Gazz

At least Egosoft is consistent. =) We can not give you a definite release date for Rebirth at this point.

Long story short, JA2 is a game with a different scope than Xeno. Everything happens on a smaller scale. A few mercs on a small island. No world-wide organisation doing major construction and research. As a result, everything in the game is smaller scale and more detailed on that scale. When you only have 3 or 6 actors, it's okay to do more fiddling with their individual equipment. Decide on which gun to mount a laser aim or x4 scope. If you keep increasing the game's scope, detail must be reduced to keep up the game's flow. That's why you don't get to equip every individual soldier in Command & Conquer. Mk1 soldier, one piece.

Why bother? It's Torment 2. Want.

The cost to research would represent the (implied) scientist's wages while the actual scientists are never hired and don't show up on any statistic. Without that system, the scientist's wages would have to be rolled into building maintenance which would make those buildings extraordinarily expensive if nothing is researched. The player would still have the option to put research on hold and only pay the building upkeep without paying for the scientists. That eliminates the need for an entirely new interface to "shut down" a building. It's the exact same thing as right now. Same cost, same choices - only with less clicking.

No. The system stays largely as it is. No rebalance at all. The personnel costs are made part of the research project. Researching Laser Rifle costs you 8000 $. That's the wages you would have paid. The man hours. Buildings are buildings. If they are destroyed / damaged, their research / production speed is reduced. The building's "output". A lab at 10% would only have undamaged facilities for 1 researcher. Simple. Personnel is abstracted. They don't have names, anyway!

What was the trade-off? Did you not have those rounds of ammunition for fending off the approaching zombies? The way you describe the feature it was clearly an optional "just for fun" action that does not enforce additional micromanagement. Those add colour and immersion at no "cost" - as far as the UI is concerned - and there is no reason to take them out. Labs, for instance, are a completely different issue. First I build the lab, accept the space constraints and upkeep. Then the game gives me the chore of implementing my own decision again... by making me manually hire the scientists that I obviously intended to have along with the lab. That's a UI problem because the UI should implement the orders of the player, not throw the player's orders right back at him. The player is supposedly the Xenonauts commander, not some underling working in procurement.

*shrug* Labs and workshops have gameplay attached. Attach some gameplay to barracks and I'm all for keeping them. Like a cumulative soldier experience gain bonus per barracks in the base because they also house the training facilities. That would put them on the same level as labs / workshops and make them part of the base management. Just having to build one and that's it? That's the absence of gameplay. Barracks wouldn't even have to have a troop limit. That's fiddly bits and not interesting. Like stores, you'd only need one... but it would be desirable to have several so they actually compete with other buildings for the space! Store rooms are much harder to find a gameplay purpose for. One way would be that every store room adds a trivial sum to base maintenance but also reduces the total maintenance / upkeep cost of the entire base by maybe 10%. Improved logistics. Also a boost to soldier morale because the quartermaster can store diet coke and pepsi. And stuff. Again, that would give store rooms a purpose, keep them in the decision process of building/upgrading the bases. With barracks and store rooms both being desirable in multiples, the base building space wouldn't have to be shrunk, either. I bet that these two alone would more than make up the "savings" from dropping living quarters off the building list. The reason why I suggested dumping LQ / barracks / stores is not that I have a special hate against those types of buildings. It's because that currently there is no gameplay attached to them. Fix the cause and you can forget about doctoring the symptoms.

Teach engineers how to take something apart? Weeeell, all ya'all need in this here weldin' torch and...

At least rip off the useful ideas! Power is nothing you manage in this game. It requires no decision. You could just as well increase the build / maintenance costs of every individual building and end up with the exact same effect. I can only imagine that someone thought "Hey, let's have some more clicking just for the hell of it!" and no one dared to question it. =)

Good point and mostly correct! Of these three only the command center has a gameplay function. It's an intentional vulnerability. You have to protect it during a base attack. Storage could be taken out immediately with zero loss of gameplay. Back in the OG I used to have an entire base dedicated to nothing but storage and that mean constant micromanagement in shuffling items back and forth. There was nothing interesting about it and no challenge whatsoever. Barracks could gain a gameplay function by aiding soldier training in some way. If there is no such thing then yes, barracks are identical to living quarters and should be taken out as well. Game design also means removing the features that do not present the player with a decision or challenge. To use soldiers, you need to hire and manage them, need a Skyranger and hanger to do so. Medical facilities. Maybe a garage. The Skyranger has multiple versions, has downtime, is a gameplay feature. It is worth tracking. How often do you manage the barracks building after building it once? If the answer is not at all then it serves no purpose. No gameplay. If overall base space is reduced then barracks carry no opportunity cost, either. Eliminating barracks + living quarters also solves an issue of great silliness. What if the barracks (or LQ) get destroyed during an attack? Do all the soldiers perish after you win the battle because they no longer have a place to sleep? Your mini tanks becoming inoperable when their maintenance / rearming / refueling facilities are destroyed makes some kind of sense but soldiers don't die that easily... If this were all there is to the game, if this were Sim City, then yes. Only it's not. Reducing the base management to the elements that actually require a decision is long overdue and it's a great relief that Chris finally got around to tackling the issue. From an aesthetical point of view you do have a point. Every base should have living quarters and storage but if they are modeled at all then they should be a fixed part of the command center structure. You build a base, it comes with these three buildings pre-built and you cannot remove them. Only the command center "core tile" can sustain critical damage. Storage or quarters can only generate fixable damage. (damage there may be a mess to clean up but it does not utterly destroy a base)

The point is that building LQ is a non-choice. If you build a lab and a workshop, do you really get to decide whether you want to build living quarters for them or not? Features like that add no gameplay because the player doesn't get to make a decision. It's not difficult to do or expensive. It's merely a chore put on the player by the game... which is a situation that should be avoided at the design stage.

