Autoclave

Thank you all for your kind posts and for being so helpful. As I said, I only wanted to share the feelings of a person new to tactics genre. As you probably know, when Firaxis were developing the gameplay concept for EU, they initially wanted to use time units. However, many other developers outside of the project didn't like it. The reception was so negative that Mr. Solomon had to scrap a full year of development. Comercialy wise that probably saved them from failure. Thanks to it, many new players like me bought the game and felt the instant fun. It's like from the very second you start playing you are being bombarded by choices after choices after choices. You know.. feeling so addicted to this sort of frequent decision making gameplay i ended up playing ... Hearthstone. It's the same game of numbers and RNG, and the second I start playing it, it's choice after choice after choice. Entertaining. PS: Oh and.. I got some sort of weird Jagged Alliance remake (back in action) part of another game pack on steam. I learned quickly that it has nothing to do with previous versions PS2: I did played fallout 1, fallout 2. I did enjoy them! Although they DO have action points, something about that gameplay felt fun. I like that leveling in fallout is not just some stats but also perks. Which is kind of a horizontal progression that gives you more choices rather than a pure vertical one. PS3: Does Xenonauts combat offer more choices as your research progresses or it is just more powerful guns with better armored soldiers?

Gauddikke, you have given me some interesting answers i never thought of. I will still probably have difficulties enjoying the xenonauts battlescpe, but at least i recognize your aeguments. I guess you cannot make everyone happy. Every dev needs to decide who their focus group is.

Thank you for your replies. I am playing the latest stable steam version, the one which you get when you buy the game. Gauddike we do belong to different focus groups, i can respect that, for some reason i missed the tactical games in the 90s. The only thing i remember playing was commandos, the real time tactical squad stealth. I just believe that something can be done about TU to make them more fun while keeping their core principles. But i cannot express myself simply because i am no game deigner. EU combat feels like navigating a probability tree which by itself is very fun. Here is a typical probability tree navigation in EU: 1. Do I take my chances and shoot at the alien behind the cover? Chance to hit is X. I need a crit to kill him, chance to crit is Y. I am in cover, but if I miss, he will have Z chance to hit me back. 2. May be i should leave my cover, flank the alien and get a guanrateed kill, but i am exposing myself to be killed by aliens in the fog. I don't know if there is anybody hiding there, should I risk it? 3. May be i stay in cover on overwatch? That alien still will have the same chance to shoot me like in pt.1 but if he will try to move he will be out of cover and I might have a higher chance at hitting him, although that will not be a crit. 4. May be i should just hunker down and guarantee that i will survive his shot, it looks like he will be unable to flank me in one move, and see if my chances in next turn will be more favorable. And if you end up dead, you will always ask yourself why didn't you pick the other part of this decisional tree. This loop constantly provides interesting choices and reinfoces the fun experience of the game. This is how we EU tactical newbies feel. I am struggling to experience the same thing in Xenonauts, this decision making process, I know that these choices are also here as well! but they are just somewhat hidden and not so well presented to the player. The secret of experiencing this fun element is hidden somewhere among TU, RNG and necessary information for decision making. May be knowing the hit percentage is not enough? May be we also need to know the damage spread and the alien hp upon deciding to take a shot so we can better understand the choices that we have?

Thank you for answering my scientist question, man i wish there was a complete and thorough guide on every game mechanics for the new players. Collecting information it bits by bits is like playing D&D without reading a rulebook.

May be I will just go more extreme way and try JA before I come back to Xenonauts. If people tell that TU is more like a simplified version, than I am really curious to see how much more extreme this can be in other tactical games. I am not going to argue about EU geoscape as that layer is more of benchmark checking. Get X satelites in month Y. Build Generator Z days ahead and get N engineers so you can build on day T a satelite uplink and so on. The general EU player consensus is that many would be happy to take the OG geoscape and combine it with the EU battlescape.

I'll have a look at Jagged Aliance. Which version do you recommend to try? May be i will look at Xenonauts with different eyes after that experience.

Edited original post. Ok, so the HP does depend on alien rank. The keyword is "maximum". So it does vary among the same rank same aliens? How can a new player identify these ranks? And how much HP they have? I don't like guessing which caesan will take more to kill, the one with the blue t-shirt or the one with the red t-shirt. X-Com EU is more verbal on its combat parameters and potential outcomes, thus it presents the choice for the player to decide. In Xenonauts I don't really have the impression that I am fully aware of the choices that I make and their potential outcomes.

