Xeroxth

Nice update. Hopefully the execution of the night vision and new ufo designs get implemented in the next update. On the M.A.R.S being taken further, @John Knee suggestions sounds very good and I can see it having more types of turrets, equipments and even chassis. For instance, rather than having a turret, especially in the late game where larger 4-tile-vehicles get used, the M.A.R.S can get an additional compartment to carry ammunitions, medic kits for your troops or energy shields. Or maybe a for-legged chassis similar to the Boston Dynamics robots that allow it to enter buildings and go on stairs, equipped with flamethrower or an industrial shotgun made specifically for breaching (or annihilating) any aliens that hide behind covers. This can allow for more play styles where most of your squad can be replaced with 4 M.A.R.Ss and one soldier with the benefit of huge firepower but in exchange with no ability to gain stats and extremely expensive to rebuild when killed.

I can very much relate to this. Especially during my one playthrough where I decided to have everyone using only shotguns and grenades. My god it’s so satisfying to collapse an entire building with plasma grenades then moving in and giving any survivors a solid mag slug to the head. The flying enemies can be a bit annoying but due to their wandering AIs, you can just wait until they land somewhere reachable and kill them with one shot.

@ApolloZani This type of caste system really reminds me of the Tau from Warhammer 40k. Most subject species are heavily augmented to be reliant on one another to exist in the alien empire. Any race too rebellious to join in the process of assimilation will just be bombed out of existence by the UOO. Because of this the empire might be stretched very thinly with only a few dozen planetary managerial Praetors for each planet and the aliens that we already know of are just from the local galactic sector closest to our solar system to respond. This will later handily justifies having more types of alien as the Xenonauts get more headway as they’ll mobilize more developed parts of the empire to the war. The invasion in the eyes of Earth in the eyes of the empire is like the East India Company trying to invade India or the French Foreign Legionnaires invading Indochina but getting too much resistance.

I’m certainly the odd one out here where most of my playthroughs have only one squad of soldiers and 2 vehicles. Maybe it’s just me getting too lucky with loosing my personnel so every time some of my soldiers die it’s always a huge blow for me. I think it can be made better by giving your soldiers more personality that involves in a game like starting and gaining traits similar to Darkest Dungeon do it with Virtues and Afflictions. Maybe rather than just something like stress causing it, Battle Scars may comes from huge mortal wounds that brought your soldiers close to death or seeing a bunch of his squad mates killed. While Expertise on the other hand can come from incredible feats that your soldiers accomplished like Demolisher for killing more than 3 aliens with explosives or Arsonist for killing an enemy by burning a building down. Combined it with starting traits and nationalities for special soldiers you can recruit will make it extremely dramatic for loosing a single soldier and by the end your team will comprised of tough, experienced veterans ready for any challenges.

Most of my points specifically cannot be used in any kind of lane based gameplay. Because as much as many supporters of turn-based air game tried to spice it up, many suggestions is stuck as the lanes had the same weakness as XCOM's awful air game. That is it doesn't allow strafing, multi-directional attacks, distraction or any kind of maneuvers that don't involve tailing a UFO endlessly. For instance, the teleportation module: If on a lane the best it can do is skip a lane or dodge a beam attack which is boring. But on a 2D plane, it can allow your aircrafts to skip a certain distance instantly or change directions to evade (each extra module provide 25% less cooldown time and 10% teleporting distance) something that will help immensely with larger ships like carriers. Shields can also be directional rather than just a bubble making its exiting for attacking the enemy UFO from different angles rather than another bar of health for the lane air game. The same thing for equipments like anti-missile flares. None of those can be in anyway implemented that doesn't make the lane game look like a slower pace ripoff of Touhou. It's either you go all in for a computer version of X-Wing, or just scrap the turn-based game altogether. X-Division is pretty great on every front especially the expanded air game (the insertion of the Xenomorph and blob enemies aside) . But I do agree that an overhaul of the UI is very needed. Especially something to show each sections of a UFO could be great. This also mean the air game should have a closer zoom than the X1 system originally had. I really think you are overstating how much actual "dexterity" is needed for playing the original air game. How can it need dexterity when the pause button a present? Similar to how FTL outside of the RNG is not really dexterity based. The bigger problem is that it lacked the depth that can make it as good as FTL where there are many weapons and exilary stuff to manage when you have a pause button. Leaving you repeating the same "use one plane as bait, the rest to destroy the UFO" over and over to even the final boss mothership. A good compromise could be a slow motion button like how the Total War series does it. "Fiddly" is a really subjective way to put it, as it was mostly caused by the UI being too simple and a lack of fine control of the aircraft turning.

