Piloter

Integrate a flight sim engine (if Chris wants to do it on the cheap, Excel '97 had one he might be able to convert)...and then don't use it for interceptions but instead let the player fly the Skyranger all those hours back to base. No time compression here! Think of it, like Desert Bus but airborne...and with a sticky trim tab. And bitching from the grunts in the back, so you'd have to listen to hours and hours of glorious lies of battle and significant-other drama and tired old obscene stories and jokes. And if you did any kind of acrobatics you'd stand a chance of losing equipment or squaddies. ("...Was he waving his helmet as he was riding the Hunter down?" "Couldn't tell, if that moron up front wasn't trying to Immelman with the ramp open, we'd still have Hans, Frans, AND all our ammunition.") I think that's why we never see the transport pilots...after that many hours stuck with the Xenonauts, they (correctly) reason that the more turns the grunts take to hunt down the aliens the more time they have to kick back with a brew in the Skyranger and unwind.

Speaking purely to the decoupling of staffing from buildings, as a tech-head OG EU player I always would have fun juggling the budget to try and build out living quarters and labs and workshops so that by the time I DID have the income I could progressively staff them. A good ground assault would let me sell the spare corpses and hire some more eggheads, or maybe give that extra 20K toward a new living quarters building so I could hire into a mostly vacant laboratory. It made me feel like one of my many hats was academic director or university chair, or General Groves trying to set up the Manhattan Project. While I understand the push toward multiple bases and increased management complexity (/especially/ after EU'12) my tactics were always to have my primary base with the shinies and defense, and just a few scattered science outposts elsewhere. A few living quarters, a few workshops or labs, lots of big radars, no interceptors, a just poor few squaddies and a couple hovertanks on lonely defense duty, a place away from the danger zone to do advanced R&D and production without the klaxons going off every five minutes. TL;DR, I feel that if the player can have automatically fully staffed labs and workshops this removes two of the base commander's many hats, and juggling all these hats is what made the original so damn fun. The essential decision is created by the space that the facilities take up. Say you've only got 10 slots left and the current labs are full. You can build another lab, hire ten scientists, but then you've taken up space that could otherwise be used for stores, hangars, defense, workshops...and you've got another 40 scientists that could be working there. Do you put in another LQ, sacrifice that spot you were going to build a hangar in, put off your defense purchases until next month, but be able to fully staff R&D and get some more fungible FNGs too? As I see it, forcing you to allocate extra space for staffing requirements inherently carries extra prioritization and strategic decisions with it that can have a significant impact on playstyle and reflect individual commander preferences.

When animation fails, fall back on the napalm model as found in Scorched Earth, circa 1994. The results will still be just as satisfying. Or if we must go newer, the flames and screaming from Blood 1's flare gun...

And if this works, terror missions could have a chance of the terror units reprioritizing from civilians to Xenonauts. Nothing like running from a Reaper, away from the bunny-hopping celatids, and trying to stay out of the line of fire of a hoverdisc until the squad can regroup. Hell, within that terror mission, make the single unit in a city map, invisible like the civilian bug, and you've got yourself a Predator 2 tribute mission too. *Governator accent* "You're one ugly mutonfloater." */accent*

I'd be happy with the timer working the same way as in EU94. Especially if there's Chrysallids or mind-controllers about. "Remember, if you're attacked by a facehugger or your mind is not your own..just relax your left hand and dosvidanya, Rodina!"

A good point. If a UFO does take off while there's a CAP active, first of all there should ALWAYS be an intercept screen. No matter how fast the UFO is, it'll take time to gain speed and elevation. Even if your entire squadron suddenly has to pull a 6 G eyeballs-in half-loop and half-roll out, they should be able to get within range to start an intercept action before it can outspeed them. The UFO would start with damage equal to what it had when it landed, and when shot down for a second time would have at least one damage category bump if not two. (light to major, major to serious, serious to catastrophic, catastrophic to destroyed). I'm also trying to think how the knock-on effects from mission completion would be handled. The initial failed capture mission would end in a draw, I think, where you'd tally all the aliens and equipment that were killed OUTSIDE the UFO, but the second one if successful should give you a minor funding bonus in that country for dogged pursuit. That sort of thing makes headlines. Should it be possible for a sufficiently high-ranking crew or big ship to escape another time? Every category more damage should lower the odds, but it could be dramatic as hell to chase a battleship (or equivalent) across three desperate crash-landings before finally subduing it. Alien morale should also pretty much take a 50% hit on the second (and subsequent) assaults. "Why won't they just let us go?!"

