The "secret war" doesn't seem to work in the context of a classical X-com game.
This isn't a classical X-com game.
11 hours ago, Chris said:
Yeah, I guess Terror Missions *exactly* as they are in X1 would be hard to recreate in the "shadow war" stage. There's two possible solutions to that which I can see:
Slightly reframe the mission so it's similar from a gameplay point of view, but more fitting with the new theme - e.g. the aliens are attacking a civilian power station, and unless the Xenonauts intervene they do a very good job of disintegrating all the witnesses. But if the Xenonauts can intervene and win the mission, they get an increase to the country relations score because there are now X additional survivors who will be telling everyone that the alien invasion is real. That actually gives a good reason why the player should save as many civilians as possible in a terror site (whereas in X1 you had to kill the aliens so the local forces didn't nuke the city; saving individual civilians was unimportant).
Bring in the two-stage mechanic I mentioned in another thread, where the Xenonauts have a "threat" counter that increases as they perform hostile actions against the aliens. If it goes above a certain level the aliens launch an attack against the Xenonaut base, so the player has keep a low profile and stay secret in the early game until they are strong enough to repel an alien attack. When they get militarily strong enough they can trigger the base attack and, if victorious, remove the threat counter for good. At that point the aliens could move into outright warfare with terror attacks against civilian targets like in X1.
I quite like the first one actually. Let the aliens carry out an attack against the infrastructure in the region on their own terms and there's no witnesses - so it raises the threat in that region, bringing it closer to war with its rivals. Intervene and save the day and the survivors reduce threat in that region by increasing support for the "Aliens are causing these problems!" narrative, pulling them towards peace with their rivals.
It better fits the scope of an actual mission in Xenonauts too, where there's only around a dozen civilians at a terror site - which makes for a pretty sparsely-populated city...
During the "shadow war" stage, "terror" missions (or chaos missions) would be mostly infiltration and sabotage - attack on intelligence and security institutions, false-flags with mind controlled humans, deployment of technology such as dedicated gateways, construction crawlers or psionic transmitters which will make future alien efforts on Earth easier.
Once the all-out invasion begins, terror missions become far more visible and direct like X1 terror missions.
The "secret war" idea
in Xenonauts-2 General Discussion
Posted
This isn't a classical X-com game.
During the "shadow war" stage, "terror" missions (or chaos missions) would be mostly infiltration and sabotage - attack on intelligence and security institutions, false-flags with mind controlled humans, deployment of technology such as dedicated gateways, construction crawlers or psionic transmitters which will make future alien efforts on Earth easier.
Once the all-out invasion begins, terror missions become far more visible and direct like X1 terror missions.