I wish there were an Stand Alone turn based air combat game like Xenonauts air phase

[goduranus]

I know that ground combat is the meat of the X-com games, but I really like the air combat in Xenonauts 1. Back in Xenonauts 1 I played just so I could fly the interceptors aroundand strangely didn't really care much for ground combat. I wish there could be a pure turn based air combat game like Xenonaut's air phase at some point.

Edited June 5, 2018 by goduranus

[FloridaBoy]

I thought it was cool too. It suffered from not having a tutorial, overpowered missles and not being able to practice without risking interceptors. It was too high risk for a reflex based mini-game.  I’d often try tough take-downs, but a single mistake would mean waves of UFOs causing havoc....

[Decius]

There's several tabletop games a lot like that. There's also X-Com: Interceptor, but there's a reason nobody recommends it.

[Drakon]

As someone who also enjoyed this aspect (though seemingly a number of people didn't) i actually thought about making a mod towards that end. Wouldn't be difficult even: all you need to do is change airstriking a crashsite so that it basically gives the same rewards as clearing it with troops, and then you only need to do a couple of missions to acquire tech and the rest is strategical planning and air missions. There is a free flash game which has strong similarities to Xenonauts air combat which is set in a fictional WW2 era and is turn based - if you're interested i'm sure you can find it quickly.

[Ninothree]

I really liked aircombat, especially being able to shoot down three UFO fighters with a Corsair when the autoresolve gave something like a 0% chance. The problem with it was that the dogfights became repetitive - there weren't enough variables fed into the mini-game. You would often end up playing the exact same match. It would've been nice if the autoresolve factored previous wins into the calculation.

Overall, I felt that its merit came from sharing principles with martial arts: gaining the advantage on your enemy by paying attention to timing, distance and angles. A lot of combat in games ends up being a match of numbers: which side brought the most HP and DPS. This was much more elegant.

[Chris]

On 6/6/2018 at 5:12 PM, Drakon said:

There is a free flash game which has strong similarities to Xenonauts air combat which is set in a fictional WW2 era and is turn based - if you're interested i'm sure you can find it quickly.

Pretty sure that's Steambirds you're referring to there?

[Drakon]

6 hours ago, Chris said:

Pretty sure that's Steambirds you're referring to there?

Correct. It's been a long time since i had time to play, so i couldn't remember the name off the bat. Found that one reasonably entertaining for short period of time - being a free flash game unsurprisingly there is not a lot of content. But i thought the execution was reasonably well done.

[emikochan]

On 6/6/2018 at 6:26 AM, FloridaBoy said:

I thought it was cool too. It suffered from not having a tutorial, overpowered missles and not being able to practice without risking interceptors. It was too high risk for a reflex based mini-game.  I’d often try tough take-downs, but a single mistake would mean waves of UFOs causing havoc....

It wasn't reflex based, you could pause and issue orders in Xenonauts 1