Ninothree

The weapon tier paradigm has been discussed before (though perhaps not with that name). To sum up what I remember, there are the camp of realists who argue against long-range plasma projectiles etc and the other side who propose that the weapon tiers are about a linear progression, so that when you research the corresponding tech it functions as an all-out upgrade. I'm guessing that the new alenium mechanic will be used to encourage the player to use a mix of weapon tiers throughout the game.

Wow, that is a really nice idea. It seems simple and obvious but I've not seen anyone mention it. I mean, I guess it could be annoying if you accidentally fill up a soldier's inventory with grenades then you have to do some extra shuffling mid-mission, but any idea which overall amounts to fewer unnecessary clicks is, I think, a bit of a winner. (Also hello)

Wow, it is almost like all the stuff that has been talked about on the forum was fed into some kind of development plan. Magic I'll be interested to see these new implementations and find how much of what changes is actually missed. The removal of air-combat in Firaxis xcom was no biggie, but then I think that that is because their first game had really dull interceptions (it was more a case of remembering to do the right R&D in time). So, Goldhawk, good luck with that one! As I've said before, I'd vote for bold changes, certainly with the little things. Alenium sounds pretty big, like it will determine a lot about the game, so obviously that mechanic has to be considered and carefully implemented (then abused in mods!). But what I really liked about the first xenonauts were the little things: airstrikes on downed UFOs, the ventilation system in alien fortresses or the way the artwork changed in your base over time. Those features were hardly something you would use in an exhibition promoting the game but they're nice little things waiting for the player to discover. So, yes, it is good to hear that Goldhawk are rethinking not just rebuilding but whilst that is important, also (please), be bold with the little bits.

One of the Halo games used a Focus Rifle (which was pretty much a laser) that fired in a stream rather than a brief, intense burst. Damage was a function of how long you could keep the beam trained on your opponent. Naturally, the beam hit dead-centre of your reticule: you didn't need to lead your target but it was nonetheless fairly hard to track your enemy accurately. I guess that the transfer to a turn based system would be - as mentioned above - that the gunner is still fallible but that the damage done would depend on time units remaining. It'd be much like the basic TU to firepower conversion of snap vs auto fire. Except in this case the calculation would be a continuous function, feasibly inputting distance and the opacity of the air too. I don't know how much difference that would actually make in terms of gameplay but if we're considering realism, I'm fairly sure that a laser's cutting power is related to the duration for which it is focused as much particles which would dissipate the energy en route. Note: Halo also sports a Spartan Laser which behaves very differently and is badass in its own right. It is a heavy weapon more akin to the class of LMG or rocket launcher. That gun was especially fun for arcing the beam across several targets or drilling directly into one. That mechanic is also an application I'd vouch for if we're discussing how a laser weaponry could be implemented.

Also you could use the teleporter to dodge missiles, plant grenades, then teleport again in less than a second of real-time combat. Fun but maybe not particularly balanced. Getting back to the original point of the thread - Apocalypse hardly branched out from the 'kill everything' approach in missions (though you could stun/loot human factions, save non-combatants and destroy map structures). Like most games in the genre, missions were mostly sweep and clear. I feel that its reprieve was the immersive strategy layer: a city of individual buildings that gradually became infested with aliens. Since that half of the game felt like a living ecosystem, it wasn't simply a means to generate ground combat missions. There is an interplay between the two, if they're both quite static the overall gameplay gets stagnant. The MO of kill everything is a lot less dull if it exists in an interesting framework.

http://openapoc.org/ How many kidneys did you say you have?

Yeah, by XCOM not allowing you large troop counts I was referring to the Firaxis version, I should've specified. In XCom Apocalypse I seem to remember you could bring tons of soldiers because you could use multiple vehicles to transport them to a building. At least, that was what I remember. My point was that Apocalypse was the same vein as the original two and Xenonauts, that the maps had a lot more of an exploratory feel to them, rather than the Firaxis maps which feel quite like a progression - not that either one style is better or worse, but that Xenonauts 2 could exploit that difference.

The 'kill everything' approach is just so inelegant. I get that that is a bit of a theatrical criticism but I find that the strategies for 'kill everything' tend towards repetitiveness - especially on harder difficulties when breaching the final rooms of downed UFOs. I did really like that if you held certain map locations, it had consequent effects. That was new and interesting, also it made clearing up less tedious. Further, it plays into the fundamental tactical element: positioning. Xenonauts, as opposed to XCOM, allows you to bring a large contingent of soldiers on a mission and supports non-linear map layouts. Having [alternate] objectives which require positioning soldiers on multiple squares in different areas of the map is something that only Xenonauts can do. On almost any mission it is expected that you split up your squad into many smaller fire-teams. A mission design which required you to carry out several tasks simultaneously would add an interesting pressure. Those tasks don't even need to be ground-breaking, the ingredients are already there: explore map regions, destroy an object, clear and occupy a space, defend an area, protect the NPCs, stun an enemy, use a medkit on a character, recover an item, or retreat to the dropship. Essentially, it would be making the standard missions just a bit less standard.

