lemm
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Posts posted by lemm
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Well you could just as well argue that turn-based strategies could become the next craze, similar to this recent surge in popularity of indie "roguelike-likes" such as FTL, Spelunky, Convoy, etc.
EDIT: On second thought, just call it a rogue-like and it should sell well, regardless.
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It's great to hear that Goldhawk is investing in the long term by programming its own engine!
Would your engine be able to support simultaneous turn-based or even real-time tactical games? And will it have multiplayer capabilities?
Will your engine be able to be compiled to javascript so that we can play Goldhawk games in browser? I think that this would instantly make your game more accessible to prospective customers.
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I like Zoso's idea of selectively upgrading components of weapons classes. It's sort of like asking the player if he wishes to specialize in either laser, plasma, or ballistic weapons, but it's a bit more refined. Where possible, I think that the strategy layer might be made more interesting by following Max's advice and basing research around "unquantifiable virtues" rather than percentual boosts in any one category. For example, an upgrade that augments lasers by allowing them to reflect off of surfaces and an upgrade that enables control over the spread of the plasma shotgun would be more interesting than simply giving lasers a 5% damage boost or plasmas a 5% accuracy boost. There should be a mix of both quantitative and qualitative upgrades.
I understand that this thread is mostly about preliminary brainstorming, but the research tree really needs to be based around the specific statistics that are employed by the combat model of the battlescape. For example, will there be multiple types of damage? Then there should be armors that provide selective protection. Will there be armor penetration or armor degradation statistics? Then the ability to upgrade each of these statistics for one technology should be considered. It's like how Kevin Hann said to design the weapons around the enemies; well, you also need to design the upgrades around the types of weapon and armor stats.
Secondly, weapons should to have traits that make them useful (or useless) against certain GROUPS of foes, and enemies need to be susceptible to certain GROUPS of traits. Little strategic decision is demanded when there is only one appropriate tool that can be researched. If two choices are offered at each decision node of the game, however, then the strategy exponentiates accordingly. For example, damage type could be dealt as incendiary, kinetic, or concussive. Lasers and plasmas would deal incendiary damage, mags and ballistics would deal kinetic damage, while rockets would deal concussive damage. If you know the enemy is a soft target that is susceptible to incendiary damage, then you would choose to research one of lasers or plasmas. As a second example, mags and lasers might be considered "fast" weapons, while plasmas, rockets, and bullets could be considered "slow." If the enemy has a high dodge chance, then you would want to consider developing a fast technology.
There are a few prerequisites to following that model I just proposed.
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Enemies cannot have overly diversified traits, and their traits need to be hinted at in advance. If you always have a smorgasboard of enemies, each of which is susceptible to some different technology, then there isn't really any strategic decision makiing involved. Weaknesses need to persist on the geoscape for some length of time, and they need to be distributed heterogenously around the globe. - Decisions that are made now need to lock you into a particular path later on. If you're always given two weeks to prepare any technology you wish, then the game just becomes call and response. You need a partial picture of what's to come so that you can plan your path accordingly.
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The number of opportunities to make key decisions needs to be limited. This is what was so great about Faster than Light. You weren't able to buy a new weapon at every stop, and you were only allowed to carry a few items in your cargo bay. This meant that you had to carefully consider which weapons and ship upgrades to keep, and which that you should scrap. Just like enemies can't be overly diversified (in a single playthrough), neither can the potential to make decisions. You can limit decisions through increasing marginal cost to develop one technolgy, limiting the availability of certain materials or personnel, or providing some immediate combat pressure, to name a few ways.
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If we construct a brilliant and detailed weapon techtree and then pay attention to the enemies and try to fit them in the game will be a poorer experience for it.
That's an exceptional point, and probably the best one that has been made in this entire subforum. Coming up with new systems of research is fun and all, but at the end of the day, the tactical AI and the enemy behaviours are what make the game enjoyable to play, and all of the weapons and gadgetry need to enhance this aspect of the game. I agree that building up the research tree around the enemies, taking bits of inspiration from this thread, is definitely the way to go about things.
With that being said, here are my wacky ideas
A research menu
- There are now six broad research fields: e.g., Ballistics & Fluid Mechanics, Electromagnetism, Quantum Mechanics, Computing Science, Materials Science, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. The research wing of the Xenonauts has a score (an integer value) in each of these fields.
