defend a landmark. Capture alien leader. Assassinate alien leader. Escort VIP (e.g. politician, scientist) to exfiltration area. Destroy alien transmission beacon. Rescue downed pilot (not necessarily your own). Free prisoners. Rescue local soldiers under attack by aliens. Defend supplies. Clear command post of all aliens. Activate Surface to Air missile site via panel in control room. Rescue hostage. Carry wounded civilian back to your chopper. Retrieve information local agents have compiled about aliens. Destroy alien mind-control device causing humans to fight you (once destroyed, the humans could turn into allies). Eliminate cultists (humans working for the aliens). The rewards for these could be as varied as deemed appropriate. Examples include: Improving end of round score. Improving relations with a particular country. Cash bonus. Stash of equipment (e.g. 10 packs of C4 or equivalent). New Xenonaut. Unique weapon (maybe just an existing one but with slightly improved stats to avoid new artwork). Revealing location of alien base. Research boost. Temporary manufacturing time reduction. I freely admit that I don’t know much about programming or the ways in which games like Xenonauts are made, but here are some justifications I believe to be accurate: Most of these would need little if any new graphics, which seem to be the most expensive aspect of production. I could well be wrong about that, of course! They’d add a significant amount of replayability to the game, and make each mission far more interesting. Especially if some Secondary Objectives are revealed mid-mission as you stumble across them. It’s genuine variety in gameplay and not just largely superficial changes, as tilesets essentially are. They could add to the whole feeling of immersion in the Xenonauts world; making small-scale battlefield decisions that impact the global war. More decision-making would be required by the player: do you order one of your valuable troops to take an injured civilian back to the chopper, thereby increasing your reputation with that country, but losing him for the next few turns when the aliens are about to counter-attack and he’s needed on the frontline? They seem like such brilliant things to include, it’s puzzling why they’re not high on the wish-list. It’s likely that I’m missing something, like the actual scale of the task from a programming perspective, but aren’t things like Kickstarter designed to raise funds to make these sorts of things a reality? All thoughts on this matter are much appreciated!