I want to research what's in the coffee...

[Wraith_Magus]

So, after hitting three crash sites in a row with my Chinook and it's hammerspace fuel supply, and researching a basic tech in basically 2 days, including ordering the next research path within seconds of the last research object being completed while it was 4 in the morning, I started to wonder...

Nevermind all this supposed alien tech involving external filtration to eat and such, how, exactly, are MY people sleeping and eating? Am I just putting out meth on a tray in the Chinook or something? IV drips of alien super-coffee?

It seems like this game has pretty crazy compressed time for everything. We have time compression to skip the boring parts, so why not make everything in the game take several times more time, and just have actual alien events be less frequent by the same rate?

[GizmoGomez]

I wouldn't mind stretching out all of the events some.

[Elydo]

Making everything occur over a longer timescale would add realism, regardless of if it made anything slower from the perspective of the player. That said, I'd prefer the pace of events to start slower and increase as the invasion picks up and the aliens stop being complacent. Noticeably so.

[Ripley]

They probaly rest as best as they can in the Chinook/Charlie in-between missions.

Its not exactly uncommon for military squads to have several missions in a row, especially in a war.

I personally dont find it that much of a problem and the fact that they retain the equipment they had at the end of the last mission at the start of the new one (alien weapons, medkits in their hands instead of their rifles) along with any seriously wounded person missing from the mission, is good enough for me as a showing of the fatigue of battle-after-battle.

If you want to get realy realistic you could have them get a penalty for doing subsequent missions in a row that reduces their max TUs, or add a "fatigue/energy" bar/timer that must be filled in base (like fuel) before they are ready for a nother mission and it takes longer to recharge if they do more than one mission in a flight, with increasing penalties.

This would be more realistic. But it would not be fun (and not in a "grenade right outside the dropship in the first turn" kind of "not-fun" but a "this is just tedious and frustrating" kind of not-fun).

PS:Im quite grateful Xenonauts doesnt have the boring energy bar of the originals. Shit was a pain when trying to relocate people to the UFO entrance after clearing out the map.

[NoirWolf]

They probaly rest as best as they can in the Chinook/Charlie in-between missions.

Its not exactly uncommon for military squads to have several missions in a row, especially in a war.

I personally dont find it that much of a problem and the fact that they retain the equipment they had at the end of the last mission at the start of the new one (alien weapons, medkits in their hands instead of their rifles) along with any seriously wounded person missing from the mission, is good enough for me as a showing of the fatigue of battle-after-battle.

If you want to get realy realistic you could have them get a penalty for doing subsequent missions in a row that reduces their max TUs, or add a "fatigue/energy" bar/timer that must be filled in base (like fuel) before they are ready for a nother mission and it takes longer to recharge if they do more than one mission in a flight, with increasing penalties.

This would be more realistic. But it would not be fun (and not in a "grenade right outside the dropship in the first turn" kind of "not-fun" but a "this is just tedious and frustrating" kind of not-fun).

PS:Im quite grateful Xenonauts doesnt have the boring energy bar of the originals. Shit was a pain when trying to relocate people to the UFO entrance after clearing out the map.

Still doesn't explain how the guys who just finished a week long project on understanding the fundamentals of alien alloys can now move directly to alien plasma technology and not blow their own balls off with a alien pistol due to fatigue.

[victorix58]

I think they are different guys and the cocky chief scientist is just taking all the credit. He's just reading the lab reports and summarizing different staffers work! Poor grad students...

[Wraith_Magus]

Well, if we're talking realism, I'd like to ask why it's the Fate of the World Resting SOLELY In My Capable Hands, and the rest of the world can't be bothered to let me have more than a hundred guys or so, (because, you know, there's probably only about 30 scientists in the whole world who want to do something that's probably as boring and routine as studying alien artifacts personally,) no more engineers working on building super-weapons than can fit in my garage at any one point in time, or let me use their runways if I need an emergency landing, or how about just plain trying to fight with more than just some random guy in a plaid shirt with a shotgun once in a while?

