Decius

If TUs were normalized (to, say, 100) and firing costs were adjusted accordingly, but movement costs were very aggressively scaled based on equipment/strength, how would that play? (by 'very aggressively', I mean that nobody can carry a full kit without experiencing some penalty, and heavy weapons are typically about half to a third the move speed of unarmored riflemen without accessories. Or maybe spilt accuracy into "aiming quality", a 0-1.00 stat that multiplies weapon accuracy, and "aiming speed", a 0.01-2 stat that divides TU cost.

Adding artillery and removing fog of war wouldn't improve the tactical game.

If you're going to apply penalties for firing at something in squadsight, be sure to provide feedback regarding what the soldier can see, and information about where they would be able to see a target, as well as what they would be able to see from other locations. That's a chunk of UI design, right there.

You have the distance scale wrong, too. That's 70m, roughly twice the effective range of a shotgun.

That's several training failures right there! He never should have been allowed to touch a live grenade before demonstrating adequate handling of dummy grenades, and also should not have been a candidate for the Xenonauts program until he was able to pass ALL the basic qualifications.

A few hours of reading is barely enough to learn all of the subject areas you need a PhD in to fully make a decent air combat system.

Anything that CAN be manufactured without access to alien materials can be manufactured more profitably outside of the secret factories. It makes sense that equipment based on those designs is simply available in unlimited quantities as soon as it is completed; any of the Cold War Superpowers would be happy to buy exclusive knowledge of a new design and pay for it with 'lost' shipments. It would be impossible to make a significant profit off of that type of equipment, since it would simply be copied by other factories and the Xenonauts would be very off-mission employing the Danneskjöld school of patent litigation. For things that DO require alien materials to manufacture, there's no way to sell the stuff that you engineered after reverse engineering it without the customer being able to reverse engineer it and learn how to make it, given the materials. Since the only reason you can build it cheaper than they can is because you have the materials and they don't, it should be about as profitable to sell the raw materials as to sell the manufactured weapons. Selling alien technology that you can't figure out how to build has no such restriction, but turning a profit on a UFO chop shop is an intended behavior, and I think that running an anational small arms manufacturing company is a degenerate behavior in Xenonauts.

If a fatigue mechanic were to be implemented, counting time spent in transit as a major contributor to fatigue could be interesting, since it would be trading off different strategic resources.

Remember the part of Eldest where the protagonist funds an entire rebellion by using magic to make lace? I'm not saying that's the reason why the rest of the series didn't get optioned for film, but there is a reason.

If you're using translocators to simplify stores management, why would soldier If you're using translocator tech to simplify inventory management, why not use it to simplify living quarters as well? If the armory doesn't have to be on the same continent as the dropship, why do the soldiers need to sleep next to one? And if there's only one dropship, wherever it it based is the primary location, and all others are merely interception/radar, or science/engineering outposts. That said, is there any reason why the surface structures (radar, hangars, air defenses) can't be arranged in a top-down grid but the other stuff (living quarters, storage, labs) be buried underground in the ant farm? Split the real estate between the two views, since each of them would need less room.

If the aliens have an equivalent to the Vietnam-era AC-130, the impact of them on the tactical landscape is "On the first turn of CAS, the dropship is destroyed along with the largest cluster of Xenonauts. On the next turn and every subsequent turn, all Xenonauts not in hard cover are killed, or one cluster of xenonauts in hard cover is killed and the cover destroyed, unless they are in melee combat with aliens that the gunship cares about hurting with friendly fire." One way of avoiding that is to make the local forces air defense good enough to deter close air support operations. But that just removes the alien CAS from the equation entirely. Xenonaut CAS using an AC-130 equivalent is also impossible while the war remains secret; large, slow-moving planes loitering and firing 105mm cannons at the ground are hard to hide.

It's the same design issue as not having close air support; at some point you just trivialize the game parts of the game.

And Carol Danvers (1968), Nick Fury, Hawk, Robert Hogan, Hans Landa, and O-6 CAPT Harmon Rabb. Put the eight of them on a mission and the antagonist that opposes them has to be something on the power level of a xenomorph queen.

If one O-6 can be badass in the field, clearly a team of eight of them would be more so.

It might be worthwhile to try a few missions where everyone uses the same primary weapon, just to find the edge cases.

Unpopular opinion? Out of all of the games in the genre, UFO:Enemy Unknown/X-COM:UFO Defense and the Terror From the Deep reskin handled the interception combat the best. Give the player strategic level control over the tactics used, allow interceptors to wait for backup, and then roll the dice several times to get a result that will be pretty consistent most of the time, but is technically never perfectly certain.

Pointing out that a work of fiction is fictional doesn't apply to discussions about the verisimilitude of a work of fiction. And the A-Team had rock-solid accuracy when trying to shoot out tires.

And that counterintutive dynamic is an additional problem. A soldier who can't hit a target across the 50m wide warehouse by aiming with the sights on a rifle won't be able to hit that target aiming through a scope on a rifle. The only roles for people with low accuracy is 'civilian' or 'ablative armor'. And the chopper doesn't have enough room for ablative armor.

Hannibal Smith had no problem being on the front lines in 1972...

"Trick"? Against Chryssalids I would regularly have everyone ready a deadman's grenade! It led to a couple of unfortunate results when it interacted with stun bombs, but it prevented several wipes.

On topic: Would it be too hard to cause the autoresolve button to display the outcome before selecting it? I was salty at X1's autoresolve doing much worse at times that I couldn't predict.

Here's a challenge: Play a game where you only pause the Geoscape and interact when something interrupts you. Compare that experience with the alternative, having the full array of controls available.

Just record the impact point of each bullet, and when replaying fire them at their impact point with magic hit chance.

Diablo started as turn based and was changed to not pause between turns. The phases and turns were in there initially, and then the 'pause' step was removed. It was a good decision, and made it 'real-time' in every practical sense, but the turns were still there under the hood; each tick happens once, and the only noteworthy difference from the Rogue model is that there isn't a full pause when your previous action completes. (plus some bugs that came about as a result, like stunlocking). At around 27:15

The only way I see to reconcile the 'realism' and 'gameplay' preferences here is to make officers different from enlisted- a Lieutenant would be about good solo as a corporal, and much worse than a Master Sergeant. But the Lieutenant would have some kind of command bonus applied to the entire battlefield. At the upper end, a Colonel could provide a better version of the tactical bonus, or a base-wide leadership bonus. It seems like bad design to make those bonuses just +numbers, and I don't see a good way to give them abilities like Long War did without changing the entire paradigm of X2. But there is plenty of precedent in fiction for officers to be overall better than ordinary soldiers; Col. Hannibal Smith is a force to be reckoned with by himself, much less as the leader of the A-Team.