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Debating Xenonauts 2


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If you end up looking at the Paranauts idea further, I strongly recommend reading Charlie Strauss's Laundry novels if you haven't;

Heh, where do you think the idea came from? :) There's also the watch in the Night Watch series, or the Delta Green roleplaying setting, and various others. Some quite interesting source material to draw from.

In all seriousness, though, I doubt that's a game we'd develop until we were done with the alien invasion stuff because the two games would be far too similar. And it makes more sense at the moment for us do a Xenonauts 2 rather than a Paranauts, so unfortunately a Cthulu-style game is simply not on the cards right now and we should probably avoid derailing the thread too much by talking about it.

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Cthulhu related instead of Aliens, why not.

I propose to read about the board game Arkham Horror.

In a city some portals to other dimensions open and monsters enter the city. The goal is to close these portals before one of the Ancients is ready to enter the world, which has to be battled then, but it is damned hard.

To close the portals you have to enter them, survive/overcome an obstacle and when coming back having enough of some tokens to close it.

For the transistion into a Xenonauts game a lot of intersecting points are there to be used, I guess.

Just a heads up; I'm a huge fan of Arkham Horror / Mansions of Madness.

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I would like to add a floating naval bases and submarine mission. Well and, accordingly, the alien base not only on land but also underwater. That is to combine all the advantages of UFO Defense and Terror From the Deep. Imagine how much will need to explore and create, as well as necessary commands for terrestrial and submarine missions.

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In addition

Scenario: At the beginning of the course of events in Xenonauts 1. Somewhere in the middle of the game observe that the plates are covered with water (either shot down a strange object with new creatures), and we need an outpost on the water. We design and build a floating base.

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I like all the ideas mentioned, and here are a few things that could be added

- Stargates.. someone mentioned it earlier, but what would happen if the aliens brought transportation gates to bring in resources/troops from other planets. Securing one of those gates would give humans an opportunity to explore maps on other planets. These would be "optional" maps to play for the purpose of securing extra resources, cash, intel, fun. Maybe even introduce the "transportation" gate in the tutorial as the only item that survived the iceland incident and earth had a few decades to learn it's secrets. You could limit the usage of gates to the mid/end portion of the game by making the maps impossibly hard with only well trained and equipped soldiers having a chance of succeeding.

Yes, please! If you don't want to dedicate resources to this, at least consider making similar things reasonably comfortable to mod in afterwards!

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As some other people mentioned - X-com Apocalypse is THE best x-com game in series.

It steadily continues plot where humanity now has integrated all alien technology, events of TfD and EU rendered most of the earth uninhabitable, and humanity built a megacity on a distant planet.

And then new threat from cross-dimensional gates comes (threat which literally eats sectoids for breakfast), rendering half of the tech accumulated during x-com campaign obsolete.

X-com: enemy unknown/Ufo:alien defense were already runned into the ground with remakes, xenonauts being best of them. Why do you want do to the same thing AGAIN?

Instead of, you know, giving it proper sequel which will spin story forward. If you can't write it yourself - ask sci-fi novelists for help - i am sure there are people which can help with that.

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maybe for the story line we can set up Earth landed on moon and in the process colonize the moon, the alien strikes back.

For those have save file, we can start at the 1st game technology and bring over the team. for those who do not have 1st game before, start at laser technology?

gameplay can be at moon base, space station, moon colony.

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I would recommend you, and anyone who's interested to grab x-com apocalypse on steam and play it (a fair warning - turn-based there is not very good - so i strongly recommend to use realtime mode with active pause - it is much more better)

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For x-com apocalypse..

1. Turn based game play is extremely easy, real time is extremely uncontrolled.

2. The weapon types dont have a meaning. No heavy weapon or sniper category. Just alien dimension rifle with fastest fire rate and after toxins just spam toxins.

I like the game. I played it for years. But ground combat needs to remake from the beginning. It's nice to watch but most of the game you put your soldiers in front of the entrance of UFO and wait.. throw a toxin or stun grenade and let them die in vain and screams.

All the city, different organisations, gates, ufos, ground combat at city view... everything is awesome but ground combat is a big fail about tactical and AI wise.