- Every research item, which includes both alien artifacts and new human devices, has a points threshhold and a points reward for one or more research fields. To be able to research the item, the Xenonauts organization must meet the threshhold score in all of the research fields. Once the item is researched, it grants a points reward that increases the Xenonauts score in those fields.
- The precise threshhold and rewards values might vary by +/10% each game to enhance replay value. However, missions can always provide alien trinkets that grant bonus research points in small quantities.
- An individual scientist could be skilled in one or more fields. It's along the lines of explicitly letting the player choose which tech path (e.g., plasmas or lasers) that he wants to focus on, but it makes use of the game mechanic that gives identities to scientists, as well as the "perk" system which was discussed in other threads.
Some ideas for Weapons in Combat
- Electric Current + Laser = Electrolaser. A short ranged hybrid plasma/laser weapon.
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. An advanced ballistics technology that requires sophisticated electronics.
- Perhaps special weaknesses could be randomized each game? For example, lasers might do 10% more against Caesans one game, but not the next. Might be hard to balance this mechanic, though.
- I think that if researchers are skilled in researching one particular technology, then soldiers should receive perks for one class of weapon (i.e., short ranged, rifles, or heavy), so that aptitude classes between researchers and soldiers are orthogonal to one another.
- Rockets and grenades can be can be shot down in mid-air by certain alien weapons, which would help to mitigate explosives spam.
- Additional ideas for laser weapons:
- Silent
- Incapable of destroying walls
- Accuracy penalty when shooting through windows, proportional to angle of incidence
- Damage penalty when shooting through smoke clouds
- Lasers can be used in conjunction with a portable, robotic reflecting/refracting device that is deployed by a scout. This robo-mirror could be used to bounce a laser shot in any direction, thereby allowing the sniper to shoot around corners. If both the alien and the sniper can see the mirror, then the sniper can shoot the alien.
Sonic Cannons? A third type of tier-two weapon?
I'm wondering if it might be interesting to have three types of tier-two weapons, with the expectation that the player could invest into two of them. Lasers would be weak but accurate over range, while plasmas would be stronger and quicker to shoot, but short-ranged. As a class, sonic weapons would provide good coverage over distance with good damage, but each type of sonic weapon would be completely useless outside OR inside of its intended target range. And, there would be other differences that I've summarized in this table. The properties decrease in importance from left to right.
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Regarding strength: What if being overweight increased the TU-cost for movement without taking a chunk of TUs off at the start of each turn? On top of that, heavy weapons would be made VERY heavy so that any player under a strength of 70 would not be able to wield a heavy weapon and armor without taking a movement penalty.
@kabill: That's a good point about players abusing the reaction fire mechanism. I guess it is better to design the game so that the player needs to get most of his kills on his turn.
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Re. Strength:
Strength wasn't a very impactful statistic in XCOM or Xenonauts because an operative usually developed it to a sufficient level after a few missions. In Xenonauts, the Predator Armor made strength irrelevant; the fact that the best Xenonaut squad composition was a Medic and 11 guys in Predator Armor with Magstorms made it completely irrelevant. If strength never appreciably increases, however, then it becomes a very important factor to consider when signing an operative. (Regardless, I think that most players could figure out what strength does after about five minutes.)
Anyway, gunpowder weapons are only relevant for the first quarter of the the game. Lasers and whatnot can have limited magazines for technical reasons. Maybe the larger star wars guns require a giant backpack that is bulky, but not necessarily heavy, which limits the soldier to 50 shots or so. That being said, the game could just be designed so that soldiers can carry 150 rounds. There is zero ammo management in Frozen Synapse, for example, and it has a very enjoyable combat system.
Re. Reactions:
Spoiler: lengthy preamble
When I play Xenonauts, I get the vast majority of my kills on my own turn by sending ahead a spotter with a shield and then sniping the alien with riflemen. (Later on in the game, I end up sniping them with Plasma Casters and Magstorms because these weapons are ridiculously accurate). Perhaps 10% of my kills come from reaction fire. When they do, it's often in a scenario where I'm just camping outside a passage or door with my entire squad. In this scenario, good reaction stats really aren't even necessary if I'm going to encounter an alien that has half of its TU remaining when it's spotted. It doesn't help matters when the computer decides to take the crappiest shot possible, as soon as the alien gets into range.