Drawing a distinction, in other words, between races that are basically just shoved into a scout UFO and sent down on autopilot, with their only instructions being "Screw some stuff up, when you're done press the BIG RED BUTTON and for Zuul's sake don't touch any other controls!"--IE Mutons or terror units, versus the ones that are familiar with the systems and actually could conduct field repairs; sectoids and floaters and etc? This opens up another interesting possibility. As the game currently stands (and EU94), any un-assaulted crashed UFO WILL disappear eventually. If we assume that the starting, grunt-infantry races can't fix their transport, this would have them stay on the map for a longer period of time, allowing starting players to stand a better chance of getting to them, and possibly generating a 'rescue' mission of another UFO with a more advanced crew to land near the crash site, loiter, and then when it takes off both UFOs are gone. This way, as new races come in, crashed UFOs would have to be intercepted first thing instead of being timed for daylight or put off for manufacturing completions. This could also introduce the idea of aliens being able to (as the game goes on) progressively repair their craft IF they're in it and working on it, instead of out trying to Serve Man. If the engine supports full-bright lighting, this would be very easy. It'd make the UFO light up like mad at night, and oversaturate/wash out the tiles during the day. Very, very hard to miss. Whether it's centered in the engine room or applied around the entire craft is a gameplay decision, doesn't do much good to have it just in the engine room if you can't breach random craft walls. What are your thoughts on making this visually distinct (barring giant red letters) against the cycling screens that have been suggested?

Or before the aliens start wising up to basic physics and realize "Hey, these guys are giving us a LOT of problems. We found their base. Be right back...just fetching a couple mile-wide nickel-iron asteroids for, um, no reason. Y'all just stay put, OK?"

Count yourself lucky, it could've been Xen. Or Temple of Elemental Evil. In which case thousands of otherwise sane people would be swarming to cancel preorders and every masochist gamer out there would be filling their pants in glee. (Although the unkind remark might be made that if we can handle these CTDs and night terror missions, ToEE will be depressingly stable AND easy...)

While I think that the aliens-repairing-their-whip concept is a magnificent concept as far as player involvement and stress ratcheting in general, I've been wrestling with how to implement it in a manner that's logical for the setting. If the player knows it from the start then you've just set up a game with a turn limit and that's not entirely fun. If you pop up a box halfway through--as Word Of God--how would the player have known this? Is there an option for aliens to surrender, depending on morale and intelligence and wanting to at least TRY to be an ambassador instead of a trophy on the wall of the autopsy room? One possibility is having the mechanic work--leading to some nasty nonstandard mission-end screens for players who've taken a long time--but having completed research on UFO power sources include flavor text along the lines of "With more data on the exact operation of these craft, we have been able to design sensors to pinpoint the specific signature of an active source. All ground assault craft are being retrofitted as we speak--this time if the aliens get power back, we'll know about it in advance." And from that point you get the countdown box. Edit: I'm not sure 'escape the map' would be a good mission type, those little bastards could scatter off the tile edges before slow-and-cautious Xenonauts could get anywhere close. Sure, you might wind up playing the AC-130 Bofors minigame for a bit afterward, but...

For us alpha-testers who keep playing and playing and playing these builds, how about an option to export our squad (name, callsign, stats) to a simple text file and import them into another game? Yes, editing the text file could lead to rampant cheating, so remove it in the beta or only leave it in for premium builds or something... But that way we can keep working with the same people, instead of having to remember new sets of names every single time we start a new game to try something different with modding or file editing or tech trees or due to bugs or etc.

