My personal DREAM-FEATURE list to make this game the best successor of original XCOM

[Kebab]

Hello there.

I know. But first - I've spent some hours writing this.

I'm new here and at once I'm starting huge discussion and feature-list. Well... I'm playing original XCOM since nearly 20 years (near every year), also played many remakes and resurrections like Aftermatch, Aftershock, Extraterrestial, Cydonia, OpenXCOM and took part in the communities of many other small home-made projects. Since year I'm checking out this game, looking, reading forums and stuff. Today I decided to register here and write some of my dreams.

Dreams that can make this game more awesome.

As always in threads like this. You can find here my personal feelings and subjective opinions what should be changed or added to this game. I know this is indie-game, so I do not expect big changes and miracles, just few tweaks and stuff.

Kebabs DREAM-FEATURE list

v. 1.2

If you want to respond to the specific idea, use the bold name (quote it), do not quote the whole idea and description

• More intelligent civilans. Currently, they are so stupid that ic even scares me. Sometimes, they like to run between my positions and positions of aliens, no matter there's whole shytstorm. Or they like going to beat them with fists. Another time civilians like to squat in the middle of the road between the bullets. This must be changed. In my opinion, civilians should always try to reach the landing site of Xenonauts.
  

• More attractive geoscape. There are some mods for this, but look - geoscape in near every game looks similar, right? Right. So, we should change it a bit - for example making night-time part of geoscape to look like this.
  

• Some random events. Playing this game is cool, but after few weeks it's starting to be boring. We need some stuff to change this. For example - XCOM: TFTD ship attack was awesome. It could be included - we need to cap civilians and don't destroy whole ship Idea with expanding huge alien life form in the Aftermath or Aftershock was nice. Also some random events on the ground - for example, with bigger alien ship we have greater chance that aliens will try to shoot us down during landing. Player will get the message that aliens where trying to defend crash/landing site. If they succeed our Choppa (or other kind of lander) will need to be repaired in base and some of our crewmembers will be injured during mission (at once after landing).
  

• Space station and space-fight. Near every XCOM-like game or indie-based title designed on XCOM idea looks similar - we are fighting on the ground. It would be awesome to bring end-game to space. For example, aliens are using most powerfull ships agaist us, most powerfull weapons. We can do it too - we are building space station like huge base, defending it (like normal geoscape battle, but using station in the center). Station would be used to end-game, somehow. Ya know, building big spaceship and pwning aliens by this thing
  

• More attractive crashsites. Right now every mission looks the same - crashsite or just landing looks same. We need small graphical changes to make it more attractive and more... mysterious. After some time each round is the same, and we are pwning missions at once. Aliens should wait for us, prepared for battle. For example every banged ship (not just landed) should be hidden in smoke. Also there should be some remains of destroyed stuff. Burning trees. Currently, every map looks the same. We could add an overlay, textures with fire, many dirt, crater around the ship, something like that. Ya know, attractive stuff, that is different every time!
  

• More attractive alien ships. They look awful, ugly and dumb. Sorry for this but it's true. Ships was made without thinking, all based on the same style, idea and model. They all look like scarabs (cockchafer or cockroach, idk how to write this in English), but with different shell. Someone should watch some Star Trek movies and know how battleships should look like One of the most awesome stuff in XCOM is about to explore these great ships. Here? We have small not attractive ships. Also interiors of those ships are... well... I need to find clever but strong word. Looks bad. They are empty, just few consoles and black borders. They should look like interrior building. We need walls inside, not just black borders, screens, doors, stuff!
  

• More different tiles and a little bigger maps. They are nice, especially those in the cities, however, they are a bit too small and too soft. We need more small buildings, barrels, fences, boxes, bushes. Sometimes half a map is like potato fields, lawn or a big parking, tons of same-looking terrain. Also maps are a little too small - when we are fighting with medium ship, it's just around the corner, rather than lying somewhere nearby, +32 blocks in X and Y direction would be awesome. In original XCOM creeping up and searching the map was cool, here we have very small area, you always know where to advance.
  

