Hovis

I'd probably buy a new one. Loved the first one. I think the thing to do would be to increase the scale. I think something that was missing from Xenonauts is the ability from the original games to go into fights massively mob-handed. I would tie this to an expansion of squad management. What I'd do, for example, is say that a Xenonaut squad is up to eight soldiers. I'd assign those soldiers from the soldier pool and then designate a leader from the group and a second in command. Then when it comes time to stick them in a dropship I wouldn't have a ship with troops assigned to it, I'd pick a dropship and then pick the squads that I want to put in that dropship. So if I send three squads, I'd have 24 troops in the mission, 3 squad leaders, 3 second in commands, and the leaders would confer morale bonuses upon the troops if they were nearby. If the squads get chewed up, I'd rotate fresh squads in for next time. This would allow for larger troop deployments with less hassle on the dropship setup screen, especially if you had a specific mission in mind- you could make capture squads or anti-mech squads or rescue teams or whatever. Maybe consider the possibility of multiple dropships. So maybe I send one from one base, it reaches the target and can wait, and then a second arrives and then the troops go in. I think the air combat thing would need a look. I think what you should do is have a big think about what the Alien doctrine would be for achieving air superiority, if that's even what they want, and what the whole world would do to counter it. The idea that the world's air forces defer completely to an organisation equipped with a handful of F-16s at the start of the game doesn't sit right. I suggest maybe adding the option to allow local air forces to engage any UFO that appears over a country equipped to deal with it. So if I've got a base in the USA and I detect an alien ship (much like the air strike option) I ought to be able to let the local boys handle it. And maybe, especially later in the game, they won't be able to and this wouldn't be possible, or it would be viewed negatively. As with ground forces I think the air combat should scale up. You might also want to consider ground based anti-air as something the player could invest in, and as something countries might already have in order to help. Ditto for radar systems. Again though, this help from countries ought to be something that loses significance as the campaign goes on. Maybe early UFOs can be brought down with heavy surface to air missiles, maybe later ones shoot them down. With the ground battles I'd also step up the local involvement, angry mobs, local soldiers and cops, these should be a heavy presence, but fairly early in the game they should become almost irrelevant. But they should still be there to add to the ambiance and the odd rare tale of a SWAT team killing an alien. Things like terror missions should be scaled up, maybe a terror mission should consist of multiple fights, require multiple dropships. Maybe three fights, one on the perimeter, one on the surface getting close to the enemy, and then one at the hub of whatever it is the aliens are doing. Maybe they're digging in a mini-base in the sewers or in a building. Maybe their ship is sort of nesting on the ground and needs to be captured. In the first game cities were destroyed if a terror mission got out of hand, but there was little sense that the fights were so severe as to warrant it. Maybe terror missions should be made a bigger deal. In general I think that the Xenonauts should have a greater sense of home field advantage, which means an abundance of people, money, conventional wargear. It's just that as the campaign progresses these things would be less useful.

I'm not against the idea of the mod being hard, what I mean is that making it this hard on the very first mission is the wrong way to go about it. That is to say, it is very easy to make that first mission hard, the player has no idea what they are facing and a squad of rookies. If the only way to do that mission is to come at it with a really heavily specialised approach (that I would have no way of knowing about without reading up on the forum first), then that's not the best design. How are you going to challenge the player later in the game if you've already played the 'Your Guns Don't Hurt The Enemy' card on day one? I mean after this first mission, any mission where the enemy actually drop when I shoot them is going to feel like a cakewalk.

So... Fired up the mod and am trying to do my first crash site. And I thought I'd give some feedback, just on that first mission. All the aliens are immune to weapons fire. Got a small ship of Sebillians and everything I throw at them is either resisted or almost immediately healed, even multiple grenade hits in the same turn. They're even shrugging off machinegun bursts. A few turns of that and I was like, "Nope." It seems to have fallen into the XCOM trap of putting the difficulty at the front of the game. I mean whatever happens from this point, the missions can't physically/mathematically get any harder than this, because it doesn't get more difficult than impossible. A good difficulty curve starts at its lowest point and goes up. I can see the temptation from a design point of view to set out the mod's hardcore credentials early in the game, but this is a temptation that ought to be resisted, I think, because it means that the first mission inevitably fails, thus has to be savescummed or the game restarted, and that's not a good start to playing a mod. Part of the fun of an X-Com type game is learning as you go and being able to overcome things as you go. I might be able to drop those Sebillians on my next time I do the mission, but only because I know what to expect and will plan ahead. It won't be as good as a result. A good fix might be to remove Sebillians from the first wave. The first mission in an X-Com game should be special. It should be nerve wracking, it should be painful, but it shouldn't be too hard. You should be able to do it with the stock group of soldiers and equipment on your first go.

