Twigg

Mechanically this doesn't make sense as you are then double punishing the player for losing a soldier, arguably triple punishing because of the armor loss. Narratively I am not sure what the cost would be associated with. If you wanted to go this route maybe you could do a temporary bravery penalty to the surviving soldiers to reflect the stress and emotional shock of losing a comrade in the line of duty.

The problem with this is it's effect on the action/TU economy. The more effort it takes your crew to stabilize from an unlucky hit the more you are incentived to prevent those hits from happening in the first place. This will inevitably lead to overwatch creeping being a more and more effective strategy which is incredibly dull to play. As it stands the game doesn't reward you for aggressive play and changes like this just push further in that direction. If we want to make getting wounds more punishing to the player than something should also be done to prevent the conclusion to that process be even more camping.

My post was a little vague, what I meant was that how would the developer balance general missions if the player could be 10 or 20 soldiers to any given mission? I agree that certain missions (the final mission in the first xenonauts being a pertinent example here) you can have a higher number of soldiers because the level designer knows that is the case and can plan around that. I also think you are going to have to accept that this game, like xenonauts 1, will not provide the kind of large scale combat you want from it in the base game. I personally would love a more robust melee combat system and a more robust air combat system but that is clearly not the focus for this game.

How would you even balance the combat when you could have some players with literally double the amount of soldiers available in the mission?

Dark, bloody, and desperate like this?

I recognize the point you are trying to make but can we not use gay as a derogatory descriptor? Not only is it in bad taste but it is also unnecessary because your point as already made with the reference to super hero costumes.

Chess is an interesting example as I am pretty sure it took hundreds of years for it to turn into the game we know it as today, it is not something that came out of the game perfect. My general point is that this game shouldn't base it's mechanics off of what lovers of a 30 year old game prefer because not only is that limiting the audience but it also limits the scope for the designers. The best example is squad size. I know the original games let you throw a ton more bodies at missions but I really prefer the more limited squad size and limitations it puts on the player.

I am one of those people who came to Xenonauts from the Firaxis Xcom games and have never played the original 90s X-COMs. I loved both the Firaxis games and Xenonauts 1 even though they had different design philosophies and therefore different strengths/weaknesses. The idea that these 30 year old games are the pinnacle of how this genre can be done is bonkers to me. It has been three decades since they originally released, nearly every mechanic and decision from those games should be questioned to ensure that we don't miss out on more than a quarter century of technology and game design advancement.

Did another tactical mission and now this is what I see. user_weird_armor-7.json

I am not sure if the defender armor is all supposed upgrade to the warden armor stats and sprites like the magnetic weapon upgrade or that I am supposed to have the option to select pre and post upgrade defender armor but regardless the way it is being displayed now is pretty confusing and probably not intended.

I have played for nearly 60 days in the new milestone 2 and have a hard crash preventing me from continuing. Definitely noticed some of the changes. I did not like the change to warden armor. I get the idea of giving the player a new baseline to act as a safety net but it winds up being more time and resource draining to get your squad up and running with a set of warden armor and that comes at the point at which the game is the most punishing, the start. I think the granularity of individual sets of armor was important as I could balance out engineering priorities (ie wanting enough armor for shield and shotgun dudes but making sure my snipers have lasers) where as now it is way too all or nothing. The new module system is fine but I do prefer the old version as I could load up soldiers with both the defense and accuracy modules to trade strength for combat effectiveness. I am sure this is circumstantial but I feel like I am taking more casualties than normal because my soldiers can either hit things or take a hit, but not both anymore. I haven't noticed the new non panic based economy at all. Built my second base at the start of the month and am in line to build the third at the start of the next. My worst area is currently at 45ish panic and I still have plenty of cleaner missions to do that can lower that no problem. Maybe you only need 2 bases now instead of 3 but this feels similar to the lab situation a few months ago where the best strategy was so clearly the best that it would require a radical approach to change that and it is probably not worth it. I don't remember if it was changed here or in a later patch but now that you can't medpack a MARS I don't think you can heal it. That combined with the fact that it and it's upgrades are so damn expensive and it's best gun has 6 shots means it doesn't feel worth it at all. This isn't directly related to milestone 2 but something that became very clear after starting a few new campaigns over the course a week. Arguably the worst part of the game is the setup before your first mission where you are creating your loadouts for soldiers, removing clearly shit ones, and hiring new recruits. Anything that can be done to speed this process up would be appreciated. It would be great to be able to bring in previous campaign soldier loadouts so I am not doing it from scratch but I would truly love it if I just didn't get soldiers with below 50 TU or strength. They might as well not exist and with new buildings taking so long to build I can't afford to let them take up valuable beds in the early game.

I agree that it isn't too difficult to get 5 tubes, you can always change the mission to make that base level success harder or easier. What I think is more interesting is the extra tubes and what you get for them vs what you risk. I played an abduction mission a few nights ago and was able to get 9 of the 10 tubes, which offered very little other than the satisfaction of playing the mission in a more difficult way. I think the player should be given exponentially better rewards for more tubes to temp them into making riskier tactical decisions. I also think this mindset can be brought into other missions in the form of temporary side objectives. For example getting inside the downed UFO in 5 turns and living till the next turn gets you a large cache of alenium. Build in an incentive to player with higher risk so the best way to play isn't WW1 trench warfare but with better weapons.

Let's agree to disagree on this one, neither of us are going to convince the other to change their mind and we have both made our point as to why our preferred squad size is better. It is down to Chris and his team to create the 'best' game for as many players as possible and I wish them the best of luck on that difficult task.

I am with Skitso that changing the abduction missions to be another flavor of 'kill everything' is a mistake. The game needs more ways to encourage different strategies and loadouts, this mission was one of the few that overwatch camping while slowly creeping forward wasn't the most effective strategy.

I think you are missing the forest for the trees somewhat. While there may be other reasons you can't take multiple dropships, one of them is that the game is designed with a certain number of xenonauts in mind and adding more significantly affects game balance. It is similar to why they changed the selling mechanics in the game because it was designed around doing a certain number of missions per wave and if you do significantly more you broke the games economy. I am not saying that other games can't use more or less soldiers, I am saying that the developers of this game chose to use a certain number of soldiers, aliens, and a specific map size and I agree with how those choices work for this game. I am making a counterpoint to you and other players request to significantly blow up the count of soldiers available because it can be easy for the vocal minority to get its way when the silent majority are happy with the current situation.