Vitruviansquid

This might seem unintuitive after the big milestone patch added a bunch of Cleaner missions with alternate goals and conditions, but I feel it's correct. After you wipe out the Cleaners, you stop having all the neat alternate missions beside abductions popping up once in awhile. Alien missions could do with a pass with a mind toward "Cleanerization" - giving them more different missions with different character. Perhaps developers could sit down and consider "what are some different reactions alien crew might have if the ship they're in gets shot down?" Maybe sometimes the aliens spread out on the map as they currently do and you have the standard mission, but sometimes, aliens try to self-destruct their downed ship and the players have to get to the ship and disable its self-destruct to extract its loot. Maybe sometimes, the aliens call for backup during your mission. I think more could be done with alien classes as a whole. Right now, an alien scientist is just a weak alien soldier. An alien engineer is just a weak alien soldier. And so on. I think there should be strategic consequences for interrogating aliens who have different roles. Techs can definitely be locked behind interrogation of the relevant alien expert on the subject.

Increased tactical depth is fine, but I feel that the game is already mostly about ground combat and doesn't need to also have a super-involved air combat. Strategic depth, which is where the air combat links to the other parts of the game, is what I think the system is sorely lacking but if a rework also improved the tactical depth of the air combat, I don't think anybody would complain.

I am on Commander

The problem, in short: Air combat doesn't present interesting choices for a player in either its execution, when you are playing the interception out, or strategy, when you are thinking about where to locate your interceptors or how to arm them, and it doesn't feel good when you make those choices. The problem, in long: You can play the air combat fairly suboptimally by just equipping your interceptors, whether they're angels or phantoms, with two cannons each, and just fly at every existing alien craft and blow them up. You'll do some barrel rolling to dodge enemy shots, and you're going to take a few hits, but this strategy has worked enough for me to go all the way to day 200 against every craft that exists in this version of the game. You can do a bit better if you'd like to, by equipping your phantoms intelligently with shit like torpedoes (a phantom with two alienium torpedoes and a Gauss Blaster will do better against an abductor than one with just two Gauss Blasters, but I'm not sure laser lances have a role at all), but you don't have to, and it doesn't feel terribly like you've fucked up if you didn't, nor does it feel terribly triumphant if you did, because, after all, no matter what method you've chosen to use, unless you did something really obviously dumb like fail to bring enough weaponry to actually down the UFO or just not fill your hardpoint slots and weight slots, then things will be kinda alright. And it doesn't feel terribly triumphant if you have the ideal build to defeat a UFO because none of the options you have are super different. They all exist for the same purpose of downing UFOs, it's just that some are better at it in a situation and some are worse. I feel like I solved (an incredibly simple) puzzle when I put together a build that works against a UFO, not that I chose a strategy and then implemented that strategy. Solutions: The biggest thing to be done about air combat is to sit and think about what strategies should be possible in the game, and then consider what options players should be presented with to enact those strategies. Using guns and using missiles are not strategies because they do not imply different mindsets - they do the same things in different ways. Instead, these are some changes that might give room for players to create strategies to pursue: - Some air weapons are decent while others are excellent, but costly to fire. Recast torpedoes as powerful, premium weapons where you have to manufacture each torpedo at the cost of cash and, for the more advanced types, alienium. Also give these torpedoes a chance to just explode some some UFOs' power sources when they hit, making UFOs give less alienium as loot. The point of this change is simple, to create a difference between interceptor loadouts that you use to down ships for cash and resources, and interceptor loadouts that you use for defending your bases and funding regions. Of course, you would then increase the difficulty of UFOs to make it so that it is difficult to defend adequately with ships that merely down UFOs. - It is very necessary to invest in gadgets for your interceptors that take up weight in order for interceptors to accomplish some of the normal stuff they have been accomplishing without prior. Imagine if fuel tanks gave you like a full 100% extension to your interceptor's range, but without it you really could barely leave the range of your base's first radar array. You would make a decision about how much fuel to take or how much weaponry, based on how many bases you have and how necessary you feel it is to send jets around the world to prevent rising panic or let bases defend each other. Other gadgets that you might be able to kit out an interceptor with might be stuff like sensors to allow the interceptor to scan around it and see UFOs outside without the help of bases' radar arrays, or go faster on the world map. - Make a lot of different levers for the options to kit out your interceptors so making your interceptors powerful in different ways have different strategic costs. Let's say we nix the system with weight, hardpoints, and equipment slots, and just say that interceptors have a missile, a cannon, and an armor. Then, maybe it costs an out-of-the-way research to improve your cannons, it costs way more money upgrade your missiles, and it costs way more materials to upgrade your armor. You balance UFO encounters so it will be generally okay if you have two of the three ship "parts" upgraded and updated, but you might have a bad time if only one of them is, and then you leave it up to the players which ship part they dump resources into upgrading.