Compared to XCOM, reactions in Xenonauts aren't that useful on your own turn because face-checking corners and doors was made safer with the addition of shields, stun grenades, and suppressing fire. Secondly, it's a lot harder to kill stuff in one hit in Xenonauts, whereas humans and most enemies often died in one hit to a Heavy Plasma or Sonic cannon in XCOM. This means that, in XCOM, the risk of trying to get a reaction kill was offset by a correspondingly high reward; in Xenonauts, it means that you're still going to get shot even if you do get the alien right as it walks around the corner.
Anyway, I think the reason that TUs are a far more useful statistic compared to reactions is because the player is far more capable of killing stuff on his turn, just because of the way the game works. However, a quick idea for a modification might be to allow the reacting player to "borrow" time units from his next turn based upon his reaction statistic. In addition to using the TUs you've banked up, you can also use (<reaction stat> * <constant>) TUs from the next turn. An interruption mechanism that interrupts you when you see an alien, before it's about to perform an action, and before it disappears from sight, and allows the player to take a shot or continue the alien activity might also be a good addition to Xenonauts 2.
Re. Accuracy:
I wonder if Accuracy could be modulated by accounting for the speed of the target and the duration that he has been in the shooter's vision. Dunno if it would be useful, but just an idea.
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[video=youtube;l2Cjc3fWFvs]
Has anyone bought this? It's a visually appealing simultaneous turn based tactical game, (i.e. frozen synapse + good graphics). It only has a skirmish mode at the moment, though you can play it online against a human opponent.
This is my favorite turn-based tactical model. It's far more exciting than the XCOM model to me, and I think it's more difficult because you can't just immediately run back to cover once you see an enemy.
Would be a good model for Xenonauts 2, IMO
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Questions regarding air combat, and how this ties in to the global mobility of the Xenonauts:
- Are the humans going to be downing wave after wave of alien craft? I got the impression that the aliens were planning more of a covert operation than they did in Xenonauts 1. I was thinking that it might fit the clandestine theme of the game a bit better if downing a UFO was a rather significant event; perhaps fewer than twenty UFOs would spotted over the course of the game, and fewer than that would actually be downed or captured. It just seems to me like it might be difficult for the aliens to disguise their influence if a bunch of UFOs are whizzing about all over the place while they lay waste to cities. To compensate for the reduction in UFO crash sites, however, you might see the same UFO multiple times, and perhaps just damaging it could be effective for retarding alien activity.
- Are events going to remain on the Geoscape for days until they are addressed by the Xenonauts, or will you be more severely penalized if you aren't on the scene within hours? I get the feeling that the player is supposed to have a prescient presence, judging by the local force mechanic.
- Should the player immediately get a global force? Will the dropship that uses alien technology even be capable of carrying 6 squad members right away?
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I agree that lengthy alien missions which are concentrated in some geographic region would be more strategically interesting than random alien races spawning at random locations all over the globe. If every variable is randomized as it is in XCOM or Xenonauts 1, then for each playthrough, the player has to pick the same catch-all strategy for each game. On the other hand, if each individual link within the chain has some unifying element, then you can tailor your long-term strategy to the scenario. That being said, even a good strategy should only provide a significant boost in the tactical game, rather than turn each battle in the event chain into a cake walk. As you mentioned, the game must provide you with a method to gather information about a mission in advance of its launch, for if there's no way to alter your long-term strategy, the mechanic itself is rather useless.
Each alien mission should force the player to think about how to alter his strategy across several categories:
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Technology: What technologies should the player research and develop?
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Squad Composition: What soldier stats should the player be developing? How many soldiers will he need for the upcoming engagement?
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Battlefield intelligence: Will the engagement take place in one area, and what type of terrain will dominate?
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Political relations: Will you need to spend resources to garner favor with the local authority, or will you be able to accomplish your mission without their knowledge?
For example, if one mission involves the caesans invading and attempting to activate one of several possible nuclear silos in a small geographic area, you would need a fast, short ranged landing craft. You'd need more close-ranged weaponry and shields, because you'll be fighting in a facility, and not on land. Since the caesans can launch telepathic attacks, you'd need to leave the mental wimps at home. Maybe the Caesans have developed the telekinetic ability that allows them divert the trajectories of objects in flight. In this case, convential firearms, rockets, and grenades would not be as effective, so you'd need to stock up on beam weapons if possible.
