Ninothree

@TrashMan I think you may find it easier to construct ideas if you forget the preconceptions given by X1 and other xcom game. This forum is about discussing what rules could be in effect, rather than using rules already in effect to determine what can and can't happen. If you stick to the latter, we'll just end up with the same game instead of a sequel.

I think that cloaking is just too good though. It is like mind control: very fun for a while, but quickly turns into an oh-so-easy mechanism to spam. If used right, you hardly need to put your troops into the line of fire - so if the game difficulty is geared to compensate, it is very difficult to play without it. Having said that, stealth is pretty cool so I wouldn't mind if there were some kind of option to use it if coupled with severe limitations - like that you can only ever have 1 stealth suit or that it drains the health of the user when they're invisible.

Yeah I can see that all sides are interested in keeping it secret. Especially if the desired end game is control over a stable population. There has to be a reason that the aliens don't just bombard from orbit. And along the same lines, there has to be a reason that Earth's military forces aren't all mobilised. If either of those things happened, then people would go nuts and soon enough there wouldn't be much of a human race to save.

I like the twist on terror missions, though I'd suggest that they should be imprinted with the xcom difficulty curve: in the early game, the civilians get creamed. Terror missions are supposed to be tough and it is not a common outcome that you save everyone. So, at the beginning of the game when you are highly outgunned, a 'successful' terror mission would be one where you extract a few civilians then do a tactical retreat, leaving the aliens to their sabotage. Later on, that definition of success would be advanced as it becomes feasible to save the infrastructure too. Though as @tachikaze points out, the aliens' objective wouldn't merely be blowing stuff up, they could do that from orbit, so if they were to commit a well-armed strike team it'd be something more subtle. Effectively, this would be something to push the relations/threat counter in the early game so there is no chance of you getting a perfect play. Until the home team gets its act together the enemy will be winning battles and gaining a foothold. That difficulty would also make you use the retreat mechanic which is not something most players normally do (if you can't complete the mission, why try it?).

Is quite hard to explain away attacks on major cities with so many witnesses. Even if it is put down to Soviet/American forces, that incursion would turn the cold war into a hot one. Maybe if those attacks took place in non-aligned countries (3rd world) then it would be easier for the mass media and general public of the East/West to ignore. As for sightings of UFOs in the sky, there are tinfoil-hat-wearing crackpots out there right now who claim to have seen them. Though I think if the aliens had the capability to brainwash humans to do their misinformation/infiltration then the story would hold together a lot tighter.

I like this idea, but instead of having the aliens appear after a timer, maybe have a visible skirmish between them and the local forces on the other side of the map. The local forces are a distraction that leave the UFO less well-guarded - whilst you go in and do your business. This wouldn't be a couple of farmers with shotguns but a serious force that could hold its own, fighting defensively from cover. If you can get out quickly you signal the locals to pull back - earning you a relation bonus. If you take too long, the aliens beat off the local force and come back to the ship, meaning you have to fight your way out. This would involve specifying that the local forces fight very defensively and that the aliens continue engaging them. But as far as I'm aware, that isn't a million miles away from the current AI. Might be quite fun to watch the battle progress, especially if you can have a hand in equipping the locals with better weapons as the game progresses.

@Chris or any software developers, just the keep the ideas flowing in the right direction: what are the practicalities in coding advanced mission setups? I guess that designing interactions with map elements (like pressing switches or blowing up power cores) is easier than writing scripts for NPCs (like civilians or other factions). It would be interesting to know the practical limits of what the engine can do in ground combat.

I think with missions you need to make the objectives varied otherwise there isn't much point. Almost every mission in XCOM:EU suffered from this fault. They were all variations on 'Kill all hostiles' with the occasional optional 'save the friendlies'. So if you tweaked some of your ideas above then they could really shine. For example, stopping an abduction might involve recovering the civilians and retreating. Or the sabotage mission could involve going to certain locations on the map and defusing bombs or carrying away vital assets (or planting bombs and stealing assets if you are doing the sabotaging).

Fire support for your team - help you to begin the mission without an instadeath. Fire support for the aliens - make the UFO breach a tad more interesting as you have to put some firepower towards those murder holes or rush their blindspot. For obvious reasons you don't want to have your own support capable of taking out all the enemies on the map without risking your soldiers. It could be fun for a while but it isn't xcom. Maybe it'd work in some tutorial phase of the game until you get the translocator, after which point you can't use death from above to win ground combat. Equally, you don't want the alien support weapon to be a high power, long range, source of frustration. Having said that, breaching the alien craft is usually the toughest part of crash sites, so spreading that difficulty over two sections (getting up to the front doors, and then opening the door of the control room) could at least mix it up a little. Accordingly, I'd recommend that the static support weapon on the ship be intentionally nerfed in a particular way, e.g. short range, limited arc of fire, but in such a way that it would encourage tactics which are dissimilar from the main breach of the control room inside the UFO.

