Gazz

People are debating PERIOD. At this point, what they are debating has become largely irrelevant. You could discuss the colour of the sky as glimpsed in a glam cam shot and it would turn into a heated thread. Very much so. The player is forced to make choices and can't have the best of everything at once. It was said that the foundry (and SHIV tech / upgrades) would be a pretty steep investment so you might not even have that installation in every game. That's a pretty serious departure(*) from the original game where you pretty much inevitably ended up with the same base every time. They seem to be dead serious about this "making choices" thing... at every level. (*) This means that the game sucks. Of course.

You're not just risking "civilian and political costs" but the annihilation of your soldiers. And if you are using super-artillery that can target a single house, then the aliens should get KEW and get to drop rocks on your team from orbit. A clean weapon that turns everything it hits into a crater and small bits of glowing wreckage.

That's like saying that DLC usually means overpriced junk. It's not that simple, though. Streamlining is a lot of work and requires a great deal of creativity. It's like removing the rock around the sculpture inside... Not all developers are amazing and smart people, though, and they don't always get the time they need to do it right. The result can be that they cut the feature entirely instead of only removing the dumb micromanagement from the feature.

It's how XCOMEU does it. The alien's turn does not take you out of the "action". It's only a red overlay text on the screen. When your soldiers hear something in the fog of war, some kind of "sound wave" cone is radiating out from the unseen origin. That way the gaming system doesn't need any directional sound hardware at all, you can play without sound, and gamers with hearing disabilities aren't at a disadvantage. Come to think of it, JA2 had done that quite a while ago. The sound "pings" on the map weren't as pretty but the principle is the same.

You can use a SHIV for mobile cover. =)

The problem with artillery and air strikes is one of scale. Apply a realistic artillery strike to Xenonauts-sized map... and you no longer have a map. Or soldiers.

Search for "apoc'd apocalypse editor". The roads are important because personnel and new recruits can only arrive by road and there is no way to protect roads. (or repair them) Even the police can destroy them while shooting some criminal or other. Or one of the various gangs, or... Road (combat) vehicles are useless either way. If you do in-city missions you can just as well deploy your squad in multiple air limos. Travel like a boss. =)

Some hate it, I like it better than the 2 predecessors. Lots of gaming goodness. And just like other games it has it's bugs or stupid design decisions. There's an editor out there that lets you (for instance) make the super-super fragile roads in the game indestructible, which is pretty much required for a lot of the game to function.

I think it's a nice nod to the original game. =) Sergeant draws pistol at the end of the mission: "Okay, everyone of you who didn't get himself shot, yet, line up and turn around!"

There is no logical reason for that. There are gameplay reasons based on the kind of choices you get. Same with the original game. It would be the height of stupidity to put the future of Earth into the hands of an organisation with a budget of what? 6 million bucks per month? Not even humans would be that stupid. In fact, humans tend to get quite focused and vicious if survival is on the line. One of the big perks of the support class (guaranteed at something like level 4 or 5) is a 2nd item slot. Support doesn't have the flashy abilities of the other classes but is a lot more versatile. In the OG space was plentiful so you could bring everything you wanted. No choice necessary. And if the weight hurt the TU too badly? Who cares? Bring a few extra recruits as mules. Anything to avoid having to make a choice and commit to it... Sorry, but strategy games are about making choices. And anyway, from the glimpse I took at the demo's game files, it looks like the entire content description (minus maps and such) in in plain text so it's likely no big thing to give every soldier 2 item slots right off the bat. If that's the balancing you want, by all means go for it.

It's kinda funny but the is a better demo than the playable 5 GB demo...It does a much better job at pointing out the kind of decisions you can make (all in tactical but the "demo" has no strategic part so *shrug*) and how badly you can screw up with that. Up to and including a total wipeout. =P

That's what I mean. There is a grand total of 4 weapons in the game. They just change their names once in a while but you only have a choice between those 4 weapons (of the current tier) if you want to be effective. If the machine gunner first uses a MG, then a laser MG, then a plasma MG... that's neither a change nor a choice. All it is is a chore without any decision required.

Doesn't mean anything to me, though. I played Civ 1. Liked it a lot but never bothered with the others after it. No idea what they did differently in those other Civ games.

The demo may be having the intended effect, though. That, or it's coincidence that a turn based strategy game (WTF?) is currently the #2 top selling game on Steam. And it's not even out, yet.

Research interdependencies don't change the desirability of a given weapon type. They merely modify the base cost and give no incentive for using those "intermediate" weapons. That's about the only approach that works but is terribly hard to balance because you have such wildly different and situational effects. That's why the AfterX ballistics are good. They don't do special effects but your laser-equipped squad would be screwed if the enemy tossed a few smoke grenades. Ballistics don't excel at anything but they always work. Having no weaknesses at all is a huge bonus. It's also something to avoid when designing the game balance. =) Xenonauts has varying damage resistances attached to each armour type so it's at least possible to balance the game so that weapons have a purpose even after you have reseached the next tier of weapons. From what Chris said, it's going to be a "heavy plasma" situation, though, where the next tier of weapons is always better than the previous one, eliminating the need to put much thought into weapon loadouts.

That's a fair guess because a beta implies that the game is (at least almost) feature complete... and a UI does need serious testing.

In the demo, most of the AI is turned off. It's a shooting gallery. The aliens wait in their fixed positions until you are ready to move up and "spot" them. Then only the low level or personal AI kicks in so that they shoot back at all. In the "real game" videos you can find and other reported play sessions, you get aliens flanking you out of the FOW (during their turn), sectoid commanders buffing and healing others from inside the FOW while being covered by more sectoids in overwatch (have fun digging those buggers out!)... and the infamous shots out of the dark. Some described the alien AI as devilish but I'll withhold judgement on religious matters until I can see for myself. =) There's a reason why they put you in charge and made him #2. He's probably a casual gamer.

It's credits because they tried cash... and it didn't really work. You buy an interceptor for maybe 100 million $, then you buy a pistol for 500 $. The scales are so way off that you can't put them into a believable system. So it's credits where the value of things is completely arbitrary and only relates to how much things are worth to that nebulous council. Effectively, the only important value there is game balance. Everything else went out the window. =) Or being a modder. Then it's the purpose of the game. =)

Oh, they're not doing a great deal of modding, yet. This is all editing plain text general config files, like defining which abilities are inferred by which piece of eqipment. The most basic form of content modding. Once someone figures out the format of mission/AI scripts or UI definitions, all bets are off.

Someone pointed out that we (as in rabid X-Com worshippers who'll buy it anyway) may not be the target audience for that kind of demo.

It doesn't. It highlights the gamey bits that you cannot see from a bird's eye cam. If it didn't, you would need the ability to move your camera down to first person level and explore every nook and cranny of a potential position so that you could find out what it covers you from. I would guess that this dreadfully boring task is delegated to your oh-so-elite soldiers, considering their strong motivation to do so.

Having a way to disable achievements is pure win. No more annoying popups here and jingles there? Totally awesome.

There is something that Xeno could pick up from "that other game", too. A different coloration for the movement allowance. Green tiles: you can move up to here and do reaction fire with your current weapon. Turning or stance changes will not affect that. Yellow tiles: you can move beyond the green tiles but no reaction fire for you.

The turn-based game market definitely needs something big and flashy like XCOM. Something to get new players interested. Once they are hooked it gets easier to sell similar games. If you explained turn-based games to a "noob" a year ago, you used 10 and 20 year old games as examples! That's not gonna fly.

What he didn't show is how he replaced the regular nerf dart with a .50 cal DU bullet after the camera cuts away.