Psionics,and why humans should (eventualy) get them

[thothkins]

at least that's shock absorption taken care of for recoil and rocket blasts.

[yahoo]

I may have one suggestion (other than made in UFO:AI suggestions for psionic warfare). If humans develop technology to block psionic attacks by aliens (maybe as form of headgear or implants), why not make something that would be unpleasant for the alien that attempts to use psi against one of us? Like for example, they try to mind control a human soldier equipped with a psionic suppressor, the alien's brain explodes -- you catch the drift ;-)

Maybe not as drastic, but it would be a nice addition that would prevent aliens from overusing their psi advantage and would fit in the theme well -- alien weapons are overwhelming in the beginning, but humans adapt and close the gap. In fact, if I understand correctly, we go a step above and make our versions superior in some regards, but I may be wrong. Same could go for psionics.

[yahoo]

Xenonauts doesn't follow the same path as x-com did either.

Chris has stated that he wants the aliens to maintain superiority rather than be matched or overtaken by the humans.

Part of that is being unable to match their psionic powers.

New weapons, armour, and craft will enable the player to stave off defeat long enough to come up with a way to win without needing to be able to go toe to toe with them.

If you don't then you will eventually be worn down by giant battleships taking away your support and picking off your aircraft.

I didn't think of that. I like it. I really disliked EU94 for there not being much to do at some point when you had eight bases and an Avenger in each of them, psionicists that were able to pick off aliens as they come. Basically, you have won as the aliens never had enough resource flow (assuming you diligently destroyed their bases) to allow them to destroy you. Alien Infiltration was the only thing that could have thrown a spanner in the works, but if you diligently destroyed the first scouts that came for that mission, you had nothing to fear.

Exactly how does he mean for humans to win a war if the aliens maintain superiority?

Shepard-style suicide mission?

Commando mission to Cydonia (or whatever the place will be in this game), I'd say. The aliens will be superior in numbers and equipment, but they'll still be vulnerable.

I don't know if you ever played Wing Commander 3. The first two games showed that we were able to go toe to toe with the Kilrathi, but in WC3, they turned out to have been stronger than anticipated and we were losing badly.

Yeah, the game is old, but I'll use spoiler tags in case you never played it and you want to now.

Humans try several wunderwaffen, all of which fail, and it's down to the player with three wingmen to infiltrate the heart of their empire to basically shoot a proton torpedo down the exhaust shaft of the Death Star, only it's a seismic bomb into a fissure of a tectonically unstable home planet.

Kilrathi are very impressed by this and surrender to you, the player. Well, when they pick you up after you eject from your ship that is destroyed by the blast from the planet. The final three missions also find your three wingmen plot-killed. Oh, and you're betrayed by an alien sleeper double agent who was your best friend. It's all bittersweet and amazingly devoid of melodramatics.

It's a very cool game, but I'd recommend looking for the re-release that has all the cinematic sequences that explain the plot in detail.

So yeah, it does strike the right chords with me.

[Malachai13]

hey pankakes, thanks for laying out your thoughts, now about my ideas for rally and inspire:

Rally would be a single target, high TU effect that would restore morale and provide a small boost to bravery for a turn or 2

Inspire/ Paragon: Aoe buff to combat related stats centered on the user, with the strength varying depending on how far a soldier is from the user, and would not stack with itself from another psychic if you were ablt to get another to that level of power, and it would be a toggle on/off, with it lowering the Maximum TU's of the user as long as it was on (25-33% perhaps?)

[TrashMan]

Humans try several wunderwaffen, all of which fail, and it's down to the player with three wingmen to infiltrate the heart of their empire to basically shoot a proton torpedo down the exhaust shaft of the Death Star, only it's a seismic bomb into a fissure of a tectonically unstable home planet.

Kilrathi are very impressed by this and surrender to you, the player. Well, when they pick you up after you eject from your ship that is destroyed by the blast from the planet.

You bomb their homeworld and they are impressed adn surrender to you?

Instead of killing you slowly and painfully?

lol

[Commissar Pancakes]

Never try to understand the Xenos, TrashMan. That way lies heresy and madness.

[TheTuninator]

Honestly, I didn't really care for psionics in the original. At first it was a real hoot to mind-control aliens and have them shoot their own buddies in the back. After a battle or two, though, you realized that psionics simply resulted in your entire squad sitting in the dropship with no risk to themselves while the aliens killed each other. The total lack of risk to your own troops, or indeed their total lack of participation in the battle at all, simply wasn't satisfying.

I had a hell of a lot more fun roof-breaching UFOs with flying armored soldiers than I ever did with psionics.

I wouldn't mind if they were in Xenonauts, of course, but I probably wouldn't use them.

Edited April 21, 2013 by TheTuninator

[thothkins]

I've put up a related Wall Of Text on human psionics over here, with a list of some of the things that could keep the fun bits, without having the overpowering

[yahoo]

You bomb their homeworld and they are impressed adn surrender to you?

Instead of killing you slowly and painfully?

lol

Well, it doesn't make sense if you put it that way :-) And it didn't make sense in the original version of the game (the one that had 4 CDs, but the CDs were of the type that fit only 512 MBs on each, forcing the editors to remove unnecessary content from the game. Too bad the content they removed was actually crucial to the game proceeding (come to think of it, they should have cut the romantic path out of the game and kept the things important to, you know, the whole friggin' story ;-)

They do kill the protagonist's girlfriend for gathering seismic data of the Kilrathi homeworld that allow precisely the last mission to happen.

Nonetheless, the game did carry the message home that aliens were superior and that humanity was fighting a losing war. The last missions were a longshot based on certain theories that proved true. But it was a real Cydonia or Bust type of mission (except that in EU94, the 'or Bust' part was very badly explained and I still don't understand why an aborted or failed Cydonia mission caused you to lose the game.)