The mechanic of partial info could be really interesting if the info it gave was particularly relevant. Personally, I didn't change my loadouts too much with respect to the alien species - it was only really androns who had the noticeable vulnerability to EMP grenades. If the cost/benefit of a mission were much more profound, e.g. if there were a cost per unit sent on a mission, then intel would be more valuable. Or, if the weakness of a species could be levered more on the basis of equipment. But you wouldn't want to go too far. There would have to be some benefit to not getting intel, say if getting intel would cost resources or time. I can definitely see it being a useful addition.

I like any idea that makes use of night missions! Had think about DEFCON - it specifically related to the US's readiness for nuclear war and more generally to their perspective on the Soviets' capability to make that first strike. So, surely it makes sense for an in-game DEFCON counter to be a function of two things: intelligence regarding what arms the enemy can use to strike and fear of how likely they are to do so. This could relate to strategy on the geoscape by choosing which regions to protect in the air war: you have to protect Earth's military but you can't allow either side to consolidate too much force in a region because when that forces reaches some critical mass they'll build missile silos and raise the stakes of a nuclear war, moving the DEFCON counter closer to zero. Thus, you have some trade-off between the military and DEFCON counters which you influence with the way you fight the air war. Equivalently, if one side gains the alignment of regions geographically nearer the enemy's home (e.g. Cuba and the US mainland), then that adds to the fear of strike capability, so you must react accordingly to swing alignment the other way i.e. allowing the aliens to reduce the insurgent military force. The counter could also relate to ground combat. The amount of alien tech you leave at a crash site (i.e. that you don't destroy or recover) would eventually be captured by the local forces. They'd surely do their own research into it - perhaps if they acquire enough then they could build a doomsday device (black hole generator > nukes) which would terrify the other side and lower the DEFCON counter. Consequently, your play style would have to alter with additional secondary objectives. You could have special missions dedicated to sabotaging or stealing Earth's superweapons so that the US and USSR don't blow each other up, these would be night missions (obviously), and the more lethal force you used the more it would affect the military counter. Again, a trade-off. One more idea is that the aliens are using psychic power to influence the DEFCON counter and that you have to tackle this through a separate route of research/special missions/building specialised defences.

The Cold War is infamous for one thing of relevance here: proxy wars. The US and USSR didn't directly do much fighting but they supported opposing factions within non-aligned nations. Maybe that could play into region alignment - in each region, one of the factions that the East or the West support could actually be controlled by aliens. So by fighting their proxy war, one of the major powers could be giving the aliens more ground. It is the xenonauts job to root out which factions are aliens (maybe they use clones or brainwashed humans as a front), then sabotage that faction somehow (covert strike operations). If the xenonauts are too brash then they risk retribution from the major powers, if they are too slow then the aliens take power of enough regions to begin their endgame (tripod attack )

I'd have to disagree with Sheepy here. I loved night missions and the light mechanic. I almost made a mod with constant night and reapers everywhere, alien zombie apocalypse style. Obviously there was no point in doing night missions; there was often little urgency to drop at night and even less benefit from doing so. But I liked the way it made you creep about and the impact it had on your tactics - even if that tactic was, in a pinch, to torch a field of corn because you needed eyes on everywhere. To follow on from what you're saying Dagar, maybe a device which gave out a single very bright flash, illuminating the map for an instant (less than a turn), so you could get a vague idea if enemies were in range but no specifics. To take it further, there could be a special class of aliens that operated at night, kinda like reaper-vampires or something equally terror-like, which were less capable in the day but more effective in the dark. You'd have to fight them with light as much as conventional weapons, so 'fleshing out' the mechanic. Equivalently, the light could offer a positive effect to civilians on the map, encouraging them to move to safer, well-lit, areas.

The best bit about factions in Apocalypse was that they all contributed to a living city. They interacted to make a working economy and history. The afterblank series had factions which were more like pure classes - robots, psychics etc but they didn't have a function other than variety. My point is that factions shouldn't just be different sides (USA vs USSR), but are more interesting if they are critically different groups (covert intelligence agencies, ground/air forces, civilian paramilitaries, cultish alien-sympathisers etc)

I couldn't see this mentioned elsewhere but I'd definitely like to see more missions set indoors. The base/final missions tend to be the most interesting to play and there is surely scope to have more ground combat in that kind of environment. I don't know how well the game engine handles maps with multiple levels but it seemed fine in X1. Specifically, I'm thinking of a map with the breach aspect of a crashsite but more of the corridor fighting of a base. For example: the aliens could hold some kind of facility, like a water processing unit, and their aim would be to attack the infrastructure of a city. So, as opposed to a strike team of aliens doing a terror attack on the surface, it'd be an infiltration team holed up underground (so they wouldn't necessarily be trying to kill or cause panic, but could be spreading a virus to manipulate the population or something). Pros Such a style of map would have plenty of opportunity for choke points and low lighting but with more of a grimy/industrial setting than the sci-fi tone of a xenonauts or alien base. Plus these missions could occur with some frequency, perhaps even without the overt UFO deployment - this would break up the monotony of crashsite after crashsite. Cons More effort to explain how these missions would fit into the aliens gameplan. More design work for the maps involved and fixing any issues of breaching/descending into an underground level.

