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During my playtesting, one of the things I've been thinking about is the use of the player's base. For a long time in development, the Xenonauts have been very well resourced - they start with enough cash to last several months, enough lab and workshop space to significantly expand their operations without needing new structures, plus a spare tank and three fighter jets. I think it was originally set up this way for realism's sake, but it's not much fun to play through. Now balancing has started, it's become about giving the player choices to make. In V17.6 you don't need to expand to hire more scientists or soldiers, but even if you did, you could easily afford to do both. This isn't interesting - there's no different playstyles or experimentation there. The conclusions I've come to is that we made everything on too large a scale, and now we need to downsize it. There's also needless complexity in some of the systems that doesn't actually add anything - we've just done it because that's how X-Com did it. This is currently what I'm thinking: Bases to be reduced in size from 7x7 to 6x6 Living Quarters to be abolished, replaced with Barracks that can hold 8 soldiers each. Laboratories / Workshops will hold 10 scientists / engineers, hired immediately on construction. Scientists and Engineers no longer have any monthly wages and do not fill living space. Radar buildings will now expand the radar range of a base, rather than improving detection chance. The starting base has 2 radars, so bases with only one radar have a smaller detection range. Garage buildings reduced to two vehicle capacity instead of 1. Player starts with only one Hunter, or perhaps even none. What's the point of this? The idea would be to reduce the scale of everything, so the player is making important decisions immediately. Want more scientists? You need a new lab. Or would you rather spend the money on building that MIG you've just researched? Or maybe you'd like a bit more radar coverage? You get the idea. Removing the scientists and engineers as a separate entity from the Workshop / Labs will simplify the base management, but I actually don't think it'll lose anything along the way. I was wedded to the idea of having individual control over scientists / engineers because X-Com did it, but the more I think about the more it's just more micromanagement. It's not like they can level up or change like the soldiers can, so why not just make it simple? Removing them as individual agents means that you can have more focus on the soldiers, and have a specific Barracks building that houses them (though they are hired / fired manually as before). The benefit I see of this is mostly that with a cap on the number of soldiers you can have (unless you build a second Barracks), you'll really appreciate each soldier. And if one ends up injured, you actually have to choose whether to nurse him back to health or to fire him and replace him with a weaker soldier who can be used immediately. The other large change is reducing the size of the base. This means you're just not going to have enough space for a base with a dropship, three interceptor bays, two labs, two workshops, two barracks and multiple radars. You'll have to specialise your bases - which should stop the single-base syndrome that frequently afflicted X-Com. Oh, and the radars - I think this would be another good change. Currently there's no real reason to build multiple radars, but in this system you'd get the choice between building a second base or expanding the reach of your first one. I think these changes would keep things fast and easy to understand on the Geoscape, but it won't make the game any less deep. If people have thoughts on it, feel free to post them - but if you're going to object to the plans, please give a more compelling reason than "X-Com did it that way"! EDIT - for clarity, these ideas have been put on hold until we've tried balancing the existing system more tightly in beta...except the radar changes, which will probably be implemented.

I think it would really help if hired personal that didn't reach the base yet would show up in their respective tabs with an "in transfer" remark. Because when I load up a saved game i find myself sometimes at a loss if i already hired replacement troops or additional personnal.

Just came across the following Xenonaut image. It looks pretty familiar. But what happened to all the soldiers in the background? I see they were edited out in the next article I viewed. Was there any other early game art that has been modified/ or has vanished since the early days?

In this build I seem be given the maximum allowable number of soldiers/ scientists or technicians when pressing the button next to them on the personnel screen. My resolution has always run the text a little on this screen so that I can only see the tens figure, howwever it ahs alwasy incremented 1 at a time. Image my surprise when I bought half a million worth of rookies by mistake.

X-COM Apocalypse had aptitude stats for each scientist and technician that you could hire, making some of your employees more valuable than others. I liked it over the way the original X-COM did it because it gave each scientist a "face" instead of having your R&D department staffed by a legion of clones. What are your thoughts on putting something similar into Xenonauts? Too much effort to implement? Needless micromanagment? If base defense missions will really have you protecting your civilian staff, wouldn't it add a little more excitement to have to choose between that physics prodigy and the two assembly line idiots who you had to hire because their daddy is one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.