Ninothree

Along those same lines, there is probably a lot of visual aids that could be implemented with icons. I seem to remember a lot of mods for XCOM2 were really helpful in giving the player the right info at the right time. A contentious one here is the indicator that you are moving in an enemy's FOV for reaction fire. Obviously it is helpful, but maybe it is too helpful when you know how cautious you do / don't need to be.

I like the idea that the game would encourage you to build multiple bases for specific purposes, and that most of those bases wouldn't simply be clones of one another. So imagine that you'd need a base with a massive hangar to build advanced aircraft, but there would be no real need to have more than one of those because you don't need a high production rate. Also, making them location dependent would be cool, so you'd need a base in, say, the Ethiopian geothermal fissure, because that would be critical for some high-energy research.

@Solver those are great ideas. I notice that they mostly have an ulterior characteristic rather than being pure damage dealers. A lot of support-type actions. Although you've not got a healer in there, which seems the obvious choice, to me at least. Along that line of thought, a support-class alien could just be one that uses psi to buff friendlies or lower the stats of enemies. Anything from TUs to morale. If psi is the mechanism, then the alien doesn't need to be toting at gun. The Psions from Enter the Breach were just floating octopuses. @ApolloZani yeah those poisoned headcrabs were the worst. And by worst I mean best. Having an annoying enemy is good design - if it can get you really riled up but still want to play so you can smash them to bits. @Xeroxth fair point that the aliens aren't exactly making a covert war what with that giant death ray in the sky. I guess I'm trying to scope out what the feel of the game is going to be. XCOM:EU had the Etherials and their assembly of different races. XCOM2 had something like the storm trooper vibe. But I don't think X2 is going for either the zoo or the SWAT team. Like I said, I don't know what the vibe is, apart from cold war alternative universe. I use the term 'realistic' aliens to mean the type of aliens you would expect to see. Douglas Adam's Hooloovoo is probably the best alien I've ever heard of, a super intelligent shade of the colour blue. Great imaginative sci-fi and really, truly alien. But it'd make a crap enemy in a computer game. You need something that looks like it belongs in ground combat. Normally I'd be against a conservative recommendation, but in this case I think the aliens should be, for the most part, on the less extreme side of things. For the bread and butter aliens, just give them a few backwards facing joints, maybe a spine that doesn't form a straight column or a tail or something. But if you start filling the game with quadrupeds ... at some point it risks the feeling that you're fighting an invasion of horses or something. And for something like a crystalline alien, just think what it would look like fighting against a rock. I think it is important to remember the perspective of ground combat, it is a top-down view in a tile-based environment. That is how you see the aliens, so the really imaginative ideas kind of need to take a back seat to what is easy to animate in a computer game. Having said that, I think that for the special boss aliens, the ones that aren't clone-grown Earth-ready foot soldiers, the visual appearance should be really mind blowing. These would be the true extra terrestrials, with homes vastly different. These few could be the crystals or the AI mainframes or the gas clouds.

Dunno, I quite liked the Codex concept. A semi-digital entity is quite fitting with the cyberpunk aesthetic the game has. Maybe lore-wise it is a bit of a stretch, but the whole series is notorious for throwing in technobabble like quantum entangled carbon nanotubes. Pretty much all the aliens in XCOM2 are ridiculous. That is just the style. To be honest, I found the Faceless to be the most immersion breaking. The shape shifting I could get behind, but their blob-like visual just didn't seem to fit. The concept was fine but it looked wrong - no doubt because it is hard to animate a lump of goo such that it looks cool. @TrashMan probably put it best with the "setting/atmosphere" point. The aliens just need to match up. Given that, I think I would go back on what I previously said. The best aliens for Xenonauts might well be humanoid. Xenonauts is kind of a creepy game, but it is not a horror. It is an action game, but it is not full on Marvel. In no way do I think I've the right to say what the aesthetic of X2 is, but I think that the visual appearance of the aliens should be guided by that aesthetic, rather than the other way around. If X2 is anything like X1, then it won't win awards for high end graphics, but the art style will be its redemption. So the aliens have got to look cool. That rules out amorphous blobs or anything that isn't really recognisable as a 'conventional' alien. I really loved xcom:apoc for having an alien race to fill every niche - some were essentially walking weapons or grenades - but they did have a blob alien and also even a puddle alien. In that case, it fit, because the sci-fi themes included biology. The same isn't true for Xenonauts; the themes look to be less around exotic technology and more around espionage and infiltration. That would mean that the front line aliens should all look as though they could be disguised as humans. Maybe the boss fights would give you a glimpse of the true aliens. So the Praetorian equivalents could be the really wild ones, like the guild navigators from Dune, encased in their own breathing tank. But the bread and butter troops should be closer to Star Trek aliens.

