panzereich

This could be the beginning of the end. Why change the gameplay like this to cater for an easier more streamlined experience? If it is such an issue, then let us get insurance for our jets or rent them at reduced rates or balance the cost of them. Or have an event where a country sponsors your loss. Or have jets from sponsored countries assist you. No. That would make sense. Instead, lets change reality to such a degree that a downed jet magically crash lands saving itself. The aliens should just give up because they can never destroy your aircraft. The magical jets also compliment the new magical country of Greece, which is now part of the middle east. These kinds of major changes to game play are only going to throw balance out even more in the long term. This should be a user mod or at most a tickable option.

Above post beat me to it and seems like a better solution although more costly in programming terms.

Enable to ability to rent certain fighter craft so that money is deducted every month for cost but at a reduced rate to buying? More advanced aircraft could be rentable as soon as the plans are developed for them. Thus reducing cash burden. The old xcom had a generous way of sustaining your budget by allowing you to sell all kinds of tech for very high prices. Maybe even the balance by increasing income from rewards? Maybe crash sites in water could be salvaged without a fight for randomly reduced returns. Ie another use for charlie. Soldiers could be assigned to certain nations to simulate them training national armies. For a return of cash and a bonus to nation.

Thanks Yorak, I understand now the effect that you both mention. This is still not true FTL travel. An outside observer can easily calculate your speed as well under c regardless of what speed your onboard calculations might describe. Your not going faster than light. You get to your destination very quickly, but your not travelling faster than c which is the speed limit. What you describe doesn't require FTL, just the same effect that makes our heads grow older than our feet.

Technological advancement is not the be all end all. In fact, its a kind of trap. Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their own success. In the fates of such societies – once mighty, complex, and brilliant – lie the most instructive lessons...they are fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong. —A Short History of Progress One of the best analogies I heard was huntsmen killing mammoths. Kill 1 great, kill 2 then that's advancement. Run the whole herd off a cliff and you have a progress trap created by technology. No more food because you were too good at catching it. This same theory can be applied to any civilization including alien. Any civilisation that can get past nuclear war, environmental hazards and limitless energy consumption and then create FTL... I don't see why they would even bother invading. Would be like the gratification gained by an 8 year old burning ants with a magnifying glass. Kind of like the Matrix bs with humans being milked for their energy. Well sorry, but like any contained system energy out < energy in and entropy always increases. A civilisation that simply expands and consumes is going to run out of resources. Lucky for us, there were many civilisations on planet Earth in the past. The fall of the Roman Empire may have caused a dark age, but we survived. Now life on Earth is dedicated to pretty much almost 1 civilisation. The global one. What happens when the lights go out and there is no one else left to carry a torch?

How do you make a system that outputs more energy than in put into it? You dont.

A particle's inertial mass increases as it approaches the speed of light. Hence infinite energy required to get closer to c. Travel at even remotely close to light speed is only possible in an atom smasher using low mass particles. The problem with the analogy is that your foot is only going to provide finite acceleration. The faster you go, the more you need to push your foot down. Regardless of the so called lack of any resistance in space, there is still the problem of relativity. You will never reach C. You may get close, but having mass, the only way is if you go .51 C and your destination is approaching you at .51 C. Relativity. Not to mention there is always resistance even in the void, as curves in spacetime would create resistance. The answers are not in gradual acceleration using 'Newtonian' physics, as Relativity is simply a more accurate representation of physics. The speed of light is a finite constant number because it has been measured. Everything else is variable. In itself, its a frame of reference. You simply cannot go at C or faster. Because C is the speed light travels in vacuum. Light which is made from photons which have no mass. So these things can go quicker than anything else. How do you go quicker? Negative mass? The answer is more about understanding the boundaries or rules, then finding shortcuts. One of these shortcuts presents itself in the fact that our own universe is expanding faster than lightspeed. Like I mentioned before, the balloon scenario. If you can shrink space in front of you and expand it behind you, then technically, for your frame of reference, you achieve 'fake' faster than light.