It's fake control because it doesn't offer any choice. If you need 15 scientists to research for 4 days then that's a fixed cost. Same as having 30 scientists research for 2 days. If you attach this cost to the research projects directly, you achieve the same thing with less fiddle. And without living quarters. =)

Not necessarily. Say the building costs it's regular (low) maintenance. The cost for the scientists is added to the research projects. Researching laser rifles costs you 9000 $ or whatever. You have the exact same system as now where the work has to be paid for. Except that instead of hiring / firing on every change of workload, the player only has to schedule the projects. After that is done, it is assumed that some unnamed flunkie does the work of hiring/firing to get the required personnel to where they need to be. No need for an additional system of temporarily shutting down installations. No need to frontload any costs. Exact same depth as now - only without the silly micromanagement. It's also much more in style with the player being the Big Boss and having a staff to do these kind of things. Would also be another potential candidate for building synergy. Every additional lab reduces total research cost by x %. Living quarters are tucked away safely below the control room. Every base has them because the control room wouldn't be manned without it. =)

Eliminating pointless micromanagement? This is an awesome notion and should be supported! Once you build workshops / labs / barracks, you have already decided on what will happen in the base. Having to build living space or doing the clicking to actually hire the scientists adds nothing. That's just me going through the moves. A pointless chore that I will happily wave goodbye to. =) It is still differentiated by the required time. Using big numbers doesn't make a game better and doesn't change the decisions that the player makes. They are just bigger numbers. =) The RADAR change will probably work as outlined. What I'm wondering is if you could merge the new and old systems. There are still different types of RADAR with different detection chances. If you build multiples of the same type of RADAR, these add up their range. The range of other types of RADAR in that base is unaffected or only increased by a much smaller percentage. Not sure if that would make RADAR spam basically required and if it would work with the space allocation. Alternative: The RADAR buildings you build increase range. The Data Analysis Centers (which need a better name) increase this base's RADAR detection chance. You can never have enough of both. Decide. (I already hate it from a player's perspective because I want perfect! That's a very good sign!) Having multiples of a given structure (the "adjacency boni" of XCOM) give a certain bonus - whether adjacent or not - is generally a good idea because it keeps rewarding specialization instead of having one main base and a bunch of RADAR sites. For instance, barracks could house 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 soldiers each. Same with labs and workshops. Multiple barracks could even very slightly increase the rate of soldier experience gain. Multiple labs: small chance (outside of research and at random times) of "upgrade" developments to current items to become available. Just small upgrades that can shake up the strict "tier" structure of items at least a bit. Multiple workshops could give you a chance of occasionally producing extra items... "from stuff we had kinda lying around here, y'know." For fighter hangars: reduce rearming / refueling times with multiples. Garages could boost the efficiency of workshops by 5, 10, 15, 20 %. Also aircraft repair speeds. I'm sure there could be more ways for structures to interact and "buff" each other. Those are just off the top of my head. A single base would be very inefficient in comparison. You just couldn't stack all the boni you want. =) And even if a base had all the buildings it needs for the intended operation, there would always be something you could build... and make it work just a little better! A little more interaction between those basic structures would give the player something to think about. Less fiddle with many different structures... but more depth. Don't anyone get hung up on those numbers, though! I just made them up for explanation.

I've seen it compared to XCOM but the tactical combat is considerably less deep. There is no opposition in the "cityscape". There is a constantly increasing "police heat" counter but when it reaches max, all you have to do is pay up to 2000$ which isn't such a big deal. The rest of the cityscape consists of buying low and selling high, building resource generators, and generally bee-lining to total domination of the map. Same thing on every map. XCOM has more strategic / management choices than that. I bought the "Two Pack" together with someone else so I still don't consider it overpriced. It's pretty stylish and fun for a while. =) Don't think I'm ever going to complete the campaign, though. I've seen enough.

It dissolved entire aliens in some silly TV series. Enemy Nation or something.

I like "Sandman". "Cowboy" because he's using a cattle-prod.

The idea was to have directional cover.

Yes, common sense. =) Have you fired an assault rifle or machine gun? I did. You wouldn't want to do that one-handed.

Maybe it has - but on the other planet first.

*shrug* At least you tried to add something useful instead of parroting some general terms from other games! That should be encouraged. =)

Yay. Woo. I cheer. Grumpy christmas to all of you!

In the strategy genre I came across Wargame European Escalation (a recent Steam sale). Really hardcore / old school strategy game. Well, more of a RTS but with a gazillion real world units from the cold war era. Infantry unit x of nation y has their proper assault rifle, grenades, and launchers... I was big on war games back in the day of real strategy games so I'm right at home. =) PS: digging out infantry from an urban area is a royal pain. As it should be. Don't even think of sending your tanks in without cover. Note to self: invest more campaign points in gunships with rocket / grenade launchers. =) Alas, artillery is terribly inaccurate. I was in an arty unit and if anyone showed that kind of performance, they'd be cleaning barrels for a month! Oh well. Pet peeve of mine. Just nod and smile. Come to think of it, there was this arty lieutenant who was a cool 10 kilometers off when planning our route march. I guess some people should be kept as far away as possible from live artillery pieces.

Can't we just agree that it's definitely no .50 cal of any kind? =P

Is that the new air combat UI?