Complexity in crafting and an economy of resources sound great - but what would it do to the speed of the game? I don't think a bit of grinding is a bad thing, it gives a little reward cycle. However, if you are forced to do that grinding to survive then we've departed from the familiar game we know. Maybe this would be a good mechanic for a player to recover from a loss: if half your dudes get wasted, grind a little to tool up the survivors. The problem is for players who are already doing well. Holding them back with the requirement to do some grinding isn't going to sit well. Beyond that, I'd also caution against a crafting mechanic that produces a finite armory. If the player only has two latest-gen rifles then every time you are in the loadout screen you'll be moving them around and spending a lot of your time clicking on this or that. Menus suck. On every game. PC games less so (praise the mouse), but it is still a faff. It is nice to be able to fully customise your soldiers, but it is a pain to have them share weapons and need to pass them back and forth. Maybe the resolution to this is that the crafting mechanic needs to be exciting enough to overcome the faff. Or, use the components to build machinery in the workshop, and that machinery can then churn out the desired gear. E.g. Warden Armour costs 10 alloy but a Warden Armour Fabricator costs 1 alien propulsion + 20 alloys. This way, you engage in a little crafting micromanagement, gain a fuller armory and it saves you the faff of reallocating equipment.

Contentious topic: realists versus the fantasists. My take is that if you're going to make a sci-fi game, then make sci-fi enemies. There is definitely scope for a theme where the aliens use mundane looking foot soldiers that are cloned humans (plays into the secret war and explains how the enemies can survive in the environment). But I'd be disappointed if there were nothing that looked startlingly alien once you get past the front-line troops. Ideally, the big boss type aliens would be something really monstrous, something that picks up on anxieties around the way insects move or the the visceral grossness of internal organs. In that other thread I think someone mentioned breaking the norm of aliens being two-armed, gun-toting bipeds. Androns could certainly get an update to look like the T1 model from Terminator, although even that has something of the human upper body about it. Sebillians did have a good effect of looking tough, but they also gave off vibes of a crocodile wearing half a suit of armour. I think you've got to lean one way or the other. Either it is a bio-engineered somewhat nonsensical fighter species (like a Reaper) or it is a regular tool-using species that grew up the old fashioned way, in which case it has to have some kind of hand(s) and sensory organs but you can go wild other than that. I think the things to avoid are the drooling types (like in Alien) or the types that are so clearly a blend of some animal and a human (like a lot of Star Wars races).

Yeah, there is no point in doing a half-arsed job of it. I've said similar elsewhere, but I think an interesting financial model is what Firaxis seem to be doing with Chimera Squad. Releasing half a game that is solid standalone content - as opposed to releasing half a game initially then charging for DLCs to complete the package. I guess for Goldhawk the equivalent would be to release their aircombat mini-game as a standalone edition. Doing so would provide some content to fans who are waiting. They could also go a bit experimental with the design because it wouldn't need to be integrated as-is into the final X2 build. And people wouldn't have grounds to complain because you'd only need to sell it for a couple of quid. Although realistically I think it would only work if they marketed it as an app for your phone or something, which may well be more effort than it's worth. Still, I think it is an interesting model.