I'd appreciate playing like that. So you could pull through a mission with only a single soldier left alive but then that wouldn't destroy your playthrough entirely. That way, missions could be geared to a difficulty a few notches higher. It'd also help in those instances where one of your best soldiers gets killed seemingly out of nowhere - it wouldn't ruin your day because you could get them back at some point. But I reckon that a lot of people appreciate the danger of perma-death, it just depends what you consider to be fun overall given that frustration is a key part. Maybe the system would need some long term punishment, like that the soldier suffers a dent in their stats which takes several months' training to recover; or that if the soldier suffers enough damage (gib death) then they don't come back (unless the surgeons are really good at jigsaws).

I actually liked the turn timers - but I play quite aggressive so they don't spoil my fun. It cheered me a little that the timers removed the strategy of overwatch creep as my personal feeling is that playing the defensive waiting game is dull (I'd rather reload and try again than take it slow). Though there is surely room for all styles to be encouraged. Scenarios like terror missions give you that soft timer as civilians get wasted for every turn your dally, and as Chris says, you can insert any dwindling mission reward into that secondary objective slot. My point is that I think there is scope to design some secondary mission objectives along a contrary premise: that you earn more rewards from the mission by taking less damage i.e. exposing yourself to fewer risks with a safer (if slower) strategy. In this case, the sub-optimal victory would be that you allowed yourself to be put in a position of weakness, taking on more enemies at once than your squad could handle.

Not to rain on the anti-Firaxis parade but you are getting a little off topic. I mean, I guess that this comes under "what are the distinguishing themes between xenonauts and XCOM?" - which is fair enough, XCOM has its power fantasy and no one wants xenonauts to mimic that entirely. The issue becomes one of extent, how much can xenonauts implement grand weaponry without selling out on its core values? I think that @Conductiv has nailed it with the point about troop positioning. If you aren't putting a lot of thought into where you place each soldier, then it has ceased to be ground combat. I remember in XCOM:EU I preferred the first missions of the playthrough because they were all about outflanking the enemy. Classic gameplay. However, a judicious amount of additional options in the fight will keep you coming back. From what I understand, this is the point of the alenium resource, that it will always restrain those 'cheat' options and nerf the power fantasy into more of a mild day dream. In any case, if those alenium weapons are just going to be augmented versions of regular weapons then soldier positioning should still remain sacrosanct. i.e. your rifle will still need line-of-sight and it will still put out a similar number of shots per turn. In terms of the xenonauts theme as differentiated from XCOM? I guess that would be the claustrophobic style of ground combat and the greater scope for strategic decision making (i.e. less of an instant gratification, arcade feel). Returning then to the concerns about importing too much from XCOM, yeah, it would be awful for the player ever to get the feeling of invincibility. That would annul the claustrophobia and undermine the strategy. So whilst it would be bad to encroach on the feel of XCOM, that doesn't mean nothing of the game can be imported, just that it should be implemented carefully.

Hah, humans deciphering alien technology just to make more powerful weapons. Wow. Sadly, that seems incredibly likely.

Well after a fair bit of research, I found this: According to the date log, they said it quite recently; I reckon that that is valid evidence but I do like poles...

There is a play-by-mail type of coop for turn based stuff, you'd probably need a bunch more stuff to do / think about each turn to keep the momentum right.

I feel a rage against capitalism coming on...

I think waiting for other people would be unbearable. My friend plays xenonauts so slowly that I can't watch him play. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the game like that but I think that if there were coop ground combat you'd have to split the servers into 1) frantic turns with a timer and 2) slow turns without. I guess that it must be equally frustrating playing civ online but I've never tried. Not to be a serious suggestion for the short term, but I wonder how far you could take the xenonauts gameplay into a MMO. So it'd be set something like an armada scale invasion rather than fighting off a thin stream.

