taking the story-background more seriously

[thothkins]

My understanding is that...

Xenonauts is a re-imagining of the EU1994 game. As such, it was designed to stay pretty close to that game. The danger is that by straying to far from those core features, you would lose a fair amount if the audience. In short, by moving too far away, it wouldn't be X-Com any more.

An example would be the current thread on Manufacturing. Now a move away form funding to an abstract resource points system may work, but would it still be X-Com.

Likewise, it's a small company, so expecting all the bells and whistles of every related game to be here is asking a lot. The game shows it's development steps and it's choice of engine fairly clearly for good or bad. I imagine there are things it simply can't do well, that there comes a point where that's said to be the case, and people have to make up their own minds if it's worth supporting more.

An example of that could be sloped terrain. EU1994 had it. Xenonauts didn't. The devs tried hard to implement an alternate system. It had issues, and so it was left alone. I find the maps to be pretty flat and it's something no amount of Arabian rug booths has helped with. I'm still kicking around though.

Picking up on some of Mordobb's thoughts:-

However, that doesn't mean that the game should have logical inconsistencies or that it should have obvious game play flaws.

Sight/ Ranges - being constantly balanced, but some relative abstract necessary in the game.

Map Size - I like progressive map sizes. I admit a few of them seem a little too funnelled, but it's not far away. I don;t want to play a two hour map, only to find a light scout at the end of it. I don;t actually want to go through every street on a terror mission, unless there's an actual alien army there. If it's just the abstracted down 20 aliens, then I want the map to reflect that.

Old Xeno-bases - The game starts. Would you prefer to have the game economy based around 1) to be able to select a base on every funding nation 2) have all of the base locations preselected for you or 3) An organisation reduced to having a single operational base, clinging on to the best technology available on a limited basis.

The game has gone with 3). You may assume that other bases are either converted, run down and at least 20 years out of date. They may no longer be secret (something to bear in mind when the funding bloc falls to the aliens) and they may not have all been set up for strike capabilities. A lot of that early money went into research, but there simply wasn't enough alien evidence to make it worthwhile.

Blue Overalls - The game used to give you Jackal armour at the beginning. It lightly mocked the old coveralls. I'd like to see it returned to that. A newer version of Jackal armour (conveniently using the same art assets) can be made available once alien alloys has been researched.

modernizing terrestrial weaponry - I infer it from the research topics, but perhaps it could be made cleared. Laser, Plasma and EM based research was all being conducted. I'd like to see it extended to psychotronics and drones too, but that's just me. Tanks become Hovertanks. Humanity doesn't exactly come up with anything it wasn't already thinking about in the game. If anything, the aliens aren't quite alien enough to make that clearer in the humans approach to R&D.

American Weapons - Well, it had to be one or the other, to begin with anyway, and they possibly feel more comfortable with the Western ones than the Eastern ones. It's taken this long to still try and balance out the ones that are there, without adding variations.

Modified Weapons/Ammo - Which brings me to this one. Personally, I'm happy with the thought of going through an X-Com game where I used each type of weapon. I'll get to the Cydonia equivalent with a sniper rifle and a shotgun etc. That was something that the game made pretty clear as an intention. While, I understand the fun of having lots of add on toys, I'd only like to see them once I could be sure that the distinct weapon types hadn't been eroded into being worthless. It may seem basic, but at least it should be pretty solid when done.

I'd not mind flamethrowers or a grenade launcher that somehow didn't interfere with grenades or rocket launchers.

Accuracy - Yes your troops are a bit poor, as is intended to a certain degree (still being balanced). Options have been given on the forums. Example: All your troops start off as being practically at their peak. Only small increments, if any are possible. To maintain the alien threat, the aliens are pretty devastating. it was felt that it removed too much form the EU1994 progression experience. So, it's not as though this hasn't been discussed.

Radar - There was a smaller radar originally. Radar ranges used to be smaller too. No, it's not realistic. A lot of the Base Management isn't. The UFO:AI game picks up on that more, by having off site radar bases and storage facilities. Even then, there's no real links between any of these games and their host funding nations. I'd love to see a lot more of that, but others may not want to wait until 2020 for the game to be released.

Military adapting to the alien threat/ spreading the tech love - They do in that they get advanced weapons and (eventually) aircraft later on. Agian, I'd like to see more on that, but it has got better.

Prone, sidestepping, moonwalking - I'm sure I wouldn't have minded if it was there. Prone aliens would be fun. I wonder if the thought of doing even more sprites killed this one, or if it was just not considered worthwhile, if considered at all.

Stingy funding nations - They are considering multiple contingencies as speculated on in other threads. In conjunction with other funding nation variables, I'd have like this to have been more dynamic, But it's well outside the core of the game, which is to replicate the battlescape feel of the original.

Zombie Xenonauts - I think that's exactly the idea. Xenonauts is supposed to replicate the feel of the original, with a few tweaks to take out the exploits of the original. It's not supposed to stray too far from that (although the air combat is a great and fun exception to that.)

[Firebeard]

I'd like to second the notion of flamethrowers and grenade launchers being implemented.

Flamethrowers, ideally, with a realistic(or, well, adjusted for balance and gameplay) range, rather than the hollywood 20ft one.

Perhaps to balance GLs and rocket launchers, it might make sense to have the GL have a reduced power or radius from the hand grenade(handwave the GL grenade as being HE rather than frag maybe?), but longer range, while having shorter range than the heavier/slower rocket launcher?

[Betuor]

On note of the Russian weapons, there is a way to switch the current weapons with the Russian ones in the assets. Also, some USSR tilesets have the weapons on them.

[Sherelian]

I see, that my Topic has changed somehow.

