The New Romance

Pretty cool. Thanks a lot!

I've noticed that before, in version 9.0. Also, the "days until recovered" counter didn't seem to work, the soldiers returned to duty much faster than the counter stated.

I'm also in favour of Gauddlike's idea. However, it will have to be explained explicitly, because it's not what people are used to from other turn-based games. If it's possible to put in a clear explanation somewhere it isn't missed easily, then go for it.

Please, answer this guy! No, really, I would call myself an advanced indie gamer (maybe not an expert), but I have never been to Indiegogo. Thus, the potential for a crowdfunding drive through that site seems very limited to me (although this is of course heuristic information processing, then again that's how the internet seems to work ). I would really urge you to try and get on Kickstarter. Crowdfunding is popular at the moment, but funding on seven different sites? It's the same with digital distributors, even though there are others, Steam is still pretty much king. One might not like that, but for the sake of the project, one should acknowledge it.

I believe it was four player-created characters plus three slots for "classic" NPCs, but I'm not sure, and it's probably subject to change anyway

... which might include Monday and traces of peanuts.

Ouuuuhhhh yeaaaaaaaaahhhh.

Sounds pretty cool I think there's definitely still room to elaborate on X-COMs original "mental states", and an alien running amok or navigators throwing their hands up in the air when the door blows off its hinges seem quite fun to me.

By the way, will there ever be a possibility for aliens to surrender? MrPyros statement about a breakout-last-stand as the aliens' last hope got me thinking. Surrender is an option that gets overlooked all too often in war and action games, and I personally like it when games incorporate it, but I'm not so sure whether it'd be appropriate in an Alien Invasion! context.

Pretty much every indie game (at least those that I've been following closer, otherwise I wouldn't really know). You're right, however, it is sad.

There was some talk about cruise missiles perhaps two weeks ago. However, it was somewhat controversial with regard to possible drawbacks of that strategy, availability of such measures and general tweaking and balancing of such an option.

For those of you that haven't heard: The Banner Saga kickstarter is out. I don't know how much overlap of interest there is between that game and Xenonauts, but I guess as it's a turn-based roleplaying/strategy game (or something like that) there might be some. Go have a look (and become a Norse god, if you're rich enough ): http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoic/the-banner-saga

Heard about that one on RPS. I didn't play it, but from the comments I read I got the impression that this must be the mother of hardcore - one thing I remember was a player describing how he didn't only need a rifle, a scope, a rail and tools to make a scoped gun, but in fact a certain number of screws! How detailed can you get...

Yay, great! Rounding out the NATO is a good idea. By the way, good luck to your and especially your wife (or girlfriend), I hope everything goes fine

The game is still in Alpha, so several of your questions can be answered with "not yet". The research tree isn't fully implemented yet, so research, technology and long range radar are out of reach at the moment. Aliens, to my knowledge, cannot yet be captured. The MiG is buggy, as its research was only introduced a few days ago. As far as I know, you cannot manufacture them in this version.

On the other hand, if enough people pre-order via the existing way, we might not even need the Kickstarter. You can always make the game better with more money, of course, but I believe there's kind of a bubble brewing that might explode, probably sooner than later. I wouldn't want Xenonauts to join the Kickstarter fray too late and then not make the funding - it'd be bad publicity. Then again, it wouldn't hurt to try because final release sales would perhaps not suffer too much from a failed Kickstarter.

They're over half a million bucks right know, not even one day after the start. Pretty cool. I gave some money right after it came live, however now we're facing the arduous prospect of waiting about two years till it's released. I hope Xenonauts comes out in the meantime

I find this to be a nice suggestion. Computers are there for doing the math, and I believe as much of that math stuff as possible should be put onto their shoulders.

Edit: I'm sorry, I misunderstood the link.

I understand that. It just came to my mind that African countries could provide combat experienced soldiers, whereas the "big players" often cannot (because of all the proxy wars). Plus, it'd get some additional flavour into the game. I'd be very interested to hear what Chris has to say about that, though (of course it is only a mod, but it'd be interesting nonetheless, especially regarding the somewhat alternative Cold War timeline). Rhodesia turned into Zimbabwe Rhodesia only in the summer of 1979, so at the beginning of Xenonauts we could still have them in. You're right, however, about the somewhat unofficial or outcast nature of those states. Good to hear you were at least considering this As another suggestion, what about Japan? Do we already have them? They featured in the original X-COM, though that was set in another time, and I don't know about the combat potential of Japan's force as they were primarily a homeguard sort of army. Another idea I had yesterday was Portuguese soldiers, who fought in Africa up until 1975. Oh, and +1 for Cuba and Vietnam

I like tooltips. It makes the game less taxing on your memory. Also, I believe tooltips have always been more of a PC thing, because consoles often don't have a cursor that can hover over anything.

If you read the manual and invest ten minutes in looking at every screen in Geoscape mode, you should be fine. I was able to play the game after that procedure. A few details eluded me at first (like right-click changing the facing of your soldiers in Battlescape mode), but it's not difficult to get a general hang of the game. However, mind that currently there isn't that much content in the game, and as of version V9.0, the enemy doesn't even have AI. So, the game is playable, but it isn't really representative of what is planned for final release.

"52 viewing", there seems to be quite some interest in this particular area of the forum...

By the way, are African countries-of-origin planned? Or are there even already any? They had a lot of strife going on down there (unfortunately still have to this day), which would make for some combat experienced troops from say Rhodesia, South-West Africa or South Africa (which have the advantage of being able to use white portraits, as I believe there aren't that many black soldiers at the moment) or other now differently named African countries such as Zaire and Upper Volta. I think it would add a nice amount of historical flavour, making you party like it's all 1979 again and it would alleviate the general tendency of video games to focus on the Western world (and maybe the Soviet Union, depending on the era a game is set in). Drawback would be to generate believable names, especially for black Africans.

I'd like special missions, be they scripted or with unique victory conditions. I do, however, realize that this means a lot of work. A better approach to the repetitiveness problem would probably be to have the usual randomly generated missions + some sort of "random wacky factor", that introduces additional and interesting victory conditions apart from "kill 'em all, take their stuff". I believe the game would greatly benefit if it expanded on X-COMs original formula wherever possible (by the way, where is the Kickstarter money printing machine to make all this affordable?).