Coffee Potato

Anti missile systems worked awesome for XDiv.

I'll try to find my old response, had a long list of potential emblem/badge ideas. I'd LOVE to see this implemented as an extension of the current awards. Edit: Found it Examples: Consecutive snipe damage(acc) Surviving a hit at low health (tus) Melee kill (str) Capture an alien (brv and hp) Kill an enemy that failed to kill them (brv) Survive an explosion (hp) Kill while suppressed (TUs and acc) Multiple units with one grenade (acc and tu) 40 tile snipe (acc++, lowers tu) Sebillian/Psyon etc Slayer, 5 of whichever unit type (minor bonus damage) Survive a cannon round to a shield (Brv, Str) Kill 3 enemies with 1 shot (Brv ++, Acc+) Kill enemy on other side of a wall (increased terrain damage slightly) Survive fatal damage 5 times (Come back as an Angel Knight), also not serious about this last one. Also, some to match the funny ones, like Don Quixote, Bogus Hero, and Broken Heart, though given some positives to avoid rage: Hit for 90%+ health on 90% or more TUs (Brv down, Ref up) Max out stats only by training (Higher target priority) Earn Sole Survivor award twice ( Lower target priority) Miss 95% shot twice in a row (Acc--, TUs+ Str+) Fail 3 panic saves in a row (Brv-, Ref++)

I would totally be down for them pulling an Ogre Battle, and having the aliens offer a truce to the winning party with cakes for everyone.

Yeah, I feel locking down numbers will always result in a better strategy game, since even the smallest thing can potentially be exploited to all hell. The TU system allowed anything with rapid fire to just make an overwatch wall that absolutely nothing could survive. Thankfully that was adjusted, and I can't wait to try it all out. One of my favorite strategy games, Tactics Ogre, had a thing where they tried, and almost succeeded in implementing everything. We're talking an armor system, like 15 different damage types, dozens of buffs and debuffs for dang near every single situation, skills, perks, and even weight/movement calculations for each and every single action to attempt to be balanced by it's speed. They would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for some guy forgetting to adjust a number somewhere in the code for some of the Dex weapons (Longbows, Daggers, 1h Katanas), giving them something like 5% extra damage over other weapons. It would have been fine, except that this was just enough to make them utterly break the game on accident. The actual meta to the game became just getting all the fastest characters, giving them longbows, and abusing time travel spells to never give the AI a chance to shoot (The original intent seems to have been for the bows to suck against armor, which they do at first, and still do against certain units, but easily break about halfway through the first part of the game). The reason I mention this is that this balancing situation, while still incredibly fun, was missed by a team that practically invented the SRPG genre, and has been experiencing it for a couple decades. Not to mention this was sort of a labor of love for those making it, so they got some of the best talent out there to make it happen, making a game with such an absurd amount o polish in it's 600+ hours, branching timelines, time travel, and everything else, that there are only 3 known minor bugs to this day. When a modder began creating an overhaul project several years ago, they wound up reworking a lot of these systems to be more uniform, and the result was a far more interesting game strategy wise. I mention this mod in particular, because a lot of the answers came in the form of reworking mechanics to a fixed %. Cursed weapons were this mechanic where a unit could be sacrificed and turned into a weapon with their characteristics. Originally, though, this meant that they would always do either 1 damage, or near insta kill whatever they hit, but inexplicably also instantly remove terrain. When remade, they did a lot amount of initial damage, followed by a % of health, depending on it's type. This was a similar situation with the health drain spell, which always did either 1 or a ton, and ultimately found a nice anti-tank niche as a 20% drain move. There were hundreds of skills in that game, but let's just say that every time there was this all-or-nothing damage situation, locking it down to a % usually solved the problem, since grinding is usually not something people want in a strategy game. Ultimately, too many moving parts will break any machine, so if things are reasonably capped (which it sounds like they did, come on Steam code..), strategizing tends to feel better. As a rabid fan of the genre, I always loved when the core mechanics are locked down, but the battles and overworld are chaotic. You know yourself, but not your enemy, as it were.

