Xenonaut

Thanks Casaubon.

Hi there, Just came back to this forum and game after a few years, I am just curious as to what this Goldhawk's Portrait Editor thing you were referring to and where can it be downloaded?

Thanks for the reply Chris. Yeah i am afraid of the wall of text as well. Cutscenes would be nifty to go with something like this. I know the beauty of X1 just as the original Xcom games were that they let you dictate your own time line and you can have your own war. What I was suggesting was perhaps equivalent of a single player campaign mode or story mode. With such, you can come up with a canon time line(if not in term of length, but in term of what happened during the war years) and series of events. It helps lay foundations for future games of the series as you can steer the story to go with the product.

where does X2 fit into the storyline of that universe? will we see the alien invasion from the beginning or will we start out with the weapons and equipments of the last game already developed (and I guess just need to develope stronger ones)? I would like to suggest a News paper like feature for X2. It is a mash up of the News system we saw in X1 where it tells you of all the alien activities that you've missed, hidden away from you by aliens that are not on your radar. The news paper allows for the "campaign" to come together as an overarching narrative. If anyone has ever played the old Sim City 2000 games you would remember the news paper feature. it tells you a bit about how you are doing, how does the populace feels about your most recent action and perhaps even hints at early signs of trouble for those that paid attention. Also for a more recent (not really) example, in that Will smith movie Men In black, where they said the tabloids were their most reliable news source. Basically the news paper feature would allow you to inject humor, lore and hints into the game without being too intrusive. X1 was a nice game, but as someone said in another thread, it was rather empty and "dead" as an interactive system. It rarely gives you feed back except for the monthly money chart and alien spotted on radar events. I have seen the gauges that you added to each continent in the closed beta. It is a nice indicator, but still "dead" in term of what it gives to players. What if local papers are available (language optional, but i bet we could find lots of fan translators) for every major countries. They are only available (flagged by xeno staff) if it mentioned recent alien activities, meaning you do not have to constantly check for newpapers. In fact it could be ignored all together for those who felt too taxed to click into them. The usual off radar news bit will still be available in the world view. However if you read the papers, you would see reactions of a region to your recent skirmish with the aliens. They can be Grateful, when you saved a town from massacre, outraged at the aliens while calling for more funding for you thanks to your attempt at helping out. Or, they can be angry at another recent [strafing of an oil rig] with no xenonauts in sight and Vengefully calling for a defunding of Xenonauts program. Strange lights and crop circles hinting at alien building in an area that you can patrol and possibly spot an alien base. A big win for the player such as a successful base assault could lead to strong support, leading to an extra shipment of X materials and volunteering scientists (a free recruit of scientist or engineer without wait time if you have the room) etc. If I remember correctly, objectives like capturing a live alien or finding certain technologies were added later in X1. The News paper would be a nice way to give players "quests" like hunting down a rogue pack of aliens who were terrorizing a small town here and there, busting an alien lab that were kidnapping human specimens, taking out a ring of alien tech arms dealers (yes vs human troops), finding and recruiting a scientist that might reveal a tech tree if successful or removing an alien structure that was trying to terra form the area... So much that you can pick up through fearful rumours and eyewitness events and yet it still doesn't come out and tell you that its an Objective or a "quest". Players are encouraged to act on the news bits but they may ignore them and play through. If ignored, the quest would just disappear after some time like the events in the world view. There could be world news like Government coming out and say things like they are happy with Xenonaut program, or they may say they think their army can do a better job etc. Basically flavored text to reinforce the fact that your are interacting with a world and not simply running a simulation.

Strength is logical to be a stat when it comes to how much weight a soldier can carry. It is the one stat that I felt was realistically represented in the way it was gained. You basically weight train your soldiers all the way since their rookie days. Accuracy? intangible like a dice roll, HP could be based partly on strength as... well taking injuries for the sake of raising HP doesn't quite make sense? but when you can finally carry that extra ammo clip or that extra grenade, boy what a bonus (and what a good job you did keeping that guy alive until this day). It is one of the most visible beneficial stat of a unit and I disagree that it is the cause of unnecessary management of squad. If you feel you are too taxed by inventory tweaking, then just do the initial load out and never look at what your unit carry again. Ammo auto filled so what tweaking are you referring to? giving your soldier better weapons? I would say that if you don't have time to give them better weapons then don't develop better weapons, not blaming it on the Strength stat. Weight training your squad should be beneficial to Strength, Time Unit and Health Point total. There is a clear risk there when you enter a battle zone with your squads weighted down and have less time units at their disposal. The reward should be obvious when or if they survived. Please put Strength back in as it is part of an enjoyable meta game. I noticed the training center taking over some duty in raising unit stats... will that take the soldier out of action for a month like the MC training in the original Xcom?