This. I never go into an alien ship without a shotgun or carbine if I can help it. The reactions bonuses on their own are worth the price of admission. If you open a door or have to grab some cover or need to get a shot down first, the carbine is your friend. I've lost plenty of riflemen to reaction shots because the poor swine were just too slow on the draw. The close range damage is also extremely nice. Masses of damage, low AP cost, again it's the sort of thing that saves lives on an enemy spaceship.

Yeah I can see how that might happen. If the calculations the AI is doing to work out where to go and what to do are based on what is going on around them (as they obviously must be) then having loads of units in play could mess that all up. So far just buffing squad size on stock alien numbers has been tolerably stable though, so what I think I'll do is stick to that and maybe buff some other aspect of the alien game plan to even it out.

Thanks for the info, I didn't know that just increasing the numbers would cause crashes (thought my PC would handle it easily) but that might explain why I've been having the odd one or two crashes since messing with the game. The advantage of more Xenonauts is that, despite doing more missions, you can do them faster if you want to and are willing to eat the extra casualties and throw caution to the wind. This is something I like, as with a smaller but more experienced team of troops you have to be a lot more careful. So far it is balancing quite well against Veteran difficulty. If this was the normal game I'd be getting battered, mostly due to the lack of interceptors more than anything. On this difficulty individual aliens can be very deadly, especially when breaching ships, so that element of the balance seems to have sorted itself out. I haven't tested against anything bigger than a corvette yet on this build. Just about to crack open a landing ship. So that'll be a learning experience.

In my experiments with the I suppose you'd call it beta version of what I'm planning, even with sixteen troops night missions (on veteran) are absolutely lethal, so adding the time pressure could be a good thing. I want the player to really get a sense that every team they send out is going to get chopped up if they are not on the ball. With regards to losing, I was thinking that perhaps the aliens might just try to wipe out the Xenonaut bases? In theory you could still lose by all the normal methods, it's just with a big wedge of cash backing you up it's harder to actually do that. I have yet to give much thought to how I'll balance the invasion itself to match the increased Xenonaut resources. Maybe more bombers and fighters and more escorted ships.

Thanks for the info. I didn't know the Chinook used to be short ranged. Might leave that alone then, or just leave it to preference. The grenade launcher could be a pickle then. I was hoping it'd just be a case of scaling down something with the exactly same functionality of a rocket launcher and fiddling the stats to match. Can figure that out later though it's not really vital I suppose.

Alas my timing has been off with it. Every time I start a campaign the game updates or, as in the case of my last campaign before this one, hits launch. This has meant I've not had a new game lined up on a stable build to experiment with til now. I'm in the middle of my first playthrough since live with a few tweaks here and there. That means I've not had the chance to test the mod out yet. I've watched a couple of videos of it though and it's a bit different from what I'm aiming for. I kind of want to preserve the low-tech tone of the game, but increase the scale of it while keeping to that. So I wouldn't be changing things like weapon TU costs or reload times and so on. More troops, more burning, more bases and more battles. Most stuff wouldn't change from the original game, there'd just be more of it.

