Eternity

[Nickolaidas]

In grand X-COM UFO Defence tradition, will Xenonauts be able to "go on forever", as long as the player wishes, postponing the final mission / act of the game?

[Max_Caine]

Nope.

Chris has said this is a race-against-time game. The idea is at a certain point the biggest, baddest UFOs start appearing. To begin with, they appear very infrequently so they can be dealt with. But they then start appearing in greater and greater numbers until Xenonaut forces are overwhelmed.

[thothkins]

My very first game of EU1994 took a year of game time. The troops had fought, not without casualties to the final room. Then the alien makes it's pitch. Even then, I thought "yeah, lets find out everything it knows and push mankind onto a new era."

But no... you have to spend three round killing the poor thing.

Imagine they had just shot the brain bug in Starship Troopers. I get the same feeling when they capture it. "If this was X-Com..."

The other issue, was of course that you could happily just sit there while the mysterious manufacturing plants in Cydonia churned out the same UFOs that were beaten last time out.

Hopefully both issues will be addressed.

[Nickolaidas]

That sucks. I hate time limits.

[raziel1981]

wonder if the community will manage to mod this out of the game

[Nickolaidas]

If it does, it'll be the only mod I'll download in my life.

[Max_Caine]

It's incredibly easy to mod in extra time. The point where the biggest ships appear can be extended to a "comfortable" spot. But the way the game works, once the big bad starts appearing, it will keep on appearing. The simplest solution would be to make the big bad not so powerful. But wouldn't that just get boring?

[Nickolaidas]

I want to keep a save where I have researched everything and I just sit there, shooting down UFOs and sending my teams. I do this just to enjoy the tactical part of the game at full ability. Just like I sometimes take out my Mortal Kombat and play for a few days as one specific fighter, while basically playing another game as my "to beat" title (i.e. Resident Evil 6) using my Mortal Kombat as a "take a break" game, I want to do this with X-COM games as well.

[Max_Caine]

Well, as I understand it, the player may initate the endgame scenario at any point after endgame conditions are met (whatever those are). But the game will just keep gradually ramping up the difficulty until the invasion overwhelms the Xenonauts ability to defend the planet. There are ways around it, of course, but the only solutions I can see would involve lopping off bits or making the final UFOs easy to beat. For vanilla, the whole idea is that humans cannot win a conventional war, and victory for the aliens is inevitable unless a solution can be found - this is strongly implied in the first topic that can be researched, and I've seen "win at all costs" reflected in other topics.

[Steelpoint]

Maybe make it that the game will not get to a state where you are overwhelmed by the highest tier of alien UFO's. Have it that the UFO spawns will hit a cap where it will be difficult but still possible to continue on forever.

Though I do personally like the idea of the game getting to a point where you simply cannot hold out for any longer.

[thothkins]

It's an improvement on the original (YMMV) , pushing the player towards having to take that final mission, rather than just whenever they feel they've min/maxed the rest of the game.

As Max_Caine says, there are a number of ways round it, but I'd not expect to see any in Vanilla flavoured Xenonauts.

[erutan]

One thing to keep in mind is that there isn't a hard cap / story event on when you have to "beat" the game - just that at a certain point the aliens have more resources and have adapted to fighting on earth to the point where it is extremely difficult for you to keep up with them in terms of resources/production/etc... if you're skilled enough and/or not playing on easy you might be able to drag it out for quite a while, but it creates a sense of "oh @#$% we're being overwhelmed, we have to go for their brain or we're gonna get wiped out eventually" that should feel pretty natural/realistic.

[thothkins]

hopefully we all realise what that point is before our main squad is annihilated

[erutan]

It'd be more likely that you'd start losing member nation funding due to not being able to manufacture/rearm/refuel enough fighters to take down the UFOs coming in... I'd imagine failure occurs mainly on the strategic/economic level than tactical (which puts you in a good spot for a hail mary against teh overmind). It's a pretty clever solution!