Lastly, I would prefer it if I didn't see the same five alien missions each time. Maybe something like two dozen missions, two to three per alien race, would be an adequately large pool.
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Technology: What technologies should the player research and develop?
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To clarify - this idea has been somewhat put on hold with the current version of the design we have in our heads. It may get resurrected in the future but right now we're planning for you to represent all of humanity (although you have to work with both powers to ensure their DEFCON levels both remain low), and there's no "mirror" organisation to compete with.
If NATO, the Soviets, and the Xeonauts all have relations with one another and everyone is aware of the alien invasion, then how is it not immediately obvious that the aliens are trying to start a nuclear war, particularly if the latter party acts as something of a mediator between the first two?
First of all, how and why are the aliens trying to start a nuclear war?
Do the Xenonauts somehow become aware of the alien plot to start a nuclear war from the start of the game?
Do the Xenonauts have relations with both the NATO and the Soviets, or are they just known to the member states of each organization? (In other words, do you have a political relations score for each of the ten regions, while the goal is to suppress the NATO and Soviet DEFCON levels?)
If NATO and the Soviets are aware of your presence, is either organization aware that you have relations with the other organization?
Do NATO and the Soviets even view you as an allied force, and not as a nuisance?
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I agree with the shift in the design philosophy that you've presented. Before, it seemed like you were trying to brainstorm a way in which the Cold War could be shoehorned into the standard XCOM Geoscape model. Now, you're redesigning the Geoscape model from the ground up so that it fits the Cold War scenario. It's like tailoring the trousers to fit the man rather than hacking his leg off at the ankle with a rusty blade. Great proposal!
I like the changes to the research model, because the linearity of the research in XCOM and Xenonauts doesn't offer much replay value. Since you mentioned bit about the additional alien metal, I am wondering if there will be instances of multiple research items on the same tier? For example, level 2A-ablative armor protects against plasma, lasers, and fire, while level 2B-kinetic armor is resistant to projectiles? (Personally, I think that an XCOM with a dozen different core technologies arranged in a "research net" would be neat, albeit difficult to balance. Maybe a neat idea for a mod
) Secondly, does the other political sphere have its own research program as well? Will the player ever trade information with the other side?I like the idea of letting the player place his orders and then letting the simulation play out. Originally, I did think that the air combat in Xenonauts was a nifty tactical mini-game (supplemented with awesome background music), but it was designed so that the player could vastly augment the capabilities of his aircraft by frequently pausing the simulation and tweaking the flight paths of his airplanes. Upon entering the dogfight, you immediately knew whether or not you could win a battle outright, and the predictable nature of the AI combined with the constant pausing made the whole sequence feel more like a chore than an engaging tactical puzzle. While you could refine and complicate the air combat game for Xenonauts 2, it would probably be better just to reduce it to the simplified risk-reward mechanic that you've proposed, which I think is more suitable for the strategy layer of the game.
I will say that I think that a more complicated Air combat model would still work, so long as the player is restricted to giving discrete orders to his aircraft. By discrete orders, I mean that the player can never supply any continuous value to the simulation as input. For example, the player could tell an aircraft pilot either to hit the afterburners and chase the UFO or to roll away and break its pursuit, but he couldn't alter its throttle with a slider control. Maybe he could tell an aircraft to bank left or to do a somersault, but he couldn't set a waypoint for it on a Cartesian plane. The air combat sequence might pause every five seconds for you to reissue orders, but you would never be able to immediately freeze the simulation at an arbitrary time to issue new orders. I'm just estimating, here, but I think that a good number for the total number of discrete combinations of orders that the player could issue his aircraft would be between 50 and 200. But, a smaller number of total possible combinations could work as well.
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This thread is intended to explore the ways that could happen and if, fundamentally, a squad-based tactics game would be able to support this sort of thing.
Why, yes, I do think a squad-based tactics game could support this sort of thing, though I think it means parting with the traditional XCOM Geoscape mechanic. I don't think that this is a bad idea, because the XCOM Geoscape (that is, everything outside of the Battlescape, which includes research and production), never offered very much strategic depth or replay value.
