Ninothree

Xenonauts 2: Controversial Inventory System.

man, I was askin for light sabers months ago ;p

Compromiiiiise. Have a small set of scientists, these dudes are all Head Scientists. Each one can lead his or her own research team. Under that Head Scientist, there is bunch more peeps acting as a support staff, and it is those support staff who are the nameless resource to add or take away with a click. Say you have a Head of each science division, e.g. energy tech, aerospace design, theoretical physics etc... each Head is always working on a project but they are far quicker when you assign them staff scientists. Assigning those staff is really easy because they're all equal in value. The upshot of this is that there is potential to have several research projects running simultaneously, depending how the calculations for assigning staff are formulated. I imagine it wouldn't even take that much extra UI, just an additional set of +/- buttons for each Head Scientist.

That is exactly what I thought seeing the posts above. Fallout 4 has both customising and crafting. Your SMG is only ever a few weapon modules away from becoming a sniper. Although to make those modules you may have to deconstruct a few choice items of loot. But just because Fallout 4 has demonstrated a system that is cool, it doesn't mean it will transplant well into X2. Crafting from scavenged materials is core to Fallout - scavenging is part of xcom but not core. I think, as Solver is saying, that the customisation has to be imagined in a way that fits into various ground combat scenarios. Otherwise, you'll just end up sticking with the scope because accuracy is the best stat to boost.

I can appreciate this sentiment, but I think you're underplaying its value - especially given that you also mention the ending of the game, which is predominantly given through the wikipedia style messages. I mean, how hard would it be to radically change how that final mission felt if it were contextualised in a different story. Fortunately, it looks as though a mod for the sequel could quite easily reach further, with geoscape situations and covert actions. So the context delivered by the xenopedia can be bolstered and made more interactive with those events. I guess what I'm saying is that the fundamental mechanics of the game don't need to change - ground combat can remain a shooting skirmish, the strategy layer can remain as base building / UFO fighting - but the whole feel of the game can be made as gritty as desired by altering the right elements of text. Even if you wanted to invoke some criminal or underground aspects, there is still scope to play around with mechanics like the buying and selling of storage items: a mod could add extra features like selling captured aliens as slaves, or becoming an ethically-dubious weapons manufacturer.

Did you ever play Fable? That game was built around choosing to be good/bad but the choices ended up feeling tiresome. They were never really that deep or thought provoking. That always seems to be the pitfall, that choices seem too obvious, e.g. kill/save the civilian. Even if the choices are less transparent, I find myself disappointed by how little those choices impact the game - kill em, don't kill em, what is the difference in the end.

Huzzah, this show is on the road! Sadly none of my lacklustre family would lend me the £465 needed to get me to that top tier (something along the lines of "get a job you layabout"). First Lieutenant will have do. The artwork on the video looks ace. In a lot of ways, it seems much more realistic than high-budget games. Kinda like how the old '80s films used miniature props instead of CGI, and those props looked much better than the special effects of the next twenty years to come. I hope that the kickstarter goes well and that you can afford to take the game to a great level. Good luck!

The challenge with the final mission in X1 was to see how many reapers you could kill before you ran out of MAG ammo and had to switch to melee...

Darker, grittier, more emotive (to the tune of Radiohead's - Fitter Happier). The case has been made a fair amount that goldhawk should plumb for the niche that firaxis have avoided. I think that they are always going to do that - except when it comes to reinventing the wheel. The argument has also been passed around about realism and setting, as stated above, the ultimate bind is to the current underlying gameplay - everything else can shift to accommodate that. Honestly, I think firaxis really hit the nail on the head with their guerrilla warfare adaptation, that explains the use of just a dozen soldiers, although god-like homegrown guerrilla soldiers is a bit ridiculous. Obviously, it is hard to say if X2 will deliver a satisfying explanation just yet. Whilst I like the idea of the Xenonauts as an organisation dabbling in darker means to achieve their ends, I do wonder how much that needs to be part of gameplay and how much of it can be relegated to the storytelling. I'd suggest compiling some of these ideas to write into the game when it comes out. The expanded xenopedia mod was a great success as far as I'm aware - I imagine a grittier story mod could perform equally well, and it could be written really dark if it doesn't have to pass the requirements of getting into the vanilla game (which may be played by those hapless 11 to 14 year olds, of whom I was one playing classic xcom).