• More missions where we have something to do. Idea of capping alien ship is nice. But we need more ideas like this to make game more different every time, every mission. For example we need to attack an alien outpost and escort captured scientist. Or we must defend our position for some time/rounds. It would be awesome to make other kind of missions than just "GO AND BLAM BLAM BLAM KILL EVERYTHING!", I mean missions like that - we must sneak unnoticed into alien outpost. Arm the bomb, steal something and get out. If we will get noticed aliens are getting strong support, we need to fight them like in normal mission.
  

Edited August 31, 2013 by Kebab

[EchoFourDelta]

More attractive alien ships. They look awful, ugly and dumb. Sorry for this but it's true. Ships was made without thinking, all based on the same style, idea and model. They all look like scarabs (cockchafer or cockroach, idk how to write this in English), but with different shell. Someone should watch some Star Trek movies and know how battleships should look like One of the most awesome stuff in XCOM is about to explore these great ships. Here? We have small not attractive ships. Also interiors of those ships are... well... I need to find clever but strong word. Looks bad. They are empty, just few consoles and black borders. They should look like interrior building. We need walls inside, not just black borders, screens, doors, stuff!

I can agree with the interiors, maybe have more going on there, and definitely on the changing things up for crash sites. But the reason they all share a similar aesthetic? Simple.

Take a look at human aircraft There's some slight variance here or there, depending on where the aircraft came from, small differences in profile and stuff, but by and large they all fit the same basic design: Forward cockpit, fuselage, couple of wings, rudders, ailerons, tails, rearward engines on smaller ones, underwing on larger craft. If you're looking at basic formulae, there's not as much difference between all of our designs (and the ones in-game) as there are between the alien craft. They're more varied than we are.

With regards to the maps themselves, there's going to be more, and hopefully more variation to reflect that it's a crash later on.

[Tobbzn]

A lot of the variety could actually be attributed under the terror site mechanic.

Say, a military research base is under attack. You land outside, clear the area, and the survivors propose to join you as discounted technicians, scientists and soldiers. With rewards based on your performance, it would incentivise some interesting gameplay decisions, much like the proposed MELD system in EW.

Maybe that could be modded in, actually. I don't know if it's currently possible to reward personnel from a mission or temporarily give you control of civilian units, though.

[thothkins]

• More attractive geoscape. Night time geoscapes do look lovely. But the Geoscape we have is an upgrade of the older one, and I'm not sure if it's going to be upgraded further. There's a whole new UI to come in first presumablyas per this thread. The Xenonauts Geoscape, while a lot simpler than the rotating globe of all the other X-Clones grew on me after not too long.
  

• Some random events. If it's "boring" after the first few weeks, then that's part of a balancing discussion. Recent builds have looked at providing plenty of lighter UFOs to settle newer players in, while still trying to get a sense of escalation in there. Likewise, lighter UFO can now still appear a little later than usual to give new recruits some training opportunities.
  While I still very much enjoy the early months, I always got a huge spike of activity in December/January that hurtled things forward.
  The focus of the game is essentially the battlescape. As a result there's not a great deal of dynamic change in the Geoscape beyond changing funding each month and funding nations signing alien pacts (bah!). Which pretty much mirrors the original really. The Geoscape events do change from minor to major events to provide a bit of colour. There's a selection of mission alternatives here and Geoscape alterations as part of the same thread starting here.
  There was a time when your chinook got shot out of the sky on a more regular basis, particularly if it was unescorted. Likewise transfers would occur using a transport plane that was also vulnerable to alien attack. Over time the devs have removed these, to prevent sobs of adults who have just seen their top soldiers or prized Alenium lost forever.

• Space station and space-fight. As EU1994 is based around the UFO TV series, I always pined for a moonbase myself.
  
  But, Xenonauts starts off in 1979 so not much chance of anything there. Besides with 3000 UFOs in orbit, you would be playing constant Space Station defence missions. There's a conceit *as per the UFO TV series) that the UFOs struggle in our atmosphere and are being converted to doing so. Not so, for targets in orbit.

