Max_Caine

A reminder to everyone that unless you own the mod in question, please don't link to it without permission.

Is no-one interested in Strategic Ops, then? Anyway, concerning balance and limitation. XCOM 2's Covert Ops had lop-sided issues with this. You could only do 1 Op at a time, but you didn't have to assign critical soldiers to the Op. On the one hand, players couldn't indulge by hiring a bunch of recruits and sending them off willy-nilly. On the other, I had 2 guys who only ever did Covert Ops. That freed up the rest of my soldiers to go fight battles. It was completely prescriptive, and I'm guessing that isn't the vision for Xenonauts. Like Ninothree, I'd endorse a mix of controls. Inducements to keep solders at base (through training) and requirements in terms of scarce resources would act as natural brakes. the issue I see with a helicopter or similar design is the narrative dissonance between a team doing a Strategic Op that needs to travel across the globe, and the insta-travel of the dropship. Why one, but not the other? But I do like the idea of having to give up space on an airbase for Strategic Ops, as that would be another more organic limitation on what you could do.

The Caesans, your Star Trek enemy, have been replaced with Psyons, the big-headed enemy.

So everyone is aware, I'm now watching this thread with my mod hat on. If people want to argue the merits/demerits of a service, that's all fine and dandy. What is NOT fine and dandy are ad hominem attacks. Kindly reserve your bile for the argument, not the person making the argument.

I think the most interesting thing that could be done with Strategic Ops is to improve their interactivity. With both XCOM's Spy Ops and XCOM 2's Resistance Ops, all you do with them is set the agent on their task then forget about them until their timer has run out. It's quite easy to forget that you've set someone on an Op because they're just a little reminder down in the corner along with all the other alerts. I've mentioned this previously but I'd like to do so again. There's a game (at least, there's a prototype of a game) called Net Gain. Now, Net Gain is all about progress bars which is not very interesting. To spice up the progress bars, Net Gain interrupts the progress bars with occasional crisis points. The player has to make a decision at these crisis points and the decision can govern the rest of the op. Here's an example: This is something that's also used in Battletech. During the interstitial period flying between missions, occasional crises spring up which the player has to make a decision on. I think this could be used to good effect in Xenonauts. You could tie a crisis decision to a timer, and give the player a short period of time to make an important decision. Let's take an example. Perhaps you've got an infiltration mission, and the crisis textbox throws up the following "Commander, we have received an emergency communication from our agent. He believes he has been followed for the past several week by a shadowy figure, and is convinced it is an enemy agent stalking him. The agent has counter-tailed the figure and is in a position to take out the target. Permission to proceed?" Then you might be given the choice to kill the figure (which may kill an enemy agent or might kill an innocent), pull out completely (ending the op), or ignore the target (potentially avoiding a messy scene, or imperiling the agent). If you tie it to a timer so the player has only a short period of time to make a key decision you introduce a degree of pressure on the decision. Furthermore, the information on the textbox might be more or less accurate. Using the prior example, the agent may be convinced or mostly certain, with every lesser degree of certainty giving the player clues how to proceed. A useful sidenote is you can make all of this just text and it wouldn't loose the impact of a crisis, making it a lot cheaper to churn out crises.

I am at work right now, so I cannot currently give this thread the attention it deserves. However, I can see that people are still fighting. I'm not having this any more. Dr Ethan. Please can you open a thread for your Fire in The Hole port on the modding discussion subforum and continue your port and all discussion on that port on that thread. Can everyone who is interested in Dr., Ethan's port please continue discussion on that thread. I also require everyone to immediately cease this disruptive argument between Dr. Ethan and Charon as of this post. Further sanctions WILL be implemented if anyone disobeys this post.

I can see that some people are upset that Charon is not paying attention to Dr. Ethan. I'm not a mind reader so I can't explain the mind of someone else, but because humans are not vulcans I can make some educated guesses. People don't always get on together. People looking on the outside cannot understand why the people involved cannot get on. People cannot be made to get on. People who previously did not get on, may get on in the future. I would ask people to look at the friction they have had with other people in their own RL lives before they cast the stone of condemnation.

Just a reminder that if you want to report a bug, please report it in the dedicated Xenonauts 2 Bug Report subforum . There is no guarantee that bugs reported elsewhere will be investigated.

Just a reminder to everyone please post bug reports for X2 in the dedicated X2 Bug report forum. Bugs reported elsewhere cannot be guaranteed to be looked at.

Perhaps the thing I would like to see most is better placement of NPC combatants vis. aliens. I don't expect the NPC combatants to last long (after all, the Xenonauts are the stars of the show!) but it'd be nice to give them half a chance by not placing them in view of aliens aliens who fry them in the first turn. It would also be nice to be able to be able to use Agents (if you're still using Agents) to perhaps influence the presence of NPC combatants? Perhaps "military advisors" could influence how many NPC combatants there are on a map and how well equipped they are? So you can influence the ground combat maps on a strategic level without messing with the map designs directly. Also, late game in Xenonauts 1, NPCs were upgraded from ballistic weapons to lasers. Is there something that could be done with tech research to influence NPC arms and armour?

So, one of the more interesting elements of Xenonauts were the friendly NPC combatants. Not that, in general, they were much good for anything than dying quickly to plasma but they were an endless source of stories. I think my favorite was the one where a player was on a farm map, they heard the double blast of a shotgun off-screen and found a farmer standing over the dead corpse of a Sebillian. Will Xenonauts 2 have NPC combatant involvement? Will it be any more complex than Xenonauts? That is one area where Xenonauts does have a leg up on its more affluent cousins.

I'm concerned that wouldn't be the truth. It's possible to put up a textbox to say "NPC defences are working", but is that somethng I'm going to remember mid-game? I suppose we'll find out come Early Access, but I'm pretty confident that people will be reporting bugs like "UFO damaged never touched it", because they aren't cognisant of NPCs without some form of reminder.

Abstracting sounds a great idea, but how would a player like me know that the NPC air defence is working? Would you do something like, I dunno, shade a portion of the geoscape the UFO is flying over so that I know that local defences are doing something?

Why? You could apply a regional modifier to any Xenonaut base built and allow the player to plonk that base down where they want to without going through the rigmarole of putting five possible bases down. Seems like a lot of work for nothing much in particular.

From the Xenonauts-2 Base System Discussion Thread, post by Chris on the 7/2/2018