Yeah I see that. If you consider Portal, its merit is that the physics engine is so plausible. The acceleration of gravity feels so right. Without that accurate reflection of the real world, the game would, quite frankly, suck ass. I think the point I'm arguing is that there is a group of those issues which should be implemented carefully, and another group of those which are too difficult to bother with, or that being bothered to get them right would diminish the fun of the game. I mean look at something like the size of the maps that are used in these games. From what I understand, that isn't a realistic scale for a skirmish. You don't bring a sniper and a shotgun to the same arena. But, it works for the game and that is the golden rule. You can have realism and fun aren't opposing goals, but when they come into tension, fun should pretty much always win. Unless you're using that realism as a theme. It would be an interesting game, one that implemented very real physics in the battle of sci-fi weapons - but I just don't think that it is this game.

I like the idea of an alien base being much more of a stronghold. So they occupy a piece of territory and you can't just fly in there as your leisure. Nor, when you finally penetrate the outer defences, can you actually overwhelm the base in a single strike. The aliens would be too entrenched. You'd have other aims of destroying certain targets, like shield generators or atmospheric controls, that would then soften the base up to finish it later on.

I think I have to disagree here. I don't think it is the job of a game designer to educate players. Sure, it is great when myths are dispelled but I'm engaging with the game for recreation. Often, for silly and unrealistic escapism. There is room for simulation games, ones that strive to portray the world accurately, but I wouldn't say that is a rule for every designer to adhere to.

Yeah, it is something you have to judge on a case-by-case basis. Ask: does pushing the realism here add anything to the game? Anything less is lazy design. Anything more is kind of a waste of the fact that games are fantasy.

Ok so two things to note, and I'm not saying them in unkindness: I agree with this idea wholeheartedly I have heard it sooooo many times I mean, this is nothing against the post or against Grimaldi for not having read and indexed the whole forum - but I'm just surprised at how much nostalgia this community has for Xcom Apocalypse, and in particular, raiding other factions. So, this isn't a complaint - that would be way too hypocritical - but I do wonder what the magic formula was for that game, if it could/should be reapplied, or if we all just happened to be growing up at that time, so those aspects of the game are fond memories. Sorry for that lil tangent, like I said, it is not meant in 'shut the conversation down' kinda way, just an observation. --- In terms of the raid concept: there are surely applicable elements existing already in the framework of the game engine: Making use of the inventory system to collect items. A kill count to record damage inflicted. The option to retreat when things get too hot (I'm imagining an alarm sounding and a never-ending swarm of defenders spawning to fend you off). As far as I'm aware, those are all things that were in place, in some form, in the first game. Though that doesn't mean it would be feasible to build a mission-type on the back of them. The more interesting thing is, I think, that the raids posed an optional mission, which you could undertake at any time (for fun or to spam resources), and the rules of the mission were quite at odds with the usual: i.e. go the whole nine yards and don't worry about collateral damage. Blowing stuff up is always fun, and blowing stuff up without being told to do so is even funner. That is what games like GTA are based on - answer the phone and progress the game, or, hit that cop with a baseball bat and see how things go. That is missing from Xenonauts. Th game has a really enjoyable aspect of piecing together alien tech / building up your squad, but there isn't much scope for just messing, experimenting or being cruel and unusual to hapless enemies.

It sounds like the ideal would be for donors to be able to submit some really basic bit of information that could be programmatically inserted into the game. I'm kinda surprised that there wasn't more of that in XCOM2 - as far as I recall, there were only a dozen or so bios in the pool. Whilst I like @Dagar's suggestion that these bits of info could be whole sentences that appear as news snippets, I worry that the truth is that some people just aren't that funny or good with their words (obviously you peeps are all hilarious ). Equally, I'd be pretty sad to see something offensive in there that slipped past the censors. Although having said that, if we can sneak in some dig at Trump, I would not mind one bit. What I'm getting at is that the input doesn't have to be a text string. I'm sure there is scope for the input to be something like GPS coordinates for an enemy base, a time-date stamp for a scripted event (reaper attack for your birthday!) or even contours on the geoscape - just delegate the boring tasks of development to eager fans. Even things like picking a colour which is used in a minor piece of the armour of something-or-other is relatively high impact. You can see it and recognise it, but wouldn't drastically affect the game. Most other players wont even know it is there. I mean, if someone picks an outlandish colour for something in a sci-fi game, no one is going to lose their minds about it (although if you represent lasers in the wrong way...)