I'd like to recall, that I am not asking for changes in the mechanics, but in the story and aesthetic. The player should feel what the story is about to tell him. The feeling right now is a mix of nostalgia in retrospective to xcom and an faszination for the mix of tactics, strategy, economics and research.

A game should not be a slave to the reality.

So after some reconsideration I'd like to make another suggestion, how to alter the story and the feeling in the game:

First change the open warfare beetween humankind and aliens to a kind of silence war. The public should not exactly know, what is going on. The nations on the other side do exactly know. They lost some crucial parts of their airforce to the aliens -- there is not to much left. But the public may be thinking, that the cold war has become hot.

Second slow down the pace. The game is far to fast for nearly everything. Such a pace kill every ambiente. Slow down. Let the first months be some rare encounter with scouts. At the moment there are more UFOS to stock up the funds. The problem can be easily solved by stretching the progress over a long time. Side effects will be a reasonable time to research all the new stuff, to build new prototypes, to train new soldiers, etc. etc. etc. The first majore encounter shoudl be months after the first dogfights.

Third vary the tasks. A nice way might be some stealth-missions to repell infiltrations by aliens. X-Com apocalypse showed a very neat story for this: the aliens tried to infiltrate different companies and the gouverment. If let untouched, they would turn over. So an infiltrated company should be a valid target, a compromised para-military camp, etc.

Fourth Give the love you put into the air-combat more story. I dont know, what kind of decisions you made on pilots. But that is on of the most vital and innovative points xenonauts offers; as it is the very one things, which allowed the xenonautproject to shot down an UFO, where everybody else failed. So put some effort into the explanation for this, i.e. in a special training for pilots with some extraordinary skill, trained for 20 years to reach some incredibly maneuvers. The experiences of those pilots demanded changes on the airplanes, which made new maneuvers and tactics possible, which made again new demands toward the planes, and so on....

So make the air-superiority feel-able to the player. He has much less crafts, low funds, is outgunned in the air and on the ground but has the most advanced piloting skills, an alien ever encountered.

Fith Give some love to details, i.e. the base-design. Let the player design his first base, instead of delivering a ready meal.

Sixth Alter the advantages and disadvantages from the different nations. If a nation is happy, she may do something more than just offering more money. If a nation is unhappy, she might cut off some ressources. That is what x-com apocalypse did: if you missed to repell an infiltration to company, you wount be able to buy their guns.

So, that's for the beginning, some ideas and thought on the topic.

cheers

sherelian

[thothkins]

First change the open warfare between humankind and aliens to a kind of silence war.

Xenonauts has set it's stall out more in line with all of the alien invasion movies than the slow infiltration of the original. Actually, Xenonauts is a little bit of a mix in practice. There's the alien fleet of a '50s invasion movie, but with the technical difficulties experienced by the UFOs of the 1970 UFO TV series. Three's also the decline in funding and infiltration of EU1994.

I'm not sure if it falls between stools or not. If the entire fleet of 3000 were to attack on day 1, it would be a very different game to EU1994. More like UFO Aftermath. So, there's a bit of balancing there, so it captures the original, without being completely the same.

Second slow down the pace. The game is far to fast for nearly everything.

Recently, I've felt that there's been a move to increase the pace. Look back at the first point. If it's trying to be more an invasion than a slow infiltration, and it has 3000 ships, there comes a time when you wonder what they are doing up there. If it's taking that long to covert UFOs they should just bribe some of the Xenonaut scientists. They manage to create plasma tech in a couple of weeks.

The point being, that there's supposed to be a growing sense of imminent catastrophe. That the invasion should overwhelm the planet as it struggles to reach a solution. Anywhere from 30-50 ground missions has been mentioned as being the time scale of this. With several UFO types and plenty of research, there should be a feeling of pressure. It's different to Alien Base farming of EU1994.

If the first encounters are separated by months, you're going to have some pretty bored players. Think of the focus as being the ground missions. Every ground mission should enable you to develop tactics, almost in time fro the next step up in ship or map size.

Third vary the tasks.

When I heard about the game, the thought of secondary mission objectives was appealing. What I didn't realise was that there would only be one. It was a little disappointing. Further mission types are here.

But say there are 30-50 missions with escalating difficulty to achieve that imminent fall of humanity. The first 5 may be light scouts, to get the player into the game. There are another what 7 ground mission generating craft. So say you can get an average of 3 missions for each of those. There may be as many as 7 terror missions, say 5 base defences and around the same number of Alien Bases. Then there's the final mission itself. That's 44 missions, it's already over the middle ground of the expected range above.

So, while there may be room for secondary objectives as bonuses, there may not be quite as much scope for active mission types for the player to go on.

Personally, I really, really liked the Apocalypse model, and would happily see an extended game incorporate that. But, it may not be the goal of Xenonauts.

Fourth Give the love you put into the air-combat more story.

They managed to nuke a UFO form the sky in 1957/58. Based on that data, and on any data from the impact site before and after the mission. Someone posted recently that this is reflected in the lower payload and higher velocity of the modified craft. This results in Xenonauts being able to take down the first UFO in 1979. Not necessarily any ground breaking technology, so much as using existing technology for a certain goal. For me, a lot of that can be read between the lines. perhaps the text isn't explicit enough for all tastes, and more would be beneficial. I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts on that?

Fifth Give some love to details, i.e. the base-design. Let the player design his first base

The issue there, is that a novice player may not know what facilities are key ones. Imagine that you know nothing about the game. So you place your command module. Then what? I'd try to have 1 of everything if I could. But that single Condor isn't going to last long. Already I'm behind in the first month. Personally, I'd want to be able to build my own base. But arguably is an optional thing or something for different difficulty levels.

Sixth Alter the advantages and disadvantages from the different nations.

I would love for there to be more on this, but it's not been the focus of the game. The rest of the post around the mission types above deals with a lot of thoughts around that.