Decius

Would it be possible to have "Movement" points and "Action" points, where every healthy soldier has 100 AP (that can be used for actions or movement), and rookies have a handful of MP (which can be used to move and turn, but not attack or open doors or juggle inventory), while experienced soldiers have more MP but the same amount of AP? The idea would be that with experience, soldiers can move around faster using less of their active attention, keeping their weapon ready to fire, while a less experienced soldier would have trouble firing on the move; and everyone can move further if they just carry their weapon rather than wield it. It is often frustrating that we can't walk towards someone while firing a shotgun (think Sean Connery in The Untouchables) without getting fewer shots.

If you're doing hardcore optimization, tracking GPU and CPU core usage is insufficent. Properly profiling how much of each frame is spent waiting on memory, waiting on PCI bus, or waiting on things higher in the abstraction is complex. For example, if memory access latency is limiting, having a smaller memory space can help (since memory access time scales at least with the log of the size of the memory accessed.)

Is there any reason the minitabs have to fit across in one horizontal row, or can they start another row above the first if there are too many soldiers for the horizontal space? Support for mods that allowed absurd/realistic numbers of soldiers on certain types of mission would be great.

My less-than-professional understanding is that through homogeneous air of constant temperature the dispersion is the same as in vacuum, since the entire beam is refracted equally, and actual air is pretty close to that. But finding a place where you can draw a line hundreds of kM long through air and ending on something interesting is nontrivial anyway. Reflected energy wouldn't add any heat to the reflectors, and it takes very little energy to ionize air. A smoke, dust or aerosol designed to impede a particular type of laser could plausibly be exactly as effective as gameplay needs it to be. Likewise, an armor piece that was designed to protect against thermal lasers would be some combination of reflective, ablative, and dissapative, in proportions that depend on the details of the weapons they were designed to counter and properties of the sci-fi materials used- maybe a gallium-unobtanium alloy exists that has a huge specific heat capacity and latent heat of fusion, and melts well above normal human body temperature but below the point where burns are a huge danger. Hit an armor plate of that with sustained laser fire, and it becomes uncomfortably warm, then melts. Hit it with a piece of lead containing a similar amount of energy, and it might turn a trivial amount of that energy into plastic deformation.

It's really hard to have a believable implementation of close air support in a balanced squad tactics game, because close air support properly delivered trumps basically all the squad level tactical considerations. A plane two miles up and five miles away simply doesn't fit in the ontology that can care about how much time someone spends aiming a shotgun.

I don't have direct experience with getting shot at with lead, but there's a lot of ability to cause someone who has fair cover to refuse to stick their head out because they expect it to be hit, and there's some value to spending ammunition at an area to make the enemy not comfortable being in the open, even if it's not accurate enough to be directly dangerous. Flashbangs, Heavy MG fire or artillery seems much more like concussion damage than suppression.

Suppression isn't the result of being scared of bullets. Suppression is the result of seeking cover (or minimizing your profile) against the incoming fire that you are actually taking. We don't see the effects properly because the abstractions pretend that everyone is standing still and waiting their turn while being attacked.

There's several tabletop games a lot like that. There's also X-Com: Interceptor, but there's a reason nobody recommends it.