Hokay so I've been playing Xenonauts off and on for months, and now it's hit v1 I figured I'd try to put on my modding shoes and kick it into the shape I want it to be. And I figured I'd ask you guys for help, because other than a few config tweaks I don't know what the funge I'm doing. I've tested a basic version of this mod out, but I want to go to the next level with it. So here is the concept. I want to make Xenonauts less a small scale group and beef the whole thing up to being more like how I imagine it might be, a bloated, supremely well funded and heavily staffed operation. The caveat here of course, is that the best humanity has to offer might as well be Mayans against heavily armed alien conquistadors. The duration of the game and the number of missions involved would increase, because you'd be able to set up global coverage very quickly and intercept most if not everything that comes in. What I'm hoping to change is: 1. Funding. Loads of money. Absolutely tons of the stuff. The point here is that the Xenonaut program should want for nothing on Earth. This means more personnel, more bases in operation, and from the get-go a general sense that you are running a full blown military operation. I love Xenonauts as is, but this will be a change to a grander, more epic fight. The challenge would not so much be survival and victory, because you'd probably have no problem achieving those goals eventually, the challenge would be to do it with the minimum loss of human life. 2. More soldiers per transport, I'm thinking 16 per vehicle is a good number. This means you are just about rolling in with a platoon, or an overstrength squad, depending on how you look at it. This means more troops on the ground, larger scale fights, and yes, it means you will win more missions however the flip side of this is more casualties. Troops get in each others way, XP levels drop as the fighting is done by more troops. Enemy numbers will also be increased to balance this out a bit too. 3. Chinook range reduction. This would mean that rather than having a main base you would essentially play this game by managing a succession of regional branches. Somebody brings down an alien ship in Japan, you're going to need a response team based in Asia to handle it. This again reduces the experience level of your squads, because your regional teams will only get involved if there's something they can reach. Regions where the enemy are coming at you strongly will see teams grow and develop, but one squad doesn't see action for months, then finds they are the only thing stopped a terror mission, you've got a real fight on your hands. Newer transports have normal range. 4. New weapons. I will elaborate on the specifics later, but the jist is that I want to expand the utility of the Xenonauts weaponry, so rather than adding a few more rifles or whatever I want to add the weapons I've thought, "Hang on, why don't I have one of these?" 5. More armed locals on missions, I figure unless you get to the scene of an alien fracas immediately, you won't find many of the unarmed civilians, aliens would have killed them or they'd have legged it. However I would expect any populated area to be pretty well populated with cops, soldiers, militias and armed civilians trying to do their bit for the species. I want there to be a good give and take between aliens and locals that the Xenonauts pile into. 6. Longer vision ranges, maybe a shade less accuracy. Would have longer, less decisive long range firefights, which would necessitate suppressive fire and flanking attacks more of the time. So that's the outline. The specific weapons I want to add are: 1. Incendiary grenades and rockets. Because who hasn't wanted to just open the doors to an alien ship and purge it with fire like the Emperor intended am I right? Would add a flamethrower too but that's probably really hard to do and much less practical anyway. 2. A multipurpose grenade launcher. Smaller than a rocket launcher. Able to fire gas, frag, incendiary and smoke grenades. All the grenades would be smaller and weaker than normal, EMPs wouldn't be useable because they'd not be able to be shrunk down (and it'd make things too easy). What I'm wondering though guys, is does this sound like a very difficult thing to set up? Can it all be done with config changes or am I going to have to roll up my sleeves and learn to do stuff? I have close to zero graphics skills, so the plan is to basically do what I can with what I have, but I would like to eventually learn how to add stuff properly. Any help much appreciated.

You can see them at it, at the start of the turn, the little green number over their head is how much they've healed. On veteran some of the little swine can get about 80 hit points back. I hit one of the officers in the face with a rocket, and all he got was miffed.

Just had a big update. Could it be...?

Need more rocket launchers.

Seen more types of fighters, but that's it. The UFOs that you damage stay damaged though, so it's no biggie to come at them in waves of three aircraft.

I think the soldiers would just sleep whenever they could. It wouldn't be an issue really, I mean you've got some flights to missions that are many hours, they could snooze on the Chinook, other times you've got hours between UFO arrivals. There's scope for them to make do, even in the most intense parts of the game. Some sort of burn-out of operatives could be interesting, but I don't suppose it would really be that much of a priority to implement.

I don't see why it's an airstrike and not just regular military turns up, that way the government gets the stuff, and that explains why it pays out to the player. It wouldn't be too unfeasible for the locals to turn up with a company of soldiers and a few IFVs and just swamp the landing site, maybe taking some casualties, but securing everything for themselves.

Yeah I think so.

I think the squad sight is fair and works okay. It doesn't -feel- particularly realistic, but I think it actually sort of is. Imagine a soldier is bimbling along with their squad, and they see an alien- What do they do? Well if they are an experienced soldier (which they are in Xenonauts) they'll call the contact, which does not mean shouting CONTACT!!! and using a minigun to annihilate a large area of jungle, it means giving a very concise yet precise verbal description of the enemy. Direction, range, type of contact. The other soldiers will be able to locate the target based on that call, and then be able to shoot it. I think that though this grants the ability often to shoot beyond standard range, this is okay, because it's directed fire, the spotter has pointed out the target to the squad and they are seeking it out, which would account for a long target acquisition range. Gaming the system sounds cheap and brutal, but it's perfectly viable and sure, it's ruthless as all hell to expose your point man to reaction fire in order to get eyes on an Bug Eyed Monster, but it's perfectly viable to use somebody as bait to flush out a shooter (a friend of mine who served in Afghanistan actually had his platoon used in this capacity). One tactic that I think is perfectly reasonable for example is to have a gun group, maybe a sniper and MG or two MGs, sitting behind the line to pour fire down onto enemies who are spotted by the scout element. Sure the gunners are largely safe, but that's sort of the point of that particular plan (and it tends to carry a risk of friendly fire). No reason to think the aliens can't do the same sort of thing. From a game balance point of view I think squad sight and that sort of collective effort is important as it really brings a sense of group and squad tactics into play. It's like chess, you use all the pieces together.

So much yes. When going into an alien base all I can think is NEED MORE FIRE.

I think the question is really one of mobility, you could categorise MGs and rocket launchers as heavy weapons because you're not really agile using them. It might be easier to ask if there are any weapons people don't ever use. Only weapons I can think that I'd really even want to live without are the shotgun, pistol and sniper rifle. But then I'm funny like that.

