Lorebot

But you're not starting at zero, you're starting from 50+ so that's already cutting your 100 battles in half. With the rate I shoot down UFOs and go on terror missions 40 battles sounds pretty normal...perhaps even below average by the time I'm hitting the endgame. If you already know what you need to do to improve a stat and how to game the system to focus on what you want then you can do that. A single point per mission is a good idea, but it's also overly limiting. If you can only advance a single stat per mission what makes the choice between TUs, Resilience, Strength, or Accuracy? If you're going by pure usage then TUs will win that contest every time. If you can only gain a single point of Resilience per mission and can only gain resilience by being injured it turns into a game of 'how many soldiers can I have wounded without any dying' and you start shooting your own guys to buff them up. You could also choose to have the same soldier do all the friendly fire just to ensure he gets his point of Accuracy. A single point per stat is more understandable as long as they're passing certain thresholds during the mission. But even then you're still going to hit the same cap with every soldier by the end of the game. So once again you end up with a group of homogenous cookie cutter squaddies filling your ships or you end up with a group of soldiers so overly specialized that losing any single one of them means you're set back 40+ missions. And there's no incentive at all to train backup soldiers because losing one is an unrecoverable loss along with the fact that a rookie wouldn't be able to fill the roll of the soldier you left back at base and you may not be able to get through the mission that way. 1 point per stat per mission with individual limitations (let's stick with 50% of base stat, ie start with 50 and you cap out at 75) means that a rookie may be able to fill a roll in combat that you don't intend him to stay in. That once he reaches a certain point you can give him the gear you intend him to have to make the best use of his specialization while still making use of him before he hits the point of being able to fill that role effectively.

True, but without individual limitations you'll eventually reach that growth cap with every soldier which is what I'm trying to avoid. A group of soldiers that are all identical just isn't fun, it makes things boring and leads to cookie cutter squads and tactics. If you know before the game even begins that your soldiers will all be able to carry a specific set of gear once they're trained, and that set of gear will allow you to defeat the game, then what's the point of playing?

I like tangential growth, but it's only truly effective if stat growth is unlimited. As far as I know there is a hard cap on stats at 100. There's no way to go past it so tangential growth is effectively meaningless since there is a point where you can no longer gain an increase in power. So regardless of how the power curve works there's an end point that will be the goal of every player. As long as the hard cap at 100 exists the only way to not end up with a homogenous group of super soldiers is to rebalance the game around that end point or to implement stat growth limitations for individual soldiers so that they all reach a different end point and then balance around the average. Individual limitations means variety in your roster and uniqueness of recruits. That soldier that can carry and use the machine gun effectively become important because having enough strength to manage the weapon is a rarity. Each soldier will be special for one reason or another, even just being average across the board would be special because in a world of specialists the guy who can handle any role with a reasonable level of success is a huge advantage.

True, but from the literature I've read the Xenonauts aren't really picking the cream of the crop. They've been operating as an extra-national organization for a couple decades without any real backing or support. They've been forced to recruit the rejects and the drop-outs, the people that have washed out or given up and have found a new cause in being recruited to the Xenonauts program. There may be hiring standards, but even in an organization with recruitment guidelines there are exceptions and in an organization that's recruiting from the left overs those guidelines must be more forgiving. A crack shot with a bad knee may be brought in for his shooting skills and someone with less than optimal eye sight may be accepted if they're unusually strong and courageous. Homogenous soldiers are boring, they may as well not have stats at all most of the time. Just give them a level and assume the higher level soldiers are better...that's not what I want. I want unique soldiers. I want to have to build a battle plan around not just what gear my soldiers have, but what they can do with that gear. I want to look at a soldier's stats and say 'he'll make a great breecher' or 'gonna give her a medpack cause she's got tons of TU'. I don't want gear to be interchangeable between soldiers and have them all perform about the same with anything I give them. Gimme a reason to think, make me use my brain...isn't that the whole reason Xenonauts exist in the first place. They know the aliens are stronger and have better tech, we can't beat them without having a better battle plan. If the story is centered around out thinking the invaders then I want to actually have to THINK to win