• More attractive crashsites. The old UFO art had graphics showing the UFO ploughing into the earth as part of the crash. While the revised art is an upgrade, that's one thing I miss as it really added to the feel that it was a crash site and that the battle would be against the desperate (and rather annoyed) survivors of it.
  [imghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/ca/Xenonauts_gameplay.jpg/220px-Xenonauts_gameplay.jpg[/img]
  I have had missions in the past where the power core had detonated and the surroundings had ignited. Perhaps not covering the entire region in smoke, but still atmospheric. Generally, maps are being added to as time goes on. I think the focus is making the game function correctly on what's there, to make best use of adding map features later on. There's also the community map pack to provide plenty of variations in the mean time.

• More attractive alien ships There was a recent post form the dev team saying that there will be more UFO props added. It falls into the same sort of category as the maps point above. The same thread also highlighted that the original EU game provided more variety in dealing with the UFO interiors. This mainly resulted in a much higher body count, so I'm not that bothered.
  I can handle not losing another soldier to those Large Scout corners. There's also the AI element to this. It's hard to say how awkward those UFOs are going to be until you can determine how the aliens will react.
  A basic example would be the Light Scout. A single room. No problem. But when the aliens can burst out of it as your troops approach, then it completely changes your strategy. Applying that to the other UFO rooms, and the addition of props to force player choices, could see this improve greatly. Besides there was a Landing Ship map I always got slaughtered in, so there's plenty to worry about already. The space between those little scarab legs used to be a kill zone for the unsuspecting Xeno-commander.
  As for the UFO design, having clear advancements on basic principles shows that thought was put into their design. Specifically having those insect connotations. I like that you can see the progression of their design as they become more advanced an more of a threat. It's adds consistency to the alien invasion fleet. I guess it's personal preference. It's a shame there aren't multiple breaching points or the wide spread crash sites of the original though.
  There's also a nice link between the beginning of the basic Xenonaut UFO design and the UFOs first recorded in UFOlogy. More on that here.

• More different tiles and a little bigger maps. As per the maps and props points above. More to come and the community map pack adds in lots of variation. There's also a balance on gameplay here. Do I want to spend two hours crawling up to a UFO? Not really. In EU1994 the Battleship hogged a pretty large part of the map. You weren't likely to miss it for long. Map creation is one of Xenonaut's strengths though, so you there's lots of fun to be had in the Mapping forums, starting with Flashman's guide here.
  

• More missions where we have something to do. Xenonauts looks to re-imagine EU1994, and the improvement was the secondary mission objective of squatting in the alien ship for 5 turns to avoid having to goon Bug Hunts for the last alien. When I first saw the game, I thought there would be other secondary objectives, but that's it so far.
  As above there's a selection of mission alternatives here.
  There are consequences in a lot of those missions. Say you're 30 missions into the game, with a single squad of veterans. You go on a mission to disarm an alien bomb and fail. The map blows up in your face, and you have no chance of getting a functional squad in place in time for the end game. Likewise for any hint of suicide missions or defending against a Reaper Hive (something that was part of Kickstarter and would be brilliant as a one off). The game should provide excitement through the regular escalation of the alien threat through it's UFOs.
  

[Kebab]

• More intelligent civilans. Currently, they are so stupid that ic even scares me. Sometimes, they like to run between my positions and positions of aliens, no matter there's whole shytstorm. Or they like going to beat them with fists. Another time civilians like to squat in the middle of the road between the bullets. This must be changed. In my opinion, civilians should always try to reach the landing site of Xenonauts.
  

[thothkins]

It is quite reminiscent of the original game, except that the Xenonaut civilians are probably smarter. I have had civilians run for da choppa, so it does happen.

[EchoFourDelta]

Civilians and local forces need to be way smarter, and capable of taking a ton more initiative than they do now. They're currently zeroed out on their battlescape decision-making properties in every category.

[thothkins]

I was fairly happy that the local forces covered for my messes by distracting the aliens. Considering I'm peeved when they kill an alien before I do, how much smarter do folks want them to be?