I would love to see the Xenonauts battling with human factions like the NATO and Soviet forces with only non lethal weapons so that you can still complete your objectives and favour without worsening the relations too much. While capturing any alien we fought, interogating them for information like running an alien version of American black sites. A separation between EMP weapons and poison gas/bullets at first then upgrading to more advanced neural shutdown guns could be really cool. Some different ammunitions that works by draining the enemy's TUs or constantly supressed them to the point that it forced them to drop their weapons and temporarily flee like the Dishonored 2 stinging bolts could be very effective as well. https://dishonored.fandom.com/wiki/Stinging_Bolts

I used to think that too when I first saw the kickstarter campaign. Then during the first few versions of the new air game, the implementation was not only slow, boring but to me somehow is even simpler than the real time air game of X1. Rather than the actual finessed controls with actual maneuvers like the ground combat, the thing is lane-based which only see planes chasing UFOs by the tail with extremely simplistic graphics that even the X1 air game can go well beyond with the X-Division mod. My point is that an actual working turn-based air game is entirely possible, but to just make it half way is not. It would have to be as complex as the tabletop X-Wing or Aeronautica Imperialis to be compelling, something that would not only take center stage over the main game of tactical ground combat but something Goldhawk doesn't have the enough resource and time to do. The reality of implementation has already disproven this point. The first implementation of lane turn-based air game is worse than X1 minigame in every single conceivable way, what makes anyone think that it will be better when the start was such a trainwreck is beyond me. On the comparison the Firaxis, I have to dissagree. The air game is actually slower and less exciting than the turn based system of X2, it's a glorified version of Mechanicus room choices or FTL dialogue decision making. The alien UFO doesn't fight back more than just continue flying in the same direction while you can't even control the movement of your interceptors. You just spam the same pattern of buttons again and again. This point I agree with wholeheartedly. Diversifying the equipment of the aircraft is key. This have to include much more movement, defensive and evasion options than just more weapons with more damage than the first game. As I suggested in the last few threads on this subject should follow the same variety of equipment as games like FTL that can be put on any aircraft to reconfigure them as needed. Different or more advance aircraft frames should have different number of euquiment slots so that you could see a progression of R&D of the Xenonauts as the war go on. The first aircrafts could be in two variety silimar to the condor and the MiG: Both having 5 equipment slots for the engine, weapons, armor, cockpit (condor having more weapon slots while the MiG having two engine slots). Later planes should have a total of 10 slots with more advanced weapons and exoteric equipment like teleporter, laser point defense, energy shields, cryoshell cockpit, EMP bursts, cloaking, boosters,...

I think we’re seeing the dynamic between a vocal minority and a silent majority here. Rather than making the efforts to complain on the forums, they would just not buy the game. I still remember how heated about air combat discussions was on the feature threads, where a lot of people only make accounts just to make backlash against the turn based system to stem the tide of a few people making constant comments supporting it. This only died down when Chris decided to brought back both the original base system and real time air combat. Even the biggest thread on the general discussion on how X2 stayed too much similar to the first game was also defended by the silent majority. Your argument on how real time doesn’t fit really, it’s just your bias showing. You have given no concrete reasoning to why having a small real time section to break up the monotony of turn based combat is not a good thing (something a lot of people addressed and complained about during the first implementation). Not to mention it’s extremely hard to create a fair system of autoresolve of a turn based combat system, forcing the people who already hate it to play it in order to even follow, a huge problem with games like Total War: Warhammer and it’s terrible siege combat. How it fits or not is entirely based on your opinion of the first game. The whole point of the mini game to be fast, short and easy to autoresolve is that the main focus of Xenonauts is the ground combat, not the air game. Making the air game taking 50% of the game is not really the point at all. Your comparison of Xenonauts and the Subset games is also extremely jarring and thematically unfit as well. The entire point of Into the Breach was to have the gameplay portray the lumbering methodical movement of giant mechas and kaijus and because of that it is turn based. While FTL wanted to have the gameplay represents the frantic combat and movement flow of space ships. Just seeing this we can see that the fast movement of the air game should be closer than FTL than anything else. The planes and UFOs are not gigantic lumering robots but dynamic fast moving machines that are extremely unpredictable. The X-Division mod has already demonstrated that this could work, X2 will only need to deepen this. Like adding more equipment for movement like boosters, teleport pack, anti-missile point defense, energy shields and different weapon setups. Also locational damage for UFOs. The insertion of Starcraft like mechanics of replacement for aircraft is also annoying. The planes and more importantly the pilots should be irreplaceable assets like in real combat to represent the already established atmosphere of the game. Loosing one pilot after a failed rescue mission should be punishment enough. The role of Xenonauts should be the only elite force that is capable of downing UFOs, let the dying and loosing to the NATO and Soviets.