This is the hight of the Cold War, the US military spends more on their strategic canned bean supply at this point in time than they're giving over to Xeno-com, here. Why is it they dump billions on nukes, and give the alien invaders literally making the sky fall down nothing more than $10,000 a month and maybe the rest of the ham sandwich they didn't finish? It's not even like only the rare Xenonaut super technology can save us, the basic equipment is obviously quite effective, and even the advanced stuff is limited only by how much you can afford and have techs to build. (Which, itself, is just a matter of what you can afford.) So, we're printing futuristic super weapons, and NOBODY wants a piece of the pie in the middle of the Cold War?

If we're talking realism, then having some sort of new discovery every other day would still be "realistic", of a sorts, but it would be coming from multiple sets of researchers around the globe sitting in their universities, rather than all huddling in the same bunkers as the grunts. They only need to be in the base when the base has an alien in it to cut up. It's not like the same scientist that does autopsies also is qualified to design plasma pistols. (And surely the techs would work faster if they were sub-contractors in factories being asked to special-produce component parts their factories are capable of producing, rather than making everything ad hoc in one workbench. How do you even MAKE armor-grade ceramics without specialized equipment?)

[GizmoGomez]

Well, think of it this way:

Back in 1958 when the Iceland Incident first happened, the nations were all flipping out over the alien attacks that were surely going to happen. The Xenonauts got founded, and secured a treaty with the funding nations to where they'd fund them in exchange for protection. Then, for the next twenty years, nothing happened. The world forgot about the Xenonauts because they weren't relevant. "Maybe that one UFO was a one time thing?"

Once the aliens start attacking again, they don't have unlimited resources; the nations all think they can probably do it better themselves. But, they still continue to fund you because of the treaty.

Once you start doing your job well, they recognize that you are actually helping and doing a good job, so they fund you more.

Also, just gonna say it: It's a game. Don't flip out.

[Wraith_Magus]

Yeah, but why can't they do better themselves? Terror missions are crazy and all... for a squad of 8 guys. The aliens aren't immune to bullets, and they only attack a single block of a city at a time, so why don't they just post the National Guard or just plain call the cops?

You wouldn't need a plane with 190,000 lbs of fuel if you just could scramble local forces. Sure, they melt through regular planes like butter, but being as I can usually take out every threat I find without taking damage by just using a decoy, that isn't a major problem until you hit the larger ships.

And as for applying logic to games, I'm not flipping out - I just enjoy the exercise of logic to obviously illogical fiction. As does a lot of people in this forum, judging by what I've read.

[GizmoGomez]

Okay; for whatever reason it seemed like you were. My mistake, and apologies.

It is a good question; one that can only be answered by the age-old adage, "Gameplay trumps realism".

<shrug>

[Wraith_Magus]

Nope, I just use hyperbole for comedic effect. I do run my armies on leftover ham sandwiches, though. I make REALLY good sandwiches.

Although I do have to wonder why we have to build whole new bases to get radar coverage, instead of just having the Pentagon call you and tell you that there's a UFO flying over Maine at the moment. It's a little silly to have people complaining and cutting your funding early in the game that 50 people died in an "unusual disruption of communications" (presumably due to aliens interrupting a football match, causing riots that killed all those people,) when there's absolutely no chance you could have stopped it, due to being only one base on the other side of the world from the problem and having no radar coverage or fighter range.

It's not that it couldn't be made into a good game - you could have some sort of funding and diplomacy concept where you have to haggle for access to specific resources that the rest of the world can put at your disposal, instead of just having to explicitly build everything yourself. It's just something more advanced and more abstract than what micromanagement-heavy X-Com did.

[TrashMan]

Well, you can rationalize labs and sceintists by not thinking of labs as normal laboratories, but rather research centers - places that comamdn andcoordinate a global research initiative. Very little actual experiments would be handeled there. The scientists there would be project heads that coordiante experiments and gather and collate data from all over the world.

[Wraith_Magus]

To talk about it from a different angle, though...

If one of the "problems" that this game faces, currently, according to the dev, is that players are expected to only get in 30-40 missions, total, and too many players are taking on every single UFO they can possibly catch, then wouldn't a solution be to just make it so that it's possible to have more troops, but that they get sick, sleep, take leave, or something else, so that you never can rely on every soldier being in top condition round-the-clock? In real life, if a job takes 4 people, you hire 5, because at least one will average being sick or something. If you want to work round-the-clock, you hire 15.

If the "problem" is ultra-elite troops and too much money if you want to have round-the-clock UFO hunting, then just make players split that experience among more troops, and that cash among their salaries.