Why have proximity mines when you can have boomeroids...yeah getting chased by grenades, neat idea but pretty silly. There are realistic and existing weapons classed as area denial, it is an interesting mechanic that, I think, would fit into gameplay nicely. You still have to pop your face out at some point but it can be used to turn the tables in a skirmish by blocking cover or preventing/advance - it wont help you outgun an enemy, but you could out manoeuvre them. Obviously incendiary grenades have done this in previous games but I never felt that mechanic to be properly effective, at least not enough to be competitive with regular explosives. It would be good to have something like a rook in chess which can, more or less, make a whole line of the battle field off limits (or at least, guaranteed to incur some cost). That kind of mechanic could then be countered later in the game by flying/teleporting/fire proof enemies.

Good argument! It is just a monetary perspective though. The logic rests upon not being scuppered in a situation without a corsair. At certain points in the game you need aircraft with the speed, manoeuvrability and payload of a corsair else you have to let the aliens do their thing. Having the option to take down alien craft can give you a massive strategic advantage, it is not always about the quick gain from a crashsite. It depends what situation you are in, if you might have a country quit funding or something. I think in my last playthrough I gave australia a corsair because that was an unmanned base, it may not have been the best move financially but I didn't have to worry about the aliens doing much damage there. Having said that, I definitely take your point; when money is tight I'll not bother with corsairs. However, I think they are the most fun ships to play with in air combat. Missiles are kinda boring! It is a game after all.

That could surely be implement that quite easily (maybe, I have no real idea) in the existing game by having the aliens mind control the civilian units on the map. Those civs could then arm themselves, possibly carrying live grenades to your troops or acting as human shields for the aliens. I like the paranoia aspect of it. It could play into the aliens being actually quite weak as a physical army but more effective infiltrators. That being said, I think it is a little late to put this kinda mechanic in the new game. You're probably best off figuring out how it could become a mod of existing mechanics.

I've yet to see a game which counters for the 'wait around the corner with a shotgun' tactic.

I buy into this series (and pretty much all xcom clones) for the game play not the graphics. If it looks right, it is easier to stay engaged for longer but IMO most of the enjoyment that comes from gaming is in those first play-throughs when you are trying to outsmart the game mechanics rather than marvelling at how the pixels are dancing. I was happy with the graphics two generations of consoles ago. Anyway, after reading the development update I'm pretty convinced that X2 will have enough interesting elements to keep me playing it for a long time even if it is in 8 bit. It is good to see all of those threads from the forum brought together in a rethink of the standard geoscape/ground combat deal. To be honest, I can play xcom even if the game play doesn't make sense but I think this new approach to the strategy layer can only improve the game and immersion into it. It should set Xenonauts apart as more than just a reboot and affirm that you don't need Firaxis' budget to make something decent. Especially I like the idea of the "super-hard mission that appears if you fall *too* far behind". I will definitely be nose diving my second play through in order to play the hell out of that mission. Also, having controllable local forces would be great, who doesn't love expendable troopers.

Shotguns in xenonauts aren't quite satisfying enough for a full run. In the Firaxis Xcoms you get that little kill cameo, it can get tiring but a shotgun-to-the-face never gets old.

Best to think of it as an alternate reality rather than an accurate simulator. Just because we have a whole bunch of sexism in our time-line that doesn't mean our fictional universes need it too. As must've been posted already, you can mod the likelihood of female soldiers (and other bio details). Though on this topic, have you noticed any women anywhere else in the xenonauts team? I think they're all guys except the secretary that is handing some papers to one of the generals in the monthly funding image. Even there you can only see her chest and not her face. I get it though, the game is about tactics and shooting aliens, not social commentary.

yeah I always try to get some reaction fire on a mission. Not the whole mission mind, that'd be nuts.

I've had an alien shoot and kill another alien when trying to hit one of my soldiers, not sure how achievable it is except by accident. Other ideas: Ammo rationing - each soldier only gets one clip, after that, they have to switch to melee (note: you will die in an andron base attack) Demolition - pack some extra c4 and blow up at least one multi-story building in every mission you can, bonus points if there is anyone inside at the time KFUFO - sit by the door and throw incendiary grenades inside the alien ship until you win the mission

Thanks, I had another look at the file I thought would let me spawn reapers, it is actually for the civilians. Derp. Although there is the folder 'ufocontents' which seems to dictate what enemies spawn for each mission type. Will have a go at changing the files in there, though it wont seem like the reapers are roaming around on the ground. Will do for a start though.