EurekaSeven

It's technically more of a discussion than suggestions to the devs, as this is still a revolving thought myself. As the lore itself is about aliens and their intervention with human technology and politics, it would be reasonable to assume that in this timeline alien/cleaners also tweaked with human space technologies, though it's not covered in lore much and frankly I'm not really sure about how to integrate such lore ingame either, as we're fighting mostly within the atmosphere. As the alien presence was kept secret by the Cleaners for decades I'll assume that the major tipping point of Cold War history would be the assasination of Gorbachev in '89-91-ish as shown at the beginning, by that time most of the crazy Cold War Space Projects (Star Wars, Soviet Crewed Lunar Missions, weaponized satellites.etc) were already closed, Though some other projects may still having questionable future, like the Space Shuttles from both sides, specifically the Soviet ones, and also the ISS, or even proposed Space Planes (or even SpaceX but it's too early for 2009). How may Cleaners and Aliens change the history of Space development? Did they deliberately sabotage the Space Missions, lingering the human Space development slower than what we did in OTL 2009? Or did space technologies being more advanced than real life, as the reality of increasing aggression forced both US and Soviet engaging a more advanced (i.e. Moon Settlement & Mars Exploration like in For All Mankind) and aggressive (Weaponized satellites and Shuttles) Second Space Race since the late 80s? How would space technologies affect the alien lores? Would the astronauts/cosmonauts in ISS (or Moon?) becoming the first witnesses or even victims of alien/Cleaner incursion, warning Earth about first contact before the game starts? Would the results of years of space research attributes to the development of Xenonauts technology? How would the continuation of Cold War help the Space development for secondary countries, like China, EU, Japan, India, UK... on their technologies? Currently I'm just having some fragmented thoughts, but.I guess It'll be interesting if the lore talks about how space technologies would be affected in such setting.

It's always worth thinking about adding 3x3 to local forces, even though Xenonauts themselves cannot equip them (hard to balance), having local military and aliens of their own vehicles and battling against each other would be a lore friendly touch and make local forces more useful

Fixing what? If you hate the setting of USSR still exist in this game and want to relate it to Russia in real life, since you didn't quit the forum outright i would suggest you do a playthrough and let the Xeno ravage/conquer the USSR, to “fix” things in this universe. There's nothing to “fix” in an alternative history setting.

You think i dont have friends who fight in Ukraine against Russians? They're not dying to defend a country INGAME and have nothing related to real life politics, hell the game even set in 2009 for no reason, a 2009 USSR have nothing to do with a war currently going on and should not be, and I'm sure you have better ways to honor your friends, like taking legal actions against governments that still use the spelling in real life than doing this to a indiegame, which USSR still exists

I still can't understand this post, because the whole thread seems magically forgot and ignore the fact that USSR still exist in the game lore. And also the fact that real life politics is not something should be brought up routinely to a game, especially when we have an independent Taipei ingame and a 50/50 of male and female soldier spawns, which are bigger political issues than an USSR-era spelling if someone ever brought this up to the devs.

Sounds like the AWACS mod in X1 which basically is a moving Radar and vulnerable to alien fire. It's feasible but I'm not sure if it's the priority of the devs I also remember in X1 there was a mod that introduced drones called Lamplighter or something but i can't remember its function.

Rather than changing numbers of aliens, changing the crew composition would be a nice touch. Alien would tend.to add.more reapers as crew if the players tend to value civilians, or increase number of robots if players prefer non-lethal/laser weaponry. Also more cleaners can be deployed to crashsite or have an reinforcement mechanism like Phantom Doctrine, stimulating situation that cleaners are more willing to take back the crashsite from xenonauts with all costs

