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Sorry, yeah. I guess I'll finally comment on that thread given you've asked me about four times now! Yeah, it sort of depends what you want to achieve with those missions; most of them would work rather well in XCOM where it's a sequence of missions that really bear no relation to the actual strategic situation or the in-game world but they don't necessarily logically fit within the structures of Xenonauts 2 so well. In fact, XCOM2 has a much better setup from a lore perspective because the aliens represent an occupying police state so it makes sense that XCOM are rescuing prisoners and all that. To give an example of what I mean, the ideas "capture alien leader", "assassinate alien leader", "clear command post of all aliens" are basically all descriptions of an alien base assault mission, right? Whether you're choosing to capture or kill the alien leadership is something that is down to the player's strategic situation - something that I'd consider a strength of the game in that you get to choose how to handle a mission rather than having to jump through specific hoops. If I look at the list from a mechanical point of view, the ideas fundamentally boil down to: Defend something ("Defend a landmark" / "Defend supplies") Protect VIP ("Escort VIP to exfiltration area" / "Rescue downed pilot" / "Free prisoners" / "Rescue local soldiers under attack by aliens" / "Rescue hostage") Destroy / reach something ("Destroy alien transmission beacon" / "Activate missile site via panel in control room" / "Retrieve information local agents have compiled about aliens" / "Destroy alien mind-control device causing humans to fight you") I guess the tricky thing is to think of ways that many of these things can get into the game. The defence missions seem the easiest candidates; adding some form of non-base defence mission is an idea I've been kicking around for a while and may well make it into X2 before release. As you say, it doesn't really require new mechanics or assets to add them in. But if you take a mission like "destroy alien transmission beacon", you've got to ask yourself how it would be meaningfully different from any other kind of mission. In practice, isn't it going to involve the player just marching through a map and killing all the aliens like they would a standard terror site? It only really becomes something new and interesting if, for example, the aliens have unlimited reinforcements and the player is actively encouraged to focus on the objectives rather than just wiping out the aliens. But then where do those unlimited alien reinforcements come from, and why don't they appear in other missions, etc? It'd be difficult to explain within the context of the game lore. So there's potentially a few ideas there but the key thing is to focus on how the missions would play differently, otherwise the different types of mission wouldn't feel much more different in gameplay terms than fighting a Terror Mission on a American Town map is compared to fighting a Terror Mission on a Soviet Town map. It'd just be the same mechanics with a slightly different flavour on top.

I think we can both see what he's getting at Chris. That's a very well thought out (and practical) response though.