Forgive my reading comprehension but I don’t see the problems you presented have anything to do with the globe geoscape. The most concrete reasoning is that Chris said it’s for seeing the entire map which even that is not convincing to me. You do know that game dev resource allocation is a thing right? They’re much more focused on making better animation and other systems on the ground combat to work right before caring about air combat. Especially when their base building was as limited as it is. They clearly have a focused and lacking in other departments is entirely understandable. Not to mention it’s one of the first games of the franchise. I have no idea what problem we even have here. Is it the choosing of maps based on the geographical locations? Because using a globe positioning system to create maps with certain set tiles have been done before. On the other hand Xenonauts’ system for air combat is entirely separate and have no connection to the map at all. If anything, the flat map affects the air combat much more by warping certain sections of the earth and making defense of those sections unbalanced as well as the radar coverage.

If you mean the base building of an XCOM like vertical cross section being better than the original, I have to respectfully disagree. It was horrible especially for the implementation of base defense. It turns an entire kind of mission into a single boring repetitive scripted event as it is nearly impossible to workout the vertical cross section base into a working battle map. Not the case for the original ufo defense where you can place rooms strategically to create defensive hard points as the layout of the base in the building screen and the battle map is the same. Not to mention it look very cartoony and ridiculous compared to the atmosphere of Xenonauts. One of the first thing preventing me from even backing X2 in the first place was the fact that Goldhawk was trying to mimic the XCOM reboot formula especially in the single base, vertical build screen. Which like any game series with a small but dedicated player base, will undoubtedly alienate the original following while not doing much to draw in the reboot crowd (they already have a big budget game that caters to them, why care for Xenonauts). I actually added my opinion on this on the radar thread. A flat map projection greatly warped the radar coverage and flight time for your interceptors the closer they get to the poles. Subtly pushing for certain regions to place bases for optimum coverage. On the matter of not seeing the entire map, that’s what the real time button and radar notifications are for.

This is also one of my long standing issues with the first game’s geoscape. A flat projection not only creates weird shapes with the radar ranges but also wonky flight time which gets worse the closer you get to the poles. Making it hilariously hard to preserve fuel chasing ufos in Russia or Canada because the projection made them so much bigger than the real regions. I also addressed about adding a globular geoscape to X2. But looking at how close the game need to be shipped, I think it’s just too late to make a globe geoscape like the original ufo defense now.

I really really don’t see why access lifts are even necessary in the current basebuilding. It seems like a terrible holdover from the XCOM style base that give off a real outdated phone game look to anything it touches (I might be a little biased on this). The only conceivable way to have an access lift in the game and not make it to unrealistic is to have it exclusively for missile and undersea bases with multiple levels and a 3*3 layout. If you want to put a hangar in the lowest level of the base you not only need the lifts for your personnel but another bigger place one (2*1 or 2*2) for your planes and vehicles. Base defense in these bases could become more exciting where you have to configure the lifts at defensible positions and set up kill boxes for the attacking aliens. Preventing any of their attempts to go down to the last level where they can destroy the generator and kill the base. The nukes are not for the aliens per se but more for your supposed “backers” and “allies”. Threatening the neutral regions to submission and calm the panic level or lower the DEFCON of NATO and Warsaw Pact using your own stock of nukes definitely seems like something I would do in an evil play through of the game. They’re going to unite in this fight against the aliens or be taken over/destroyed by Xenonauts, their choice.