Hello dear players! First some short introduction about me:I never played any of the original X-Com games. My introduction to the series was X-Com: EU (2012). I played EU and the EW expansion for a total of 500 hours and I enjoyed it a lot. Naturally curious about origins of the series and learning about Xenonauts I decided to give it a try. My knowledge of Xenonauts mechanics is frankly quite limited having played it for two days. I am sure that there are lots of details that I am not yet aware of so feel free to correct me. I believe that the developers hope that Xenonauts is interesting not only for the diehard original xcom players, but those new to the genre are also finding it fun and worth of their time. I bring you to the table the opinions of someone devoid of OG nostalgia while being heavily biased from X-Com EU experience. I do not know how open are you to criticism and how this commmunity usually handles threads like these. But i will try to write into a respectful manner as I understand that creating Xenonauts was a difficult endeavour. I like everything about Geoscape/strategic layer offers. Only one question though: what is the point of scientist allocation to simultaneous research projects? Does every extra scientist add the same amount of research points as the rest? I suppose it's a linear progression, correct? If this is true than splitting scientists between two projects will always be a strategically wrong choice. Why not just first focus all your effort on one project, reap its benefits, then focus on the second one? Battlescape: this is where i believe Xenonauts will have trouble attracting new/EU players. The devil here is time units mechanics. I understand that most of you would argue that Xenonauts tries to be faithful to the original game and that time units were an integral part of OG, but you have already introduced stuff of your own like Riot Shields, Suppression, Cover. Therefore, it's not a carbon copy of OG, it represents your own vision of the game, therefore it's open for criticism. I noticed that you already have trouble balancing TU with all those discussions about % based TU costs for weapon shots instead of fixed TU costs. I understand you cannot/don't want to remove TU from the game. OG players are probably loving it and they hate the 2 action systems from X-Com EU. I don't want to talk about which one is more realistic as this would be opening a can of worms. Why turning your soldier costs TU? What are you trying to achieve with this? Make combat more realistic? What is the point of TU reserve if my snap shot will require 21 TU to shoot instead of 20, just because some alien is a few degrees to the East of the soldier's field of view? This adds complexity to the game but does not add depth. The tactical decision making doesn't become any more fun because of this. Why is TU cost per angle so severe? You are basically charging 1 TU for every 45 degrees, right? It makes the movement and shooting planning even less fun. It transforms the battlescape into a Time Unit Accounting mini-game. When I am paying 20 TU for the soldier to snap shot, I am paying for him to take the gun, aim it into the direction where alien is and shoot. Why do you factor extra cost for aiming just because the alien is a few degrees to the other side? Xenonauts soldiers seem to suffer from some severe neck/torso pain that makes turning while moving difficult? I believe that many new players will find the TU movement costs quite high. My soldiers are too slow if they want to have a reaction shot available. While breaching light scouts I am not always able to reach the back aliens with a shotgun to the face. Speaking of which, why is a shotgun to the face not enough to guarantee a caesan kill? (about that later) HIDDEN MOVEMENT. Is there any explanation why you cannot just teleport anything that is outside my soldiers' field of view? Why do I have to endure these painfully slow turn times? This is such a no brainer that I really have nothing to comment here. I am not asking you to replicate the stupid teleport bugs from EU, but do something for your players! Searching for the alien craft. As I read, you were several thousand short of kickstarter funding for the motion sensor. Let me tell you in all my honesty, searching randomly for the alien craft is NOT FUN. I would like some general direction hint towards which i should advance. Hell, even Firaxis recognized this issue and gave us at some visual hints about alien location, their maps are generally built in such a manner that you know in which direction you should advance. The pacing is just no really there. RNG for the sake of RNG. There is a reasonable amount what I consider a healthy Random Number Generator experience. Planning arround RNG aim/damage takes a solid effort. I think some of the combat things could have their effects, parameters more on the predictable side. We like random, we need random, but we don't want too much random in our games. Why flashbangs are so unpredictable, sometimes they supress, sometimes they do not? Oh do some species/rank aliens have different HP? Is this true? If yes, why? Isn't aiming, weapon damage not enough RNG to make the game difficult? -- Finally, I really don't know If I did a good job at explaining my feelings in this post. What I basically wanted to share with you are my concerns for Xenonauts attracting new players that never played original X-Com. And I believe that battlescape will feel broken for many new players and thus ruin their experience. They will enjoy geoscape, they will enjoy planning bases, downing UFOs, but they will not find the battlescape fun. Please notice, I have nothing against xenonauts being a difficult game, because this is what players expect from an xcom remake, but it's important for you to understand that we want the game to be difficult because of the difficult decisions we are forced to make but not because of the RNG, Micromanagent and other chores we are forced to endure. I don't want to criticize you guys. But I just cannot get EU combat experience out of my head. Even if some of you might call it streamlined but it does offer this fun combat decision making I struggle to find in Xenonauts. I will refrain from giving suggestions and asking for massive gameplay overhauls. I only want to point you to some of the issues many players like myself might have with Xenonauts when it is released.