>>> And I once again have to repeat that effectively faster-than-light travel is already well possible, provided an energy source. It's not even hard. Faster than light speed travel is physically impossible. You cannot simply accelerate and eventually go as fast or faster than light speed. The closer to C (lightspeed) you travel, the more energy is required to accelerate further. In terms of speed of light, photons have no mass so are able to travel this fast. Anything with mass would require infinite energy to reach speed of light. So in theory speed of light IS A highway speed limit that nothing but massless particles can reach. A spaceship attempting this kind of lightspeed travel would need to consume more energy than the big bang. Ie Infinite energy. e=mc2. Energy = mass x speed of light squared. There is pretty much a general consensus on this. However, it seems the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light. How? This can be illustrated with a balloon. If you draw some dots on a rubber balloon and then inflate the balloon, you can see how this could work, how the space between the dots expands and they grow apart quickly, yet they remain in the same space. By stretching or shrinking spacetime artificially, you could in theory travel lightyears very quickly. Again energy required to do this. Some of the magic of general relativity is revealed by the fact that gravity and time and linked to create spacetime. Time on the Earth's surface passes slower than if in orbit. Mass is therefore part of the equation and cannot be removed. Going past Einstein, quantum physics and the latest string theories are somewhat bound with general relativity if more than 4 dimensions are taken into account. Ie height, width, breadth and time. This again can be illustrated by imagining a wire. Imagine an ant crawling on the wire. It can go up and down the wire. Now if we look from a distance, the ant appears to be moving up and down a 2 dimensional line. We cannot see the curve in the wire from a long way away. However, the ant can also go around the wire because it is tiny. From a distance and our perspective, the ant has vanished. The same applies to our own 4 dimensional space. If we could image 5, 6 or 7 dimensions. Smaller ones bound up in a quantum (really tiny) state that are hidden from our view or perspective. String theory uses these extra dimensions to primarily allow the effect of gravity to integrated. The four forces in our universe are the strong nuclear force (holds our atoms together) weak nuclear force (radiation) electromagnetism and gravity. Gravity appears to be very weak compared to the other forces. If it wasn't we wouldn't exist. In string theory, this is because gravity or the unknown particles responsible for it (gravitron?), is leaked out of our own 4 dimensions into other smaller dimensions. The strength of gravity is dispersed so it becomes weaker. It leaks, because the particle responsible for gravity is so small no one is able to identify it. It is so small, that it can fit into these other tiny quantum dimensions. As with Einstein improving the less precise Newtonian model. String theory hopes to improve general relativity and incorporate the quantum world within general relativity. Quantum physics exhibits all kinds of strange properties. Such as particles that appear to interact with each other at great distances regardless of distance. Particles that appear to act like a wave when observed. Einstein called it spooky action from a distance. He hated the way it wouldn't fit within general relativity. In fact it makes many people uneasy. Once this new model is completed, there will be a much greater understanding of how everything works. Travelling faster than the speed of light is impossible. Travelling to the stars might not be. Getting to places really far away really quickly could become a reality and in turn our butt probing technology would develop at an exponential rate.

Ok. I admit I was being pretty far fetched with the whole anal probe thing, I guess I watch way too much Southpark. The real reason for the invasion is that America's radio waves reached their planet, they got a whiff of matchbox 20 and had to put a stop to it.

Who says aliens want to conquer us? From what I have heard, the general consensus is that they simply want to probe our butts. If FTL travel is ever harnessed by Earth, then I believe butt probing would of a higher priority than invasion.

Having played the original xcom enemy unknown, I went into the new xcom game without expecting too much. It seems that developers always mistake streamlining with over simplification. I want things to be complex, with many systems. I realised that some of my most revered PC games of all times have something in common. I can list some of these games, although it does show my age. Sid Miers' Pirates, Sword of the Samurai (Microprose), Ancient Art of War, Star Control 2 and Jagged Alliance. Lately I've been playing total war quite a bit. All these games have layered systems, where you often have a strategy layer combined with a tactical layer. The tactics effect the strategy and vice versa. I'm motivated to build strategy and then test it out in a tactical battlefield. The intertwining of these two systems can turn a boring grindfest into something more than just the sum of its parts. As always, when I see a game like this that has promise, I immediately get excited. Strategy, tactics, an intense learning curve and a single player experience I can sink my teeth into. UFO aftershock and UFO afterlight, brought turn based/real time together with heaps of complex systems, big rpg elements and a strategic war to win mars. The problem with the game, was that I got very bored with the tactical apsect. It was mundane and I always saw the same maps and enemies seemed badly concepted. I thought about this a lot, with the new xcom game coming out I started to wonder if going down the same route as afterlight would make the game fail. Annoying aliens, strange weapons, alien alliances and strange game mechanics would put me off completely. So I guess what I am saying, is that when I finally booted the new xcom up I was pleasantly surprised. Without spoiling anything, certain aspects of the game pay homage to the original, the customization is great, the animation fluid, the missions are mixed up and varied and most of the streamlining seems to work really well. Familiar aliens with added details. Familiar weapons that took me back 20 years. Laser weapons = nostalgia. (I used to handicap myself by not using plasma weaponry in the original). I was worried about missing aspects such as big squads, inventory systems and base invasions. I ended up being ok with all of that. The only things I would change would be to make the atmosphere more like the original (it is called enemy unknown after all), add more UFO lore and get rid of the stupid alien squad spawn system. The last being the thing that irritates me the most. I would much prefer aliens to be anywhere. It was so good, carving my own way into ufos and then marching right up behind a muton and executing. This new game has no direction facing, so ambushes are reliant on the ghost suit and the scanner. By making the aliens more randomly spawned around the map and taking their turns, the maps could also have been made bigger, allowing bigger squad sizes. Procedural generation should have been used to more of an extent. Overall I really like the game. I think it fits as a remake of the original with a just a few gripes. I'm really glad xenonauts is coming out, but it was so refreshing to have turn based strategy presented in the way firaxis did. I actually want them to do TFTD now.

I think it was a tsunami caused by using the magic wand in Photoshop. Since the planet isn't really that big or complex, maybe pen tool and pathfinder would be a better option.

If your going to make Crete or any part of Greece selectable, then you might want to be careful. We want Chris to finish the game. http://www.geek.com/articles/games/arma-3-developers-arrested-for-spying-on-military-camp-20120912/

Its a great year if you like strategy games or have a pc. Creativity and taking a chance are sorely missed in the industry. In fact, some of the developers are already crying about how so called triple A titles are receding. Great news everybody. Some really good indie titles are coming out or already have. To name a few... xenonauts, Faster than light, mechwarrior online, minerwars 2048... great times.

I wanted to sell my house at some stage, but I don't think fish are paying much.