Yeah, they said we need to wait a bit until the core stuff is nailed down. Really looking forward to doing that too.

So I'm sure I'm not alone in really liking when there's missions that show off the grunts and randos handling the invasion, despite the odds. As such, would we be able to play those missions when locals save your guys? Maybe they send a small team to finish them off, and so it's whoever survived from the wreck, and a dozen random locals on the other side. Or, you know, something to that effect. I want to see the NPC armies more.

I want to have a deployment option upon landing. It's not like they're glued to the floor until they get there.

After rereading it, I'm all for power and skill rolls, it worked great for FTL, and that remains my jam to this day.

I just know I'll always remember my first run to get Wolf armor. I could only afford 3 suits, and it was an Outpost raid. I read the description "it can take a 50 cal at point blank." That first guy died to two pellets from a shotgun at the other end of a hallway. I like to think they then kinda did the MGSV thing with Snidely.

I really liked the Phobia system X2 put in, rather than perma loss on bravery. Armor wise, I should clarify that in XDiv, it's usually like the case mentioned above. Some units have high DPS weapons that will initially be stopped by armor, while others can kill outright. Like in Phase 3 right now, here are a couple missions: Mission 1, first intriduction to the next phase. My top 3 guys step out with miniguns and Predator suits. They are immediately ambushed. my top guy goes down (Blood Cannon, a chemical AoE gun), while the others and their rookie trainees get into positions around the dropship, hoping to drop some Shock Rockets on whatever just sniped him. One unit takes KO damage from an electric gun, and goes unconscious (Predator doesn't handle electric damage well, neither do shields). The others take some plink damage from wave and ballistic rifles coming from the background infantry. The Blood cannon takes out 2 more, while the tank drives up to shield the others from everything else. We eventually get almost everyone back to the drop ship, but still, the A-Team of 10 in the best gear we had and a tank (for 11) still got shredded by a team of what turned out to be 6 or so. Since armor degradation goes both ways, the team was pinned down and suppressed by the Rifles, damaged by the big guns, and pressured by the other small arms and melee units, who were there doing scratch damage and blocking paths, but progress was still difficult, because their armor had to be worn down, which took a lot of our firepower, limiting turns to only being able to stop 1 or 2 units, while needing to focus on locking down the rest. Ultimately, whether more or less units (depending on the mission), there's a lot more "Let's stop and have a think here" time. https://youtu.be/aK5__O3QaZI?t=493 The Previous mission was against a carrier. 11 Vs around 60 Ceseans. In XDiv, they come with 600 HP foward shields, 1 handed weapons, and still pretty decent armor. Immediately, we drop out of the shrike, and start getting pounded by fire from out of sight range, as one would expect from end game. The shield guys run out, and while I know they will be able to take a couple shots, they won't last for long, even with shields of their own. What results is this crazy thing where these shield guys are running cover to cover, throwing out smoke, while rookies fire stun rockets in the vague direction of incoming fire, and the gunners all file behind the tank to push into the wall of huge beams coming their way. Ceseans start taking 2-3 rockets each, which are used primarily to get past their shields, allowing us to use them. It was this insane thing of constant attack and defense from all sides, showcasing so many mechanics I've loved about this game since vanilla. https://youtu.be/eHWeVNbRzpA?t=12168 It creates this sort of evolving feeling, since your units are mostly dying like normal in Phase 1, then have specialized armor against only certain things by 2, followed by almost matching their armor in 3, but then effectively seeing that armor stripped very quickly by 4, since cannons start tearing off halves of buildings, machineguns are throwing around cars, etc. It matches the scaling that X1 did, but makes it more believable given peoples' adaptive capabilities, and what an ultra powerful, if kinda lazy super invasion came by for a visit. While at first glance, this may seem like it invalidates certain weapon options, I genuinely have changed between almost all classes for different situations almost constantly. Even rifles, which some have stated as being underwhelming, have saved this campaign on several occasions. TLDR: When there's explosions everywhere, it's natural that people would have a way to survive them. Easiest case scenario, can we at least get a boom reducing armor?