I think most of my soldiers' deaths come from being shot at by aliens from out of sight in one way or another. I moved a soldier somewhere, gambling there weren't enemies around the corner, or just outside of sight range, or behind that door, and then the alien comes out and blasts him. What makes the convoy ambush mission too easy is that you know where all the enemies are going to be. To make the mission more difficult (in a fun way), I could only think that you'd need to introduce some degree of randomness to the enemies' location, which would be reconcepting the entire mechanical basis of the mission. So yeah, I dunno.

I agree with this. I think the Cleaners being so easy to shoot on missions, but their base being difficult to attack makes a perverse incentive where you don't actually want to finish the Cleaners off, but instead want to keep "farming" the Cleaner missions to get money and experience for rookies. There should be something about the Cleaners that puts a clock on the players to attack their base. I've proposed in another post that, once you discover the Cleaner base, then other Cleaner missions should stop spawning, and instead the Cleaner base should passive create panic so long as it's there and not destroyed. I've also proposed that Cleaner missions should continually scale up in difficulty so that players feel like it'd be easier to nip the Cleaner faction in the bud rather than having to keep fighting stronger and stronger Cleaners.

Okay, this is probably the last reply you're gonna get out of me, so let me make this one count. Yeah, we know there are different games with different scales. You might notice that Warcraft and Doom also have entirely different control schemes, entirely different pacing, and are in entirely different genres. But we're talking about Xenonauts 2, a game which has already had a Kickstarter campaign and a closed beta, and is now in open beta. You are really not beating the allegations that you are using sophistry or that you honest-to-god just have no idea what you're talking about, if you are implying that Xenonauts 2 can now pivot to being a game on an entirely different scale on a whim. The first paragraph here is built on the interpretation that my argument is about how players self-identify in the game (I think you really meant to say "self insert," but that's neither here nor there). And that's a misrepresentation of what I said, because I clearly said, "It was tedious to keep track of," as my reason for disliking 26 soldiers in those games. And the second paragraph is kind of telling me you either didn't play those old Xcom games or you had no idea what you were looking at when you played them, because no, it wasn't really about player choice to be a "platoon commander" or a "squad commander." In UFO Defense, you had to start with the Skyranger and bring 14 soldiers because that was the best tech available, and then when you upgraded to Avenger and got to bring 26 soldiers, it wasn't really a choice because you were just handicapping yourself if you didn't bring more soldiers when the game let you. These were games that set a challenge in front of the player and tasked them to defeat the challenge, but you're talking about them like they're sandbox role-playing games. Jesus Christ, man, did you just think readers wouldn't notice that you're talking about UFO Defense like it was Stardew Valley or Minecraft, or is this really an actual argument you thought would sway people? This is the first thing you've typed in this thread that I agreed with. Yeah, you have the right to "demand" the game to be anything. Let's just be a bit more honest about your demands, alright? You can "demand" that a machine gun in the game weighs just as much as a machine gun in real life or whatever other thing. When people ask you why you'd want that, just say it like it is: it appeals to your sense of immersion and you've given absolutely no thought to how it'd impact game balance or how much other people would enjoy the game or, in fact, what genre the game set out to be, or what the lead developer has said about the direction he wants to take the game in, or the other objections that I think you routinely read from other posters when you bring up your ideas. Edit: Oh yeah, and if it helps, naming yourself "Kommandos" and then having your avatar be a picture of a sad little blue-eyed, blond-haired boy isn't a great look if you want people to tolerate the sophistry you try to put out on the internet.

