Losing is Fun

[Anon_Spartan]

There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground in Xenonauts. If a city is under attack by alien forces and you engage, only to retreat, everyone is just as pissy at you as if you hadn't helped at all. I know that the politicians are already terrible people if they're nuking their own cities to stop a few androns from walking around, but I think this black and white play style only encourages savescumming or ignoring terror missions. I think the huge 60,000 financial loss for messing up should be mitigated by if you showed up and killed some of the enemies, even if it was just a few easy ones.

On the subject of retreat, Im not sure if there could be a way of making retreating easier. Something like a 'Home' button that sends the selected unit back towards the dropship on a automatic path? Also, maybe the alien's turn could be sped up except for actions you can see, since besides movement and claw scratches there isn't much going on. My idea is just that when the shit hits the fan, people might just reload a save file than deal with it because of how painfully boring retreating is.