Recently I was playing through a new campaign and I realized that i liked the maps that were created by the modding community so much. Their sheer number makes the bloody fight against the alien that much more unpredictable and enjoyable. However, though i am sure I have not seen all the maps yet through randomization, I get to thinking about how unbloodied they are. The Aliens did not *just* arrived at the map as your soldiers. They didn't just started running for the town the same time you landed. There seems to be this pristine and untouched qualities to many of our tile set. The cities or military installations under siege by aliens should be filled with dead bodies, pile of bodies (human and xenos), craters, bullet holes, laser holes, signs of mayhem and spilled fluids (bodily or otherwise). Not only that, but many of the tile set lacked that sense of urban decay. No grafitti, no bloodied hand prints, no hopeless or hopeful scrawls of survivors on blasted and blackened walls of ruined and deserted areas. All that, before the troops even touched down and the aliens start shooting the surviving citizens. Maybe corpses needed to be modeled or maybe we can add the existing death sprites to the tile set and use them as default map making tiles. What do you guys think?

update: was able to bypass this by loading the Autosave file at the end of the base combat. I think there is always a save file whenever you finish with the combat phase and going back to world view. When loaded, the auto save file allowed the game to move forward and menu is enabled again. All you have to do of course, is to fight that base mission successfully in one sitting.

something bugged my menu so that I can no longer hit Escape to call it up. The game progressed normally except there is no way I can quit or save. Why isn't there an actual menu button on the interface to allow us to get around this issue? *Edit*: This is similar to the Alien base crash thread I just found. I was in an alien base attack and now my menu is disabled even after the battle is over. Oh and I thought battle is over but in reallity it returned to the world map but game has frozen. The Base screens still work and you can send items, equip soldiers, but world map crash and ships are frozen.

story: So the war with the aliens aren't going well, at first the army of xenonauts house only the best of the best... men of course. Then reality sets in and conscripts ran dry ... so women soldiers were drafted. Then when the fighting is most intense, injured men and women who were grafted with alien technology to be part metal and part flesh will appear. To combat monsters, we have to become monsters ourselves... What actually happen in game: first batches of soldiers are all male portraits, then at some point in the war with too many loss, female portrait soldiers will be draftable. Then modified soldiers with portraits of half metal half human will appear to be draftable. These cyborgs walk around with the existing sound of the Andron movements. Cyborg strengths and weakness: _ low Time units _ low dodging stats (has lower chance to avoid hit) _ high strength _ good accuracy _ decent natural armor What is required: _ Cyborg portrait and some ability to control when the game allows what type of unit to be draftable. _ Cyborg portrait and hand graphics for soldier screen (if someone will go the length of modifying human body to the extreme these cyborgs could look way cooler than simply having a metal arm) Just something that mirrors the world war when the men went off to die by the thousands and then women had to be drafted into army units but extended now to cyborgs with help of alien tech. I am not sure if its even possible, but i thought I would put it out there.

would be nice to reskin or make a tank into CHAS, the robot from Starship Troopers Roughneck Chronicles lol

ooh i hope its possible. Imagine if you shoot down aliens close to base, they would just walk right over and say hello with a base attack action.

lol i liked it when they used to panic when we slaughtered enough of their brethren

Why do they seems unaffected by my success in battle? Given the early aliens were clones that were taken over by a single alien mind so death means nothing to them or to each other, but that alien overlord must surely feel some sense of dismay? I had a base defense action just now. Lucky for me my battle hardened veterans were at home at the time and they proceed to trap the aliens in and pick them off one by one. There is only the caesan leader left to deal with. I know where he is approximately so I have him surrounded. During the alien turn, the caesan rounded a corner of a guard point and ran out of TUs. I thought to myself, "Nice, now we can end this". The next turn, the full morale soldier who stood guard at the guard point completely panicked, dropped his weapon and ran off... Is there some sort of alien proximity or fear aura that i am not aware of?

lol just found this thread as well. I've been mostly on and off lurking the forum until last week when I bought Xenonaut and started posting more. Played a lot of the original X-com and TFTD. I appreciate very much the fact that Xenonauts keep up the spirit of X-com and not sold out to the dumbed-down trend of today's games. Although not having psionic or MC training does seem a little short because it did take some management in the original game. The Vanilla run has been enjoyable, looking forward to mods and possibly contributing to mods after this.

it is a bit overwhelming for those who don't upgrade properly I guess. I still had some ballistic rifle going against those large floating drones... the battle was ugly as heck. It was more of a question than a request for a new feature so if it's not there then it's not there.