I think it’s just an early build where the map was still tailored to a “30 minutes into the future modern world” rather than the alternate history scenario Chris presented in the recent thread made regarding revisions in the lore. I suspect the geoscape will change a lot in the upcoming builds. On the difficulty in making the geoscape less complicated, we can fully utilize the alternate history to our advantage. Let’s just say that after the Icelandic Incident, both sides of the Cold War made multiple gains in technology that is crucial for continuing the conflict into modern times. The Soviets implementing a version of cybernetic planning with OGAS, preventing them from stagnation like in OTL. Without the stagnation, India got closer to the Warsaw Pact and officially joined in the 90s, never actually privatized their economy. Yugoslavia and Greece also fell right after Tito died. They won the Afghan War. While on the same page, all of mainland South East Asian countries also falling into the Soviet Camp. On the opposite end, the US now have an even bigger control on Latin America than in our world, to the point of making Puerto Rico their 51th state. All of Central and South America except for Cuba became NATO aligned (there will be an event to change Cuba if the player choose to do it). All of the Middle East also got friendly with the US, Theocratic Iran got overthrown. Australia and Indonesia formed a western ally block in the Pacific. Both sides also continued the space race. The moon having multiple mining operations for Helium-3 to fuel huge fusion reactors on Earth. Mars also having a small base built with cooperation of the US and the Soviet Union. The invasion starts when suddenly all of these bases stopped their communication and the International Space Station disappeared out of the sky (presumably abducted by the aliens).

I love the idea of a missile base. There should be terror missions where the aliens choose to attack a NATO or Soviet nuclear silos but after you beat them back, some warheads got mysteriously “lost” during the intense firefight. Procuring nukes could have you dominate entire regions by providing them a nuclear deterrent, having the panic level completely under control no matter how many cities the aliens bombard. But doing this also leading to worsening relations with both major factions, meaning they give you less favor missions, less funding and their troops on the ground battle can become hostile to your Xenonauts. If you continue with the “dominate” path, more missions will pop up where you have to eliminate the two factions entirely, this also have the intended effect of their soldiers not getting tech sharing and still using ballistic weapons against you. You can also try juggling diplomacy between the NATO and Warsaw Pact helping them with favors, sharing more tech with them, and protecting their VIPs while refusing any missions that directly harm one faction. This will later have the effect where your soldiers can gain assistance from NATO or Red Army troops with powered armor and plasma weapons. Of course you can also just help one side win the Cold War by antagonizing their opponent and even giving the alien orbital station to them. With the diplomatic or hybrid path you can build relation centers to recruit factional soldiers, unique research and more funding. Who wouldn’t want a special force Israeli commando specialized on SMGs?

I mean it is the best way to have actual human enemies in the game. Both sides of the Cold War certainly have different goals in mind for Xenonauts even during the dire situation of an alien invasion. These interest might coalesce into open engagement based on the decision the player make regarding the direction of Xenonauts (siding with communism or capitalism or just going independent, acting like an Illuminati-like organization that hoards alien technology for humanity’s own good). NATO and Warsaw troops should be fought and recruited with their unique traits and faction unique weapons/equipments. Because to me having mind controlled humans acting as the only non-alien threat would be really boring. I think the founders shouldn’t be only countries but 4 main “factions”: NATO (made up of most of the American continent except for Cuba, Western Europe, Japan and Australia), Warsaw Pact (made up of Russia, India, Korea, Central Asia and Eastern Europe), Non-Aligned (China, Africa and Southeast Asia), and Xenonauts council. All of the founders wants to dominate the non-aligned countries and Xenonauts is the one part that will tip the balance. You can certainly take part in geopolitics if you wanted to with a reward being free cheaper bases, free personnel and unique weapons but you can just rule over everything eliminating panic altogether in exchange for a low but extremely stable monthly income. I would suggest that can come about if you decide to takeover the alien orbital bombardment platform to eliminate your former founders.

