Zixinus

I really like this mod and I think it deserves more attention. It allows the player to do more and protect more areas in a way that is balanced with the main game. It helps the player by creating more work for them by detecting more UFOs and able to monitor regions they otherwise cannot afford to. Yet all at a serious price of a defenseless plane. The only serious negative I'd add is that the AWAC xenopedia entry should be custom-written rather than a copy-paste from wikipedia, or at least give some flavor text as to why the Xenonauts decided to use it. I congratulate the mod author and urge him to update the mod.

Just a note and I don't really want to get too much into this argument, as I would be defending my idea disappropriately. The thing is even with precision-fired needles/darts (at least those used in real life) is that they only work when the target is mostly still. , he shoots bears while they are hiding or still. Then you can aim for the right part of the body to be hit. You cannot do that in the middle of a firefight*, even if you have enough time to carefully aim: the enemy will be either moving or behind cover. Snipers will be glad to hint center of mass* while adjusting to the target's speed and other factors, never mind stuff like head-shots. Of course paintballs/peppeballs aren't full-proof either or necessarily better at getting through armor. But with them you just need to shower the target as much possible rather than hope that you managed to do hit the neck rather than hard skull. But of course since you are the guy actually making stuff, you go with what you want to go. I'd just like to defend my idea, as people tend to do with their own ideas. *If someone who knows more about how sniping works and can point to real examples, I'll be happy to be corrected.

I actually had a similar idea, although going for a far less radical treatment than Tom is imagining. The basic idea wouldn't be something as radical as uber-lethal VR room. Rather drugs, intense exercises, couching and good equipment. Think Olympic athletes. There would be focused intensive training on stat-specific areas (core, leg and back muscles for strength, lug-expansions and intense aerobics for TUs, confidence-building exercises for bravery even, etc) of the body augmented first with known steroids and hormones. This would be aided by various trainers such as those that prepared Soviet athletes for Olympic games. The treatments would give quick good results but would questionably be good for their long-term health. However since there is an alien invasion going on and these soldiers need every edge they can get to repel that, they would be willing to sacrifice that for victory (after making a fund with their absurdly-large pay for their post-invasion health care, just for optimism). This would give a nice touch of a human element of the war and the soldiers fighting it. In the room itself there would be hardcore exercise equipment that wouldn't have fitted into the barracks/dormitory part (such as treadmills), a mini gun-range using projectors (using imitation guns because real ones would cause too much noise), a medicine lab for giving and monitoring the drugs in the soldiers, etc. The mod could also be part of the base-upgrade thing, with the upgraded bases having futuristic 3d screens and better imitation guns for accuracy and reflex training, using scavenged alien tech for more sophisticated medicinal upgrades (alien superblood for stamina, stem cell treatment for health, etc), whole-body exercise machines, some sort of fancy brain-gadget for resisting psi attacks (I actually had the idea of using a sensory-deprivation coffin for some reason), etc. Essentially it would be an intensive gym in one base tile. It would be an extension of the soldiers-screen. Soldiers have a good chance of gaining one unit to a selected state after about a week's worth of hours are spent inside. Soldiers cannot attend the gym while injured. The stat would be a mere +1, so it would be slower than doing many missions. There would be a chance that the soldier would get wounded during all the intensive exercise and be unavailable for missions, instead stuck in the hospital. There would also be a very small chance, especially with the alien-tech stuff that something would go wrong and the soldier would get a stat decrease.

Gauss weapons are already in the game, they just don't really act like it (look up the relevant xenopedia entry). They are just a straight upgrade to the existing arsenal rather than feel as new weapons. You can also say to add a cocktail of universal irritants (asbestos, cinnamon, etc) to the paintballs, thus suppressing units that are not sufficiently armored (everyone that doesn't have a helmet basically). You'd get a poison+suppression weapon in one go, with a realistic weapon that already exists (made in the 2000s but there is no reason why they wouldn't make them in the 70s if there was enough reason). It would make sense between the blood-poison and the acid. Most organic aliens should feel pain after all. You are right that it would do the same thing as needle-guns but I am unaware of any weapon using swarms of needles. The needles you see in wildlife documentaries are actually carefully-prepared and measured in dose before use, requiring an expert marksmen to hit in just the right body-part. Whereas with pepper-ball delivery mechanism you can say you include acid which can seep through the armor. You can't say much for that for needles, because if you are shooting needles you might as well be shooting bullets. The reason they don't add stuff like that to today's pepper-ball weapons is that they usually use such a weapon as a less-lethal weapon and adding stuff like sulfuric acid and asbestos would look bad on the police (or the police would just use guns instead). Nobody feels the same way about aliens though.

