Just a dream of mine I've had for a while, as unlikely to ever see the light of day as... oh, I don't know, Simon Cowell having a soul lurking somewhere in the dark, fetid recesses of himself, but I thought I'd share it anyway and perhaps it might excite someone else too.
X-Com will forever be one my desert island games but I always secretly wanted there to be a PVP option, where one player could take the role of the invading aliens and the other as X-Com. You would have to build and manage your UFO fleet, research the technologies to allow invasion, breed new troops in vats, run drop missions to pick up humans for anal probing, or cows for... um... let's just say fun and draw a veil over it. Essentially the same epic management game but with an alien twist, and of course entering direct battle with the other X-Com player on the ground.
The aliens might be a degenerate, cloned race, with no genetic diversity. The reason to abduct humans is to build up a DNA bank for developing enhanced alien lifeforms - a kind of artificial evolution if you will. So if they captured a brainy human, this would provide some DNA for vat-grown smarter aliens with stronger psi powers or research speed; capturing someone tough, strong, or an eagle-eye shot would enable the aliens to incorporate those capabilities into their breeding programme. The DNA would be like tech points in the ship design part of 4x TBS - i.e. you could design an alien using the DNA resources which you'd captured.
However each DNA sample would only provide a small improvement in those skills, and may even have some disadvantages (e.g. nerd DNA may increase soldier psi skills and perception, but reduce strength, accuracy, morale etc.) , so you would have to make a choice whether to focus on a core skill for an alien species, make a generalist all-rounder without any particular strengths, or hold back from releasing a new species until you have enough DNA of the type you want, to spend it on making a seriously powerful species, but in the meantime your existing soldiers get relatively weaker against X-COM, who are continuously researching new tech and levelling-up soldiers as in the vanilla game.
Part of the alien tech tree would be devices for detecting DNA traits in humans before capture - initially the aliens would capture humans and not know what kind of DNA they'd got until genetic analysis on the mothership. This would support the strategy of focussing on particular attributes to develop your alien soldiers and scientists. Aliens could eventually establish and build secret bases on Earth too, and both sides could expend valuable time and resource in trying to locate and destroy each other's bases via the tactical battlescape.
Oh well, it's nice to think about. I'm just ridiculously happy to have Xenonauts sitting on my hard drive right now, and to see that there is still a great market and community for TBS games.
Goldhawk, you guys rock, thank you and keep that sh*t up!