Here's an outline for a new Geoscape mechanic that I thought of, which is inspired by the Rogue-like elements found in the Indie Game, Faster-Than-Light, as well as SwarmSim, a game that belongs to the Cookie-Clicker genre, and the XCOM-without-bases idea that you mentioned.
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The new Geoscape is supposed to require more deep strategic thought than it did in XCOM and Xenonauts, games in which the Geoscape was more or less a series of tasks that acted as the glue that held the Battlescape missions together. The key difference between the new Geoscape and that of the old XCOM games is that the Xenonauts are not the sole defenders of Earth; rather, they serve to augment Earth's defense and to retard the alien onslaught by spearheading both the combat AND the research initiatives
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The Xenonauts organization serves as the Vanguard defense, rather than the only force that is capable of shooting down UFOs. While the player sees the movement of army troops and aircraft wings on the the Geoscape, these forces and the battles which they fight are handled by the AI. Using his handful of elite pilots and squaddies who are equipped with the best weaponry, the player needs to intercept the most dangerous alien craft in order to retrieve the newest technology so that it can be reverse engineered. That is, while the human defense forces are capable of shooting down scouts, the Xenonauts are busy seeking out corvettes.
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In addition to acting as the Vanguard defense, the Xenonauts are also spearheading the research initiative. They are the ones who develop the methods required to produce the increasingly powerful weapons that are eventually circulated to the national defense forces. They do not directly protect the Earth from every alien aggressor like some band of heroes in a comic book. Rather, they protect the Earth by modulating the terrestrial defense forces. The effects of a failed mission are felt later on down the road.
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The resource management game is much different, because the player no longer has a cash budget, and he no longer has a central base. The Xenonauts are able to use governmental facilities, which exist in the dozens or in the hundreds depending on the the type of the facility, so long as adequate relations are maintained with the nation that owns the facilities and so long as the facility remains intact. If a facility is reduced to rubble, its reconstruction will take many months. However, the longer a facility is protected and supplied, the faster it will be able to level up, thereby enabling it to produce more advanced weaponry and devices.
- In addition to shooting down UFOs and retrieving the alien artifacts, the Xenonauts must make sure that the technology arrives at the research lab and that the lab is protected until the research there is complete. To make matters just a little more interesting (and to increase replay value), each research lab is only able to handle a particular class of alien artifacts (e.g., small arms, personal armor, medical devices, and so on), and each research lab must reach a sufficient experience level before it can process a more advanced alien artifact. Additionally, some research projects might require additional shipments of a particular alien artifact before the project can be completed, because a project might just unexpectedly fail.
- Like research labs, factories would gain experience and become more productive as they produce more devices, assuming that they are not reduced to rubble. Like research labs, they are only able to produce certain types of devices. As the game progresses, factories naturally level up at a basal rate; however, the Xenonauts can accelerate the development of a factory by supplying it with the resources that it requires to produce goods. They provide a resource sink for the player to dump the spoils of combat. However, it might be better if factories were merged with research laboratories, as both of these elements operate almost identically.
- Radar and Hangars are just placed randomly around the map; Radar grants vision for the Xenonauts, and their Troops and Airplanes can recuperate at Hangars.
- The game is still a race against time, for the aliens will eventually overwhelm the Earth. It is the job of the Xenonauts to prolong the resistance movement for long enough while they develop a formidable strike team that can disable the alien mothership.
Of course, if you want the Geoscape to remain as a fancy intermission between battles, then this is all way too complicated. On the other hand, I don't know about increasing the number of airplanes, because then it seems weird if the player commands dozens of aircraft but only 10 soldiers. I was trying to think of a method by which the actions of a small band of elite agents could be propagated and amplified so that they would have major ramifications down the line.
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The new Geoscape is supposed to require more deep strategic thought than it did in XCOM and Xenonauts, games in which the Geoscape was more or less a series of tasks that acted as the glue that held the Battlescape missions together. The key difference between the new Geoscape and that of the old XCOM games is that the Xenonauts are not the sole defenders of Earth; rather, they serve to augment Earth's defense and to retard the alien onslaught by spearheading both the combat AND the research initiatives
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Ideas:
Perhaps the Wraiths could only be able to teleport to a special orb that they carry. They can either drop the orb or cast it like a grenade, and it is activated after a single turn.