@Drakon about the AI and tech in the game: the aliens need not make use of every element of tech available. If they did, then the human and alien factions would feel too similar; differences would seem superficial. Just because a particular game mechanic may be difficult to teach to the AI, it doesn't follow that you should deny it to the player. Sure, poor implementation might worsen your experience (e.g. AI doing stupid/unfair things) but players can usually forgive some element of ridiculousness if it is fun (e.g. jet packs and light sabres ). So yeah, things like teleportation should be left out unless you can nail the way the AI uses it and I guess if elements like proximity mines are going to be implemented then other mechanics may need to follow to forestall the rage (e.g. running-soldiers can't spot them but static or walking-soldiers can). In terms of the Geoscape and air combat: I'd advocate bundling the overall strategic decisions into some turn based format. All the resource management, R&D, base building etc doesn't need to be real time and staggering those events is to no benefit; they can all be a set of decisions made in one instance, a logistical phase of each turn. However, as air combat is pretty much the only exciting thing that happens in the geoscape layer, overtly reducing that to a decision tree of text boxes and percentages would be sad. Some level of animation, or watching an event unfold, is a must. There is some stuff to pick apart here and I'd say it is worth figuring out what makes air combat exciting and what level of input is fun-strategic. I'd say air combat involves two main elements: chasing and then engagement. The chasing part is satisfying to watch as red and green blips approach one another but does it need to be plotted on the standard geoscape? Also, how many real-time decisions made at this juncture are meaningful? Does the question of a successful chase have to hinge upon you bringing pilots in from other bases? As for the engagement, I can appreciate that reaction based combat is not everyone's cup of tea but the dog fight should feel thrilling - quite the opposite of an autoresolve and deserving of some kind of mini-game. Maybe take the aspect of FTL that involves targeting parts of the enemy ship(s) but fold that into a turn based system. Say you give your pilots orders for distinct actions, 1 time-unit per turn: making a pass (firing) or other maneuvers (closing distance, evasion or retreat). Just like FTL, the mechanics could be as simple as %chance to hit (no messing around with 3d spaces) but as your engagement takes place over several turns your strategy would have room for complexity, though in actual fact it might be a semi-solved problem i.e. someone could calculate the heuristics of what orders would likely yield each outcome.

I think the best way to get to the bottom of this is to go back to how Drakon started and lay out the axioms we have in their most minimal form. After that essential form is expressed, it should be easy to pick out the problems and weave any number of stories around what an xcom/xenonauts game could look like. Galactic colonialism could be (and indeed has often been) made to work as an idea for aliens but that is just one example of narrative polish that goes at the end of creating a scenario. If you start with that, then the other pieces traditional in the game might not fit in so nicely. For instance, I think XCOM2, for all its infamy round here, did a good job of changing the standard storyline whilst keeping faithful to gameplay: a resistance movement and guerilla combat make much more sense than the whole of Earth having a tiny, moderately resourced, strike team who can take down UFOs with conventional weaponry from the get go. ---- So, the axioms as I see them, for a game in this genre. Please amend as you see fit. 1: Aliens have come to invade Earth’s territory, the player takes control of the humanity's only real form of defence [this is the geoscape layer] 2: The aliens' invasion is subtle, not nuking cities but small-scale attacks which can be fended off by a single squad [ground combat] 3: The invasion is progressive and starts with weak scout troops - Earth's defence only encounters the enemy's most powerful forces much later on [difficulty progression] 4: The aliens have far better technology and it is only by harnessing that tech that humanity can prevail [research and engineering] 5: By culminating a research tree and understanding the enemy, the player then forms a counter attack for a win [resolution!] ---- Our prior discussion has mostly concerned the why of point 1. However, I think that the five points actually get more tenuous as they go on, so it’d be better to keep them in mind from the outset. The biggest plot holes, for me, are the capability of Earth’s scientists to master alien tech and develop weapons on par with the enemy’s; and also the sheer relentlessness with which the aliens send out their hordes of foot soldiers to be slaughtered and looted, giving the home side a path to victory. From what I understand, Julian Gollop’s Phoenix Point is going to get around those issues by imagining the enemy as belligerent and barbaric mutants. So human scientists are smarter and the enemy’s strategy is a crude overwhelming of the Earth. However, if you want sentient and sophisticated aliens, then they require some flaw or rationale to end up letting humans appropriate their tech. Also they need some strategy which is ultimately threatening but not insurmountable. XCOM:EU did this by the aliens intentionally nurturing the human capabilities (the gift) but underestimating human resistance (ha, dumbass ethereals). I always felt that writing to be a little weak. The idea of the secret war for xenonauts 2 seems, roughly, to be that the aliens don’t have the resources for an all out takeover (which would be the obvious thing to do if possible) so they are trying to subvert humanity through infiltration - this would position the enemy as actually quite weak and ultimately defeatable. Though faced with that premise, some people round here seem to have lost their shit. Effectively, the aliens need to seem better than us in most ways, but must eventually succumb to our ingenuity (and M16s). Personally, I’d lean towards a game scenario where, for the first half of the game, you are managing a losing battle (as you’d expect vs advanced aliens), then you discover the aliens’ weakness and spend the second half of the game exploiting that, regaining lost territory and finally seeing them off in a big showdown. The weakness would be something the aliens don’t have, e.g. biological or chemical warfare, as you can easily do interstellar travel with just some specialised physics This premise would challenge the norm (axiom 4) - humans wouldn’t be able to adopt esoteric plasma technology as in most other games. Instead the player would fight back with something the aliens didn’t see coming, like weaponised viruses or genetically enhanced super soldiers. Conversely, another premise could be that the aliens are waging a war of covert economic or social manipulation, and humans win by counterintelligence locating the aliens base and an armada of nukes saving the day.