DISCLAIMER: This post would be only used for fan-lore discussions, It's not asking the devs to take those discussions and suggestions seriously! Hope the game comes out as the way it is! ------ One of the contexts that Xenonauts 1 intrigues me would always be the alternative Cold War settings, which put the game lore more serious and closer to a real-life geopolitic and military background (especially the modification of real Cold War jets to shoot down aliens), comparing the previous genres. I've read the Crimson Dagger as well. Though the depiction of the Soviets was kind of meh but still an interesting story and setting. And as we all know the X2 lore took place in another Alternative History timeline aka Cold War continues in the 2020s. For the Earth in X2 though, fewer lores were focusing on the Cold War setting itself. Despite a "not-Cuba" version of the Iceland Incident and the "Berlin Wall still stands" opening, It's hard to deduce from the lore about how the world came into such stage that Soviet and Warsaw Pact still survived, and how the world would go through if Alien invasion happens in this setting. The only clue we have about how this world was changed from Our Time Line (OTL) was the more peaceful version of the Iceland Incident, that the US and USSR agreed to form a neutral research organisation for the alien wrekage (the predessesor of Xenonauts), but it also mentioned that the organisation found nothing interesting for decades until the 21st century, so it's safe to assume that most of the history of this world was just as same as the OTL and Iceland Incident have little to put into it, except for some reason Soviet survived until 2020. I'm actually working on my own mind-lore about how this Alternative Timeline would be before the game event, about how the combat contingent of Xenonauts (fighter squadrons and commandos) were developed through the cooperation between different countries, though it's still in an early stage and also it's more focused on the Eastern Bloc and Asian Pacific nations (specifically China and Japan) so I won't explain further by now, but I do think there're some interesting questions for discussions here: - How did Cold War in X2 universe developed after the Iceland Incident, that the whole Eastern Bloc had avoided the catastrophical 1989-1992 collapse and managed to remain the status quo till 2020? - How did the events that led to the survival of Soviet had butterfly effect on geopolitics on other countries, Western or not? -- (For example, Would China stand closer to NATO because of the incresing threat and cooperate with American industries? Would Japan avoid the economic crisis in the 80-90s and maintained her economic bubbles until 2020s? Would US avoid the 9/11 and Afghan, and took focus on Europe, as Soviet in this universe may pulled out or won the Afghan War? Would European Communities still form the EU as in OTL but without Eastern countries? Would Latin American countries continue their junta regimes facing an everlasting Soviet/Cuba threat? Would African become a third frontier between US and Soviet, that Cuba and South Africa continue to fight over Angola? Would countries like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya and Syria keep unified, as the Soviets may took effort to protect them from a civil war? ... ) - How would the event in this universe affect the technologies? Would US-USSR Space Competition ensues, with even more players like China, Japan, EU and not-SpaceX? Were space probes and even astronauts become the first victims of the invasion long before the game event? Would abandoned military projects during and after Cold War managed to continue and made it into production? Would OGAS be developed, making Soviet and its allies having a completely different Internet systems to the West? - How would the alien threat and the presence of the Cleaners affect the general culture of human being? Would there be a surge of more UFO-related cult and conspiracists like the Heaven's Gate, due to the increase of UFO sightings from 80s to 10s? How would society and conspiracists contribute to the mindset of people involved in the forming of Xenonauts? Would intelligence agencies infiltrated by the Cleaners acted differently and obstruct the political cooperation between nations to identify the threat? How would real life UFO encounters, notably the USS Roosevelt Encounter, or real life events like the Chelyabinsk Meteorite and the failure of Space Shuttles, unfolded in the X2 universe that hostile UFOs do exist? - ... The setting of the 2020 Cold War in X2 lore is really interesting for me to explore, it's also interesting to imagine that whether the 21st century in this timeline would seems a better or worse one than our current world, not only for the US and UK, but for many other countries. I also took inspiration from other alternative history Cold War settings like For All Mankind, which also presents a Cold War continues alternative timeline. Feel free to share your ideas here (or not), It would be existing for people to dig into the lore of the universe of X2

I always thought Chief Scientist has some Japanese blood from his c@cky looks Speaking of which, though characters are surely not the main focus of the game, I do wonder what's Op Director's role in campaign despite blabbering with Chief Scientist. You can pay a visit to Chief Scientist every time you want to research something, though Op Director on the other hand is hard to find in-game despite being an advisor for tutorials I guess? Also I do think it's not nessesary to have a fixed character art for the Commander aka the Player, a black silhouette would be enough, as characters like this often remains that way

Thank you for all your hard work! I'm also willing to help with cn localization if wanted

I'm not familiar with Steam Community though but I can see that through these years you're becoming more and more extreme towards critiques and that would be a really bad signal for the game community. The game had been delayed for multiple times and it's understandable that most people not from this forum being upset about it. We don't need the game forum becoming toxic based on personal vendetta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm It's really interesting because the cut setting of the ATLAS Base might be a pure coincidence (the percise location is different), but they really shares some similarities, a rare example of how a game lore actually touches a real life Cold War project that people had never knew. They even have a VR Podcast for the Underground Camp.

