FloridaBoy

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.