Every ppl know that, 2 force shielded and disruptor rifles/toxin guns would make you indestructible.

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For x-com apocalypse..

1. Turn based game play is extremely easy, real time is extremely uncontrolled.

2. The weapon types dont have a meaning. No heavy weapon or sniper category. Just alien dimension rifle with fastest fire rate and after toxins just spam toxins.

I like the game. I played it for years. But ground combat needs to remake from the beginning. It's nice to watch but most of the game you put your soldiers in front of the entrance of UFO and wait.. throw a toxin or stun grenade and let them die in vain and screams.

All the city, different organisations, gates, ufos, ground combat at city view... everything is awesome but ground combat is a big fail about tactical and AI wise.

Every ppl know that, 2 force shielded and disruptor rifles/toxin guns would make you indestructible.

Yea, pretty much (my 2 solders with toxic guns killing every alien which comes out).

2014-10-26_2224.png

But the idea itself and setting itself were executed pretty nice. The active pause realtime mode was practically the best thing about that game. Much more tactically solid and interesting.

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Xenonauts is already a remake of X-COM Ufo Defense that why I think remake is better. However I have a short story for sequel.

Have you ever seen post-apocalyptic UFO? I haven't. Post-apocalypse. You're lack of weapons and resources. Most researches are lost. Xenonauts need alien alloys to re-research and produce laser weapons. Everybody hates each other. The only way to win - all people of all kind must unit together against aliens.

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Xenonauts is already a remake of X-COM Ufo Defense that why I think remake is better. However I have a short story for sequel.

Have you ever seen post-apocalyptic UFO? I haven't. Post-apocalypse. You're lack of weapons and resources. Most researches are lost. Xenonauts need alien alloys to re-research and produce laser weapons. Everybody hates each other. The only way to win - all people of all kind must unit together against aliens.

Already been done. Twice - in UFO: Aftermath and UFO: Afterlight.

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I'd love to see the alien strategic AI have some kind of "personality." For example, it could be an aggressive one with mission selection tendencies randomly selected, but biased towards more brazen events.

In Xenonauts, there is no overarching plan to alien missions. Whatever RNG rolls is whatever RNG rolls. I've always been weirded out by how distracted and unfocussed the aliens could be. I'd like it if there were some sort of strategic AI that does internal research and resource gathering, a la XCOM: Long War. Low alien resources would weigh resource gathering missions higher than aggressive ones, or something.

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Air Combat - I'm not sure exactly how I'd redesign this yet, but I think it could do with further improvement.

You totally sold yourself out on air combat. You went from X-Com style air combat to unlimited fuel for dropships and forever free fighters. Do not make a sequel. I'm sure fanboys will defend you, but piss on that - I lost faith in you when you sold a slice of your integrity for the sake of getting the game finished.

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I was just thinking that Xenonauts is so close to perfect. There's a few design decisions that need reworking, like progression could be smoother like you said, rotating views for easier observation, custom color palettes, easier to compare stats in the in-game guide so that the wiki isn't needed on first playthrough, maybe some more in-depth air combat. But then you get to the bugs like how sometimes clicks don't register, or how alt-tabbing messes everything up, or how there's no linux/mac version due to engine constraints, and it got me thinking "too bad they can't just remake the game now that they know what they do now." And here you are suggesting just that! I think it's a great idea and I'd buy it.

I think instead of removing the "all in this together" aspect a better idea would be to have 2 types of bases: the regular ones and smaller, more numerous bases. That's how real life is, right? Like they'd just have radar and airstrips, and the aliens would only attack the large bases with troops (for simplicity's sake and hey, they're more appealing targets anyway). Maybe even adding in aircraft carriers to extend range could be a fun idea! Still, human on human combat could be fun. (Exalt anyone?) Perhaps you could have it that the world at large was united by the threat of invasion, but there are still ideological terrorists attempting to take you down in an attempt to re-ignite the cold war. So occasionally you'd fight rebel communists, or a capitalist mercenary firm. They'd be more concerned with their ideals than the threat of extinction.