I would suggest a compromise between fixed values and progression. I've never seen a soldier with less than 50 strength so use that as the base point in the progression, say 20kg to start, then allow progression up to 30 or 35kg at 100 strength. Or change the formula to 1kg/4str and give a bonus 1kg for every 10 points. That way at 50str they'd be able to carry 17.5kg, at 60 they'd be up to 21kg, at 100 they'd be able to carry 35kg. Then implement a limitation on how quickly a soldier's strength can increase, maybe 1 point per mission if they satisfy a requirement. Perhaps even impose a limit on how many times a soldier can increase in strength, say after they've increased their strength by 50% (ie going from 50-75 or from 60-90) they can no longer increase that stat through missions. If you do this I'd recommend changing the way new soldier's stats are chosen on the hire screen. I rarely see any meaningful difference between the soldiers for hire, anything less than 5 points of difference is easily overcome after a bit of training. If there was a real difference between recruits things like stat advancement and hiring for a purpose would become much more central. As it stands all the recruits seem to have stats ranging from 50-60 upon hiring and they can all pretty much perform any task you want them to. If recruits came with a wider range of stats, say 40-70, you could choose specialists and see a genuine difference in their performance during missions. Hire the guy with the 70 accuracy to be a sniper and get the lady with the 70 strength to be your heavy gunner, sure they both may have a 40 in some other stat but they're specialists...you're not gonna give the sniper a ballistic shield and send him to breech a door, he's gonna sit in the back and wait for his shot. If you implemented the limitation on stat improvement it would be even more meaningful to keep an eye out for good soldiers to hire instead of just grabbing whoever is available when you need a replacement. A person with a 40 stat wouldn't be able to advance it beyond 60, so soldiers will either find a niche, be well rounded, or just be bad...and no amount of training will turn a bad soldier into a great one. It would also give you a reason to leave your veterans back at base, once they've reached their limit you'd be better off swapping a couple of them out for rookies to get them trained up too.

The big problem with flying at low altitude or attacking a UFO using ground vehicles is that the aliens miss almost as often as you do, and their attacks do WAY more damage to the city than yours.

Yeah, the best way to prevent damage to the city is to only engage at close range, only use flying vehicles to engage the UFOs, and to have them fly at max altitude. The downside to this is that they're sitting ducks for alien weapons and you'll lose more ships. Early in the game I care less about the city getting hit than I do about losing hovercars or valkyries so I tend to force them to use the taller buildings for cover where I can. Easier deal with an angry faction or some loss of funding than it is to constantly be replacing my vehicles. Of all the things that are bad about Apocalypse there are many things that are good about it. And what can we learn from that? What works and what doesn't? What can the devs fold in to Xenonauts and what can't they? The 'experiments' have been done, the info is collected, we know what makes a great X-Com. The question remaining is can we get all the good stuff in 1 game?

There was a reason the original designers made changes in the sequels. Many of the features from Apocalypse were fantastic, but others were not. The real time system was clunky and too unforgiving for many players. But the changes made to the economy, research, production, and base features were generally very well received by players, as was the improved interception combat. I'm very happy with the air combat in Xenonauts, but the geoscape needs some work yet and I'd like to see some of the improvements that were successfully in X-Com's sequels be folded in to Xenonauts as well. As often as I go back to play EU1994, I've gone back to Apocalypse far more often. Though I've played UFO Aftermath more than both of them, and if you haven't played that yourself I'd highly suggest you check it out. The geoscape is extremely simplified, there's no economy to speak of, the UFO interception isn't very engaging but it's fast, the battlescape is very well put together and combat is very well balanced (unless you let the game go too long and then every alien is coming at you with a rocket launcher >.<).

I wouldn't complain about such an addition if living quarters were increased in capacity to compensate for the additional need for base crew. It could be linked to the Medical Bay and the Garage, each Med Bay could support 5 doctors and each Garage could support 5 maintenance crew. Each doctor or maintenance man could increase recovery/repair/refuel time by 5%.

I just started playing Xenonauts yesterday, but I'm a long time X-Com fan. I was extremely put off when I found that I was unable to supplement my income with production of researched goods. I hope the devs are planning on adjusting that because cash really is in short supply in the game just as it always was in the originals. I would like to throw a suggestion out there just in case they're paying attention. Of all the X-Com games the economy from Apocalypse made the most sense to me. It ran on supply and demand, the less items there were in circulation the more money you'd get for selling them. But once the market was flooded you'd get very little in return, until eventually you'd lose money on producing items for the purpose of selling them. I'd suggest something similar, though it may require some redesigning of the Sale and Relations mechanics. The idea is that when selling items you could choose who you're selling them to, like transferring items between bases. Each nation would keep track of what you've sold them and pay you less as their inventories increase. Selling to nations with a low inventory could even improve your relations with them, since they'd obviously be using those items to defend themselves. If you supply nations that aren't covered by a base it could even lead to them defending themselves more readily and cause them to down more alien craft on their own or take care of alien assaults without your help. Though once their stocks reach a certain point you'd stop improving relations and you'd earn less for selling to them, and if you keep selling them stuff they don't need it could even hurt relations. As the nations defend themselves their stocks would reduce naturally over time, they may have the tech but they won't have the training of the Xenonauts soldiers or engineers so they'd inevitably lose items through use and wear. If you can strike a balance between supply and demand you could find the supplemental income you need along with providing the nations that are outside your coverage with a means to fend for themselves until you have enough funds to build bases in those areas to get them coverage. It could get you a lot of cash in the early game, but late in the game that stream of income would reduce substantially. So you'd get your relief valve for funding without providing a means to make funding trivial at the end of the game.