Bit of late, but That really helps a lot with my own research on Warsaw Pact elite forces that can be mentioned in Xenonauts Universe. Thanks! Though I'm little bit curious, as you've listed a lots of less known conflicts that a PACT personel might involved into, but you never mentioned the Operation Danube aka Prague Spring in '68. It was one of the biggest depolyment involving almost all of the Warsaw Pact countries and also includes special opeartions and sabotage (e.g. Spetznaz caputure of Ruzyne Airport), so I'm guessing it could be one of the most common combat experience for a PACT soldier during the period. I'll say REFORGER might also be an available experience for US soldiers as it includes exercises dealing with a possible Soviet invasion against Germany.

I remember that in 2019 or earlier when ppl talk about the Air Combat System, someone had brought up an old (maybe 90s?) Strategy game that involves commanding real life USAF fighter jet squadrons to intercept UFOs. I remember that either the UI or the mechanism of the game was quite similar to military command stimulators like CMANO, or at least someone said it was realistic on a strategy level. Now that I'm really interested for playing such game but I just can't quite remember its name, and whenever i googled the results are mostly X-COM or Xenonauts, and i did tried to find the post talking abiut this with no success (maybe the post was in the older X2 feature threads that are cleared later). Did anyone else remember such game, or maybe i saw it on other sites but had confused memories?

I'll guess it will be difficult to complete a "tutorial campaign" by the devs with fewer resource and time. Such mode need to at least include a way to "insert" dialogs, fixed scripts, a number of markers.etc to a ground combat mission (and maybe air combat), if the devs have such resource to do so they will reveal it right away as such ability can also be used to create more dynamic "main story" missions and especially the final one to make it more immersive lore wise, and also demonstrate deeper aspects of those NPC characters by utilizing dialogs (like XCOM2 and Chimera Squad that have dialogs popped out occationally). But it would an interesting idea to make such tutorial missions, maybe setting as the prologue of the main event, or even something related to the Iceland Incident.

The world currently is fuckup sure but do not make this thread into political statements. For the discussion, It would be good to have weapons from different countries (especially European), but I wonder what difference would they have in game except the look. Also consider that the vanilla ballistic earth weapon would be phased out quickly after new types of weapons being researched midgame and you won't pick them up again, so it do not worth the time for much development.

Yeah the no peeking is bad, it costs extra TU for stepping out-shooting-stepping in, and you have to step out in order to get a good sight. Also, it's kinda annoying that shooting enemies around corner is often a one shot thing, if you can't wack the alien in one shot and have to crawl back to cover, next turn the alien will happily walk around the corner and kill the operator in zero range, while the soldier has no TU to react to this as the TU are wasted for just stepping out and stepping in.

I would say such cartoonish style is the successor of X1 art style (it's realistic enough for me, keep in mind that we're dealing with aliens and this is the most authentic art style we have comparing to range of games with similar plot). Also, it might be too late for the devs to change such art style while we're going for EA for less than a month. I would reckon your "realistic" style refers to a more blurry filter instead of the model itself. Otherwise, there is a similar game called RAM Pressure that have some realistic design like authentic gear or something, but it looks too Edgy becuase of its poor VA, cursed choice of soundtracks and lack a darker filter like this one.

I will also suggest something opposite, that the panic multipliers can be reduced gradually after the commander throughly researched such "fearsome" alien (aka Autopsy & Interrogation), this would first make sence as the soldier would get more confident for certain alien (especially reapers) if they know its weakpoint and understandings, and secondly, this might make the Alien research options more useful comparing to just increasing damage against certain type of an Enemy. I would also suggest additional panic/stress factors including Being suppressed, especially under heavy fire (like not only being sprayed by a drone, but being shot by Both a drone and an Andrean) Being shot at from the war fog (making long ranged enemies and night missions more challenging) Crossing through hazardous environments e.g. fire and toxic smoke, without protection gear of course. Being flanked, this was a factor from the XCOM series if I remember right. Additional stress if the top-level officers are killed first Soldiers may also reduce panic if an alien was killed by explosives or rockets, blowing your enemy into pieces is always a "YEEE GET SOME" moment for military inviduals-- at least that was my impression.

Then I would say it's a part of the Strategy gamplay, as these gamers would take extra balancing on their input and output for extra infrastructures (the upkeep of 20+ soldiers each month would be fancy), and as you said, people can run teams of 4-6 to bypass this problem, but on the other hand, it make the ground missions more challenging as well as you have less personel each time and have to rely more on tactics. So how players reacts to the stress system would make the gameplay more variable, you either put less effort on ground missions and airstrikes them, or you need to build more base/infrastructure and scratch your head for balancing a huge number of upkeeps. There're no one exclusive type of players for X2 and everyone should have the right to take their own solutions for the stress issue, it's encouraged.