Insectoid aliens? A large mantid creature that runs around and slashes its victims. A terrier-sized arachnomorph that climbs up walls and latches on to the heads of its victims. Maybe a burrowing worm that can snatch its prey from beneath the sands. Or a kamikaze dragonfly alien that explodes in a shower of caustic goo when it reaches its target.
What about alien flora as an area-denial weapon? It can't be stopped with projectiles, but fire is very effective at containing it.
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Okay, so mechanically, the game is aliens + another competing faction. Well that sounds neat, and it lends itself to a possible multiplayer mode, but I'm still not sold on why the aliens are out to get us.
How about this for a story:
Maybe this time, the Praetors don't want to steal our DNA, but they want to conduct a social experiment / reality TV show. They've been searching the galaxy to find an advanced, sentient race locked in a bipolar geopolitical situation, and as luck would have it, they've stumbled across Earth in the 1970s. For their own research / amusement, the Praetors begin to artificially accelerate the existing arms race by introducing alien technology in the form of captive species, one UFO wave at a time. Ostensibly, the aliens that they send are out to take over Earth, but in reality, they have been attenuated so that the humans can capture them. The Praetor mothership looms in the distance, ready to unleash hellfire upon humanity should the experiment go awry.
Now, the Praetors are clever about this. They don't want either political bloc to have knowledge that the other political bloc has recovered any alien technology, for this might lead to a political denouement if all of humanity were suddenly aware that alien life was out there. Naturally, neither political bloc would want to reveal knowledge of their technology to the other side, either. But the Praetors eventually mess up. A small percentage of the aliens they send (the higher ranking ones, I guess) have not been fully attenuated. Somehow, these aliens have learned of this terrible experiment and they are able to convey this message to the Xenonaut organization. The Xenonauts learn that they have a mirror organization of which they were completely unaware, all this time.
Having learned of this, what are the Xenonauts to do? Do they alert their NATO or Soviet patrons and contact their mirror organization, thereby alerting the Praetors that they have become wise to the scheme and risking an immediate containment strike by the Praetors against the Earth? Or, do the Xenonauts sit there quietly, hoping that their counterparts receives the same message and that they are also wise enough to play along. Maybe this message never comes, and no one is the wiser. In this case the NATO or Soviet patrons will eventually become restless and seize the technology for themselves in order to launch a decapitation strike against the other political bloc. Perhaps the Xenonauts might even have to fend off raids from their own sponsors. Maybe they need to shoot down aircraft from their own faction to prevent a nuclear war, or to aid their shadow counterparts in retrieving technology!
Anyway, the ultimate goal of the game is to unite with your Ruskie Xenonauts and to defeat the big, bad alien boss so that humanity is free from this experiment before it is destroyed, either by itself or by aliens. I've described this like a story, but really, it could be handled like a Rogue-like game, in which a subset of the the complete set of events are generated for each game. The key point to this whole thing is that there are a few months of dormancy, and then a big war starts all of the sudden. The other key point, if you're allowed to have two key points, is that you don't control what your patron organization does, and you have to treat them as potentially hostile, because ultimately only you can save Earth (which is made clear by the game).
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Well, it seems like Xenonauts 2 is quickly becoming a video-game-mechanic rationalization simulator. Sort of like Xenonauts 1, but now in 3D!
What exactly are these aliens doing, anyway? I wonder if the reason that you're having problems to devise a believable war scenario is because the behaviour of the aliens doesn't fit with their intentions. In Xenonauts, the Praetors were genetic scavengers who travelled the galaxy for the purpose of integrating the essence of newly discovered sentient life forms into their own genomes. Well, why didn't they just probe one human and then death-ray the rest of the planet? Or, why didn't they just take one human and then continue on their merry way? Why, oh why, do all of these alien fleets send in progressively stronger sorties, one-by-one, only to have them shot down? It's like they're trying to select for alien-resistant humans!
I like the idea of incorporating political relations into the game, and I think it's something with which you should thought-experiment in all variety of ways, because it works well as a core mechanic. It's a mechanic left unsatisfactorily explored by XCOM clones, in my opinion.