With this style of thinking, the whole point is to set up a scenario that permits ground combat, with around 10 soldiers and no ordnance back-up. Sadly Ripley, we're just not allowed to nuke them from orbit, surety isn't always fun. There are games that combine vehicles of all sizes with infantry fighting but they are usually multiplayer first person shooters or something. It would be good to see some of that in a tactical turn-based game - maybe have another layer between the geoscape and ground combat where your soldier squad is just the tip of the spear, but that would be a different game than what we have here. The translocator idea that was doing the rounds some time ago seems to be one of the best patch-explanations I've heard: that all the sensible, taking-the-fun-out-of-it, aerial bombardments or surveillance just wouldn't be applicable. Fundamentally, you have to accept some amount of disbelief in order to generate the gameplay that is traditional in this genre. I mean, the original xcom game was made in 1994, seemingly before games or gamers cared about making that much sense. XCOM2 made a lot of changes to rework the essentials of traditional-xcom gameplay into a story/set of mechanics that felt remotely believable. I think that ultimately, linking the global and very local scales is too much.

It seems that once you get past the £75-tier the rewards become content-based (as opposed to relating merely to game access), yet even those upper tiers look to be things that might possibly be modded when the time comes. So, the reward is inclusion, or decision-making, into the base game. Moreover, those higher rewards are getting the pro team to work on and polish your desired content. Rewards: You get a map builder (did someone say Skitso?) to construct a design from a sketch you submit. Maybe size it such that you need to stitch a dozen of these sketches together to form one complete map. Donors get to do a bit of voice acting, like a death-cry. The Goldhawk sound engineer then cleans it up with whatever audiomagic needs to happen. The option to add a few pixels to some of the artwork or throw in ideas for alternative skins for aliens. Technical artists would obviously then touch them up. Ideas for how to hide easter eggs in the game. Obviously this would need a bit of a veto system as I'm sure Goldhawk don't want a hidden dickbutt in X2. I guess that it is a bit hopeful to have any old user-submitted content be of a quality sufficient to meet the market; also, there are loads of barriers facing people who might want to enter modding (e.g. time and skill). With the above, I'm trying to say that stuff amateur modders would want to do, but feel that the output is beyond them, could be something the design team can help with if the donation is sufficient to cover their time. There could be other rewards relating to access. Like allowing a £100 donor to stream their play of the demo as the official teaser release.

I really liked aircombat, especially being able to shoot down three UFO fighters with a Corsair when the autoresolve gave something like a 0% chance. The problem with it was that the dogfights became repetitive - there weren't enough variables fed into the mini-game. You would often end up playing the exact same match. It would've been nice if the autoresolve factored previous wins into the calculation. Overall, I felt that its merit came from sharing principles with martial arts: gaining the advantage on your enemy by paying attention to timing, distance and angles. A lot of combat in games ends up being a match of numbers: which side brought the most HP and DPS. This was much more elegant.

^ that was an interesting read. Thanks. I'm definitely more interested in computer game violence, where no one gets hurt, but it is nice to hear about the reality games are based on. Suppression is probably the same deal as shotguns though: the myth is more playable. Overall, this is why I prefer sci-fi worlds, because they make their own rules.

Morale is a weird one, a lot of it is tied into the psi system which is contentious anyway. There is a lot morale could do, as @visig says, like acting as a multiplier for other stats - though the effect of that wouldn't normalise the difficulty, it would only make it easier when you're already doing well and vice versa. Maybe it would work if missions were designed so that you had to gather as much morale as possible before fighting the 'boss' aliens in the final room or otherwise be forced to retreat if your squad weren't brave enough to finish the job. In any case, whatever morale does, it should act as a distinct variable in relation to health or suppression stats - if they are too closely linked then why distinguish them? Sure, if you fire plasma bolts at me, my morale would probably take a hit but there are other stats which recognise that, being fired upon shouldn't be double-counted. Similarly, if morale is calculated by a count of enemy vs friendly deaths, what is it achieving? You should be pulling out anyway if you're losing too many soldiers. Even the idea above of "taking a breath" (for unused TU to recover morale) is odd. I think that conceptually it is really good: it makes a kind of logical sense that you could hold back a soldier to rally their strength; but would it make the gameplay any more interesting? It'd just encourage you to play slower which isn't exciting. Similarly, the stat being related to soldiers' proximity wouldn't make the game more interesting (however much sense it makes intuitively), it would just narrow the options for how to play i.e. more turtling, less flanking. I do like the idea that morale remains a mysterious stat that carries on within and between missions, maybe have it being increased or decreased by something the player can't really control precisely. My feeling is that a brave soldier isn't necessarily one who hasn't seen any death or injury - on the contrary, they'd surely be more hardened. As a game concept, I think morale/bravery needs a specific purpose: like being a condition for a soldier to learn a particular skill or something. Otherwise, I can't see how it adds much mechanically, despite how much it is a real thing.

