Safe-Keeper

I like the idea of only being able to stabilise some soldiers, leaving them unconscious/disabled for the rest of the mission, but saving their lives. Perhaps they have some fractures or a severe concussion that means they are out of the fight, but will recover when brought to a proper hospital. As for first-aid, real-world first-aid, at least in the civilian world, consists of first checking for consciousness, then for breathing, then there is the recovery position or CPR, and of course getting control of whatever bleeding there might be. So you could have an Analyze action and one or more First-Aid actions, depending on severity and perhaps whether the patient is bleeding. These could just be called various variations of "First-Aid", or slightly more immersive stuff like "Stop bleeding", "CPR", "stabilise fracture", and so on. I also like the idea of various actions having advantages and disadvantages, forcing you to make some tactical choices. Perhaps you could even be made to make a call between aborting the mission to evacuate the patient. Or perhaps there could be a "Med-evac" action that simply removed the patient from the map if you had a clear, safe corridor back to the landing craft (let's just say the helicopter crew came by with a stretcher and retrieved him and now he's safe in the chopper) or to a large enough area for an invisible, abstracted medevac helicopter to land. Problem is that having to do too much when a soldier is wounded would get slightly tedious and time-consuming, since xenonauts have a tendency to drop like flies, so a balance will have to be achieved.

This could even be an interesting gameplay consideration. You could choose to illuminate your immediate drop zone, giving you an initial advantage but also broadcasting your position to the aliens, who might just converge on your drop zone and take cover around it, so possibly not a good idea if you're landing with a small squad. Then again, I suppose the aliens would hear a Chinook landing anyway, but hey, sometimes you gotta sacrifice believability to make a game mechanic. Let's just say it glided the last stretch to the battlefield :P .

1. possibly the best solution: just have them gradually get better over time as the game progresses. Explain it however you want -- the world's militaries taking the war on the aliens more seriously and sending the Xenonauts better troops instead of just recruits, for example. I'm also toying with the idea of dismissing skilled soldiers to train recruits. You would have to make do without one or two good troopers, but your recruits would get a welcome bonus to their stats. 2&3. good point. You should be able to dismiss recruits, but also hold on to the ones you want for when you need them. Perhaps there could be a finite and (very) slowly replenishing pool of officers/veterans you could hire as well as recruits, though. You would only be able to hire a few of them, and I suppose they could also cost more. I'm personally not really in favour of making recruitment more complicated than it has to be, though.

Not sure if I agree with landing craft actually doing stuff like firing flares or firing on enemies, but I do like the idea of several distinct kinds of landing craft, especially if you start with at least two already unlocked. Off the top of my head, you could have one landing craft that fits more troops and perhaps has more doors and windows, like the Chinook, and a smaller craft that fits far fewer troops, but is faster and has longer range, and perhaps also has a higher chance of not being intercepted by UFOs as it flies low or has stealth technology or whatever? Not the best example, of course, but what I'm trying to say is, it would be fun to be facing a mission and think "which helicopter/plane should I use for this one?".

Hope it's OK that I'm necroing this thread. CK2 has pretty basic stats, too, and they manage to increase immersion quite a bit by creatively naming their stats and writing fluff texts for each one, see for example child traits, even though they do simple things like "+1 intrigue" or "+10% movement speed". It's not neccessarily about how much they change gameplay as much as that their set of traits helps you connect with your troops and makes them feel more real to you. For example, if Ragnhildr of House Yngling just has a +1 bonus to martial skills, you think little of it, but when the stat says "Rowdy" and the fluff text says "This child is loud and lively and usually prefers rough physical activities over calmer pursuits", suddenly Ragnhildr feels more like a real person to you. She's a little tomboy and you can just picture her pretend-fighting with the boys and running through the woods, perhaps with a wooden sword in hand. The same would apply to James Cunningham the fresh Xenonaut recruit. You can put in all sorts of traits here, from slightly generic stuff like "this character is just naturally cool-headed" to character backstory and action film character tropes. For example, you could say he grew up on a farm and spent countless days and nights out in the woods hunting with his dad. +10% to firearm accuracy. He is a young parent and thinking of his lover and his daughter gives him extra determination; +5% bravery. Also, players would start interpreting unrelated things as being part of the character's personality because that's just how humans work, see Extra Credits' video on this, and this would further increase immersion. You could have a character have a Marksman trait giving them a slight accuracy bonus, and then when they land an improbable headshot, you will feel it is thanks to this awesome trait, regardless of whether the soldier would have hit the target anyway. Darkest Dungeon, too, did a great job simulating what would realistically happen to adventurers who had to take on dungeons full of horrible creatures, even though it of course pretty much built its gameplay around it and the effects thus of course were far more severe.