What about leaving the Xenonauts as their own neutral organization, financed either by a rogue billioniare or by the Citizens Against Alien Invasion public advocacy group? The Xenonauts organization has to score political points with both NATO and the Soviets in order to expand its operations around the globe. However, winning too much favor from one organization might prevent you from interacting with another organization. That way, you're exploiting the Cold War mythos, but you're not explicitly forcing the player to play "as" NATO or the Soviets. (Then again, I'm sure that many individuals would like to play as both factions because it would mean that they could use two different sets of ballistic weaponry). There could be a bunch of rival Xenonauts organizations who get in your way.
A more complicated idea that I had was to convert the Praetors into intergalactic Freemasons, who control other species politically and coerce them to form large, intragalactic military expeditions for the purpose of bringing the entire galaxy under their control. This would mean that the alien races who attack earth are actually very factionalized, and that the player could play one against another. Well, it's just an idea
I also like the idea of renting vision from the host territory, and it might be a good idea to do away with bases altogether, provided that you still retain some form of resource management and weapon production.
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I enjoyed Xenonauts throughout its development and in its finished state, but for your own sanity, do you really want to spend another 2-3 years to make the same game over again, considering that everyone and his dog has made an XCOM clone before you? Personally, I think it would be a waste of your creative efforts. Anyway, to answer your questions:
Would you buy a Xenonauts remake?
No, I don't think I would, unless you made it sufficiently different from Xenonauts 1. I enjoy single-player games partially for their novelty value, and there won't be much of that in a remake of a remake of XCOM. I'd much rather play in a different setting, like underwater or on a giant space station, or even as the alien faction. However, the vanilla, terrestrial-surface setting would be acceptable if the combat system or the tech tree were radically different than that in the original game. I need something new, and a graphical face-lift just isn't enough. Besides, what you're describing sounds essentially like UFO Afterlight/math/shock.
What annoyed me most about Xenonauts?
I think that the combat AI was the most lackluster aspect of the whole game. It wasn't terrible, but it never seemed like the alien squad was working as a cohesive unit. I wonder if it would be possible to make the computer learn from games between two human opponents (assuming that you had a multiplayer mode).
Oh right, the missions got monotonous after awhile. Yeah there were a few base raids and terror sites now and then, but 90% of the game was the same thing. You could definitely be more creative with regards to mission types.
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I searched this sub-forum for the term, "multiplayer," and I didn't get any hits, so I guess I'll be the first to ask: are there plans to add a multiplayer mode, either co-op or arena deathmatch?
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Borrowing from Starcraft 2 campaign missions, here are some ideas for minor objectives:
1. Stop a train (or convoy) that is carrying supplies. I suppose that this would be a CP supply cache on rails. Maybe it could move around the Overworld.
2. Collect > 50% of some item before your enemy does. In the SC2 campaign, you had to collect 100 zerg eggs before the AI did. I don't know how this could easily be applied to Pathfinders lore though. Maybe obtaining a critical mass of some fissile material before your enemy does? The point is that you have to get over 50% or you fail the mission; no partial credit is awarded here.
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One tactic that the pathfinders could use would be to disarm an installation through deception. They might be able to steal a password or fake a communication from an important, high-ranking individual, which could trigger the guards at the target location to relax. "Cutting off the head" is an important tactic in asymmetric warfare.
Regarding looting as a game play mechanic, I think that it can help to serve as a soft-checkpoint, provided that the items that can be looted are a couple of tech-levels behind whatever the highest tech-level is attainable at some arbitrary checkpoint in the game. Speaking of which, how are you planning on addressing tech-level progression? The thing I hated the most about JA2 was that your squad of elite mercenaries was armed with nothing but handguns at the start of the game, which is simply absurd. Do we just start with the best guns available from the command post, albeit in short supply?
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tl;dr: Will time be linear?
The 72-hour preparation period is reminiscent of the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, in which the protagonist, Link, has three days to prevent the moon from crashing into the Earth. The key mechanism of this game, however, was that the player had to periodically rewind time in order to complete the game. The game was cleverly designed so that Link would experience several different 72-hour chronologies on each iteration after time was rewound. If this was a defense simulator like X-Com, I wouldn't have mentioned this mechanism, but the fact that each character will be permanently coded into the game, so to speak, means that Pathfinders could have a little more of an RPG-feel to it, if that's your intent.