I liked the ending personally. Tried the stun thing on round 2, and sure enough, the Mega Praetor just kinda went poof. It would be hilarious to have a variant of the PS1 game win cinematic, except with them waving around Praetor arms or something as a joke ending. It might be a fun idea to add in a thing where if you survive a certain amount of rounds, and have the planes available, the ground crew could somehow say something like "with the Praetor gone, the ship has stopped moving", which could then be followed up in a few rounds with "We are firing the [yada yada science gun]", which could then result in a hold getting blown out, which could then be docked by the landing ship in order to escape. Dunno how possible that is, but sounds pretty cool in by head brain thing.

@Charon That sounds friggin awesome, not gonna lie! Also, I'd love to discuss more on the recent version, but I can't play it yet, the Xsolla branch is still on 1.67, so no clue what the new stuff is like. Personally, I wonder if a near perfected mini version of the above is the system FTL used. Just points distributed around different systems that allowed for different things to be powered. Like a Burst 3 and Glaive beam might one-shot the last boss, but no one in their right mind is going to risk a build that can get ruined by a single shot on the engines. (Brief primer: Every room type could have 3-8 Maximum bars in it, getting hit took 1 away until it could be repaired, EMP temporarily disabled them, and each piece of equipment took a different amount of power to use. So the above example used 2 weapons that took 4 power each, but with a max of 8, would lose half their firepower from a single shot that got past their shields). I think X1 was a dang close approximation of it, with a lot less RNG and detail.

It depends on how the game plays down the line. If there's tons of teams like Long War or XDiv, it would be amazing. If it's like what we've seen so far, Xeno 1, etc, rotating teams wouldn't be necessary, so you could know your individual agents.

Has anyone gotten their steam code to try the new version? I had called Xsolla, but never heard back or seen a code( only had gog option, never pressed it).

Also, might be an outlier here, but I hope the thing gets those edged tail bits. something about clunky, boxy planes trying to be agile just always did it for me. Hell, I should ask Charon how I can remodel the X-Div Marauders with this sexy thing:

This may be kind of out there, but have you considered an option for those times when something crashes right by your base? Like when I saw a UFO land the next county over one time, I kept thinking "Why can't we just send a couple trucks or something?" XCOM Files experimented with cars and trucks as dropships, and I've generally heard only positive stuff about that (They seemingly just moved super slow, with it being assumed they took barges across water).

I love the VTOL, but would assume a heli would be more durable, personally. In X1, I didn't trust the Charlie whatsoever, but adored the detail that it was built to get shot while landing as to it's limits.

YESSSSS! I can't wait to try this!

Directional tracking might be in there, since tanks use it, no idea on Xeno2 though. So far, XDiv has nailed the armor feeling in my book. It doesn't degrade by much from most shots, meaning you need things like miniguns, shotguns or cannons to really "shred" armor. Rarely if ever does armor integrity fall apart without making sense, and most of the time it bounces off the damage it should (Only Ballistic/Laser go down, fire and chemical resistance is always the same).

True, but they tend to handle fire at least somewhat OK. I know this is largely from attempting a lot of Ironman/Insane runs, but I always wound up just using Hunters more than the other tanks, because of being comparatively easy to replace. Seeing a scimitar get taken out by one guy with a rifle beyond sight range always kinda bummed me out. In XDiv, I've regularly been using them as proper cover, using teams of shield units to guard their sides, while they laughed at frontal damage a good bit of the time. Having armor options for tanks felt great too, you had your modest armor/hp scouts and truck units (Hunter/Seeker), high armor, ok hp, but MG only heavy tanks(Scimitar), and the more generalized armor, but cannon useable medium tanks (Siege). So if it's against Ceseans, a suppression tank like the Scimmy will do the job, while having a rocket spammer on Terror Missions or open maps can work as an amazing "oh crap" button. The Siege I've only recently gotten, and a little late at that, but it's like a tank that can either destroy cover or be a semi reliable sniper while serving as a meat shield. Feels great to have options. (I haven't even gotten to the mechs and such yet)