Another thing to consider is that Xenonauts is great at building tension in a way that Firax-Com doesn't. I'm afraid to go around corners or stand too close to buildings because I never know what's gonna happen. But Xenonauts never really uses that tension, the reaper will go in a guy's blind spot and then he'll disappear. 3D will probably help this, but make sure you keep the tension level high!

Edited by bjt23
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You totally sold yourself out on air combat. You went from X-Com style air combat to unlimited fuel for dropships and forever free fighters. Do not make a sequel. I'm sure fanboys will defend you, but piss on that - I lost faith in you when you sold a slice of your integrity for the sake of getting the game finished.

Excuse me, integrity of what? Xenonauts is an x-com inspired game, not a direct remake. If author wants to deviate from original - he has a full artistic license to do so.

Besides, who are you to dictate what to make and what not to make? Some entitled schmuck over the internet, that's who.

Edited by smoke_th
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You totally sold yourself out on air combat. You went from X-Com style air combat to unlimited fuel for dropships and forever free fighters. Do not make a sequel. I'm sure fanboys will defend you, but piss on that - I lost faith in you when you sold a slice of your integrity for the sake of getting the game finished.

At the end of the day, air combat was and is the worst part about XCOM. The air game is likely the least liked aspect of any XCOM game, Xenonauts, NUXcom, or other wise.

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Secondly, what annoyed you about the first game and what do you think we should improve?

hello, well done on making X1 its a classic in its own right!

Here are my ideas for you;

1:More infantry pictures, there always seems to be the same old face in each base.

2: When you stun a reaper zombie with a stun rod they just disappear in X1 (prob a bug), however in X2 stunning a zombie could be a last chance (say 10%) of saving them before they turn into a reaper (if they survive they could be horribly disfigured like a ghoul in fallout 3 or something but still deploy-able in future battles after a drop in stats)

3: my best ground combat battles have always been when my strikeforce has taken heavy losses and there are fallen soldiers everywhere, so have an option to deloy 2 chinooks to a battle if needed.

4: more reapers, its the aliens best weapon they should take advantage of it. Mowing down 30 reapers per late game battle would be incredibly terrifying & rewarding.

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For x-com apocalypse..

1. Turn based game play is extremely easy, real time is extremely uncontrolled.

2. The weapon types dont have a meaning. No heavy weapon or sniper category. Just alien dimension rifle with fastest fire rate and after toxins just spam toxins.

I like the game. I played it for years. But ground combat needs to remake from the beginning. It's nice to watch but most of the game you put your soldiers in front of the entrance of UFO and wait.. throw a toxin or stun grenade and let them die in vain and screams.

All the city, different organisations, gates, ufos, ground combat at city view... everything is awesome but ground combat is a big fail about tactical and AI wise.

Every ppl know that, 2 force shielded and disruptor rifles/toxin guns would make you indestructible.

Ok, I give you that. But the toxin guns are really late/end game weapons, most of the game you use other weapons. And there are many interesting ones, like the guided missiles. There are teleporters, cloaking devices or disruptor shields, you dont get any of them in xenonauts. And why are you saying there were no heavy or sniper weapons??? Of course there were. A couple of cannons and launchers and a laser sniper gun. You even had a jumping proximity mine and a sword :-)

I would be ok with goldhawk changing the ground combat or improving it, for me the best part of Apocalypse was the city management mode anyway. The alien invasions through the dimension gates and the following air fights were much more interesting than in xenonauts.

In xenonauts you get your invasion every couple of days with 5 squadrons, shoot them down and enter ground combat at the crash sites, 5 times after each other with very repetitive maps and battles. Then you maybe research one tech and the next 5 squadrons come. You repeat the same thing many many times and for me it just gets boring after the 50th crash-site-mission. But you need to intercept the downed ufos to get the money for your production, so you just go through the monotonous missions to fund your progress.

In Apocalypse there were more different mission types, not only you fought the downed ufos, but the aliens would just randomly appear in buildings in the city. And there were many different buildings, many of them multiple storeys high, each forcing you to adapt your strategy a little. Some of the other organizations in the city would even turn against you later in the game and you would fight their well-equiped soldiers too.