Such a mechanism doesn't have to require time-travel technology. The player could reach a node in the game that would trigger a flashback sequence. For example, perhaps the player controls the core Pathfinder squad for 24 hours, at which point it is revealed to the player that there is a pathfinder who has been taken captive by the enemy forces. The game would then switch back to t-minus 72 from the perspective of the captive, and the player would control the captive pathfinder for 24 hours through a liberation mission, at which point he is reunited with the core pathfinder force. Success in the liberation mission is rewarded by one of several tactical advantages can be gained, but exactly *which* advantage depends on the route by which the player is able to free the captive agent.
I think that this sort of mechanism could serve as one of the "Minor objectives" that you mentioned in the Strategic Objectives thread, while also augmenting the replayability of the game.
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I like the idea of a less linear tech tree. But the game should give you hints as to which research path you need to go down.
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I looked through the discussions and stickies, but I couldn't find any explicit mission statement for the community edition. Is it just supposed to be an enhanced version of the vanilla game, a whole new game, just a toy that a few people tinker with, or what? I did read that it could be used as a base for modding, but I didn't see any definite "end goals."
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The US army has a microwave gun that it can be used for crowd control.
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I second Gauddlike's opinion in that I don't think that the battlescape needs to be aligned to a grid, and a grid definitely doesn't automatically make the game simpler or quicker. A grid works well for Xenonauts (which is essentially a fancy board game). For a 3D world, however, I think that an aura that highlights the ground to demarcate the maximum range that a unit can move on its turn allows for a more natural-looking environment. Of course, the 3D-world can be aligned to a grid (either hexagonal or rectangular), but the art and level design has to be more carefully crafted in order to support that decision.
Another important point is that a well-designed battlescape allows the player to move units quickly when there is no action, but it also allows for a decent amount of complexity and precision management during the big engagements. For example, TFTD had horrendously long missions, partly because the player was forced to move units one-by-one until the last alien was eliminated. In contrast, JA2 and Xenonauts got around this by allowing some form of simultaneous unit movement. The new XCOM does away with time units altogether, which I believe was a good design decision.
I hope that the "Big Game" has a more well-developed geoscape than either Xenonauts or XCOM did. Xenonauts was an improvement over XCOM in terms of logistic simplification (i.e., not having to ensure that your base didn't run out of ammo, grenades, and paper clips), and Xenonauts was FAR more balanced than XCOM, thanks in part to the amount of beta testing it received. But I think that there were a few critical issues that reduced the depth of Xenonauts, mostly at the level of the Geoscape. Of course, the game was supposed to be a spiritual successor to XCOM, so this linear style of gameplay was justified.
But, I digress. Every game of Xenonauts (and XCOM) plays out identically. You always start with the same base (optimally positioned in the Middle East), and then you're besieged by the exact same waves of increasingly beefier aliens, whose equipment you salvage in order to progress down the same, linear tech tree. And to top it off, the final showdown is always the same thing. In order to improve the depth of an XCOM-style game:
- The geoscape could be randomized for every game, as it's a sci-fi setting and you're no longer restricted to fighting over the entire Earth.
- The research path could be vastly expanded and furcated so that the player is no longer able to get everything in one game. Perhaps, instead of just laser guns and jackal armor, there are three types of tier-one weapons and two types of tier-1 armor, each of which has its own unique strength and weakness.
- There could be different types of missions, each of which would require a different distribution of types of operatives or weapons.
Finally, I hope that some form of a multiplayer mode is added. At the minimum, a deathmatch style mode would be nice, but there is a lot of opportunity for creativity in making a massively-multiplayer-campaign-mode that takes place in a persistent universe. For example, two teams of ten players could wage war in a game that takes place over the course of two weeks. I'm inspired by the concept of the (imaginary) board game, Risktego, the game of Risk where every battle is decided not by throwing the dice, game of Stratego. To translate that to an XCOM style game, the decisions at the geoscape level would have to be made communally or by a team captain, but each battle would be assigned to a single player, and battles would have to be able to be played out concurrently.
Xenonauts 2 - Crafted Weapons / Armour
in Xenonauts 2 Discussion / Suggestions
Posted
I like this idea a lot more. I'd rather have a more complicated tech-tree or crafting system and no engineers than to have both a rigid tech tree and a simple production system. I think there is more strategic potential with the former system.
Yeah. "The guns have names," so to speak. Losing a weapon is just as painful as losing an operative.
There should be some stiff penalty to recycle a gun into its component parts of alien origin. Actions with lasting consequences increase the strategic depth of the game.