Kissamies

I think immobile armed vehicle on the site would be cool, but the aforementioned turtling might be a problem. A vehicle doing CAS has been discussed elsewhere. I have a basic idea for armed transport. You might have a choice between an unarmed transport or an armed one. Former could carry more and the latter wouldn't be completely defenseless if attacked by UFOs. It might also be able to clear the landing site better. In-game this would only mean that there is far less likely to be any enemies within a certain radius of the LZ. Also some buildings might be blasted to rubble :D

Mi-24 is a gunship that also has transport capabilities. A groundbreaking machine at its time. However, I agree that pure transport chopper is a better choice. The vehicle's fighting capacity doesn't manifest in the game, especially not in the air to ground way which would be the gunship's mission. It's better to use a pure transport helo both from believability and thematic standpoints. A russian helicopter to use would then be Mi-17, but I think the Chinook is better here. Some scattered other points on the OP, using that convenient numbering: 1. Yeah, lack of nightvision always annoyed me too, but I guess the point is to have darkness have some meaning. It'd be just mood lighting otherwise. I'd be fine with that, though. 2. Those Altair games have a theme of last remnants of the humanity forming ragged bands to fight back. It makes sense that they would need training. In the traditional XCOM scenario, the recruits are already conventionally trained soldiers. The experience they gain in battle goes for learning to fight the aliens. Hard to believe you could have extensive training programs for that. 6. One of my ideas was stationary vehicles as on-site gun turrets. Maybe more feasible, but I bet people would be dissapointed that they couldn't move. 10. My personal pet peeve with both Firaxis XCOM and Xenonauts is that the weapon selection is same types of weapons repeated in tiers. First you have bullets, then you have lasers, then plasma and finally MAG. Easy to balance maybe, but banal. Mix it up a little. The original XCOM had this too, but it also had enough special weapons outside the matrix so that it wasn't so noticeable. FloridaBoy's point 3: It's hard to balance, but I love this feature when it's used in 4X games. It prevents the one true tech strategy you'll always use. Of course in the UFO genre there is some randomness generated by what you manage to salvage. Maybe playing that up would give you similar results.

I think you misunderstand. I wasn't saying there should be transit time for the aliens between covert and overt phases of their invasion. I was just thinking of story reasons for aliens not having overwhelming force so that they'll bother with subterfuge instead of just filling the skies with battleships and bombarding everything into rubble. The invasion fleet is probably already in the system when the secret war happens, hiding behind the Moon or whanot. That or already in transit and very near. The secret war is waged by forward elements of that fleet. I was just thinking that futher reinforcements for the fleet would not be coming in the while. Purely a story thing.

Yes, not making more use of the setting was a common criticism of the first game. It'd be great to see more of it the second time around. I know many creators hate it when the fans chime up with even more ideas when they are in the middle of writing it, but I can't help theorising. Maybe the invasion comes in 3 waves. The first one was scouts in the 40's and 50's. Roswell, Crimson Dagger and such. They made the humanity aware enough of the threat to start the Xenonauts. Based on this initial scouting the aliens found it likely that if they just show up with an invasion fleet, the humans are likely to unite and turn their considerate Cold War arsenal against the common enemy. The nukes would especially be a concern. Maybe not strong enough to stop the invaders completely, but they might hurt them and the aliens would prefer not to have areas of the planet they are conquering blasted into radioactive wastelands. They also desire to conquer efficiently if possible. Maybe due to the slowness of interstellar travel or inefficiency of the bureaucracy of their empire, it would take many years to get reinforcements from back home so the invasion force is all they have right now. So they send a second wave of scouts and infiltrators to futher pinpoint and sabotage the sites of most resistance and soften as many areas on the Earth as possible to the idea of allying with them or at least staying neutral when the invasion comes. The nuclear arsenal would be a big objective. Ideally the aliens would prefer to gain control of the nukes, probably by controlling the nations that have them. Failing that, they would try to neutralise them site by site. Plan C is to have them all at least scouted out so that the invasion fleet can deal with them. Don't know if there needs to be a game mechanic representing this other than having some of the tactical missions happen around missile silos, airbases and nuclear submarines. Likewise the influencing nations or power blocs could be presented by aliens running abduction missions and infiltrators sometimes being discovered. They'd also try to sabotage various military targets and manufacturing centers. The third wave is the actual invasion. It triggers when the aliens gain enough of their objectives, turning enough countries to their side or neutrality, or are thwarted enough that they figure out they are discovered and can make no futher gains this way. Them becoming aware of the Xenonauts could be a factor, or if they were always aware, discovering where the Xenonauts are based. The organisation represents Earth's united front after all.

I have to chime in to the alien mind control discussion even if it's a bit redundant. Even if the telepathic mind control is LOS and short duration in tactical combat doesn't mean it doesn't necessarily mean that's all it can do. If the aliens abduct someone and have all night to work on him, they may condition his brain however they wish. I think that's fairly plausible for the setting. Then there's also the bit more crude but classic mind control implant from Invaders from Mars.

