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So, what I was thinking was something along the lines of say having two charlies and having both drop troops on the same objective at the same time, maybe in different areas sometimes. I just think it might be cool

Was terribly let down by the base building of Phoenix Point and while I did enjoy some of the innovations that were introduced for XCOM the concept was far too limited Xenonauts 1 kept the original approach which I liked but highlighted some of its shortcommings so now that X2 decied to improve on the base concept here is my therapeutic list of improvements I have expected from PP and now hope will be found in X2: 1. The art needs to be popping, fitting with the era and game UI style AND each type of buildings needs to have its dominant color scheme to instantly set them apart visually. e.g: Hangar blue, Living Quarter Green, Factory brown, Reactor yellow, Defense Buildings red etc... They shouldnt of course contain only these colors but subtly warry on them viaa markings, some of the equiment paint etc.. so that it works naturally and gives a bit of variety to each base, provides instant recognition and collect-em-all feeling besides allowing the player to just look at their base without being instantly bored and/or discussed by the models/bland color choices This is a screen where the player will spend the most time after tactical battles and maybe the Geoscape and is the basis of game progression: it needs to reflect that 2. Players should be able to build a practically unlimited number of bases BUT each base should have a high enough maintenance fee to ensure additional bases are only built if they are really worth it and the player is doing well. In some cases it should be a valid choice to decomission an existing base containing a bunch of hangars for example as the countries around it have all fallen to ruin and are not actually paying into the budget anymore - this would work excellently at throttling base expansions and serve as a dynamic difficulty (one a base is destroyed by aliens you have more money left over at the end of the month to rebuild). What the heck: place a devastated base icon on the map or abandoned base marker to make the world more reactive to the campaign events and refect game progress 3. Limitations on buildings: Hangars should only be allowed to be built at the side of the base for planes to be able to leave the base and yes they should be 2x2 and yes: each hangar should only be housing a single plane which should be visible when in the hangar for visual flair and overview of what is where and how many. Other limitations can be energy (produced by reactors), storage room and living quarter. Now here I would introduce manpower or staff Staff: Each building needs staff to operate including labs and factories but also hangars, radars, reactors etc. There should not be any difference between lab and production staff to do away with the one-time not really a decision micro of hiring these Each living quarter provides capacity for +20 Staff Staff are hired in three ways: Base staff manning all the buildings, soldiers and pilots Each staff type should have different upkeep (salary): Base staff the lowest amont and pilots the highest amount The goal is to both simplify the MGMT of staff, while also introducing interesting decisions and lend a much imposing scale to the organisation. The player could now hire hunderds of staff per base and would need to decide not just if they have money for a new hangar but also if they can staff it and have enough energy (which also needs staff) Staff can be tied into many aspects of the game: when bombed a base could loose staff, purchase cost can be dependant on region and relationship, Base staff could accumualte exp as a unit etc, etc... Now the 3 types of staff are signifficantly less in a given base moving from base to soldiers and to pilots so it could be considered to have 3 types of Living Quarters to really spice up the minigame: Base staff LQ: 20, Soldiers LQ: 10, Pilots LQ: 2 4. Base layouts should be different with each region/continent providing various amounts of usable space, bonuses and even shapes to build in. E.g: Bases in Asia, could recieve a +10 staff bonus to each living quarter, Or Africa could provide lower consturction costs for buildings, EU lower maintenance for labs etc.. 5. There need to be various sizes of rooms BUT this should be simple not needing rotation (like in X1): 1x1 and 2x2 layout rooms are perfect just like in the original. The 1x2 hangar sie in X1 was less optimal then the origina 2x2 as it does not provide sufficient space for the art of the planes (the need to be bigger over time) AND hangars need to take up a lot of sapce to fucntion as a limiting factor when designing a base 6. Adjecancy bonuses - obviously. But since I thought everythign ellse is trivial here are some details: Core building can be a lift but also needs to provide a small reactor and some minimal staff so its not jsut a lift but a core base element that should be 1:1 so there are a lot of directiosn to expand into (it needs to provide base energy and staff as otherwise new buildings cannot be constructed OR the player wil lalways needs to start with these trivial selections. The provided base amount can be fairly minimal though jsut enough for 1-2 buildings to get things started Reactor provides discount to energy usage Rooms of the same type (labs, factories, storage, defense buildings, reactors, hospitals, living quarters) should provide bonus to rooms of the same type: we got this with XCOM and forgot about this in PP... Exception is hangar for planes as only one plane can be dispaled properly per hangar Robotics room (automation) decreases staff requirement and upkeep cost of adjecent rooms as well as increase their output if lab, factory OR reactor. Tech should provide increased bonus effect to this room later which means the player should want to design their bases with these rooms being as much in the center as possible if they wish to decrease the upkeep of their bases long term Hospital ward increased healing rate with each adjecent Living Quarter 7. Each base should have their region represented around it (eg.: bases are in a mountain and beyond their walls you cna see the desert, forest, river, arctic snow whatever is specific to the region) - this would put all bases in a frame help to make them even more unique and identifiable as you would SEE that this base in in the Desert or in hte Arctic or in a Jungle 8. Base Defense buildings: Rocket Launchers, Radars, Shield generators protecting from bombing AND right from the start: base garrisons: These should come in small 1X1 and large 2X2 sizes that provide a small or large number of soldiers in case the base is attacked wielding base equipment. Such a garrison room would resolve the issue of having to keep weapons and soldiers in bases only for defense and would provide a great boost to important bases as well in case the planes are out or the soldeirs happen to be tired, injured, dead... very thematic, usefull building that take up loads of space and staff 9. Display planes in each hangar (Xeonauts did this but PP hasnt) AND vehicles in tank hangar: e.g: each vehicle hangar can hold 4 tanks, and each are visible on the base overview when not used to see how many, what type and what loadout is on them I thought that these improvements would be trivial on the original but having seen countless remakes and even successful iterations only using one of them (adjecancy) I needed to get it off my chest Do you agree, or do you think I missed something? Are at least some of these in the new X2 game or are planned?