"The Septillians left the colony ships, walking onto a planet basking in sunshine, with rich acidic oceans, and warmly enclosed in a thick envelope of CO2. The last remaining humans would have made good hunting sport but gasping at the low levels of oxygen they couldn't run very fast."

Good thought process Drakon. I didn't know the thing about 100 strategic nukes being enough to cause nuclear winter (I just looked up the paper, I think they would have to detonate in specific urban areas for it to happen). I like the idea that the aliens would mainly be trying to interfere in international affairs and that such a game plan would lead to your four conclusions. Though I'd suggest that you could alter them a little: option three could be a 'score' achievement, whereby the effectiveness of the xenonauts leads to some fraction of the Earth remaining habitable (not a total loss). Also, I think that you are dead on with the second assumption. The idea of alien colonisation always falls a little flat in my opinion. That stick-our-flag-in-another-planet kind of sci-fi was all the rage decades ago but it doesn't hold up now. 300 years ago some parts of humanity were quite happy to invade and colonise but today there is a lot of guilt and retaliation to that, in another hundred years our species hopefully wont be so merciless. Even in relatively old ideas like Star Trek there was a non-interference directive for the Federation. However, I take your point that the aliens are only doing it because they are being forced to but I still feel that there is scope for a much more solid rationale, especially one that works with the notion that the alien's attack is incremental (else the game would be really hard). If you can assume that aliens are capable of interstellar travel, you can probably assume that they can wait thousands of years to terraform a planet. Yes, you could find a caveat here - maybe the aliens can only do such travel once and so arriving at Earth they have no choice but to settle here - but making use of a caveat is not solid reasoning. The aliens could still be aiming for control but not necessarily to disembark their civilisation and find a new home (which also runs into the additional issue of environmental incompatibility, likely they'd not enjoy 1g of gravity or 1 bar of air at 21% oxygen). Control, in a more sophisticated sense, can come in many ways: subverting government, owning core economic actors, or even by continually destabilising humanity so that we never make it into space. Even those forms of control are the basics of neocolonialism. Advanced aliens may have even more subtle forms of domination and manipulation. Eliminating every aspect of Earth that aliens could find elsewhere (land, minerals, energy, position in space), the only thing I can think of that would draw them here would be our species and society. Possibly they'd want us for some inscrutable purpose, like using us as a card in galactic politics, or something heartless, like studying our behaviours when under attack.

Restart whole mission >> saving repeatedly throughout

Alenium sounds good, brings those choices into the game to 'moderate' the fun. Also, it doesn't even sound ridiculous from a science-energy perspective, mini-reactors are perfectly feasible and would be exactly the kind of thing needed to boost laser technology or the like. Although the obvious use for them would be to make light sabres...

Happy new year indeed! It is nice to hear that things are coming together. Although I would put myself in the experimental-camp rather than the revamp-group so I'm a little sad to hear that innovations are being reined in. Nevertheless, I'm sure that the end product will further the particular Xenonauts charm but look that bit nicer and run that bit smoother. You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Yeah I enjoyed scavenging alien grenades. I remember there was a lot more of that kind of thing in the original games because you used the same ammo and missiles as the aliens so there was quite a bit of bounty to be had. But I can see why most objects get scrapped immediately - what is the point in holding on to ufo-entertainment if you're ultimately going to sell it anyway!

As far as I'm aware, none of the games of this genre has played around that much with spotting/acquisition distances. I think the UFO spin-offs use a perception stat, XCOM2 has the stealth mechanic and the armours in Xenonauts1 allow for different vision cones - apart from that, spotting aliens has been quite a passive effect of soldier placement/orientation. Ideas like this may be a little late to the party, but specific actions that affected vision cones would be an interesting addition, maybe a usable item like binoculars to spend TU to reveal some map or give a buff to squad sight. But then, I can see how added vision is quite contrary to the desired, claustrophobic, feel of ground combat. I'd certainly lean towards mechanics that are gamey rather than realistic (though all the above is interesting!) Similarly, I remember a lot of forum discussion about scopes, that in terms of gameplay they must come at some trade-off, else why not equip everyone with one by default. Maybe this issue could be that trade off, that a scoped soldier has a better effective weapons range (possibly allowing aimed squad-sight shots) but they also have narrower field of view. Thus, most map layouts would demand a mixture of scoped and non-scoped soldiers. Currently the feel of ground combat is that soldiers feel like very isolated assets on the field, they aren't really an interdependent squad with overall tactics; there is an element of positioning and flanking but effectively each soldier is just another gun.