Yeah, this is the main point for me. Palette swap isn't very exciting. Though even the original game had weapon tiers in 3x3 grid (I'd say heavy cannon might get a pass for having ammo types, tho) it was OK because there was many additional weapons outside that grid. Original game also tried a bit of that RPS armor game by having some late game units be vulnerable to laser, but I bet most players went all plasma and blaster launcher anyway. I maintain that the specializations are the best approach with weapons. The new tier should be clearly better overall, but the old ones should have enough niche that the player may want to take a few of them even if he wouldn't have to logisticswise. Lasers and better should be deadlier than ballistics, but ballistics could keep the niche of having the grenade launcher with payload shells. Lasers would keep the most accurate sniper even when plasma and MAG weapons rule the field. Plasma could remain the king of brutal, short range splash, though some shielded enemies might be resistant to plasma specifically. For MAG, I don't really care if they overshadow the ballistics completely. They are the late game tech, right?

I like the idea of having first the shadow and then overt war in stages. The Xenonauts will want to stay hidden so that the aliens won't attack their bases or undermine them in other ways, but eventually the cat will be out of the bag when they increase their operations. The Aliens probably want to find an economical way to conquer. If they can get the superpowers to fight each other or maybe infiltrate them so much that they can outright ally with them, they will need to expend less of their forces. Sowing distrust will keep the Earthlings from showing an united front at any rate. The upper echelons of the goverments may know about the UFOs, but they may be so suspicious that they always suspect that the other side will use them as cover up for their operations and they may actually do so occasionally. When the war moves to the overt stage, the Aliens will still try to bully countries into surrendering or opting out of the war with the terror attacks.

Probably has been mentioned already - I'm too lazy to read all of this - but I bring this up in case it hasn't. The modular build also makes it much easier to start with shot down UFOs that have varying degrees of damage like the original game. In this game currently you have either intact craft or shot down craft with some cosmetic action figurey external damage. I would like to see the UFOs more damaged or maybe even destroyed outright if shot down with too much overkill. Of course it would probably be possible to make UFO variants with gaping holes in them even without modular construction, but I imagine it makes it much less work.

I realise I'm late for this party, but I like the subject. In this game, and even more so in Firaxis' game, it bothered me that the weapon tiers are so obvious and so gamey. Same weapons in different flavours that get progressively better. I would mix it up by not necessarily having all classes in all tiers and all tiers having something unique. Also, while the next tier should be overall better, the previous tier should have some unique ability that can make you take few of those weapons with you even if you have access to the higher tier. Ballistics - As the starting tier and easily available, I don't think they need any advantages. Lasers - Should be very accurate, good range but steady damage drop by range instead of sudden at the end if it can be modeled. Lasers could also blind targets that don't have protected vision. The simplest way to model this might be simply giving them the best supression values. Pistol and precision version should be available first and maybe rifle, but with no burst option. The fluff could be that the cooling methods limit them to single shots. The second research level would then allow rapid fire, giving the scatter laser and burst option to rifle, if that's doable. I find the concept of "laser shotgun" very silly, so no carbine unless it is made to behave more like the rifle. The unique weapon would be the dazzle laser, which would be very much like Max's Firewall. Does no or neglible damage, but blinds (supresses) targets very well. I'd envision it as a SMG sized weapon that fires 10 shor bursts. Another, probably not doable, idea for lasers I had is external power packs. The clip sized power packs wouldn't be powerful enough to be practical for other weapons than pistol, so larger packs on the belt or backbag connected to the weapon by cable would be used. The clip-sized power pack would be good enough for 6 shots for pistol, about the same for carbine (2 3 round bursts), 3 shots for rifle, 2 shots for precision and scatter laser (1/5th of a full burst). Dazzle laser would use less energy, so the clip would give 1 or 2 10 round bursts. The 3x2 belt power pack would have 10 times the energy and the 5x3 backbag power pack 5 times that, 50 times total. Plasma - Should be the king of raw damage, but have poor range. The initial weapons should be the "plasma shotgun" carbine and the human version of alien plasma cannon. The fluff would be that humans are struggling with the gravitic focusing technology and the early versions of human plasma weapons try to work around it. The former weapon just shovers the target with plasma at close range and the latter tries to give that plasma bolt more range by making it real big. The vehicular version could also be available with the initial tech. The second tech would then represent a refinement in the focusing technology, allowing the rifle and maybe the scatter and pistol as well. No precision, though. MAGs - Overall should be more of an sidegrade than straight upgrade to plasma. Their strength should be that they don't really have any weaknesses. All weapons available by the standard tech pattern. The only thing I might change is not to make the MAG ammo so interchangeable. At least separate the pistol/carbine calibre from the rifle/precision/storm calibre. The special weapon could be the "payload rifle", a rifle sized weapon that shoots grenades with rifle AP costs. If doable, it should have 4 or 6 grenade clips that are same size as the machine gun belt. The explosions should be little smaller than hand grenades. The defining feature is the ability to fire any sort of grenade that is available as hand grenade. If that is not doable in clips, then single shots like the rocket launcher and normal grenade size explosions. If not any grenade type, then at least explosive and stun like the rocket launcher, but then it'll just basically a replacement for rocket launcher and not as interesting,