X1 had dropships with minor bonuses: more doors to exit, then a manual selection of drop points. Maybe a bonus could be something like smoke cover - but whatever it is, the bonus has to be modest and not really do too much. Whilst it would make a lot of sense, practically, to put a turret on the dropship, that would defeat the point of ground combat. If you are given an easily defensible spot of cover, with ordnance, then an easy tactic would be to sit and wait. Where is the fun/challenge in that. The point is to get your soldiers to do the fighting. Fighting from an entrenched position might make an interesting scenario but not for the bread and butter missions. It can be annoying to be pinned down from your first turn, but the dropship in the development build of X2 has wide doors so you can make every soldier engage immediately. There is no bottleneck. Essentially, this means that if you do get a alien or two in a very close welcoming party, you can near enough unleash the full firepower of your squad. So, there isn't much need for fire support from the landed craft. 8 troopers should be able to manage 2 aliens (if they can't, bring more rockets). I guess a good compromise would be that the dropship has doors which can be closed (somewhat mirroring the alien craft) so that you can really turtle the first couple of turns if you are stuck, but then have those doors susceptible to damage, so you can't hide behind them all day.

Yeah, the main forum thread for the new Xenonauts, a game the Goldhawk team are surely working hard to create, is probably not the place to chat about how great some other game was. Buuut Apoc was pretty damn good. Aliens: Apoc had variety. From the a huge building-sized godzilla monster down to tiny eggs or green puddles of micro-organisms. The aliens made sense too, it was a society, with a caste structure and a life cycle to discover. I believe that came from them designing a sci-fi and mapping it on to a tactical game rather than the other way round. My vote here would be for aliens that fit into a bigger picture. There is scope to have some really wacky designs, like teleporting aliens made of light or fungal creatures that operate via spores - but it is crucial to have at least one species at the centre of it all that has hands and a brain. That is the 'housekeeper' species who builds all the ships and stuff. They can't just be slaves, they've got to feel intelligent, independent and a little bit normal. Game mechanics: I was definitely a fan of the living city. All the corporations had some interaction with each other and something they added to the city. The Solmine organisation imported Elerium from offworld - if the spaceport was damaged, the market supply of Elerium would dry up until the city sent repair vehicles out to repair the damage. The back story to these factions really tied everything together, it is an aspect of hard sci-fi where the imagined reality feels factual. Most RPGs are a world waiting for the player to drive things forward, the Apoc cityscape would tick along with or without you. I guess in terms of a perfect remake to the game, I'd be interested in seeing more interaction between the aliens and the human organisations - as it was, they just got infiltrated gradually. It would be cool if the Cult of Sirius was a bigger player economically. A more believable outreach program for alien takeover cooperation.

I think that this issue is to do with activating/deactivating the fog of war (the eye button). EDIT/ADDITION: Tracking of projectiles can sometimes be unhelpful. After you click to fire, the camera jumps back to your soldier, you watch the bullet travel through empty air across the screen, the camera then jumps to follow but if the projectile hits at that moment then you miss seeing it land / the damage that comes up. Grenades can only be deselected with esc, clicking the gun or switching units doesn't effect the selection. This means you don't get an overwatch shot and if you forget to switch back on the next turn, you'll lob a grenade rather than firing your gun. Also, the UI doesn't make it clear that you have selected the grenade at all - the ammo image disappears and the soldier switches the item in their hand but these are quite subtle changes, certainly to a newbie. With the stun baton: as Jean Luc said, the animation isn't very satisfying. The damage doesn't come up as the baton strokes either. Also, I used that for my final kill but the alien disappeared and the level didn't end (on the plus side, I explored right to the far end of the map).

Add a bit of decorum to the game with a touch of Latin I didn't know that that convention had a proper name or that binomial had two meanings.

The following kind of comment is probably becoming a bit of a habit of mine - but I have long been impressed by Apocalypse's alien life cycle. They didn't resort to the vat grown soldier cliche but had a fairly deep explanation for how aliens are created. I'm not saying that X2 should necessarily have eggs and chrysalis alien types, rather, that whatever the nature of the aliens imagined, getting a fair ol' back story behind them, that unravels as the game progresses, is a real treat for the player. It probably is my favourite bit of the game, getting a new alien onto the operating table and discovering their story. A trick that XCOM seems to have missed is that whilst they have a wide set of aliens in their menagerie, none of them has the feel of a real species; there is only a token effort made to explain how the aliens eat and they all seem to exist for a purely combat role. It feels implausible and kinda lazy. Essentially, the inclusion of something like the Harridans from X1 then makes a great example of a sensible caste system - they fit into ground combat just fine but their decent back story makes everything else hold together a bit tighter. All it takes is a bit of story. EDIT: OK and some pretty graphics too. It doesn't hurt to have them look good.