The economy in xenonauts is really simple as well. In apocalypse you would keep all the weapons of killed aliens, you could use them after research or sell them. I even think you were able to sell alien corpses. And you could make money producing weapons and then selling them.

Not to speak about the options to equip your aircraft with many different modules and weapon systems. How cool was it when you had 10 fully equipped annihilators built and invaded the alien dimension and fought about 20 or 30 alien ships at once?! And then came the alien dimension combat missions...

Xenonauts gives you the ground combat, while pretty good, for me it gets very repetitive really soon. The air-combat is a mini-game at best and that is pretty much all. There is so much more you could add to the game.

I wouldn't just buy an Apocalypse remake, I would fund it!

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Apocalypse is great at every aspect you count and another game with this aspects and totally remade a ground combat would be the best choise. We don't need any world or cold war. But Chris and his team want to make something very different thrn apocalypse as I read the topics.

Xcom games are mostly repetitive. I can't count how many ground mission I played at Xcom and tftd in 20 years. I didn't have any problem about it. Ofcourse random map is very important here. But give me random maps and many techs to recover and produce, I can play GC missions until end öf my life :).

I am not happy with the new air combat idea. Apocalypse air fight was so fun.

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Snip

Eheheh, you got it wrong. Alien encounters in apocalypse WERE NOT random. They were following a pretty nice algorithm - when ufo (any type, even scout) hangs above building - it infests it, with a small-to-medium chance of infesting nearby buildings.

After a cleanup mission if some aliens escape (Yes, unlike ufo 1/2 aliens can flee from mission) - they'll try to relocate to nearby building and hold out there, all while trying to subdue organization that building belongs to.

(side note - when poppers explode they still count as alive alien - i found that out when i hacked the game and gave my troopers popper 'weapon' - they suicide bomb, but appear on the global map right after the mission like if they escaped).

If you will not pay attention to the call, or aliens decide to move after initial infestation - they'll move whole pack to the next building as well, demonstrating basic tactical approach.

Point being - always watch closely to alien ufos and take a notes about where ufos were hanging - 95% chance that THAT building is infected - and you can immideately send killsquad and initiate alien hunt mission there without alarm going off.

On top of that, every subdued organization automatically has a medium chance of each building which belongs to that organization to contain minor wave of aliens. And they also gonna try spreading around if you clean it up but not entirely.

And that's where most fun occurs - if aliens subdued organization BUT all efforts, of that organization, to assault x-com were in vain - there is a 50% chance that next alien invasion craft will shoot down buildings of that organization, turning them 100% hostile against aliens and 100% allied towards you. :D (that's one way to break an agreement)

Here's another part of apocalypse which really struck a bullseye in terms of strategy - senate/goverment is not the only organization which you need to keep an eye for - delivery services also are.

Once delivery service turns hostile on you - it's pretty much game over as you will not be able to not only buy/sell anything, but also transfer equipment between bases (except hand-held items which you can drag with use of your solders).

Edited by smoke_th
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Eheheh, you got it wrong. Alien encounters in apocalypse WERE NOT random. They were following a pretty nice algorithm - when ufo (any type, even scout) hangs above building - it infests it, with a small-to-medium chance of infesting nearby buildings.etc.

You're right. And somehow that IS my point. That's another thing that made the gameplay more interesting. You had to watch the organizations and sometimes could guess where aliens could be hiding and make a pre-emptive strike. It kind of made some sense and added another layer to the tactics.

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Two questions - one, would you buy an improved version of Xenonauts again if we made it? Secondly, what annoyed you about the first game and what do you think we should improve?

I'd probably buy a new one. Loved the first one.

I think the thing to do would be to increase the scale. I think something that was missing from Xenonauts is the ability from the original games to go into fights massively mob-handed. I would tie this to an expansion of squad management.

What I'd do, for example, is say that a Xenonaut squad is up to eight soldiers. I'd assign those soldiers from the soldier pool and then designate a leader from the group and a second in command. Then when it comes time to stick them in a dropship I wouldn't have a ship with troops assigned to it, I'd pick a dropship and then pick the squads that I want to put in that dropship. So if I send three squads, I'd have 24 troops in the mission, 3 squad leaders, 3 second in commands, and the leaders would confer morale bonuses upon the troops if they were nearby. If the squads get chewed up, I'd rotate fresh squads in for next time. This would allow for larger troop deployments with less hassle on the dropship setup screen, especially if you had a specific mission in mind- you could make capture squads or anti-mech squads or rescue teams or whatever. Maybe consider the possibility of multiple dropships. So maybe I send one from one base, it reaches the target and can wait, and then a second arrives and then the troops go in.