X1 did circle the tech back round to kinetics, with the rail gun type weapons. FWIW I put my vote in with the non-linear progression in weapon types (it just feels more interesting), but I think the discussion broaches a bigger issue that keeps coming up in the forums: player choice. When is it meaningful, when is it fun. I think if we can get a sophisticated perspective on what choice actually improves the game, then all these discussions will be better framed.

Would not be surprised if the art team for this game was different than the team for XCOM2. If it were me, I'd want to put my own mark on the project and not be held to recreating someone else's style. It is not as if superficial details are the mainstay of the cannon. I'm a bit sad to hear that the strategy layer of the game is weak. Firaxis definitely started taking the game down a path where the strategy layer is more of a setup for your ground combat rather than an semi-independent game in and of itself. I've recently started playing PlanetFall. The strategy layer is a slimmed down version of Civ, so it can hold its own. Is nice to see how the genre has really proliferated in the past ten years.

The new game looks like it has made a lot of changes to the standard formula. Compare it to XCOM EU/EW and the only recognisable elements are the cover system and a few types of alien. Combat used to be sweep and clear, then in XCOM2 it turned into stealth and ambush, and now this SWAT set up is just another step. Like the timeline turn system, I suspect that they're field testing some of these mechanics before deciding to launch them in the bigger XCOM3 title. I'm interested to see how the player population is divided. There is a definite distinction between play styles: either keeping all (or very near) of your soldiers alive, or callously sacrificing them for the greater good. I'm sure these play styles roughly overlap with the ironman option. But from experience these styles either mean that you spend a lot of time reloading in the early game, or you slow down your progression mid game. Chimera Squad requiring you to play in one style looks like it will be divisive, but I think the campaign will be better balanced for it. Overall I think the game might be a hodgepodge of ideas that were thrown around in development, but wouldn't make practical sense to include as a DLC, so instead they're bundling it as a standalone. It is going for less than a tenner at the moment, that is way under priced for a game from a major developer - which leads me to think they're recouping sunk development time into ideas that didn't ake the final cut, and that they're going to be listening attentively to feedback.

Lol, don't get me wrong, there is definitely something sexist about wanting to erase women, even in a fantasy setting. But it doesn't really matter in the sense that it is a game built around military structures, colonial alien aggressors and generally shooting stuff up. Most games like this are well inside the patriarchal oppressive violence-based system, so if someone is going to nit pick about not having enough female soldiers, then they are probably missing the bigger picture. Having said that, I think the default settings being inclusive of female soldiers is a good thing. And having that setting be alterable suits all tastes on the realism spectrum.

Am always surprised by how many people seek these details of realism. For me, games are definitely about escapism (yup, escaping to a world where you'd be just as likely to find women shooting aliens with lasers)

Making the research tree more complex and interesting seems like low hanging fruit. Easy implementation (compared to something like redoing air combat mini-game) but really powerful in terms of shaping up the campaign into something less linear and repetitive. For a wish list though? I'd be more ambitious than just adding new techs. I'd want to entirely overhaul the concept of 'research projects'. Currently they are checkpoints that require a certain amount of science points to pass. I'd want the research to be about pushing in certain theoretical directions, with testing rigs and equipment that you need to build in a lab. That theory, however well-formed you let it become, then gets passed to the engineers who try to build according to the specs you give them. Research trials and the capability of your engineers to churn out working prototypes wouldn't be a simple process of 'earn enough science points'. I think this would make the science/engineering dichotomy much more sensible (because at the moment it is a bit sucky). And there would be many more branches of science to pursue. Currently, you have a conventional physics which is boosted by alien physics with a bit of xenobiology nudging at the side. But there are loads of channels you could split research into so it would be a real tree with branches for: materials, energy, nanotechnology, cosmology, electronics/computers, AI, encryption, aerospace, genetics, alien physiology/psychology/sociology. A lot of these are already there, but the research projects are oriented around understanding individual objects you find in the UFOs. Once you study an engine, you know everything about propulsion forever. There is more scope than that!

