indaris

I took a look at this. 10 years of development hell. Looks awful. Designs not creative at all, stolen from better franchises art concepts. Less features than the original. Extremely outdated GUI. Poor reviews all over the internet. Overly defensive team and tiny zealous fanbase. Hard pass.

So good to hear! I'm rooting for you guys!

I like the premise of XCOM which is that rather than have a Covenant style alliance of aliens (which I still enjoy too), they're basically a bunch of failed experiments. This allows you to have some weird designs which maybe aren't particularly grounded, but they exist because of the meddling of a powerful civilization and kept around to act as a measuring stick against future experiments. As an aside, I think people are misunderstanding what the Codex was. It's basically an AI that can deploy a holographic defense barrier allowing it to act in the physical world rather than over a network. It's like a smartphone that can attack people when they fail the thumbprint scanner. I suspect they were created as part of the occupation for some sort of purpose (monitoring or assisting the Advent troops?) so they have a humanoid shape. It's entirely possible that it originally WAS an attempt to digitize humans which failed and was repurposed for data protection.

I think it's a pretty cool idea, but I'd support it mainly in a system that expanded the air game a lot more.

I just read this and it has made me a very happy man! I look forward to playing the game on release. Congratulations on the child! I had one of my own last year, and it's quite an experience. Good luck.

I would assume that by the start of the invasion, any satellites Earth might have had are either destroyed or disabled. That would be step one in any planetary invasion. The photos and stuff would probably be available. However, to implement what you want, it's probably moddable very easily. You could just remove the initial fog to clear all of the map. You'd still have to rely on normal sight and you wouldn't know where the aliens are, but you'd have the whole map revealed already.

That's entirely down to loadout and character skill choices in Chimera Squad. You can absolutely do easy no-kill sweeps even at the end of game, but you have to choose to do that rather than just pick lethal skills and equipment.

It was a viable tactic to rush early UFOs with a squad of shieldbearing guys with stun batons and just beat the shit out of Caesarans for resisting arrest.

There's an optimal head to body ratio for most life-forms and toddler with macrocephaly is pretty far from it.

That's not how X1 worked at all. There were region-specific maps, especially the Middle East. Arctic maps, desert maps, forest maps, farmland maps, city maps and small town maps as well as middle eastern village maps and possibly others I can't recall.

Weird aliens are a great idea, but not 90s videogame aliens, which is what XCOM had. There were strange things which were basically monsters that belonged on the cover of heavy metal albums. Which is cool but... why do they exist? A giant flying eyeball? Why would such a creature evolve and what value would it have over a drone with a camera? How could it even manipulate environments on it's homeworld? The aliens in Xenonauts 1 are perhaps not super creative in design, but they are very plausible. Ixhcel as you present, is basically just a bipedial humanoid alien with extra arms. Something like the Elder Things from Lovecraft would avoid the bipedial symmetrical design. There were some designs in the XCOM reboot that I liked. Mainly the Thin Men and the Seekers. The Thin Men are a fantastic idea. It plays into UFO/Alien mythology with a decent reason, they're creepy. It's just great. Whenever possibly, play to the source material if it works. The Seekers were cool because they were obvious alien tech designed as a weapon. They had no other purpose than hunting down and killing humans who were alone. Great stuff. XCOM 2 had even more better ideas. I really liked ALL the Advent troops, but that's a specific "Aliens have won" scenario so I won't touch on that here. There are three really good designs that I love. Archons, Faceless and Codexes. Archons are on the surface, clearly some sort of vanity project or PR weapon. They're made to look like angels, but they're obviously stitched together. It's a fantastic idea with the Advent Churches popping up. Faceless are cool because, shapeshifters. It's a good idea from a gameplay and a narrative standpoint. And then the Codexes. They're so different from everything else. Basically you have these AI avatars running around for some reason, and they're repositories of data and information for the Advent. They're some sort of coordination/data gathering device that is intelligent and independent enough to act individually. That's very interesting and it's not some sort of bloated mutant blob monster.

You're correct. The Cold War element is gone from the game and now it takes place in modern times. This works fine for me personally and I don't think it hurts the game, although it was kind of interesting to see a alternate history game like this. I liked seeing the soviet stuff as it played well into the idea of both the 1st and 2nd Worlds having to put aside their differences and fight against the invaders. It doesn't hurt that the two biggest military powers in 1979 have all the cool stuff, so it's nice to see available.

Yeah, that mod is a good proof of concept. Large bombers modified to be effective against certain UFOs would be pretty cool, you'd have to be very careful and protect them against even scouts and other fast maneuverable UFOs

Aircraft carriers would be interesting. Maybe not that you made them but perhaps you could "borrow" use of them from a world power and keep a few troops and some aircraft on a carrier for extended range capability.

Sorry, Comrade. Trashman got it 100% right. Flying low over water is a death sentence inside of engagement range. You have nowhere to hide and no energy to maneuver with. Flying low avoids radar in certain circumstances, but most of those circumstances are when dealing with surface radars. If you are within detection range of an enemy aircraft, flying low will just make you easy prey, unless you're in an exceptionally mountainous area. The only time you want to fly low over water is when approaching an enemy ship or surface installation and you're trying to use the curvature of the earth to conceal yourself until the last possible moment. There are also many problems with doing it this way and arguments for approaching as high as possible instead (mainly that once they see you, you can't do anything except hope you get them first, which is why many anti-shipping missiles do this, but combat aircraft do not.) I can see altitudes being useful in a couple of different ways. You have to actually engage the UFO, so the UFO is going to generally pick the altitude where the battle takes place. UFOs typically don't react to human aircraft unless they're directly under attack or the UFOs are interceptors. A Scout UFO might be at a low altitude, scanning towns, abducting people, mutilating cattle, etc. Your aircraft/weapons could have different performance at low altitude and gain some sort of advantage from attacking from medium altitude and dropping down on top of them, etc. An AWACS plane could be in the area and provide some additional data or bonuses to attacking the UFO. This AWACS would then need to be protected from UFO interceptors which would easily destroy it if unprotected. High altitude interceptions could be necessary against more advanced UFOs and maybe even some sort of stratosphere level interceptions in the very late game or against specific rare UFOs. These are just ideas, but it's certainly possible to expand the air combat into something interesting.