Well go on. Tell us which game design concepts you had in mind with your suggestions. I don't think anyone in this thread finds your suggestions to come with too little explanation. This is a word salad trying to pass off a non-argument as if it was an intelligible response to the (extremely straightforward) thing Skitso said. Skitso said that all decisions to change the game has to include game design and balance in mind. You merely pointed out that there are players at different levels as if that makes game design such an incredibly difficult and mystifying task that it somehow invalidates what they said, so that instead of making decisions to change the game to include game design and balance, it would somehow be better to make decisions to change the game based on realism. But this doesn't make sense at all as an argument, because if game balance is such a difficult thing, it actually makes more sense to make every decision to change the game with game design and balance in mind.

I was there and I played those games. Yeah, it was too many soldiers. It was tedious to keep track of and became a detriment to gameplay. It would also be so in Xenonauts 2. An argument that you could have 26 soldiers in Xcom and TFTD isn't an argument that this is a good thing to have. They asked for some explanation of why this is a positive for gameplay, not whether another game you enjoyed had the same mechanic. Games you enjoy can have bad mechanics, and we hope their spiritual successors (like Xenonauts to Xcom) refine the formula, not repeat it by rote. This is such a grossly disingenuous way to respond to their argument. You know they're not talking about changing the entire genre or aesthetic of the game, you know they're not talking about completely divorcing the game from reality so that a gun makes you run faster or survive better, you know that the developers aren't out to make the most accurate military simulation it can, and you know you haven't addressed the main point they're trying to make, which is that they'd like to see your suggestion about how to shape the game come with an explanation of how it'd make the game more interesting in terms of the choices a player would have to decide to make. In lieu of actually engaging with their concern, you've brought out a strawman to just try to make him look ridiculous. This is just sophistry and petty bullying. Now, I haven't been around the forum the entire time, because I only dipped in to give my feedback for Milestone 1 and now I'm dipping in again to give my feedback for Milestone 2, so maybe you've already done it, but it strikes me that Instead of clogging up other people's threads that have productive suggestions on how to improve the game, you can go make your own thread with all your feedback about what's not realistic enough and then see if Chris comes in and says, "wowee! We never thought that a machine gun in the game had to weigh exactly as much as a machine gun does in real life! Thanks! We'll make that change right away!"

A dude's just proposing that soldiers with sniper rifles should be able to take reaction shots and some people act like he wants there to be magic and wizards in the game.

"Meh," on these posts about realism. You look at that real life training with firearms, you look at chess, and consider whether this turn-based science fiction strategy game about shooting aliens looks more like those or chess. If additional realism will make the game deeper and more interesting, then sure. But what I see are posts where Chris, the lead developer, says stuff about how he meant for Strength as a stat in the game to give players an opportunity to make interesting choices with what their soldiers can carry, and then players posting suggestions about how Strength can do just that, and then some dude who really loves realism in the game makes a post to essentially educate everyone about what modern soldiers carry in their backpacks as a way to argue against the lead developer of the game. I'm "Meh" on that idea With all love and respect, I think you should read over and check the tones of your own posts in this thread and possibly other threads if you're shocked that people talk to you that way.

5 is a nutty number of shots for a non-laser rifle to have in this game. If non-laser rifles had 5 shots, Your laser rifles would have to be downright impossible to use. I was thinking you could easily knock the base amount of ammunition in a non-laser rifle from 20 to 12, see how that feels, and then maybe go down to something like 8-10 if players still aren't needing to reload in a mission. It would be great if the game had mechanics to encourage you to shoot more bullets, sure. I just don't think the dev team is looking for a rework of the game's battle mechanics that are radical enough to make it happen.