I didn't know that about TftD. I got through a mission or two after playing the original and gave up because I thought it was just going to be a clone. Still, sounds like it was essentially the same game. Maybe this is something akin to Moore's law. A five-year gap between a game and its sequel back in the 90s would have seen far less of a step improvement than you'd get today. I am bit concerned that X2 will not make a big enough stride. I'm sure it'll be a great improvement, but personally, I'm a bit tired of the gameplay. I first played UFO defence 25 years ago, and I spent a little too much time on the Firaxis remakes. For me at least, another round in this genre needs to do something really interesting. A lot of the community's complaints have been to veto streamlining, but the changes I'm hoping for are more ambitious. e.g. XCOM2 having a stealth mechanic, or Apoc refocusing the strategy layer. Overall, I think X2 will service fans who are looking for something authentic or faithful.

Yup, a new coat of paint is precisely what they did when they released Terror from the Deep back in '95. An hey, people loved that game. Although you know what was the best thing about TftD? It brought the xcom franchise one step closer to Apocalypse.

There was actually some backlash at XCOM2 for having too many human enemies. Can't please everyone.

I like any idea that makes the geoscape more interesting. Currently, the only spatial element of the geoscape is radar coverage and interceptor range. In terms of something that can make X2 stand out, from X1 and from XCOM, the geoscape has a lot of potential. At the moment the geoscape is a very un-stimulating environment. For a game that falls into the strategy genre, this feels like a bit of a waste.

Does there have to be another reason? Well, in FPS games the melee is the finisher if you ever get up close. But I think it is a bit easier to spam it when playing turn based. It might work as a viable finisher if it were put to some skill check - like you can only successfully knife an enemy who has lower strength than you. So it can be cheesed early on (if you have enough TU to make it to point blank range), but you can't hack a sebillian until you get power armour.

My point is that orders such as 'win at all costs' / 'protect the territory' are more meaningful that 'assault' / 'strike'. In your example you say "Good for fighters with a lot of missiles. Less useful for fighters who focus on short-range guns". So, why have that order if it is pretty much only in there to give to fighters with lots of missiles. Once you've armed your aircraft, there is automatically a good and bad choice between 'assault' / 'strike'. My suggestion was to have orders affect the outcome of the fight. So if you always pick 'win at all costs', you're very quickly going to run out of aircraft, pilots and money. So, you need to find the right balance between splashing enough UFOs and letting your pilots live long enough to become veterans. I'd agree with the orders you were suggesting if they weren't just determined by the conditions of the fight itself. i.e. you need something else in there to influence your choice (my examples were resources and other things in the strategy layer). The altitude and terrain stuff is good. Maybe clouds as a variable would work too. But my issue is still the same. If all the variables are based within the aircombat system (munitions, altitude, terrain, UFO-type), then there is a predetermined best-choice for what orders to give. Once you figure out the best choice, aircombat is a solved system and you will always use the same attack pattern (essentially just a grind, even if it is a bit rock-paper-scissors). For aircombat to stay interesting through the whole campaign, it needs to be really closely interrelated with other elements of the strategy layer.

Yeah there can be slow moments. Like if you want the soldiers right at the front to have full time units on the turn you breach, but then you realised you need to move some items round in their bag or something, then you have to cycle through the turns again. I think a continuous player-turn would work in XCOM or something, that is based around activating pods of dormant enemies. Technically, this applies to enemies camped in the UFO, but the point is that often you don't know if all the enemies are in the craft, or if one is lurking elsewhere. The turn based system builds up tension around needing to tread carefully at every step, just in case you leave yourself open. The broader issue is that the build-up of tension doesn't really work all the time, like when you are 99.99% sure that you're safe. At those times, some streamlining would be appreciates. Or, some sneak attacks by the aliens...