I think the air combat thing would need a look. I think what you should do is have a big think about what the Alien doctrine would be for achieving air superiority, if that's even what they want, and what the whole world would do to counter it. The idea that the world's air forces defer completely to an organisation equipped with a handful of F-16s at the start of the game doesn't sit right. I suggest maybe adding the option to allow local air forces to engage any UFO that appears over a country equipped to deal with it. So if I've got a base in the USA and I detect an alien ship (much like the air strike option) I ought to be able to let the local boys handle it. And maybe, especially later in the game, they won't be able to and this wouldn't be possible, or it would be viewed negatively.

As with ground forces I think the air combat should scale up. You might also want to consider ground based anti-air as something the player could invest in, and as something countries might already have in order to help. Ditto for radar systems. Again though, this help from countries ought to be something that loses significance as the campaign goes on. Maybe early UFOs can be brought down with heavy surface to air missiles, maybe later ones shoot them down.

With the ground battles I'd also step up the local involvement, angry mobs, local soldiers and cops, these should be a heavy presence, but fairly early in the game they should become almost irrelevant. But they should still be there to add to the ambiance and the odd rare tale of a SWAT team killing an alien. Things like terror missions should be scaled up, maybe a terror mission should consist of multiple fights, require multiple dropships. Maybe three fights, one on the perimeter, one on the surface getting close to the enemy, and then one at the hub of whatever it is the aliens are doing. Maybe they're digging in a mini-base in the sewers or in a building. Maybe their ship is sort of nesting on the ground and needs to be captured. In the first game cities were destroyed if a terror mission got out of hand, but there was little sense that the fights were so severe as to warrant it. Maybe terror missions should be made a bigger deal.

In general I think that the Xenonauts should have a greater sense of home field advantage, which means an abundance of people, money, conventional wargear. It's just that as the campaign progresses these things would be less useful.

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I'd probably buy a new one. Loved the first one.

I think the thing to do would be to increase the scale. I think something that was missing from Xenonauts is the ability from the original games to go into fights massively mob-handed. I would tie this to an expansion of squad management.

What I'd do, for example, is say that a Xenonaut squad is up to eight soldiers. I'd assign those soldiers from the soldier pool and then designate a leader from the group and a second in command. Then when it comes time to stick them in a dropship I wouldn't have a ship with troops assigned to it, I'd pick a dropship and then pick the squads that I want to put in that dropship. So if I send three squads, I'd have 24 troops in the mission, 3 squad leaders, 3 second in commands, and the leaders would confer morale bonuses upon the troops if they were nearby. If the squads get chewed up, I'd rotate fresh squads in for next time. This would allow for larger troop deployments with less hassle on the dropship setup screen, especially if you had a specific mission in mind- you could make capture squads or anti-mech squads or rescue teams or whatever. Maybe consider the possibility of multiple dropships. So maybe I send one from one base, it reaches the target and can wait, and then a second arrives and then the troops go in.

That's an awesome idea! Maybe add some mechanic like combat fatigue or something that makes me want to rotate squads a bit and let people have a "career", starting of as a squaddie and maybe work their way up to platoon leader! Man would that be cool!

Actually I'm going to sit myself down and start programming that game now :) (but would prefer that the Goldhawk guys did it, they're probably better at it... :) )

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Would I play a remake? Only if the game isn't a step back. I've seen a lot of sequels focus on better graphics and top voiceover talent. They pay for this by cutting parts of the previous game out.

If 3D graphics means smaller maps, no, I would not buy a sequel. If it means fewer weapons, aliens, gear, etc., no, I would not buy a sequel. If I want a simplified XCom with 3D graphics Friaxis has that covered.

If the sequel is a step forward, yeah, I'd buy it.

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