Twigg

What I want is for new enemies/scenarios to force me to play differently, that is where the difficulty should come from. Too much of this game is a steady ramp of damage/hp/defense where it feels more like a 'Keeping up with the Joneses' situation than a terrifying secret alien invasion. One of the things the Firaxis games did so well is they would throw something insane at you every so often that not only forced you reassess how you played the game but (more importantly imo) terrified you as a player and reminded you that you are facing this unknowable entity. In a nutshell I want the game to give me more strategic and tactical options (and no upgrading to a gun that pew pews better is not a new option) and then force me to use these options in new ways to deal with growing threats. The game already does this well with the early cleaner missions and how they differ from early alien missions but it is gone within a 100 days and I am back to turning off my brain and playing the game on autopilot imo.

There has to be a better way to ramp up difficulty than throwing more enemies at the player. Not only does it make missions significantly longer, it also increases the likelihood that a large portion of the battle will happen right outside the dropship. These games are always more interesting in the beginning than in the end and a large reason for that is that a small force of humans vs a small force of aliens makes for a more tactically interesting and well paced mission.

Why are we talking about limitless possibilities like that is inherently a good thing? All games have rules and the fun/challenge comes from working within that space to find solutions to the problem at hand. I would much rather make a few meaningful choices than a large amount of relatively simple or meaningless ones. I do agree with you that the combat missions themselves can quickly get tedious, though I believe that is down to how simple they are. "Kill all the dudes before they kill you" doesn't lend itself to particularly interesting tactical gameplay and it forces the terrain, map layout, enemy type, etc etc to do the heavy lifting. That said lots of people hated the timed mission (and the versions of it the second firaxis game) so maybe we are the outliers and most people find the very basic mission structure compelling enough.

For what it is worth I agree with you, past a certain point increasing the number of soldiers and enemies makes the game more tedious then fun. IMO these type of games work best when you are quickly cycling between the strategic and tactical layers and 2+ hour missions break that great flow. If I as a player have proven I can take out 12 aliens with 6 soldiers doubling the numbers on both sides doesn't lead to more interesting or clever gameplay, just more time between mission start and end. I also think that capping the number of soldiers and aliens can open up space for new gameplay options like secondary objectives on missions or a more fleshed out relationship between a soldier and their weapon so they don't feel like basically the same thing with tweaks to range, damage, and rate of fire.

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.