So I watched a YouTube video on FarCry 2 and one of the features discussed was how you rocket launcher had a backblast which could even start fires, which in turn could spread and be unpredictable. Both would suit Xenonauts 2 in my eyes; first because I like the concept of powerful weapons having dangerous drawbacks that you have to work around (this could also be considered for some other weapons and mechanics), and secondly the idea that flames and smoke are these unpredictable, uncontrollable things that you have to respect as a threat, and not just a static road block. It would also make you put some thought into how you used incendiary weapons. It might be tempting to kill two aliens with an incendiary grenade, but if they are standing on a lawn or in a forest rather than on an asphalt street, the fire might become an issue two or three turns down the road. I'm not asking for Minecraft-level wildfires that engulf the whole map, but accidentally burning down a house you were considering using as a fire base would spice things up nicely. Perhaps there could be different levels of fire, too. Embers, flames that you can try running though at some risk like those in X-Com, and large flames that block all movement. I get that there is the predictable/unpredictable scale to consider, though. As in, I like ideas such as fire (and thus smoke) spreading and even having floors or ceilings suddenly collapsing from damage or fire, but I understand that players may not enjoy having to work around these things, not knowing if a building is going to collapse, or when. So for gameplay's sake, you would probably have to communicate somehow that "okay, this house will collapse in four turns unless fire is contained". Also, the fire idea especially might be tricky with regards to AI, especially if they have fire weapons.

Even this could be ridiculously unbalanced. Those eight shots could kill just as many aliens, without even risking one of your actual flesh-and-bone soldiers. I'm intrigued by the idea of your transport ship being able to pop smoke (or perhaps illuminate its area with a flare?) on call, though.

Sorry for replying to a sort-of old thread, but I just realised that what would make just as much sense would be to have recruits take more time units to do various things such as reload their weapons and take aim. You would have terrified recruits fumbling with their weapons in the heat of battle, and experienced veterans who routinely do these things since they've done it a thousand times before.

The only way I see this working is if you have an "inbound mode", where you can see the whole map and you then decide a landing site. For balance's sake, I suppose some/most of the aliens could start out in buildings or concealed so that you didn't learn the location of every threat instantly. Then once you picked a spot, your helicopter would be able to take a shot or two at them as it came in to land, and then once it landed it was up to your troops to fend them off. Overall, though, I don't like the idea of drop ship-mounted weapons for the same reason I understand why they left HWPs out of this game. It'd be really hard to balance. Then again, it is fun to have some overpowered weapons to wreak havoc with once in a while. The Blaster Launcher was hilariously overpowered in X-Com, but boy, was it ever fun. So I wouldn't be against being able to play with some heavy weapons like helicopter door guns, HWPs, or infantry mortars at certain points in the game, I suppose.

