Geopolitical Mod

[Andeerz]

These ideas are beyond excellent. I hope Xenonauts ends up being hella-moddable and able to incorporate at least some of this!

[RuskiVolkov]

I think this is an incredibly fantastic and amazing idea. My only question is how it is going to be balanced with the game. Is the invasion going to be slowed down to allow the player to focus on all sorts of other research branches and political debating?

Are we only going to have soviet weapons for 2-3 weeks after we receive them because we'll already be getting laser weapons?

Those questions aside I would really love to see some form of something like this implemented in the game. I think xenonauts (and the first 2 X-Com games) are less about management and politics and more about beating back the aliens. Which is fine and all, but I would very much like to see these features in the game.

[thothkins]

Thanks for the kind words. Had it support, it would have run under the hood of what you see now, creating a changing world in which the invasion was occurring. Most of it is a result of player actions and success at repelling the invasion.

I'd completely agree that if the focus of the game shifts away from it's central path too far beyond a very little, then it would be detrimental. The above would have added wrinkles, surprises and some hopefully interesting choices.

[Solarius Scorch]

Agreed. Even if it's not implemented as such, it provided us with some excellent reading material!

And I admit I'd like to see a little more socio-political background in the game anyway.

[Zekram Bogg]

Wow. This is pretty impressive stuff.

It's perfect for a large scale mod obviously, but what about figuring out a smaller scale one too?

Because honestly, when I first heard about this game and its Cold War setting, I figured there would be something in the geoscape to represent nuclear tensions between the US and USSR. I mean, if you're going Cold War, it seems like a logical step, and I'm a bit disappointed there's little in the game along these lines.

Something fairly simple, like adding a Mutually Assured Destruction Doomsday clock to the Geoscape - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

Where basically, at the start of the game, the alien threat resets the clock to forty-five minutes to midnight due to the mutual threat they represent, but if the 'nauts aren't able to perform well in the two major superpowers regions - North American and USSR obviously - it not only hurts relations, but adds seconds and minutes to the Doomsday clock as they start hurtling accusations at the other power, especially if you place a base in one of these regions but not the other. When the clock ticks to midnight, the major superpowers decide the nuclear option is viable and they start nuking alien craft, and soon, each other.

Some major things that could add lots of minutes would be if one of the superpowers is taken over by the alien threat, but not the other, adding a full fifteen minutes to the clock since the temptation to now nuke the rival nation that is working with the enemies of humanity would probably be too great for either power. Oddly, if both the USSR and North America are taken over, then the threat of nuclear annihilation disappears, and could prove to be a strategic choice the 'nauts take in such a case.

This could lead to an alternate end game scenario, where after huge swaths of the world are nuked, you can still attempt to fight over the wasteland that earth has become to defeat the aliens, leading to a possible phyrric victory ending.

That's the kind of simplified version of this idea that I was expecting to be in the game already, with something like your proposed mod as an expansion pack or something. Because man, that's a lot of awesome detail.