Wait a minute. So how did Germany and Poland got into the EU? If I remember correctly that in the new setting as planned by Chris, the Warsaw Pact still exist to this day. So I’m assuming that Germany is still divided between the GDR and FDR while Poland is still in the socialist camp.

Yeah, but because most of the new updates added crucial quality of life changes that should have been in the game from the start. The number of enemies however is still largely lacking. Ah I still remember starting my first JA game knowing nothing and making a sniper build that failed miserably, then basically breezes through the first half of the second playthrough using a gang of just dudes with revolvers. Good times.

I’m will to wait as long as I can to see Goldhawk release a stable, moddable and deeper version of X1 like they said they would. It’s not like the world will end or anything. Although I think it’s also important to keep a decent level of expectation so that backers and fans of X1 don’t forget about X2’s release.

I disagree on Phoenix Point still being anywhere near good. It’s a damn decent game, but it’s nowhere near what promised during the kickstarter campaign. It’s still too janky and only gets exiting with the new DLC (which to me just adding features that should have been in the game from the start). Sorry to sound a little bit argumentative in my tone. I just wanted to share my opinion on enemy design. I love JA2 and the expansion to death. Still to this date I don’t think any TBS game that came close to it in depth. But Xenonauts is not striving to be a successor to that .

I was actually thinking that the only unique assets needed for a base is the main hub, the specialized tier-2 rooms that is the main role of the base only for the air launch, production center and research hub. When the main hub is chosen, the base will have a set numbers of rooms in a exact configuration (like the rooms in different ships in FTL). For instance the main base will always be the versatile 5x5 square. The research hub would be much smaller and in an L-shape. The production center would be in a 3x5 rectangle to look like an actual production line of a factory. The Air launcher would be set up with the hub being a large 2x2 hangar with other rooms connected to it in a cross configuration. The underwater base have 2 levels of 3x3 connected by a main elevator hub. While the aircraft carriers only have 4 build slots combined with the already set runway but can move anywhere.

I love how the old Hammer & Sickle game did it where the location of the enemy when your soldiers break the line of sight with them is complete guess work based on sound the enemy makes when moving, and this ability can get hampered by a soldier being temporarily shocked by an explosion or the enemy going prone and sneaking away.

I think you should be able to choose the what a base after the main one specializes in through choosing the central hub of it to be either a mechanic center, a big research lab or a hangar control tower. A recon base should just be a borrowed aircraft carrier after gaining enough favor with a faction. Less build slots, but is much more mobile. An undersea base should be a cool DLC if Goldhawk wanted to support the game further down the line.

@ooey Chris actually agreed with this. He said that making a scouting unit being similar to a fallout floater could be cool. The thing is also easy to create higher ranks. Maybe the elite floater comes in the fire, shock and radiant varieties (the fire one explode, the shock immobilize and the radiant have a debuff field). I don’t actually say that we should fill the game with just weird aliens. Just enough in the specialized kind to make players actually wonder about the scale and threat of the Praetor-led invasion force. The current lineup is already good, I just think that there’s no harm in adding 4 to 5 weirder more specialized aliens for the later part of the game to spice things up a bit. Although an invasion of horses and rocks actually sounds fun. The Animorph series did exactly that with an invasion of slugs with some using an alien centaur host body. On the implementation side, I feel it’s not that hard to actually make a new enemy in a turn based game like now. The problem is the design, because yeah X-Division put in the Xenomorph but it’s so out of wack compared to other aliens that it just doesn’t work. For a new unit you would only need: - stat lines - a static model - running/walking animation - attacking animation - suppressed/prone animation - sound bites - death animations (yeah I really dislike the weird weightlessness of the rag doll, having custom fallout style bloody deaths is better) It’s not like Chris and team are actually making a game like Total War where the model details is huge and making so many animations that they needed to create a skeleton for each new creatures. Simplicity is best. FTL managed to create an interesting set of aliens with a few pixel sprites. Goldhawk could just put the design in first and let the community finalize it through mods. @TrashMan Most games that have an ensemble of aliens never do it the same way so it’s not really that prone to tropes. While games with monogamous aliens with switching weapons really gets boring as they’re limited with the way of having equipments (unlike normal soldiers in a game like Jagged Alliance or Strain Tactics). See the recent disappointing Phoenix Point for that. @Solver not to mention these different kinds of aliens can also be mixed and match to create really unique aliens. For instance second-form alien + heat lamp alien: a radioactive crystal enemy (with trilateral symmetrical design) inside a containment suit. It attack by shooting a concentrated beam of radiation through a slit in the suit. This attack works similar to a poison headcrab attack, draining 90% the soldiers health for a single turn, giving other enemies a chance to kill for that turn. But if the suit is damaged, it will turn into a heat lamp alien that also harm its allies. Basically a glowing triped with a thick mech suit. Or the previously mentioned modular alien that also being a dedicated combat medic in its first form. We are still missing dedicated roles like a buffer, a healer, a demolition expert, a flamethrower and of course the melee berserker that serve to draw fire (something along the lines of the Klingon redesign I posted would be great).

