FloridaBoy

I thought it was cool too. It suffered from not having a tutorial, overpowered missles and not being able to practice without risking interceptors. It was too high risk for a reflex based mini-game. I’d often try tough take-downs, but a single mistake would mean waves of UFOs causing havoc....

Yeah, I have a lot of memories from Xeno1 of my squaddies getting mowed down from behind by a machine gunner’s reaction fire. Seemed like they were really good at spraying their own squad, and rarely hit they Xeno that would trigger the fire....

They could be hunting rebel Praetors hiding on Earth or the remnants of a previously defeated advanced alien species. They might not be certain that their targets are on Earth so they start by sending small search parties. The Xenonauts and the rest of humanity are just pawns caught in the middle. The aliens hiding on Earth could feed the Xenonauts tech secrets, hoping that by the time the serious fleet shows up humanity is strong enough to fight back. That might also explain the staggering development of tech on par with the aliens.

Binomial scientific names would be an easy way to add a touch of realism.

The list of mission types that are going to be in X2 sounds great, especially the DEFCON missions. Here some other style missions that might be fun to consider: Running the Gauntlet: Your squaddies would basically have to cross a map heavily populated with aliens to an extraction zone. I was thinking that certain landed ufos could be a trap for Xenonauts, and instead of focusing on elimination of the enemy, the goal is to reach safety. Maybe as they approach the crash site enemy reinforcements are sighted and the squaddies are ordered to abort the mission? Show of Force: This came to mind thinking about the alien pyramids from terror from the deep, and the book starship troopers. With power armor, explosives, jump packs, aliens and destructible terrain, how about late game missions like the opening of starship troopers? Send in the squaddies to target either alien infrastructure or sympathizers with the goal of LEVELING everything. Not the tight corridor fights of the base assaults, but open surface maps. Show the aliens or their allies that the Xenonauts are a force to be reckoned with. Survive and evade: If/when your transport gets shot down, instead of autoresolve there could be a mission where the surviving injuries squad has to reach a safe extraction point. Seems reasonable the aliens might send a squad to mop up survivors of a targeted attack, especially if they are looking for intelligence on the Xenonauts activity. Search and Rescue: If/when your interceptors get shot down the Xenonauts could also have to secure crash sites for their interceptors that are destroyed. Again the aliens could be trying to gather their own intelligence about the Xenonauts and have an interest securing the site. These could be similar to a base defense mission where you deploy in a defensive position, prevent the interceptor from being attacked. Failure could make replacement of the plane take longer, there could also be a few scientists and engineers on site to help with the recovery and they could be killed. Other ideas?

Another approach would be to ignore training mechanics and to just have the starting stats of the recruit pool increase as the game goes on. Maybe bump recruit stats by 2-3 points per month? Maybe with a cap at 70? That would make sense logically as national armies would have troops gaining experience fighting the invasion and there should be a better pool of recruits to join the ‘nauts.

I’m kind of on the fence on training ... but if the autoresolve feature for ground combat is included, there should also be a way for troops to gain experience outside of the tactical missions. I went through a X1 game on insane difficulty only doing ground missions to collect tech and alenium, completing battleships and an alien fortress no problem, only to get totally smoked in the endgame mission, because my squaddies stats weren’t nearly good enough. They need to be fast and accurate in that mission, you can’t afford extended fire fights. I was dominating the strategic layer, and a full aresenal of top tier weapons and armor, but realized that I would need to load my save and get my troops additional ranks before I’d have a decent chance. After doing a couple of ground missions just to grind out experience, I lost interest.

How about giving them access to beta testing AND letting them create pick a soldier name/nationality for the random soldiers in game? Something like that might be fun.

My biggest requests are: 1. More mission variety both in terms of terrain and objectives. 2. More variety in equipment and weapon tech that change play-styles using existing mechanics - For example predator armor totally changes the tactical game by maxing out str. Let’s get tech that increases tus, acc, ref, vision, brv etc. More weapons that only cause panic, suppression, fire, smoke and stun. Area effects that are linear or cone shaped. 3. Tech tree branches that are randomized/close during a play through. Not being able to follow the same research path or research everything each game - forcing players to adapt at least a little to the circumstances each play through. 4. More story elements - tactical, strategic or text based events. 5. If you keep a way to autoresolve crash sites (which I like) you should have a way to get better trained recruits late game... I’ve lost some squaddies late game in veteran Ironman, it is a total pain to grind rookies through the ranks for the endgame and at some point completing ground missions is otherwise pointless. 6. More explosions.

It would be an interesting feature to add, but honestly I’m not sure it would change my overall enjoyment of the game.

This is a great idea. Maybe in addition to the aliens there should be a bunch of husks everywhere in terror missions that you have to burn, with the idea that if you don’t burn them they become a alien/human hybrid capable of infecting other humans or infiltrating human society or just badass alien grunts. Could be Reapers or it could be reprogrammed humans.

How about something as simple as adding lots of destroyed buildings, corpses, smoke and fire, stun gas clouds, ominous music and lighting, more gruesome civilian death animations, timed explosive devices scattered around the maps maybe planted on corpses?

I agree with more tense/erie music, but otherwise I liked the theme a lot. I don’t think the normal missions really need a darker/more gruesome tone, after all the Xenonauts are the ones that are in control of the crash site missions. Plus, while I understand where you are coming from, it was way grittier then X-com and XCom and it is about fighting space aliens with laser guns. I actually get tired of all the super dark atmosphere in a lot of recent games. But on the other hand it might be great way to make terror missions/special mission more thematic. They are not very common, and should be dark, gruesome, and tense. That would also reflect the game play, where it is not uncommon to finish a crash site without a causality, but I often lose squad dies in terror missions.

I’ve been replaying Xenonauts over the last few weekends...it’s been getting me thinking. You could also have missions against humans factions, the third XCom had a lot of those. Extract an friendly intelligence agent or defector, eliminate an alien sympathizer, find evidence of an alien sympathizer influencing/manipulating their nation. The existing mechanics for post mission scoring could even be used. Xenonauts wouldn’t want to use lethal force against humans, so the missions would rely on avoiding enemies and using stun weapons. These missions could give you relation bonuses. Botching them could make things worse. ”USA promises full support to the war effort against the alien invaders after prominent senator was exposed working with the invaders to overthrow the government” “Rogue paramilitary organization makes botched kidnapping attempt on Soviet officials. Kremlin promises they will be held accountable!”

How about having some unique secondary objectives for some of the terror sites that yield unique bonuses. For example there is a terror attack on the town of Hawkins, and you need to find and secure a single scientist (civilian) or an experimental aircraft or vehicle or object from the near by research facility. You could have a one part mission where the objective is on the battlefield hidden somewhere or a two-part mission where the first section is a normal terror mission and the second is entering the research facility behind the aliens. The aliens would be trying to overwhelm the conventional forces guarding the objective and destroy it before the xenonauts can stop them. Secure the objective and you get a powerful one-off experimental reward that can’t be replicated. You can only ever have one and you can only get it by accomplishing the terror site. Maybe an aircraft, armor, weapon, super soldier of some kind (psionic or a fearless robot or just real good stats), an alien that has been turned etc. Even if you had five or ten different objectives/rewards and randomly encountered two or three in a typical game it could add a lot.