Decius

I would be okay with making the soldiers fall down and be unrecoverable during the mission (the current 'dead' state) a 'badly wounded' state with a 75% chance of survival with a permanent scar of some kind. Some of those scars could be mixed: Faster reactions but lower accuracy for the jittery soldier, or immunity to mind war but vulnerability to other forms of morale loss, in addition to the strictly worse ones. Since those scars would replace death, the balance issue would be in avoiding having the penalties be too weak, and soldiers being used as ablative armor being too possible.

I wonder if a hybrid model of "X%+N TUs" would work out; if the LMG is, for example, 50% +1, then it only ever gets one salvo off on any turn, even with MAXINT TUs- but with 30%+30, it's still going to be limited to one salvo for total TUs under 150, but someone with 70 TUs would be much better at repositioning and firing than someone with 50. It would have the side effect that anyone with less than 43 TUs would be completely unable to fire it, which I think is interpretative of them being so badly wounded/encumbered/impaired/suppressed that they can't manage the weapon at all.

What use is it for a man to save the whole world, if he dies doing so?

The thing I noticed is that only the aliens had powerful weapons where any given shot mattered a lot. There was a distinct lack of any kind of human armor-piercing tech among all of the rockets, despite the launchers which should have been able to fire penetrators but which appeared to only have large area denial munitions that weren't effective against the enemies targeted, despite literally every alien being so heavily armored that they weren't shot to death so much as eroded.

Sounds a lot like Phoenix Point. There's a lot of room for improvement on their hit detection, and it creates the odd emergent feature that some very heavily armored enemies are best handled by destroying their weapon and inflicting any amount of bleed. It does feel nice to have your sniper pull out their sidearm and make several precise shots to counter an enemy at close range, or to get into a flanking position and take out an arm holding a shield, but it's a different niche of Laser Squad than the survival horror/HFY niche.

It's plausible to have it both ways- a small number of technobabble cannons that leave holes in anything that they hit, and several other weapons that are faster and perhaps more accurate but easier to deflect or absorb.

I don't think I ever completed the final mission with no losses. What might be an interesting compromise is if there was a mission AFTER the world is saved that was either an exfiltration or extraction of the squad that won the day, or possibly a series of missions that determine how badly the death throes/disorganized remnants damage Earth in a margin-of-victory sequence. It would be a moderate departure from form to have substantial elements of the game occur after the boss fight, but there are already plenty of examples of escape sequences.

There's certainly not enough room for all of those in text without it becoming a spreadsheet. But it could probably be shown- how easy/hard would it be to display armor and weapons in a 3d model along with name on half the screen with name, portrait, and the role symbol displayed on a schematic of the dropship? Also show the soldier number for that mission.

"Breaking" armor doesn't mean that the armor is evaporated, any more than breaking cover means the cover is evaporated. It would be sufficient to pulverize strong ceramic plates into dust, or start spalling a hard plate.

No, it takes more TU, but the same amount of time. Higher TU means you run faster, since movement takes constant TU.

If the dropship has blind spots, enemies should be unable to start in those blind spots. There's design room for craft with a higher capacity but not more interior space, if a soldier in very heavy armor takes up more than one soldier's worth of weight but still fits in one tile. That could also be used as a balancing factor and allow heavy armor, robots, or vehicles to be better, if they take more weight. Few aircraft are limited in passenger capacity by how many seats they have; aircraft limit how many seats and cargo space they have so that they reach their full load when the seats and cargo bays are full.

There's some value to having a squad that can be moved around as a single unit, such as putting equipment assignment on the squad position. But working out the edge cases and the UI for it is time better spent on other features. Giving a mechanical bonus for using an accounting feature is cancer; if you want a rapport mechanic, have it work pairwise independently of squad.

I was referring to the idea that tanks could go in the open and serve as cover for others. Even literal tanks have to protect their sides and rear and top and bottom.

To a certain degree it's a thematic decision; do you want armored characters to be able to shrug off attacks except for the one that kills them instantly, or do you want them to take gradual damage? But walking in the open and trusting on armor to protect you is suicide if there is any anti-armor in play.

Once we get enough alien technology, we could build a drownball stadium.

The difference between an experienced soldier who is new to a unit and one who has operated with that unit for 5 or so engagements is non-trivial, but measured on axes not modeled in X2. Things like knowing where everyone's field of fire will be and how they will move are entirely abstracted out by the hive mind controlling the soldiers.

I like the idea of funding the entire project on a few *Sebilian meat roasts*. Although I think that the Oregon Trail model might be more effective: Periodically generate an offer of a trade, at least one side of which is for something that can't be purchased for currency. For example, a country might offer to buy UFO parts for money, or UFO parts for different UFO parts, or alien bodies for a plasma cannon, or a wagon axle for some antimatter. There could be a fancy simulation behind what is desired and what is available, or it could just pick randomly from a weighted list of everything that is at or below the current tech level, or maybe even some other shadowy agency has an extra bit of alien tech that you've never seen before.

I'd also like for movement speed to be a thing that you could trade off in a meaningful way. The sprinting speed of someone with a light weapon should be much higher than that of someone with a standard load.

I can still hold out for more experienced operators to be able to fire more quickly, not just run faster.

Sure, give burst fire a recoil penalty. I'm specifically talking about firing multiple shots, not faster bursts.

The entire point of air support is to be unfair. The entire point of any development in warfare since at least the Greek Phalanx is to be unfair. (No fair, you're using other people's shields for defense!) In warfare, it is desirable that there be negligible chance of losing. But the point of a game is for there to be generally balanced playfield. If there is a simple course of action which results in a negligible chance of losing, it is a degenerate strategy and the game should be modified to remove that case. *Alien* close air support, in a single player situation, doesn't need to be 'fair' or 'balanced', it needs to be 'counterable'- it's an additional challenge that the player needs to overcome, and since the scenario is asymmetric what is left is balancing difficulty. If I had to balance player air support, I'd make it cost strategic resources. Not just money, but panic/relations or some other defeat mechanism directly. (Air support is not nearly as subtle as heavy machine guns; while the machine guns are only audible for a couple of miles, the aircraft firing are visible for dozens or hundreds of miles; the amount of effort needed to cover up that is substantially different). I'd make a small portion of that be incurred merely for having the support available, add a large cost to the first time it is fired, and a substantial cost for each additional shot fired per mission. And then I'd make it realistically effective: The air support can see the entire outside area and can fire six rounds a minute anywhere on the map, with a six tile diameter (30m kill radius).

As characters get more TU/turn and firing their weapons the same number of TUs, they are firing faster. Why, then, are the soldiers also firing more accurately for the same TU cost? They should be able to aim and fire just as accurately, but faster, or just as fast, but more accurately. Yes, they are developing two different stats that affect two different things in the interface, but that's easy enough to fix: Have a base TU cost for the shot, and allow additional 'aiming' TUs to be spent. Total TUs determine how fast they pull the trigger, while accuracy would determine the added effect of each percent of maximum TUs spent aiming.

Remember when games could get away with making political statements?

The use case for pistols is when you need something that is lightweight, either as a backup or because you aren't expecting to need a firearm but want to hedge against that. In a base attack, it would make sense for the science and engineering staff to have pistols. It makes sense for the snipers and heavy weapons carriers to carry them.

If the AA is functional, then after the dropship arrives gameplay shifts to a hidden object game to get enough of the squad to fill the appropriate number of body bags.