Cattletech

As fans of tactical turn-based combat, I figure many would be interested in this: www.chaos-chronicles.com Hopefully they can succeed where Troika failed.

I do believe using KickStarter has much added value. Don't give up on it too soon.

Upped my pledge! (I have no money left for other kickstarters this month; sorry )

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2?ref=live Hot on the heels of the Doublefine kickstarter, we're now getting a crowdsourced sequel to Wasteland, from some of the old Interplay veterans. For those who don't know, the original Wasteland was the precursor and major inspiration for Fallout 1. It's already at $250k, a few hours after launch! The goal is $900k, and the game will obviously benefit from an even bigger budget. So if you miss that kind of game, and wish they hadn't stopped making them, now's your chance! (note: I'm not in any way involved with inXile, I'm just a humble fan of Fallout, which from my experience largely shares the same target audience as X-Com - I hope Chris doesn't mind me spreading the word here)

They had just received the 1936 olympics broadcast and ascertained we are a race of competetive warmongering xenophobic expansionists. At first, they figured they could quietly abduct humans and splice the 'enlightened, peaceful' genes into our own... but no, the darn humans just had to send in the jets and go nuclear. THIS MEANS WAR!

Surely the game's intended audience isn't Halo players?

Allow me to clarify my point/reasoning: 1. To cater to the "console crowd" - i.e. a control scheme that isn't suitable for handling a large force, a modern-day view of difficulty/frustration/time consumption in gaming, and *cough*shortattentionspans*cough* demand for fast, action-oriented gameplay - the game will be balanced around small squads and low lethality, at least on Normal Difficulty. 2. The devs, however, are aware of the appeal of high lethality, "squaddie of the week" gameplay, and want to cater to that crowd as well. 3. Thus the 'Classic Mode' difficulty level, which will be more lethal, and either enable bigger squads in the vanilla game itself, or will (hopefully) be easily moddable for that end. I'm guessing the "PC" interface (which may or may not be PC exclusive, this is irrelevant) will facilitate management of a larger force, compared to the standard "console" interface (where it seems you have to sequentially cycle through the squad to select troops, at least judging from the screenshots). Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that is at least what I'm hoping for (either that, or the whole squad size 4 issue being flat out wrong / misinterpreted).

I'm guessing that on Normal difficulty level there will be very few casualties, and more of them on the higher ones. IIRC they also mentioned a 'classic mode' difficulty level for the PC. Hopefully one of either occurs: 1. Classic Mode also allows for larger squads, and has the control scheme to support it (e.g. they mentioned "a zoomed-out full-map view of the tactical map" for the PC). 2. It's moddable enough to allow for the above to be implemented. If that is the case, I can live with the 2-action system / unlimited ammo / single base. Also, I hope they have the sense to limit the number of Rockets / Grenades / High Explosives.

I wonder if their definition of "turn based" is the Baldur's Gate version of "turn based", as is often the case with journalists. Sounds more in line with "action strategy" to me. Then again, maybe I'm just jaded from all the recent franchise rape.

Some visual indication of remaining APs in the unit number UI would be nice, so you know which soldiers still haven't been moved. IIRC it has been suggested before, e.g. coloring the unit numbers. Is it already on the TODO list, or has it been rejected for some reason?

Hmmm, good question. I hadn't swapped any armors, was just using the default set-up. I'm guessing the default is all-Jackal?

Tactical Combat loading time Am I the only one getting sluggish loading times for tactical combat? Something like 1.5 minutes. I'm guessing it can be optimized somehow. If it's not brought down to a more reasonable level, please consider pre-loading the assets in the background as soon as the player intercepts the UFO / sends a transport. Soldier turning speed Soldiers take quite a bit to turn. Please make it faster / more fluid.

Selecting the lowest resolution, windowed mode, seems to cause the game to actually play at 640x480 or something like that. Needless to say the UI is quite messed up in that state.

I can confirm the second one, in 8.2. It was just after moving a troop, wearing the not-blue armor (wolf?). I'm not sure, but I think I had picked up an alien blaster with him (into my backpack). A 2nd play caused a crash when I picked up an alien rifle into my hands.