This is good. But a better way should be that the humans are just working for goals that go against Xenonauts in the middle of the war rather than just brainwashed humans. Like you doing favor for the NATO side that directly harming the USSR for instance just to gain some funding and relations. I mean I have never once seen such a thing where uniqueness harming a game. Making homogeneous boring designs always do. For instance look at the 343 takeover of the Halo franchise and the true death of originality after. I agree that relying too much on gameplay over lore can harm a game. But having you enemies look different but still act the same with the same set of behaviors and equipment is just so boring. After all, the enemies must actually pose a threat that force player to create new strategies to defeat them. I seriously don’t get why “believable” aliens always have to look humanoid. Is there something I’m missing because I specifically remember that convergence evolution only works when under the same environmental conditions and biological niche, not on different planets where the environments are drastically different. In fact it would be much more unbelievable if a civilization hundreds of light years away from us still have to same number of limbs! Aliens only need to look cool and work (have functioning grasping appendages, a way to communicate and a big enough brain). The Covenant from Halo did this really well with the balance of different aliens with different statures, combat roles and the lore explanation for it. Star Trek only got stuck with rubber headed aliens due to the lack of budget and being a live action show (Roddenberry actually tried to have more strange aliens in the animated series). What we are lacking is a few alien that fit certain archetypes: 1 Flying/floating aliens that aren’t drones that can shoot and attack your soldiers while in the air 2 Big worm/snake like aliens (kind of like the worms from Chtorr) 3 Insectoid aliens 4 Crystalline aliens 5 Aliens with more/less than 2 arms or legs 6 Aliens with dinosaur stature These things can be combined to get seriously great enemy designs. Like this redesign of a Klingon from the same artist that designed the creatures in Subnautica. I would find it quite humorous if a 2 meter-tall Serbilian tried to disguise itself but dressing in a business suit or the Cessna try to hide their gigantic bubble head in a helmet ;). None of the current aliens can disguise as human even if they want to. Maybe we can go around this by rather trying to make the alien biologically resembling us to blend in, give them holographic devices that hide their forms from regular eyes. Like the DNAliens from Ben 10 or the invaders from They Live. That’s not even mentioning the current opening have the aliens straight up invading earth with no infiltration at all. Based on the threads on the features section.

Yes but this premise would be more fitting for aliens that are so out of our scope that the prospect of even fighting one is impossible. A simple action of forgetting their toys on a random world can cause untold destruction. Things like the aliens from Roadside Picnic, Ian Bank’s Culture, the Xeelee from Xeelee Sequence or the Halo Forerunners. For instance: Yeah I know this, but with the level of technology needed to support such a thing, it would seem completely unreasonable to not mass produce the thing and drown any opponents in digital corpses rather than using the same troop type or just give everyone teleportation. The energy requirements for a single Codex would be so massive that it could be used for any purpose and destroy a planet based force like the XCOM with a flick of a wrist. Its existence create a huge plot hole and lore inconsistencies that ruins the setting. The Forerunners when they got such a tech was able to make their entire arsenal to holographic soldiers (hard light) with hundreds of thousands of nigh-indestructible ships, bilions of planet cracking drones, trillions of War Sphinxs that can atomize continents.