Floored at 0%, or is AP going to be strictly better/strictly worse than HP in mid-range situations? For example, if a HP round does 12 damage 0 penetration, and an AP round does 10 damage 20% penetration, and there is no floor, the AP round will do 10*120%=12 damage against something with 0% armor, the same as the HP round. At 20% armor, the AP round would do 10 damage while the HP round did 9.6, outperforming until at 100% armor the AP round does 2 vs 0; with those numbers and no floor, AP ammo does strictly more damage if the enemy's armor is nonnegative. If we adjust HP ammo to do 15 damage instead, against 50% resistance the HP ammo does 7.5 damage while the AP does 7. (They break even at 60% resistance, doing 6 damage; AP ammo with those numbers is less ineffective than HP ammo only above that range) To find numbers where AP ammo is noticeably better against targets with armor in the 40-60% range, and HP ammo is noticeably more effective against unarmored targets, try giving AP ammo 60% penetration, give HP ammo 1.5 times the damage, and floor effective resistance at 0%. HP ammo is more effective down to 33% resistance, then AP ammo becomes radically more effective. Very heavily armored targets will still reduce the effectiveness of AP rounds, and there's even an option for base resistances above 100% (although effective resistance should probably be capped at 100%, to prevent a shot from healing a particularly well-armored target). Alternately, things like high-expansion rounds could instead apply a multiplier to the target's resistance: 15 damage with a 2x resistance multiplier against 30% resistance would double the resistance to 60% and deal a mere 6 damage, about the same as the 10 damage unmodified round. If the armor piercing value of ammunition isn't a big enough difference to be worth the tactical costs of picking which ammo type to run, the effort to implement the feature is wasted; there has to be a situation where using AP ammo is better and a different situation where it is worse, or it becomes a global upgrade.

I wouldn't inflict morale damage for walking through terrain. Morale as a resource to be spent is incompatible with morale as one of the ways that the opponent can damage you. Having suppression fire do both suppression damage and morale damage would make it either OP or useless, rather than situationally useful (either they get suppressed AND panic, dying to shotguns next round, or neither). Frankly, there's already enough of a snowball effect; taking losses results in having fewer soldiers in the fight, which means expecting more losses. Having a strategic reason to evaluate the cost of casualties versus the benefits of accomplishing more mission objectives would be better.

X-Com Apocalypse had an oversimplified system for building collapse (If there was ANY connection to ground, the building would stand, even if it was a sheet of drywall holding up an apartment building). Having a more sophisticated building collapse system could be interesting, but giving enough information to players to predict what was likely to happen from a given action seems excessively complicated, and a system that cares about how much load each structural piece is holding up would add a lot of complexity to terrain design for only a modest benefit. I wonder if making each structural tile do a configurable amount of 'stability damage' to connected structural tiles when destroyed might work; if an exterior wall of a tall building has 10 structure and deals 5 to a wall directly above it and 3 to walls adjacent to that one when it is destroyed, sustained fire that destroyed one side of the ground floor wall would cause reasonable damage to the walls above it. If that damage also spreads to floors, it would propagate in a believable way into the building as well. Fire can be included in that system just by having fire do some amount of structure damage to each tile (maybe variable based on the tile; steel and concrete hold up better than wood to fire, a wood frame with drywall over it might withstand concussive blast better than a hallow cinder block) In any case, at the very least anything that doesn't have any connection to ground (or something that can fly) should fall down, even if it still had structure.

Having things like airborne hazards (and the tools to protect against them) would be interesting. If it isn't going to be expensive to enable modding support for the ability to give ammo arbitrary properties (dragon's breath EMP shotgun rounds , skittles MG ammo fired from a pistol), that would also be good. If things like allowing each round in a magazine to have different effects would crowd out other features, it's probably not worth it.

A system that implemented career-ending but not promptly fatal injuries might be interesting, but that really needs more non-combat billets (range safety officer? Morale and Welfare? Classroom trainers?) that could be filled by someone who had an arm cauterized by plasma and earned some medals by firing back with their pistol. Another way of looking at an injury system is "Anything that would be a career ending injury is also a combat incapacitating one, and that guy with his arm cauterized off counts as "dead" even if he collects disability pay afterwards, because tracking soldiers through three years of physical therapy is a different genre that what we're going for.

For there to be a real choice, every disadvantage would have to be actually important at least some of the time. If fuel consumption is a variable, then you have to want to conserve fuel sometimes; for being slower to be noteworthy you have to care about the transportation times, if avoiding interception or surviving crashes is important than you have to be intercepted and shot down and everyone killed sometimes. Fuel management, trying to meet strategic timeline schedules, and reloading after the A-list got killed by an interceptor are all things that don't add to X2's gameplay.

