Reiver

Isn't the entire point of X:CE that it's baseline Xenonauts with extra features and a handful of bugfixes? Which is to say, no drawback to vanilla beyond some GUI prettyness?

Be aware that this is a game that plays out over months and years, and even the high-speed interceptions take minutes at a time, before time acceleration brings it back up to a playable speed. 'realtime' is plenty slow enough for the strategic map, because your targets will be moving pixels at best.

Y'know, the bug reminds me of one thing I always wanted: Bases in lost regions suffer more frequent raids, potentially with hostile Local Forces helping out. Would this be moddable, or a matter for X:CE?

Esc. The menu does it, I believe.

Warband is absolutely my favourite of the series - it emphasises and expands what was great about the original, whilst its sequels seem to mostly advance the technology era - which is not ideal in a game where massed ranged fire was the least enjoyable thing to face. So very many mods. I hope they eventually come back and try a M&B Warband II, but I doubt they get enough sales for sufficient redevelopment to justify it - direct sequels tend to be comparatively expensive.

What would a bomber do in an airstrike? I ask because I had always presumed airstrikes were done via local forces, hence why you were getting paid - you were handing over 'ownership' of the site to the locals, who promptly blew the hell out of it. "Thanks for that! Here's a cheque. *napalm*"

That both sounds and looks really promising, Chris! Are you still inclined towards keeping the 'minor action', or is that being discarded?

Remember though that Enemy Within doesn't deal with multiple transports nor base defense operations while your assault crew is out. There can be very good reasons to keep soldiers on hand with advanced weapons, and even better ones to let your home guard rock your finite reserves of lasers once your away team is packin' plasma. Other than the aforementioned juggling of roles, I'm not sure how you'd go about a solution to this from a UI perspective, even ignoring the technical limitations.

The direction you're headed with Small Game is pretty promising. Good luck with it!

Do the command centers continue to hold troops once you have crew quarters established?

It is and it isn't - after all, you'd want a splash screen to pop up and note that stuff is being busted on landing, so you need intact examples of each UFO in order to properly study them. This is both consistent with the original (In which you needed to do this if you wanted to see Elerium any time soon), and with real world missions; the british in WWII sent a commando raid to capture a german radar, after all. You're after intact UFOs so your scientists can analyse them and harvest their parts, nothing more weird about deliberately letting them live than there is on using nonlethal weapons to capture alien officers; it's just hardware instead of wetware this time.

... wait, Civilian deaths aren't penalised? Huh. I've been avoiding them on general principle, so that's... interesting.

Oh wow, kudos to Skitso. Does he get a little badge for his efforts?

Y'know, one thought I'd had while playing through last time was that an option could have been to make crash sites miss vital equipment - and perhaps a science popup after the first time you did one warning you so - while the 'live' saucers had the real bounty. This would encourage you to actually let some land, and scramble a strike squad to do the harder missions in order to get the pay, whilst also meaning you'd be more time-constrained on how many you could do per wave (because live sites are shorter lived than crash ones). Was this paradigm tested at all during development? It feels like something that on paper could certainly encourage variety, but maybe it'd fall apart. Hm.

Which is probably fair, all told. We don't need to refuel nuclear reactors all that quickly either.

Having high ranking officers around in the original game also reduced the morale loss for casualties. A Skyranger full of rookies and your highest ranking dude (Who was preferably armed with a blaster launcher and a psiamp) who sat at the back of the skyranger all mission was a great way to train rookies - as long as your officer didn't die, half the rookies could die and yet everyone would stay pretty cheerful.

The main reason I'd like to see an energy system is if, rather than "You run out of energy just for jogging around the map a bit", it helped track your soldiers stamina between fights. This would be significant in measuring whether you really do want to go on the third combat op in a row with your troops. It's different from Old Xcom, sure. But you could, say, ballpark balance to an operation a day or so is sustainable, but more than 2-3 in a row starts penalising your TU cap when your energy is depleted, and you'd have more motivation to click the 'airstrike' button after all.

Hah, that's awesome. You must be thankful it's a good name! Y'know, instead of "It was a good idea at the time."

Not at this point - the system currently tracks the stats of the soldiers as they die; it doesn't hold a user-entry section. A text box isn't a bad idea, but they're running out of space on the display as it is.

A passing thought: It'd be kinda cool if instead of 'breaching charges', you had to rig up Alenium demolition packs, with all the costs and game-changeyness attached. If you could then rig Singularity Launchers to be the standoff equivalent, that'd be even cooler (Though I do understand there'd be, uh, balance challenges there perhaps). In this way, it'd be closer to OG in that you couldn't initially breach - but did get the ability to do so later, and when you do it completely changes your tactics. Just a passing thought. Would it be possible, though? I don't know.

Brilliant. Instead of "ETA-2 days", go for hours. Some days, you'll wait two hours to have another batch of troops arrive to head to the meat grinder. ;-)

Note that (as far as I am aware) one of the design goals of XCE is that everything it is an enhancement, not a change per se. So you should still end up playing stock, just... better. More buttons. More windows. More modifiability. (That's correct, right guys?)

Yeah, that's fair. Good luck! Aside: If you do expose them, would you be able to have the exposure opened out to general equipment? I'm thinking of, eg, modified kit coming with night vision or something. Just a random thought in passing, mostly.

I think this is a great way to deal with name-length - you're stuck with your real name until you get given a callsign; then the callsign replaces your given name in length-limited spaces. No extra length, and tons of tasty flavor. And if I want to call my dude 'toadstool', I can do it without feeling bad about erasing the name his momma gave him. ;-) A second suggestion: Let people add the 'manual' callsigns at any time, which then supercedes the randomised stat-based defaults. That way, the soldiers with callsigns are those who have actually achieved something, and those you care about. The latter can be importaint if, eg, your rookie manages something completely insane, but not strictly recognised by the ruleset defaults. Your halpless rookie scout who landed up in the open yet somehow dodged six plasma bolts in one turn? Yeah, he's gettin' called 'Lucky'.

Point of order, 'guv! New Zealander. Loving the ideas here. We'll see how all the flags fit, but hopefully we'll be fine.