I'm well aware of the feature and lore settings of both X1 and X2 so no lesson needed. However, the electronics things is something i did forgot. I would say if you keep the fry electronic things as an explanation for throwing flares, that's plausible, but it needs to be hinted in the related lore pages (like "Flares" or tutorials for night missions). Also, I'm still thinking that night mission scenarios worth the risk if all the odds are against human, but with little profit and gameplay additions to make it both fun and challenging.

I know about the NV upgrade long time ago, I'm just saying that from a authentic prespective and considering what irl military do with NVGs, it seems a little bit out of place if an elite unit set in 2020 don't have a mandatory NVG in the first place and have to reverse the technology of aliens into advanced armour to do so, and even the MARS should be upgraded for NV capabilities instead of pre-intall a fancy thermal sight. It would be more plausible if the game was set in 1979 which NV technology were still primitive. Also, if I remember right, the Warden Night vision helmet is a once-grab feature, you don't have any sorts of NV capability before, and suddenly got a perfect NV ability with no retrctions after. While i was saying about imposing restrictions onto early-game NVGs (or aka real-life counterparts), I'm saying that the NV technology in game can be presented with a more progressive way. You first have no budget or support so you cannot afford NVG and have to rely on flares and searchlights, then you acquire normal military grade NVGs with restricted angles and range, afterwards you would get some advanced goggles with thermals and longer range, but still with much restrcitons (like really heavy), and finally the Warden Helmet give you the perfect solution with unrestricted range and angles. That would make the night missions more tricky as from early to middle game, your soldier with current human technology although can overcome darkness, but the aliens can still outrun them (in the lore the Seballians are borned with night vision and thermal abilities), so the odds are still against the human. Such advantage from aliens can only be overcome after you get more advanced Warden armour.

I understand the aim to recreate the flare feature, but there can still be space to introduce a restricted NVG for authentic purpose as well. At least, even for modern binocular NVGs, the tunnel of sight (or whatever it is called) is still too narrow, the operator have to scan the surroundings routinely as their sight angle is restricted than naked eye. Some one would purpose the fancy DEVGRU GPNV-18 NVGs as it has bigger angle, but it's not only expensive, but heavy, it would be painful to swing your head around with this thing on the helmet. Also, both NVG and infrared are electronics, which also means they can be disrupted or jammed. Same restrictions can be imposed on present time infrared goggles. So well, before the Xenonauts can play with the night vision helmets, the present time technology is not perfect in night missions. It would be both authentic and logical if such feature is introduced. I'm also wondering, a dark missionmay be extra authentic if it has the greeny filter

I would agree that it shouldn't be much input for additional AI friendlies, and it is hard to manage. Air Combat though did have concept of AI fighters to join the assault, and it was featured in early builds, not sure whether the feature is kept for now. I would say if to increase military/police presence for rather authentic aim (or not), the best circumstances to add them physically would be in a scripted mission: like Alienkiller said, VIP under attack with bodyguards, or as you (Kokon) suggested, a circumstance that military is already presence in engagement and needs help. I would also imagine a reversed case, that the Xenonauts being ambushed after arriving at some faked landing sites (or their urban safehouse/bases being leaked to pro-alien groups), and the military becomes the cavalry that help to penetrate the surrounding enemies from other side of the map and relieve the siege (or simply air strike them). However, the missions in Xenonaut can be hardly scripted so it requires more development time with little outcome. It could also become a temporary substitute for fallen xenonauts on the battlefield, similar to the droids in Chimera Squad. If a xenonaut is fallen, military PJs would arrive to take their body back(or try to revive him back to base), and also give you a friendly soldier with just average gear to fill up the fallen one. Otherwise, i would prefer the military involvement in an ambiental way, like adding ambient sounds to indicate player that there are additional fightings and air search in the background, or mention them in lore more often. It would be interesting if there are events that xenonauts and local military have different interest, and would have scuffle in a political way (in addition of the already teasered special missions). I really like the espionage event chain in X1 that someone in the xenonauts was cooperating with foreign militaries to smuggle Xeno-techs, it would be interesting if the greed towards advanced technology, or the need for national interest (i.e. arrogant President Trump want to take control of Xenonauts to deal with Soviet/China), would lead the local military to negatively affect xenonauts in a boarder picture (stolen items, blocking airspace, bomb the crash site before xenonauts can reach.etc)

Wut, We don't have EA for X2 yet, and people are already suggesting X3?