EchoFourDelta

I was feeling nostalgic a while back and bought the Roughnecks:Starship Trooper Chronicles DVD set a couple years ago. It was early 2000s CGI Saturday-morning show, but it was actually pretty good despite the cheese. It actually did better with the concept than the movies did (which, admittedly, despite that being something the people posting in this thread could do with 15 dollars and a Super 8 could do, but whatever). Power armor, larger exosuits operated by the troops, a much wider storyline and more endearing characters, and it had its share of those moments where you can't help but go, "Ok, that was pretty cool." Even now, it's not exactly terrible.

Yeah, soldier "class" isn't so much their specialty as it is a loadout. It's just a way of organizing gear and equipping troops quickly. You can create your own, or edit and rename existing loadouts by right-clicking the "role" letter.

That thing was like... HALF the battle in fighting an alien base in the OG.

Did this with the smoke grenade a short while ago, turning it into an incendiary. I turned its chance to start fire way, way, way up from 0 to about 90% in its radius. Good times were had by all.

The hypest insanity. But yeah, what you'd do is create an object pack for how it looks laying on the ground in the Battlescape, one for the image you see in the Geoscape and inventory, and a set of objects for it sitting in the soldier's hands in various facing positions, according to how it was held (like a rifle, pistol, whatever), a "statsheet" the details its fire modes, ammo, its cost, whether it's bought or researched (and that data), choose sounds, and drop pointers in for the game to integrate it. From there, the game would use it with any armor you had equipped, since they were independent. Similarly, arms, legs, and heads were SORT of independent, so the game can read different "races." If you have an armor that reveals the soldier's head/arms/hair, you can key it so that it reads off of that, and displays a white/black/asian dude's/chick's appearance over that particular armor.

Wait. If the Chinook was originally continental, in order to incentivize some additional gameplay decisions and base placement until we got advanced transports (triage) and the issue was terror missions... Wouldn't it have been easier (or at least made more sense in preservation of the gameplay) to push terror missions back a bit, or to localize them somewhat, rather than do away with that whole idea?

Yeah... it's not like the old one. There, it was as simple as making the weapon sprites and telling the game to drop them in where appropriate.

I generally set that to about 3/ or 4/5 of the pistol's maximum effective range. Aliens'll get the same when that drops.

It's like that to ensure that you have a relatively good chance of getting the materials you need to start some tech development early on; due to luck of the draw, you might not get a bunch of UFOs with stuff in serviceable condition early on, or in quantity. This makes sure you do.

If you're just kicking around your own gameplay, it might be possible to kick back the appearance of terror sites.

I just run fairly continuous combat air patrols, with the aircraft flying horizontally across the map, separated by their radar range.

Oh, yeah, that's the point of the Reapers, especially with the endgame, which I won't elaborate on. One makes ten, ten make one hundred, one hundred make one thousand, and then that original Reaper's "tree" burns out. Reapers would be a legitimate nuke target. Everything else... ehhhhhhh.

I've been playing with it like that since the Steam release. It's great, and takes like 5 minutes to change up.

I gotta say. After looking over this the past few days... This reads like some of the really badstyle stuff that the SCP Foundation had back in the day before we cleaned it up.

It's hard to imagine much of anyone dropping nukes of any size or configuration on a city for anything except Reapers. "Sir! The eight Xenonauts that landed in New York were killed!" "Mother of God. Authorize the launch." "Uh, sir, we've got reports that there are only eleven combatants there. We could wait for SWAT and the local National Guard armory to mobil-" "I can't believe nukes are the only option." "But sir, we could get a Ranger or several Marine air alert battalions there inside of a few hours. It took the Xenonauts even longer than that to arrive on stati-" "Jesus... it's finally come to this. Nukes on our own soil." "But I just received word from the Joint Chiefs and MacDill. They can mobilize the entire ready component of USSOCOM with an armor attachment in have them here in forty-five min-" "Launch. The. Nukes. And God help us all. "

1. Research new transports. You'll get the Shrike first, then the Valkyrie; each of these increase the number of troops you can deploy on the battlefield at once after you've researched them as the game progresses. 2. You train troops by using them in combat. Each soldier can gain one point in each stat per battle. Time Units are gained by having a soldier expend 150 time units in a single battle. Accuracy is gained by firing at an enemy at least once anywhere up to 1.5 times the weapon's maximum effective range. Strength is gained by moving your soldiers around with at least 80% of their current maximum carry weight, represented by that bar you see in the loadout menu. Reaction is increased by having a soldier take a reaction shot. You gain Bravery when a soldier loses morale and panics; this can happen due to being wounded or seeing fellow Xenonauts killed, or by killing another Xenonaut with friendly fire. Resilience (health) is gained by accruing 5 points in other stats. You can increase each stat by 1 after every battle, providing the soldier fulfills all of these things ina single landing. 3. Actions taken in view of an alien where the alien can see the soldier taking the action, like firing or moving. They cannot act if you suppress them with gunfire or explosions, however.