What would this actually do, though? If you could just gun down anyone in the drop zone with helicopter door guns or whatever, all it means is some free kills in the opening of the mission if aliens even spawn near the drop ship, which they don't in Xenonauts 1. I also see it encouraging turtling and AI-luring, as other postsers pointed out. I suppose you could get chances to use it in a wide open map, or if the helicopter happens to be angled right as to give you a lucky sight line down a street or something, but all I see this doing would be taking challenge out of gameplay. A better implementation would be to allow soldiers to shoot out of the view ports of the helicopter. The soldiers in the helicopter would have heavy cover, but would be able to hit aliens outside just fine. However, come to think of it, I have been playing with an idea of a special type of mission for when your troop transport gets shot down. If this happens, instead of just losing everyone on board, you start a mission where the helicopter has crashed and is damaged and some of your soldiers will be dead, and most or all of the survivors will be wounded. Aliens then assault you, rather than the other way around, and if you lose all your men, or perhaps if the helicopter is destroyed, you lose the mission. In a defensive mission like this, where you had to spread out your troops to guard the helicopter, I suppose it would be fun to have a kind of "last stand" situation where you have been driven all the way back to the drop ship and you have a heavy gun or two to provide some fire support if manned by Xenonauts. I'm more concerned with how you can't look out of the windows of the drop ship in many X-Com games, I seem to recall this being the case in Xenonauts, too. Edit: have to say I dislike the idea of auto-firing weapons. Sounds like a good way to get my own squaddies killed.

With tanks gone, maybe there could be a "Fortnite pickaxe"-style weapon that allows soldiers to knock down obstacles like low fences (and maybe even walls) at the cost of time units? Something like a small handheld battering ram like the ones police forces use? Also, a good way to have tanks would be to have them be this "special" unit you only have in some missions. Perhaps these missions could be extra tough with more and/or better equipped enemies than usual or something to compensate, and you'll have some fun getting to use an armoured car with rocket launchers or machine guns. Base defense missions, particularly hard terror missions, what have you. Something that either makes X-Com go "hmm, yeah, we probably need some extra firepower for this one, bring in the armoured car", or where maybe local police/military forces commit vehicles like this and you get to assume command of them when you arrive.

I totally forgot about that. Haven't played Xeno in ages, so had to fire up the game to have a look. He does indeed say "we'll build anything you want, comrade".

Hearts of Iron 4 has a neat system where you can train divisions up to a certain skill level by holding exercises, but this comes at the cost of equipment and vehicles because ammunition is fired, vehicles break down, accidents happen, and so on. In Xenonauts 2, perhaps we could train troops at the cost of money and perhaps even some "attrition" from wear and tear to whatever advanced weapons, ammo, and equipment that you have in limited supply that you choose to use in training, and even the chance that a soldier could get injured during training. I don't mind the ability to train troops, but I do feel there should be a cost involved, and a max skill level. Would help lead to that "desperate defense of Earth" feeling when you lose soldiers and have to throw those poor recruits into the fray without proper training. As for the rest of the OP, as another poster said, I don't need variety for variety's sake. One of the things I liked the most about the original X-Com game was its unsentimental approach to weaponry -- it's one of the only games I've seen where a rifle is just a "rifle", not an "1337WTF-A2 Origami Syndicate Special Full-Auto Assault Rifle with pickles and scope", and they also unceremoniously threw in some strange weapons like the heavy cannon and auto-cannon because they just didn't care, it was a game about tactical combat with aliens. Edit: I sort of liked that the USSR was more in the background in Xenonauts. They seemed to cooperate, but still didn't trust each other. I know it'd be a lot of work for the devs, but it would be neat if you were playing as a Soviet or Western organisation based on where you put your first base, at least in the early-game. Gradually the east and west would cooperate and coordinate more, so that mid- and late-game content was more identical except from maybe some flavour names. Heck, maybe in the early-game the "opposing faction" would be reluctant to even allow you to fly inside their territory. Some diplomatic/political stuff like that would be cool. none of the countries really do anything in traditional X-Com.

