TheTuninator

Eh, in this case I think it's better that the developers pick them. Chris has a far better idea of what constitutes the lore of Xenonauts than we do, and is thus in a far better position to pick suitable names.

QFT. Also, it's important to keep in mind that the Chinook is literally the last place you would want to put civilians. It's a huge, lightly armored target in a free-fire zone, and it won't be lifting off until all the aliens are dead. The smartest thing a civilian could do in this situation would be to hide and stay away from the Xenonauts, who are the main target of enemy fire. As such, I really don't think any kind of special civilian AI is called for. It's not very logical or realistic in the first place, and from a gameplay perspective, I think herding civilians like cats would grow tiring rather quickly.

Again, you're assuming people are going to have several seconds to stare at the alien and rationally asses it. This is a warzone. No civilian is going to stick their head out for more than a second, and they sure as hell aren't going to be rational about it. They're going to see something moving with a gun and duck the hell back into cover. How does that not make sense? If you're doing a crap job and lose funding, that means you are not protecting those countries. If you aren't protecting them, why should they give you their money when they could spend it to protect themselves, something which you are not doing? Whether or not the entire world is funding the Xenonauts is irrelevant if, in the eyes of that country, they're doing a crap job. As the president of the US, why should I continue to authorize funding to the Xenonauts when they've constantly permitted mass attacks on US cities and nonstop violations of US airspace? Better to pour those billions into a homegrown defensive organization which will have actually protecting the US as its sole goal. People won't trust them, necessarily, but if you're given a choice between "I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords!" and "DIE HUMAN", I think I know what most people will take.

Yeah, this is pretty easy to explain along these lines. The F-17's already been refitted for anti-alien operations by the US personnel behind the inception of the Xenonauts; now that they have access to Soviet tech, they need some time to retrofit the MiG. Seems reasonable to me, no?

It's really important to keep in mind that all of these aliens are humanoid. There's no way for a civilian to tell whether there's an alien or a person in that alien-looking armor, and even if they could, it's going to be difficult to distinguish a human from an alien at any appreciable range, particularly on a terror mission. If you're a civvie and you see movement, you aren't going to stick your head out to see if it's a human or an alien; you're going to run and hide for your damn life. If you're failing to do an effective job, nations will deem it not worth their investment and pull their funds in order to funnel them into homegrown anti-alien efforts. Makes perfect sense to me.

Nah, I measured the distances and the X-COM craft do indeed go much further. The relative map sizes may be different, of course, but that still results in less coverage.

There's rumors going around the official forums that the max squad size is 6. If this is true, I will be really disappointed. I can't see how they can maintain the same level of lethality possessed by X-COM and Xenonauts if your squad size is just 4-6 soldiers.

A cool way to handle some of the UFOs "running away" might be to have them do a high-speed pass at the interceptors; that'd both allow the player to get some licks in and allow the UFO to escape if it's not destroyed.

Hmmmm, not sure how I feel about implementing a "leadership aura". Chris can obviously speak to this far better than I can, but Goldhawk is an indie team, and they can't really afford to stretch themselves thin for extraneous features. Basic stuff, such as having them stay in buildings like Xentax suggested, is fine, but I'd much rather see AI coding time go into making the aliens more formidable and intelligent opponents than into making civilians behave slightly more realistically.

That'd be unnecessary extra clicking that would quickly grow irritating after the first time. Better simply to grow familiar with the ships as you play.

This is definitely another important consideration. Patrol is a key way to find alien bases, and as it stands if you put a base in northeastern NA you can't even reach the southern end of South America with interceptors, let alone patrol there for an appreciable length of time.

I think the problem with denying players a fourth hanger to house the MiG from the start is that this is not X-COM; alien ships don't come alone. If you're facing a flight of two corvettes, or a corvette and two scout escorts, you're really going to want three fighters to take them on, and having to wait a month while a hanger builds would suck something awful. I'd vote for the "start with 4 hangars", myself.

And, if the majority of players seem to prefer it that way, then I'd agree that the aircraft ranges should be kept as they are. I just think it's something that warrants some more scrutiny once the game is feature complete and a bit more polished.

I actually like this idea quite a lot! It lets players learn the research screen right away, it explains the role of the MiG, and it acclimates players to air combat in a more graduated manner. The empty hanger is the only real complication from it, but that can easily be resolved, I'm sure.

Oh, I agree. I'm simply raising a concern as the aircraft ranges are an area in which Xenonauts deviates significantly from X-COM. I have no problem with deviation from X-COM in general, and I think it's great that Xenonauts is trying to carve out its own niche as a unique game, but in this case I think it's a deviation which hurts player enjoyment of the game when compared to X-COM. My main concern is not detection, but rather pursuit; where in X-COM you could give chase to a UFO for quite a considerable distance, in Xenonauts you're pretty much out of luck if it heads away from your base at all. To use the example of the East Coast US base again, in X-COM you could chase a UFO from over Texas or New England to the tip of South America or well over Europe. In Xenonauts, you can get maybe 2/3rds of the way down South America (and have no fuel left for the fight) or maybe midway over the Atlantic most of the time. If I pick up a UFO over the Atlantic and it heads in the direction of Europe, I'm pretty much powerless to stop it. At the end of the day it's nothing I can't cope with, but I would definitely urge you guys to examine aircraft ranges again during the beta, as they are currently maybe 1/2 to 2/3rds that of X-COM aircraft.

Drop tanks are a good idea for an additional feature, but they wouldn't solve the problem that I perceive here, as adding drop tanks forces the player to sacrifice combat ability in order to get aircraft ranges up to a more playable level. As it stands, you've basically got to write off defending Europe at all and even a decent chunk of South America if you are putting your base in NA, which in turn makes putting your base in NA just not that viable an option. The player shouldn't have to make a sacrifice to expand defensive capabilities in this situation; defensive capabilities should simply be expanded outright.

Firaxis won't kickstarter. They have a publisher, and even if they didn't, the amount of money required for an AAA title like their version of X-COM is far beyond the power of Kickstarter to raise.

I think Chris' idea of the intro movie as a series of hand-drawn pictures about the Iceland Incident, sort of a briefing, almost, would actually be pretty awesome. Good intros are extremely memorable and typically representative of the game to fans for years after its release.

Releases are always so buggy because it's an alpha.

I have ~16,000 subscribers (though they're mostly for Fallout videos) and I plan on doing some Xenonauts gameplay once the game is a bit more developed. Not exactly the same target demographic, but it can't hurt, right? My Youtube channel is under the same name.

Wow, those look pretty awesome!

But then we miss out on the great Cold War aesthetic! "Black ops" and UFOs are a huge part of the Cold War mythos nowadays, and I think Xenonauts has chosen its time period perfectly.

I think a weather system might be interesting, but as you say in the OP, it's not something I would want the devs to implement for the release.

Yup, that's a risk I'm willing to take to avoid the frustration of my planes running out of fuel while chasing a UFO across the Atlantic.

Yeah, he was saying that in reference to a human telling you to run somewhere, which I agree with. I'm pointing out that in the context of a normal terror mission, most civilians aren't going to want to be close enough to a combatant to distinguish if they're human in the first place.