Like I said already, nice Idea. Such Elements I get missing in the UFO-ET-Games (1 and 2) too. There you have the same Sitiuation. Either your People are light Armed and have enough Reserves with them or they are heavy Armed and can´t carry so much. I understand too (I have done my Soldier-Duty), that in deep enemy Base-Missions, Special Mission etc. you can´t say to your Enemys: "Hold on, we are out of Ammonition and have to supply us again, before we can continue the fight." For that Situation it´s good to have fully equiped Soldiers and use them wisely.

So the nuXCOM style underground base is out? if it were up to me, I wouldn't limit the player on how many "rooms" he can have in a base the only limit would be the energy needed to upkeep those rooms and the cost to dig deeper and deeper to accommodate new rooms. storages, labs, hangars, engineering rooms etc , each would have a different energy upkeep so if a player wants to make a huge base just with storage rooms (which would have lowest energy upkeep), he should have this option and flexibility

Here is one of my screenshots. As you can see, there is simply nowhere else to place another 2x2 radar. I had to remove the current radar and do without the radar for a whole month. For people who have been playing for a long time and know what technologies they will be able to research and where they will build - this is not a problem, you can just not build an intermediate version of the radar on the main base and save money. But for beginners this is a big problem. If you imagine that the hangars will also be 2x2, then except for the hangars and radar on the base, nothing else will fit. At least three hangars must be located on the main base.

Ok there is a video on the beta (though might be outdated at this point: From this it seems there is adjecancy bonus and hangars work the same way as in X1 + planes are visible as they are being built Please please reconsider making hangars 2x2.... 1x2 is way too easy to fit into any base in any reasonable number. It negates the need to place buildings smartly for adjacency bonus as the hangars will fit in anyhow hover you build your base if they are soo sleek + there is much less space to display larger planes towards the end. Even X1 had 1x2 living quarters and labs so you might have run out of space at least in the main base but these are now 1x1 tiles - please make hangars big again As for staffing I can understand its a big leap from the original and especially from the remakes. Just note that buying additional lab and production personnel and then never having to think about them again is not an interesting decision. I like the idea of having a large base with tons of people working there but this system does not support that - it was usefull in the original as this was the main way to scale up research but there are other methods for this in modern systems (leads, hints, autopsies increasing research) and building up is more easy then it was before (unless we caount the heavy laser produciton exploit)

I have also had the experience, also in some very early versions of the game. There was a time when terror missions were basically Chinook defense missions because every alien would just rush towards it. Note you still have your 8 guys in that picture though! In the original X-Com, there'd be four bodies lying around...

Yes. I experienced that in Xenonauts. Not nice. Androns and discs everywhere. Me constantly retreating direct from the start. Total desaster, "Judgement Day" like.

Absolutely, I've kept this in mind - there are of course some comments that simply don't reasonably apply to Xenonauts, and I've omitted those. So for whatever reason, a lot of that is about atmosphere and character. It seems to be a very common opinion that the originals are atmospherically superior to Xenonauts. From reading the comments that talk about this, I think it can be broken down into several aspects (this is my interpretation of other people's opinions): The alien appearance. Again, a well-known issue, no more needs to be said. The general creepiness. Come to think of it, Xenonauts didn't seem to try for creepiness. The original had some battle music that was more creepy than intense, several alien enemies that were designed to be creepy / off-putting, more night missions with aliens in every shadow, etc. Lack of "integration" of the Xenonauts story with pop culture. The original had some unmistakable references to general UFO, alien and conspiracy lore. The Sectoids are basically the aliens from X-Files and abduction stories. Alien abduction stories are reflected in the game, there's even an abductor UFO that has cows. The final mission lore is entirely inspired by alien lore popular at the time. Xenonauts has no such connections. As a personal note, I feel that conceptually the Cold War setting is far superior to the near-future of every other game, but admittedly Xenonauts did nothing with that setting. Another interesting complaint is that Xenonauts doesn't, early on, give the same feeling of being outgunned and dominated as the original. Upon some consideration, this is perhaps a fair criticism. The very predictable alien invasion progress in Xenonauts also doesn't throw any curveballs at you. In the original, you could get unlucky and get an early terror mission... and if it were anything but Floaters, you were pretty much screwed. Cyberdiscs took forever to kill with basic weapons, Chryssalids would eat all your rookies. Xenonauts has mechanics that prevent early terror missions or base assault missions, and doesn't allow for the sudden appearance of stronger-than-normal aliens. This is also related to squad sizes. In the original X-Com, you started with a squad of 14 (and you got 10 if you used a tank). This meant that the slaughter of your troops felt brutal but was more possible to deal with. You could lose 2 soldiers just trying to get out of the Skyranger, but you'd still have 12 left. Of which another couple would die during the mission. Xenonauts can be almost as unforgiving as the original (after all, your rookies probably do die in one hit) but even so, the smaller squad means you cannot lose 2 guys just getting out of your dropship. Some people also miss blaster bombs but I cannot understand why.