One of the ways to add depth is to have different groups of humans use different names. The scientists might use binomial nomenclature in a formal report, but soldiers are going to use very different terms in their 'formal reports', and both will have formal and informal terms. Showing that in a way that isn't confusing to the player for having to correlate four or five different names to the same creature type might be a challenge.

The genre is big enough for more than one game this decade. Pheonix Point isn't going to displace X2 any more than Dune 2 displaced Command and Conquer.

One thing to consider with training- what does it actually consist of? Are we just giving them a pallet of ammo and telling them to hit the range, or are we bringing in subject matter experts and giving the soldiers classroom time on xenoanatomy and where vital organs are and how their joints can and can't bend? Things like demolitions training or medical training could make new equipment, actions or skills usable (or effective), focused drills could improve accuracy, reaction time, or other stats. Presumably the recruit pool would include some people who already had some of the more mundane training, but even specforces typically don't all have all of the assault/sniper/medic/demolitions/lockpicking/foreign language/electronic warfare/hacking training, because by the time any one person had completed developing that many different skills it would be time to retire. Spending somewhere between a fortnight and a month, at the pace of X1, to become eg ten times better than baseline at field treating injuries seems like a fair balance- nice enough that players want someone with that ability, and expensive enough that they can't give it to everyone.

Close air support would be very hard to balance, gameplay-wise. That's because close air support is designed to be completely unfair and unbalanced.

It's not easy to see where your shots land when firing in stressful conditions, unless you're using tracer rounds.

A good starting point for an alien campaign would be after a human victory. The opponent has close to technological parity, massive number advantage, and momentum, and you have some escape pods and some pistols. Destroy all hyperspace jammers and request reinforcements.

The wattage of a laser is the maximum amount of energy it can deposit on the target. Five watts is nowhere near enough to 'punch a hole in solid steel'; you need to put enough energy on the target to either melt or sublimate the surface. For plate steel at roughly zero range, getting a clean cut requires kW-range lasers. Since a clean cut isn't needed, and aircraft don't have plate metal armor, similar power levels are useful against aircraft IF the targeting system can keep the laser pointed at the target long enough to melt a control surface.

The average soldier in a war kills fewer than one other soldier. Unless for some reason human soldiers are MUCH better than alien soldiers, there should be a very high body count, with even the most 'routine' missions being dangerous, even if done perfectly. Soldier costs (in money and in the supply of willing recruits) need to reflect the fact that soldiers' life is less important than some mission objectives. That can be shifted quite a bit towards 'human soldiers use superior tactics to be better soldiers' and 'most alien 'combatants' are poorly trained in ground combat because they're spaceship crew' to support the squad-based tactical gameplay, but an assault on a fortified position protected by trained soldiers should not be expected to be cheap.

If the goal of an alien terror attack was just to kill civilians and make them scared, they'd be dropping rocks from orbit. The aliens on a 'terror' mission have some other goal that we don't understand- maybe they want to study the stuff that's there, and the way they study a building involves taking it apart, or maybe they have motives that are too foreign for a human to understand. Either way, they aren't going to act like a human optimizing for terror tactics would, even if they have the effect of making people panic.

X1 has roughly four different UFOs, of different sizes. There's the type that's linear "open the door and mutual shooting gallery", then there's "Open one door into a room with three doors", and there's "Open two doors into the same room", sometimes mixed in with "Use a teleporter". More different floorplans on that same gameplay wouldn't add much, it would need to be a new type of thing.

More UFO assault isn't a problem. More of the same UFO assault could be a problem. One way to mix it up would be that the craft is preparing to depart. Once the engines are started and the navigator launches, any soldiers still on board have to choose between being captured, crashing the UFO (e.g. by shooting the navigator or blowing up something important), or die trying. Larger UFOs would help with that, if they were large enough to be a map with nonlinear paths rather than being on a map tile with pretty much one path to the command center.