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/395281/2012-11-18_18.50.06.sav Terror mission popped up, I clicked 'intercept' and chose the Chinook, but it was going to be in the middle of the night so I selected a new target waypoint for it to patrol for an hour or two. Now it will not retarget the city--when I click on the city from the map, it pops up "Mission Launch Control" and the Chinook is correctly listed as airborne. When I click the Chinook and select "select new target", it prompts me for a destination...so I click on the city and it pops up "Mission Launch Control". When I click Intercept on the Geoscape and click on the city, it brings up "Mission Launch Control" once more. Windhoek is going to get nuked, and my guys are going to be close enough to need decontamination, all because the pilot 'mysteriously' forgot how to land. No wonder those bastards are nowhere to be seen when the Chinook hits dirt, they're hiding from the Xenonauts! (Stock 17.1 except for Realistic Aircraft and Community Map Pack mods.)

"There are some places in the US and Middle East where the "Terror Mission" would be terror for the aliens not the citizens." Terror missions in Detroit should either end with the Xenonauts automatically winning on the first turn, or having to hunt down all the gangbangers who now have acquired plasma weaponry and are probably after the Xenonauts for their boots. "Commander, are you aware that there is surplus weight capacity on the Chinook? Please tell your troops that having so many 'speed holes' in the alien bodies doesn't make them lighter, or our research easier." "...They were like that when we got there!" "While you're at it, please send the 55-gallon drum of recovered 9mm rounds back to the quartermaster with a sternly worded note to convert all rifles back to .223 or 5.56." "...That wasn't us!" "Oh, and Transport says they'll call those missing Hunter wheels combat-lossed, but you're on the hook for a replacement AM/FM/8-track. They also wonder how that happened when the driver says he only stepped out for two minutes to take a leak." "...I don't know if we should stage a recruiting drive there or just let the aliens have it." (*grew up an hour south of the D*)

Terror mission: The aliens are confident, we're dealing with trained commandos, overwhelming orgazational and technological superiority. Goal to cause as much havoc as possible. Pre-arrival, enemy troops would fan out individually, seek high spots for better fields of fire and less grouping. Post-arrival, depending on rank in charge, they could either see the Xenonauts as civvies to be slaughtered and persist in single-unit tactics until the kill count starts to climb, morale drops, and they begin to regroup and find somewhere defensible. If the commander is higher ranking, instead of waiting for the cannon fodder to start going down, their units could start to regroup quickly (first couple turns) and attempt to establish sniper perches and flanking positions. This gives the player an excuse to USE those rockets they've been saving. Landed UFO: The aliens are there for a reason, present in nominal quantities, and organized. There would be a perimeter around the UFO itself and fire support elements with the scouts, to protect them while they pick wild flowers, romance cattle, or whatever it is they're doing. Post-arrival, the scouts would fall back toward the perimeter and the advance guard would attempt to advance, suppress, and neutralize. As the kill count starts to climb there would be a retreat (organized, if the highest-ranking officer can override the morale of aliens for longer, blind panic otherwise) back toward the defended perimeter. This might start to tie into an idea where if the aliens have uncontested access to the ship or engine room for X turns, they can take off again. You left an interceptor on combat-air-patrol when you landed the skyranger, right? Crashed UFO: Depends on the highest-ranked officer whether they have enough presence of mind to establish a defensive perimeter (higher ranks = smarter positioning, higher terrain, covering fire, etc) and work to get the craft mobile again (landed turns x 1.5 to compensate for damage) or just all pull back to the engine room, hoping to get it airborne before the scary soldiers arrive, or (for very low-ranking officers, early-game) just run around randomly and shoot if they think they have a chance, but try to get away from their ship because it'll draw fire and they want to live. I like the idea of the local strategic situation changing depending on who's there and for what, and depending how savvy your commanding counterpart is. Especially for that feeling when a sniper and a rocketeer take out the highest ranking alien behind enemy lines and their whole strategy starts falling apart. No, it's not fair, because they can't take you out--unless Chris lets us have avatars--but the point is to progress, not be stymied in one map for six hours because Sectoid Rommel over there read all our books.

Sorry Chris, forgot to note that I was running the Realistic Aircraft mod