The crucial thing is to calibrate everything such that those orders are each useful in their own right. In my head, I can see myself always plumbing for 'assault' over 'evade' because the whole point is to win a fight, not dance around. Instead of having orders relating to how to win the fight, construct them to influence the outcome: Win at all costs: incur damage but splash the UFO (good for intervening in the alien's plans) Protect the territory: maybe lose the UFO but maintain relations (boosts income, no need for ground combat) Capture: down the UFO carefully, keeping alien artifacts intact but permitting loses elsewhere (good for your scientists, bad for your engineers and pilots)

I think the last mission is hard the first time you play it. You are warned there is a time limit, and even if you bring some heavy weapons you don't know how much ammo to conserve. And the big boss is pretty bossy. Still, as far as final missions go, I wouldn't say it was too different than most.

There seems to be agreement on the original idea of trimming down player input (down to zero for some). Fine grained micromanagement can be left to the tactical layer without upsetting anyone. So instead of clicking repeatedly where to move to avoid an attack, just have an 'evade' button. Thus, in place of a skill game (ala X1), the air combat becomes more tied in with the overall strategy layer (almost closer to XCOM). As a player, you don't take the role of the pilot, but the commander back at base making a choice about how the interception should go. That choice is driven by priority of your strategic needs (relations, loot, spawning tactical missions etc). But the options you have to chose from are determined by your politics/science/economy. e.g. you can't tail the UFO or fight at high altitudes unless you've researched alien propulsion; and you can't just torpedo every scout because eventually you'll run out of munitions. I have to say, I'm not sure about clouds. My feelings aren't strong either way, but I'm just saying in case anyone else thinks military radar can probably see through water vapour. In terms of aesthetics, I very much have in mind something like the X1/XCOM radar view. Maybe with some wire mesh ground topography flowing beneath what is still a 2D battlescape (which I assume is simplicity itself to code ).

I had a little look at Birth of the Federation. It seems interesting. I like the idea of a turnbased/realtime meld. From what the top post says, Chris is looking for something that doesn't involve much micromanagement in the interception mini-game. It has got to be smooth. The idea being that you push all the management towards creating your aircrafts' loadouts in the base management screen. Essentially, the choice of loadouts are the key to this phase of the game, not your orchestration of the dogfight. In Xenonauts, tactics happen on the ground. Ultimately, when a wave of UFOs launches you want excitement (stuff is gonna happen), but you don't want tedium (fighting a long series of repetitive aerial battles). In my mind, it should be almost cinematic. Design-wise (IMO) there are aspects of a game which can be a grind (and some are rewardingly so), but shooting down UFOs isn't one of them. As we've experienced in X1, the minigame is fundamentally limited due to a lack of variables. As a minigame, it always will be limited (unless it gets enriched to the levels Charon suggests above). In its current place, the airgame phase shouldn't require a lot of clicks to get through. For what its worth, my vote would be to expand the airgame to something on par with ground combat. But as that isn't going to happen, I reckon it is most constructive to think about how to renovate the X1 system to make it as smooth as possible. Working from the assumption that you've got to issue your pilots some orders, I think the most unnecessary ones are actually to do with movement. If you can simplify the process of clicking where you want the plane to fly, the whole dogfight becomes much more streamlined. Keep the 2D field of combat, but strip out the aspect of clicking on the radar screen to direct the fighters. Reduce the player input to some basic orders like which enemy to engage, what formation to fly, and how much damage to take before breaking off. That way, the majority of success is leveraged with the decision of the loadouts, and the phase of the game where the action happens is still exciting, but ultimately not determined by the players reactions.

This reminds me a bit of Spore. In the Cell stage you attach parts to your body as you evolve - the location/orientation of those parts then determines their use in battle. I can see that happening with weapon placements, that you can position their fire cones with a fair degree of freedom to then match your play style. e.g. dual cannons overlapping in front (aggressive, chasing), or side mounted (defensive, but maybe the weight affects your dodge %). Similarly, the location of shield generators / armour plating could be a thing. As well, if these things were mixed up on UFOs then no two dogfights need be the same. I definitely agree about keeping aircraft in use for longer. The idea of sunk costs that are going to be discarded always seems pain in strategy games.