LeonidasRex

I agree with OP. An encyclopedia entry is not a story. Stories need characters with emotions. It doesn't move the audience to note that a million people are afraid. It moves the audience to show that one specific person we care about is afraid. I expected the Cold War setting to practically write its own fascinating story. It could have been told as a series of conversations between world leaders. The main characters would be the US president and Soviet Union lead. Maybe add a character as the leader of the UN controlling Europe and Africa, then add Chinese domination of Austronesia. Now you've got a handful of relatable characters with interpersonal conflicts representing global political conflicts. And the player represents this independent group that must balance political forces as it fights aliens. For example, ignoring that terror attack in Moscow might win you lots of friends in Washington.

Yes, and that's precisely the weakness of the game's money system. You don't know why you're rolling in money. I don't know why I'm going broke. And none of it relates to the far more interesting ground game.

This sort of funding problem has killed both my games. If I were to start another, I would find someone's guide on exactly what to build and when. The ground game requires so much time investment that it's awful to start over because you bought or didn't buy the right thing weeks ago.

OP here. The relevant question is whether Xenonauts is a good strategy game. Like chess. And good strategy games involve information-action feedback loops. First, you observe the game space. Then you make decisions about how you will influence the game space. Then you observe the effect of your actions, and you gather fresh information to repeat the cycle. The Xenonauts ground game is a great strategy game. You gather information about where the aliens are, and then you move your soldiers accordingly. You listen to plasma shots and the screams of civilians. You peek around corners. Each ground game presents a new arrangement of aliens on the landscape. The Xenonauts geoscape is a terrible strategy game. There's no information to analyze, nothing to react to. The map is always the same. The global alien attack is always the same, I assume. And even if the global alien attack varies somewhat from game to game, hidden information and long build times ensure that you can't react meaningfully to what they're doing. The Xenonauts geoscape is just a ritual. There's one best way to play it, one ideal solution to the puzzle. Once you find that solution, there's no reason to ever vary it. If I were to play Xenonauts vanilla again, I would first look for step-by-step instructions on exactly what to build and research on which day. Then I could blow through the boring geoscape stuff and get to the interesting ground combat. More likely, I'll wait for a modder to eliminate the geoscape's invisible tightrope and move the ground game to center stage where it belongs.

My first game was on hard. I put up my second base in late October. The aliens wiped it out in mid-November, and I lost three regions at the beginning of December. So this time on normal, I built three bases with three planes each to keep from losing funding. And I bought soldiers to keep the bases from getting overrun. But now the upkeep on those soldiers has wiped out my income, and I can't afford to put them in basic armor, let alone make laser weapons for my A-squad. I still have no idea when to expect a base attack, or how many men with what experience and equipment I'll need to survive it. With enough fiddling, I'm sure that I could find the magical middle way in which the strategy game works. And then I could just do it the same way every time. It's just that the money decisions and air combat aren't that interesting. And the ground combat, which is interesting, doesn't seem relevant to whether I win the game.

I can't play this game any more. I've tried it twice. It just doesn't work for me. The ground combat is just what it should be. It has lots of nice tweaks over the original. My only complaint on the ground is the lack of options with ship assaults. In the original, I remember blowing open the roof of the small alien ships and filling them with smoke. I remember motion sensors and ship walls that could be blown with explosives. I remember bouncing grenades around corners. Those are small flaws. Here's the big flaw that convinced me to quit trying: The strategic game is very narrow. It's designed to produce a specific plotline, just like a good alien-invasion movie. Armed with experimental technology, humanity's only hope lies with our plucky wisecracking heroes as they launch a desperate assault on the alien mothership. The strategic game presents a very narrow unmarked path to walk. Expand too slowly, and your political support will collapse. Expand too quickly, and you'll go broke. Buy too many scientists or engineers and you'll go broke. Buy too few, and you won't keep pace with the increasing alien pressure. If you buy too many soldiers, you'll go broke and waste player time grinding on characters who don't matter. Buy too few soldiers and you won't have any defense when the aliens invade your base. How many soldiers are enough to defend a base? I still don't know, and I no longer care. The only way to find that unmarked strategic path is through trial and error. The strategic game isn't simulating anything that I can predict, so every strategic decision for the new player is essentially blind. Was I supposed to buy more scientists at the end of month 2? Should I spend the last of my cash on missile arrays, more radars, or better equipment for my soldiers? The strategy game is a "guess what I'm thinking" game. If you didn't guess that aliens would start base invasions as early as November, then too bad, your game is screwed, try again. Next month the aliens might have tougher ships that my air weapons can't handle, or tougher armor that my ground weapons can't pierce. You can't build both, and if you guess wrong, my game is screwed. And the trial-and-error nature of the strategy game wouldn't be so bad if the feedback loops weren't so long. It can easily take a game month to realize that you spent money in a way that you shouldn't have, or you didn't spend money in a way that you should have. And during that time, the player has invested many hours in ground missions. Last night I realized that all my careful soldier maneuvering probably didn't matter at all, because my game is probably doomed because I didn't buy extra scientists three weeks ago for a laboratory that I should have built two weeks before that. Instead I bought extra soldiers to protect against the base assault that killed my game last time, but now maybe I've bought too many soldiers, so they're a game-dooming waste of money. It'll take me a game month and twenty man hours in ground missions to find out why my current game is doomed, and which decision that I've already made is the bad one. I've played lots of tedious strategy games. I've mastered Dwarf Fortress and Crusader Kings 2. I loved the original X-Com. But I don't have enough patience for Xenonauts.