I mod the game for larger numbers of troops in the transport, eighteen to be exact, and for my standard crew I use a variation of the modern British Army infantry doctrine. So two sections of eight troops, in two fire teams of four. Each group contains two riflemen, one machinegun and one rocket launcher. The two spare troops are snipers. If I'm taking a tank with me then it's the same deal but with only nine soldiers. Later in the game I liked to have a designated grab team, to take aliens alive, and this is typically made up of lots of riflemen and rocket launcher troops carrying stun rockets, stun grenades and maybe a couple of guys with batons and shields. This squad has a bad habit of suffering pretty obscene casualty rates, but those are the risks. I also like to have a designated hard target squad, which is usually a tank and then nine guys with mostly machineguns and rockets with a couple of riflemen as spotters. I use those guys for terror missions or a particularly nasty looking crash site where I don't give a crap if I make a mess of everybody and everything on the ground. Must confess, I have yet to work out an optimal team for base assaults. I like to take a tank in, but they can get blocked off in unpredictable ways, so I might have to go with pure infantry. However I do it though it always turns into a bloodbath. Edited to add, always carry lots of grenades too. SO MANY GRENADES. Aliens do not like grenades.

Having the UFOs target your Chinooks does raise an interesting question though, just how much air traffic is there for them to single you out? I mean it's a safe bet that civilian airlines and air freight is not happening in the game world, that whole business would be locked down as soon as the first UFO decides to use the British Airways flight for target practice, so you've basically only got military and government aircraft in the sky. With that in mind we can only speculate how many military aircraft are up. It's not unreasonable to think they are just going for anything that looks fishy to them once their crew is on the deck.

I'm not sure how to use multiple mods at once, which is a bit of a problem. How do you increase things like number of alien ships per wave and such like?

Hey folks, just interested to see what people have done to the game by tinkering with configs, or using mods, or generally just mucking around with it, and how it's panned out. Personally I'm playing the game with a -massive- amount of money, think I gave myself about fifty million at the start or something, plus I changed the capacities of the aircraft to carry the most people possible (which I think is eighteen). In addition I am running the realistic aircraft mod (which is why I wanted all that money, wanted to try all the planes out). The effect of all this modding has been pretty cool I think in that it has changed the nature of the game and moved the goal posts. Unlike playing the game with regular resources, a fat pile of money means that I was able to place bases on every continent straight away, with a specialised research and construction facility as well. Coupled to this I've got regional Xenonaut squads, as well as special teams for live capture and heavy assault. All this extra firepower moves the objectives for me however, because obviously having all this gear I am able, indeed pretty much compelled to not allow any incursion to go unanswered, so when the aliens show up things get a bit hectic, with fighter groups being scrambled all over the world. Having lots of troops means that experience is harder to come by for any given soldier, and equipping the whole cadre of troops is just not happening, so I've had to face more than one terror mission with large numbers of badly equipped and inexperienced soldiers, because they were the only guys in reach. Such missions can be a bit of a bloodbath, but I like the style of arriving in force, fairly confident of victory, but having to focus more on keeping casualties down than worrying about whether I'll win the fight or not. Alien base missions are proving a particular swine, because my troops tend to be pretty green round the gills, which means casualties can be heavy, and of course this means that experience remains low. My elite heavy assault team for example, on my first ever base assault, suffered about 80% casualties and had to be rebuilt out of softboys in a hurry. It's still a challenge, because I've set the target of engaging the enemy in a much more aggressive and broad way than would be possible with a normal start up. I don't know if it will pan out to be particularly balanced with the endgame, however I like this style of play- it kind of presents the game situation as more of a no-holds-barred fight against the aliens, rather than a low key resistance fight. So, what have you folks managed to do? Any recommendations?

I've stunned loads of aliens with stun gas, in fact in my current playthrough (which is slightly modded I should point out, but not in any specific way relating to gas grenades) I have a dedicated team that I send to smaller crash sites with the intent to take the enemy alive (this is loads easier with the EMP/electric stun grenades by the way). What I do is (on small craft), when I've pushed the enemy back to the ship (capturing aliens in the open with gas is very hard to do) I line up the troops at the door to the ship, gas grenades ready, and then on a new turn one guy opens the door and I bung a grenade in at the nearest enemy. Then I shut the door, in case he gets any ideas of reaction shooting. Grenade goes off, alien moves about, and next turn I do the same thing. Maybe get more grenades in as the aliens will have used AP to get out of the gas. After a couple of turns you can basically turn the ship into a giant gas trap, with nowhere for the aliens to hide. Keep the door shut and listen for the sound of bodies hitting the floor. That said I wouldn't attempt that early in the game. My 'Night Bus' squad as I called them suffered pretty crazy numbers of casualties as it is.