That's what I mean. By phase 3 (of 4), your Wolf units can usually take ballistic small arms well, lasers decently, but Sebillians use a mix of Ballistic AND Fire, meaning one just goes straight to hp, you can only rely on it with scouting info. Ceseans bring laser, stun, and electric while carrying shields, which can easily KO your guys if they get close. Androns run a mix of everything generally, and take a LOT of punishment except for EMP damage. This pairs with some enemies having multiple armor layers, such as the Fan-Named Onion Chrysallid (The Roboreaper Class). Point being, it's more about being able to adjust your defenses appropriately to make moves, while still keeping that scary feeling of shots from anywhere. It makes organization and coordination a bigger focus ultimately.

From a design perspective, what do you think of the way XDiv implemented armor? Namely taking the existing mechanics turning everyone into a low key Andron, with a mix of initially high resistance to a couple of things, which then gets shaved off with 1/3 of all incoming damage? For that matter, they gave close quarters weapons a chance to hit enemy TUs, which also worked remarkably well, but that's it's own thing. Point being, let's say you have a team in Wolf, which had variants per tier in that one. They go in with really good kinetic resistance (as per the description), to the point where easily 5-10 ballistic shots (On New Game +) will usually just bounce off or plink. They can take 2-3 low powered lasers, but would still take full damage from fire, electric and acid. This lent to a really cool feeling of your units getting super raggedy with those shots that god through, which, in my opinion, increased tension dramatically when you have to trust their armor to do it's job, rather than hope they can survive the plink. It becomes this other hidden resource, but unlike shields, you don't know how much is left, you don't know what damage they rolled, and they easily could die as easily to the next rifle shot as they would survive several more hits. Additionally, the higher armor all around meant that tanks could sit in the open, or provide mobile cover. It was this awesome feeling when you'd have 2 power armor guys walking and taking autocannon and minigun shots out from behind a tank, while stun rocket guys in the back finished off the ones they suppressed. I feel like the universally heavier armor lent a lot to your units feeling like they were supporting each other morale-wise, and this was bolstered a lot by the morale mechanics I've posted about before. The mod may not be perfect, or for everyone, but man, oh man does it have some fantastic mechanical ideas that feel great.

Give it a minute, they tend to be around later in the day, pretty sure no one's aware of it yet over there.

So when it comes to Shields, it always made me wonder how they just degraded to nothing, surely some things would just bounce off harmlessly, right? So it got me wondering, why not have Shields just grant near immunity to certain damages, instead of being a health bar? Or, why not let them break if overwhelmed, but regain some lost durability to half or so next round? This is another "here's how XDiv did it" moment, but Shields feel so much more believable when they can actually take a few hits. A couple versions: X-Div had variants with 150-270-450 go for different phases, with different sizes, the heaviest of which could fit in the back pack, but prevented the unit from doing much of anything aside from blocking or using smoke. Super handy for holding positions and being portable cover, at the cost of next to no damage out of them. Armored Core had a few versions, but 5th gen had the best Shields, with each type having durability, but providing near complete immunity to a certain damage type from the front. Even with relatively light weight, and the option to use several Shields at once, the lack of offense generally still relegated them to tank or scout roles online, but they felt awesome. XCOM WOTC had a Shields mod that essentially gave someone a small amount of ablative health every round, up to a Max of 5 or so, but also gave them situational cover. Good for newcom, but a small shield Regen pool can work. There's a couple of really good Tactics Ogre mods that accidentally came to the same ideas years apart. Namely smaller Shields that improved Dodge chances, but didn't boost defenses (damage threshold in that case), and gave a chance to avoid melee damage, and large Shields, which improved damage resistance, and had a chance to negate ranged damage. Both felt fantastic in the chaos that is TO. Please consider adding more depth to Shields, they are often underloved, and one of the identifying things about xeno in my book.

Gotta have cheerleaders. In this case it might just be a Sebillian in a bra, but close enough.