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 Extremely outdated GUI.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.

To get back to the main topic, if that's the case, that's a good thing. I've said before in other posts, but X1 was an excellent game and it took the XCOM formula in all the right directions. Making a better version of that game (Xenonauts) should absolutely have been the goal from the beginning, and I think that it was, but unfortunately somewhere along the way some ideas were implemented to appease certain vocal minorities who really just wanted the game to be remade as the original XCOM, which it had already surpassed in every way. So more accurately, it was dragged backwards to the game that inspired it by members of the community and then over time, the developers realized they actually were taking steps backwards in doing so and returned to their original formula which was nearly already perfect. Unfortunately, in the state that it's in, there are still some issues that will probably never been resolved because of how it was designed. (Tetris UFOs are the most egregious example.) But having played the most recent version after coming back for a while, it's nice to see that bases and air combat have been restored to their former glory. I think the idea of changing those elements was a good idea, but they needed to be expanded rather than dumbed down.

Generally speaking, women only get involved in military operations in a large scale when you are losing badly and you don't have enough men left to fight. (Often seen in insurgency scenarios.) So perhaps in an alien invasion scenario for the survival of the species, this makes sense. You take whoever you can get who seems like they can do the job! On the flip side, sending women to die against the alien invader is potentially global suicide. Men are expendable on a civilization/species level, women are not. You can justify these things however you like.

I agree with that. I don't think psychic powers should become available to human forces, but defenses seem reasonable. (This is one thing I really like about Xenonauts is that they didn't fall into temptation with psychic soldiers. That has its place, but as the game is, it's unnecessary.)

Despite your assertion that there is no unique art style, you just described it. "Realistic" (Bland is really unfair if you're going to criticize the rest as being comicbook, plastic and neon, don't you think?) I've said this before and perhaps I'm the only one to think this, but the Xenonauts alien style is great. I'd compare it favorably with Halo. Halo designs are generally really good, they feel realistic and not cartoonish or gamey, they tell you what you're looking at in a glance. (What type of enemy am I facing? What does this weapon/ship/vehicle do?) and they're memorable enough that they stick with you. I personally think the Androns were a great addition. Alien terminators? What's not to like! XCOM aliens were... lets face it. Blobs and weird Doom demon nonsense. They were monsters made for a video game without any thought as to why these creatures would actually exist. Xenonauts tried really hard to explain WHY the aliens were what they were and the UFOs were what they were and why they didn't just wipe out the planet from the start. It was refreshing and actually pretty neat to see done in a sort of retro cold war style. In fact, the idea of the Cold War ending early because they need to deal with the UFO threat is a great concept. (Moving things to modern day is fine too, don't get me wrong.) That was a really cool idea though. I am a little sad to see Cesareans going back to Sectoid designs. Little grey men are a hilarious idea, but it makes no sense biologically speaking. The taller skinny greys that X1 had were a good idea and frankly I think the X2 team really listened to the XCOM fanatics too much in terms of designs and mechanics. (Sacrificing art and level design for the ability to blow up any square of a UFO is a losing proposition any way you slice it.) If they want to play XCOM, those games are there. Xenonauts was trying a more realistic take on that concept and a better one in my opinion. I recently was told that that air combat and base building has been changed back to X1 which I am very happy to hear about and I appreciate the team taking in feedback as I think those are superior approaches to both mechanics. I guess I just feel like Xenonauts 1 was almost the perfect game it needed to be and in making a sequel instead of expanding that perfection into an even more nuanced and perfect game, they were goaded into making yet another XCOM game which has already been remade many times and doesn't need it. I won't mince words here. I would rather play Xenonauts 1 than any other XCOM or XCOM inspired game. I backed Project Phoenix and I don't care for it, frankly. I've got hundreds and hundreds of hours in the XCOM remakes and who knows how many thousands in the original XCOM. I prefer Xenonauts 1, mechanically, visually, aesthetically, from a lore perspective. It's just a better game all around.

I should have just posted that. Good video. My point is that once missiles fly past their target, they can't just loop around like in a cartoon and continue the chase. I don't think air combat needs to be this complicated, but maybe different type of tracking systems could be developed to be more effective against UFOs?

I see what you're saying, but that really only makes sense in very long range engagements where you can defend against a missile by forcing it to expend all its energy and fuel trying to constantly adjust course before it reaches you. Maybe instead of having "dodge" as a maneuver, you could deploy limited counter measures, when if timed right would disrupt target lock. The aliens don't have much in the way of missiles currently, but I suppose you could include that as a more common weapon type. UFOs with countermeasures would be interesting too, an extra level of tactics around baiting them to expend their CMs before hitting them. You kinda had this in X1 where you could bait enemy fighters to launch their missiles and then break off to the overworld and then re-engage them once they were depleted for a more advantageous attack. As far as I know, the missiles in X1 are almost impossible to evade without "dodging" so it's probably fine as is, although some other way to more strategically deal with those weapons would be interesting.

Not accurate. The IR sensor or radar is on a gimbal that has a limited range. Once the missile misses a target, its lost sight of it and most of its energy in most cases. There's no way it turns back around and keeps chasing the target. It might find something else to track beyond the initial target though. A missile that constantly is updating the intercept point would be more accurate, but the distinction is almost unnecessary at the range/time involved in Xenonauts air combat. They're not launching AMRAAMs at like 20nmi or anything like that.

We're not talking about Football and Basketball. We're talking about XCOM which is what Xenonauts is. It's the same game, with a different look and some details changed, just like all the other XCOM-likes. This isn't a strange concept in video games, so I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. It actually has the best aesthetics and style of any XCOM game because they came at it from an approach of how to make it interesting, realistic/believable, and still fit the mechanics. Original XCOM was guys with mushroom hair and spandex fighting weird Doom monster knockoffs. The gameplay was fun, but god it was ugly and had no idea what it was doing stylistically. XCOM (2012) re-envisioned this, but it's still sort of a silly superhero spandex adventure against comic book aliens. Xenonauts changed all that and actually made it a bit more gritty, interesting and appealing without sacrificing the actual gameplay at all. It's fine that you don't see that. There are plenty of people out there devoid of taste like you or appreciation for art and you still manage to live full and productive lives. Cold War XCOM was a great idea and they nailed the art, lore and feeling of it. They turned what was basically a comic book into something actually pretty cool that felt like it could be taken seriously as a franchise. With Xenonauts 2 they wanted to do 2020 realistic XCOM, which, now that I've been playing the current version, I am very happy with with the sole exception of the Tetris UFOs.

But you don't care about creativity. You want an XCOM-clone without aesthetics. That's why I still play Xenonauts 1 instead of XCOM, because it looks better.

Agreed. The Steambird approach reminds me of Aeronautica Imperialis and X-wing, where maneuverability arcs are a major part of the strategy. I could definitely get behind that idea and I especially like your suggestion of making enemy weapon types more diverse. You could further improve things by adding armor/shield facings, specific weak-points and subsystem damage, especially with larger UFOs where you might need pinpoint strikes to cripple their defenses before moving in for the kill. More powerful weapons could make such tactics unnecessary against older UFOs as the game goes on, mirroring how ground combat becomes easier as your firepower increases.