Bayoneted weapons. They have a slight TU disadvantage but they allow melee attacks with all weapons. This would make a machinegunner that has made two steps not completely defenseless. Research would allow taser-bayonets, then chainsaw-bayonets using alien materials and finally what is essentially a short-ranged plasma-thruster/flamethrower that can burn through walls. Bayoneted weapons are heavier (especially the researched versions) and can make the weapons require more TU to use. The more high-tech ones also have a chance of not working or missing or even injuring their own soldier. The problem is that there is only so many things that you can machine-throw at people before it stops being effective. That said, here are some exotic weapon ideas: - Graviton-guns: there is already a xenopedia thing about gravitons. Why stick to using them only with plasma? Instead of using them with what is hot gas, use them with hardened crystals or just by themselves? A heavy weapon that when hit will make the target implode and ignores armor. Having heavy armor doesn't stand a chance when the very atoms are attracted together. Leaves no stuff behind though. - Super-paintballs. I'm serious: throws a mix of balls that penetrate the skin and target the super-effective-blue-blood thingies that most biological aliens have in common (according to the lore). Other chemicals contain universal inflammators (various highly-coerse dust with large-enough glass crystals or something) that will cause minor wounds through chafing for the poison to seep through as well as acids to eat through armor. Attack is chemical and can go for several turns. It's low-tech but at least makes sense. -Laser-tasers: lasers that instead of divering maximum thermal energy instead focus on ionizing the air and delivering as much high-voltage electrons as the air allows. Does thermal (maybe half of existing lasers) as well as stun damage. Should be fairly effective against electronic units. -Cold-guns: shooting a stream of super-cooled liquid nitrogen (or other cool-at-near-absolute-zero element of your choice) will just disperse in the air. Not with gravitons! These will collect the liquid nitrogen long enough to create an increased range. Who said that thermal damage has to be high temperature? Armor and clothing would be unexpected form of attacks and thus have a reduced effectiveness. -Micro-missiles: essentially gryojets with alien tech. High-range and act as mini-rockets. Unlike gryojets these have payloads that are delviered with contact-fuse. These payloads are shaped charged facing forwards and thus do not have splash damage. Less explosives delivers but can be fired in large bursts.

If its not a tricorder than what is it? Is it a hand-computer? Then why does it have only two buttons? Is it a communicator? Lore says they communicate with radio waves, they have no use for communicators. What is that thing in the middle? At best, I'd say that its a tracker. It would be there for aliens to find humans among a crowd, preferably humans they previously abducted, did experiments on and inserted whatever, and on the mission they want to find that human again to see the results. Or scout-probes. Small probes that are not meant to fight but to record stuff like electronics and broadcast signals. Soldiers would have to find them because they have basic security measures on it, that is a screen-lock and later self-destruct. This would explain why they just aren't picked up after the battle. Either soldiers are issued a basic cracker (once the item is researched) or just fiddling with it prevents the thing from locking. So once battle has ended, soldiers might use it to find people that have implants or find hidden alien tech. Bonus money and/or publicity, as well as new information. It might help give the location of an alien base for example. The thing could also be a visualizer (a display screen for us), something that the alien-hive-mind would put information on as an aid to the unit that is wielding the visualizer. Once used it can give random information, depending on what the user last requested. It might "blip" the location of enemy units, might give information about the current saucer/base, it might show drones/terror units, structures, or it might show certain civilians. But please don't just insert a tricorder. "Tricorder" is purely there for tv-plot writing purposes and to save budget by having only one prop do things that several different props should do (seriously, what a tricorder does depended on what the scrip required, like so many Star Trek gizmos). It was made because TV-writers (and actors) often did not understand just how may tools and what kind of tools you actually need for engineering work (real or imaginary), so they just made only one and used the futurist-excuse. Why would "women" create a seperate class? What would distinguish them from men to the aliens on the battlefield, their ability to give birth? Are they gonna gross out the aliens with their ability to lectate or something? Do you think the aliens would stop battle to ogle at a hot chick or something? What you then want is traits. It would make sense for alien fighters on your side to have traits that your human soldiers don't have. Like an accuracy penalty but no night-vision penalty for the lizard-guys. "Racism" is an idea of creating social boundaries for different kinds of humans based on mostly-arbitrary criteria (example, "he's Irish so he's a drunkard, so he's a lower race despite being European"*). Creating different non-combat classes does not make too much sense in the setting. Why would you bring an engineer or a scientist be with you on what is a lightning-assault/super-SWAT missions? They would just get in the way and they could not realistically do almost anything useful in the quick-combat situation (a medic isn't going to replace a soldier's lungs before a shootout ends, alien tech or not). If they'd be needed they could just get there with another chopper, circle around the place and land once the all-clear is given. A medic (to stabilize a patient further than first-aid can) and a alien-item/corpse-recovery specialist might make sense to be along with the pilot of the chopper, but not on the battlefield. As for specialized combat classes... no, at least in my opinion. That's what the remake did and it was annoying. It limited what weapons you can equip and how you can use your classes. I found this annoying as it limited how flexible your tactics can be. It's good that it's different for Xenonauts where you can change your team loadout on the fly and change classes on what you need. *For the record and moderators please take note, I do not support racist views. I picked the Irish one because its one of the more ridicolous examples of racism.

Yes, the mod really gives some leeway in strategy. It is cheaper way to find aliens outside of your base's range and allows you to "find" crafts not in your radar range. And it balances out nicely: the search is active (ie you have to look for it and rely on reports), costs a lot and does not extend your aircrafts' range. If I can have only one request is to please update the link with a more up-to-date version of the mod and one more friendly to the latest version's mod intaller. When I tried to use the launcher's mod installer the option to buy AWACS just didn't show up. Plus, there is the air-force icon still on the wings (as for the Xenonaut's icon, I'd just use the alien-skull).

Here was me hoping for just some bayonets for bayonet charges, instead of hoping that my soldier MIGHT shoot straight within 5 meters and not miss then pathetically die. Maybe a taser-bayonet too.