That's the thing, though. You don't need 1:1 parity; you can pull off "believable" without turning something into ARMA. And you interpret wrongly, good fellow! Getting paid to play Xenonauts and X-COM? That's boss as hell. But yeah, seriously though. Try this: 1) Expand units' vision by 50% 2) Double the range of pistols, and triple everything else, aliens included Give it a shot.

That's the thing though; we're told both things. "We're re-creating the original feel," and "Just because it was in the old one is no reason to hold ourselves to the formula." I mean, pick one, or create your own original spin and a more palatable version. If you want to play X-COM without the hassle, play OpenXcom. That, or give us some believable writing to fall in line with what's depicted in-game. And yeah, I'm having a great day. Twelve-hour shift with nothing to do but play Steam games.

That, or since they're not adapting tech like the Xenonauts, they don't have the capability to keep up with the new ones. Anything a "Conder" could take down, an F-15 would tear new strips all over. The nations of the world apparently just have trouble detecting them, or modifying their fighters to carry ten times the fighter's base weight in fuel to chase them intercontinentally.

Pfffffffffffffffffff

That. Exactly that. The idea that plausibility in depiction of content and game balance/fun are completely contradictory/unblendable elements is hilariously fallacious, and is a crutch of bad writing and effort, or symbolic of a lack of creativity in depiction. There are other ways to balance a game than by making both sides equally crappy, or making one side incredibly crappy and telling us they're super elite Ricky Recon Green SEAL Beret Force Recon Spetsnaz... who can't hit a target 5 meters from where they're standing with a medium machine gun. Balance doesn't have to mean everything is perfectly equal, or set up so that both sides are on exactly the same footing, or that nothing can ever be too useful. Asymmetry has a fun all its own, but give us asymmetry in the right direction. It's not because we're utterly crappy; it's because the aliens are more advanced. If the only reason the aliens can win is because you balance it so that human troops can't hit the broad side of a barn from inside of the barn... maybe you need better aliens and a stronger AI. As an aside, this would probably make it easier to swallow terror missions that would likely better be handled by the local SWAT team and a few cops on patrol. Or the local gun store owner/outfitter and the usual customers. As it stands, everyone present sees like... half a dozen Navy SEALs, etc. scramble out of a helicopter that took four hours to get there, presumably trip on their way down the ramp, ineffectually spray gunfire for two or three minutes, kill half of their own number with misthrown grenades that travel roughly five or six paces and rocket fire at ninety degree angles from five meters away, with the remainder cut down seconds later under a hail of plasma fire because they ran out of the 80 rounds they could carry without falling over in an asthmatic spaz attack.

We have the same thing going on with soldier stats, where the lower they are, they're yellow, then green for REALLY low stats (if you edit them), and high stats are a dark red that sort of blends in with the black background. In addition to making it more difficult to read it's... kinda counterintuitive.

The second one is something I always have issue with in games, even ones like this. If we're controlling extremely high-level specfor... depict them as such, and make their dangerous enemies all the more fearsome. If you're depicting two sides in a conflict, one human (our "control" here), and the other, somewhat more advanced aliens, show us that the aliens are winning because of their tougher troops/greater numbers/more advanced tech/whatever, not by biasing the humans to a hilariously unbelievable shit-tier. Grunts in Western militaries can bust targets at 500 meters, carry a hundred pounds of weapons, armor, and ammo for hours, call down air and missile strikes by the dozens, and the weapon systems on our armored vehicles are good (in many cases) for literally miles. I understand that not all of this can be depicted, but come on. Instead of taking away from that, show us what the aliens do better on the ground war, because as both this and a lot of stuff in the OG stand, there's (no joke) not much on the aliens' side that couldn't be stopped by the local hunting club and some deer rifles.

Man, I think that continental Chinooks and transcontinental Shrikes and Valkyries would be great. I mean, people want transcontinental assault transports... research them.