I think if there was not a percentage counter for cleaner intelligence and the endgame, I think a lot of players would make unhealthy predictions about what's going on in the background. You'd have posts saying, "I guess I hit a dead end in the game, because I can't do anything to advance, but the game isn't throwing anything new at me, either. This game's broken/sucks." It is only acceptable for no counter to exist because you already understand that the game is keeping score for you in the background. So the counter feels unimmersive, but in order to have it hidden, you needed to know that it was there in the first place. So I think the best option is to make another difficulty setting checkbox to obscure progress counters, as Skitso already proposed.

Suggestion 1 - I was warned. I forgot how, but I was. Maybe there should be a pop-up window that appears when you try to embark on the mission with less than three empty slots. Suggestion 2 - I agree, widely, with the idea that it would be nice if the game could support more multiple strategies in different playthroughs. The game kinda railroads you into most of your research choices. You make some small decisions like whether to make accelerated guns or skip them, or whether you want armor or guns first, but then it soon feels like those choices dry up and you're on a railroad for awhile in the early-midgame. You have your lasers and your armor, and then there's a stretch of the game when you kinda just research whatever the game throws at you, until a bit later. But that said, I don't like the idea that every strategy game should have a way to play wide and a way to play tall. I don't think playing tall is a strategy that fits in with the genre. Besides, you can already fit *a lot* of facilities into your main base. You can really just have a main base with everything, then two more bases that just have generators and radar dishes to cover the rest of the world. I don't think you actually need hangars in your alternate bases because even the starting dropship can go anywhere in the world and once you get Phantoms, they can basically also go around the world. Suggestion 3 - It'd be nice to have more customization for your dropship, which would also make the battle-layer gameplay more varied up. I don't know what kinds of equipment besides extra seats a dropship would have, though. Suggestion 4 - You can already do this. Suggestion 5 - I also think this would be neat. Suggestion 6 - This would also be neat, but I doubt it'd be a thing. Suggestion 7 - I don't see this as necessary, because the game does tell you how much TU you'll have at the end of actions and how much actions cost. Suggestion 8 - I dunno, maybe I'm being too radical, but I just feel like the Soldiers screen and the Armory screen should be merged together to begin with. Suggestion 9 - These screens can definitely be streamlined. I agree. Suggestion 10 - I think the current meta is actually for people to get the accelerated guns, then skip lasers, and then upgrade directly into Gauss. I think it's actually not a problem that players end up picking between accelerated guns and lasers. It gives some difference between different playthroughs, and allow players to make a strategic decision. If anything, I think the actual problem is that Gauss weapons just sort of replace the weapons that came before and is too straightforward of an upgrade. It reduces complexity when you'd expect the game to increase complexity as your playthrough goes on.

I'm definitely for the idea of more "levers." - There was an idea floating around earlier where doing alien autopsies should let you create more little gadgets that have perhaps a bit more niche uses that your soldiers can then carry around. Something like autopsying a Psyon lets you craft a module that boosts your bravery a bit, or autopsying a Wraith lets you craft a module that makes your soldier slightly harder to hit. I think more little gadgets in the game like that, or even stuff that's sourced and crafted by the players based on earth technology, means there more stuff players have to choose to have their soldiers carry. - I think all non-laser guns carry too much ammo in this game, but rifles are particularly egregious. A soldier with great marksmanship can wipe out an entire Scout's worth of aliens with one magazine of 20 shots. A soldier with poor marksmanship can kill everyone with 2. Both can certainly go without reloading through an entire mission against Scouts, but also, Observers, Destroyers, bases, and I dunno how big those unreleased Cruisers are going to be, but probably also Cruisers. 20 shots is a lot of shots. 8 shots is still a lot for a shotgun. 15 is a lot for a pistol, but we should let that one slide because pistols are bad in other ways. The other weapons are a bit more okay.