The turtling argument is a good one, but I'm thinking it will also encourage you to stay moving as you know that once you're taking shots from somewhere, whoever (or whatever) is shooting is only going to get more accurate. I understand it's a significant change, though. Didn't know others had used it to good effect already, so that's interesting to hear.

The thing I want the most would be for other players to control the aliens when you play missions in single-player, for extra challenge . Also agree an alien campaign would be cool, strange that no one's done that considering how incredibly many X-Com clones there are. I suppose the goal of the campaign would be to sway all the countries in the world to your side or something before the humans accomplish all their main objectives.

I'm going to miss them. Understand your reasoning, though.

I always just imagined that a UFO landed, dropped off aliens, and left again. Also, I'm with Chris here, we don't need more UFO assaults in Xenonauts. As a compromise, maybe you could have a UFO fly to a city to initiate the terror mission for then to fly away, and you have a chance to intercept it before it goes back into space . Edit: I liked the idea somewhere in this thread to have a large building to clear, SWAT-style, but I think that'd work better as a separate type of terror mission. As long as the devs can implement it in a good way, of course. The ship missions in Terror from the Deep were certainly not popular.

Would it make sense if a soldier who fired several consecutive shots at a stationary target (or even one that didn't move that much), would get increasingly better accuracy with each shot they fired? Logic being that you pop off a shot, see where it hits, and then correct your aim based on that shot?

I like the idea of a proper first aid system . I don't know how many things and action sI would like there to be, but now that you say so, it would be cool to have painkillers and whatnot, and perhaps even having your medic give CPR, which would take several turns and have only a certain success chance. The first X-Com game had painkiller and stimulants in the medi-kit, after all . There is something about having a wounded man and having to cordon off his position and hold it while the medic or medics treat him or her that I like.

Could soldiers develop persistent personality traits over time? I don't like naming examples because it easily turns into a discussion on whatever game I use as an example, , or like I'm just stealing ideas, but I'm thinking of Crusader Kings II or Darkest Dungeons-style traits that develop over time based on what happens around the characters. I'm using CK2 as an example because it has such a large selection of personality and physical traits. Both things such as "Slow", "Quick, "Genius", and "Hunchback", and personality traits such as "Trickster", "Arbitrary", and "Organiser", some of which are acquired over time. For Xenonauts 2, I think it would add a lot both to depth and immersion to have appropriate traits for your soldiers, both traits that are present at start, and ones that develop over time. You could even have temporary buffs and penalties such as fevers, high morale or pride following a successful battle, cowardice, disillusionment, complacency, and so on. You could also have injuries like losing an eye or getting a lasting hand or foot injury.

I have no idea how this would be implemented, but an X-Com game where you play as the bad guys -- either aliens invading Earth or humans invading some other planet -- has been a dream of mine for a long time.

I honestly had no idea what to call this suggestion when I was making the thread. So, when playing games like this you basically have to make a choice of how much you want to "save-scum". Some choose the ironman approach, which has even become an official setting in newer games, while others choose to reload missions and even turns if things don't go as planned. So I've been thinking -- how about an option to allow the player to save the game, but to regenerate certain things each time they do so? I'm primarily thinking of ground attack missions here -- you would be able to save the game, but each time you load the save game, the placement of aliens, civilians, and so on in the fog of war is generated again. This means that you would be able to "save-scum" by loading a mission if it goes badly, but that you couldn't do this to "learn the scenario by heart" to perfect your approach. Each time you reload, you're playing the scenario for the first time, especially if you were only allowed to save at the beginning of a ground assault mission when playing with this system. The map itself would be the same, but Of course players could use this system to repeatedly generate missions to make things easier for them by for example reloading if they find an alien in a good position, kinda like how you can start new games of Civ to get that perfect city spot with the exact resources you want and whatnot, but I think that it could also present a nice challenge to players who use it seriously, so to speak .

Just chiming in to say that I would really love a game where you fight aliens using War of the Worlds-era technology !

Yeah, it's meant to be the other way 'round.