Continue the fight after the Council of Funding Nations try to shut you down.

[warioland]

What if you can continue playing after the Xenonaut's Counsel tries to close you down when you have enough power to self-sustain yourself? What if you can tell them to go screw themselves?! Or tell them kindly to walk away, that you can handle yourself from here on without them? Especially when you owe them over a million and they're about to shut you down just as you're getting your manufacturing projects running in full strength to pay them back. They're gonna be pretty upset regardless...

So an option to ask you to continue or give up would be AWESOME.

So by continuing to Command, as soon as you leave your final Council Monthly Report, you're told that the Council has frowned upon your decision to stop them from dismantling everything you created, because they're obviously going to want everything from a canceled Xenonauts project, to spread it amongst themselves to try to fight the aliens, resulting in the Nations backstabbing each other, and so on. Gameover.

So this would be a cool twist.

"In your response to disobey direct orders of relieving yourself from commanding the Xenonauts, this Council of Nations is prepared to take action against you and anyone you are connected with. We will not negotiate with rogue operatives. Be advised, your actions are not without consequence."

(Gives that nostalgic vibe of the good old days when video games allowed you to make consequential choices early on, not that Xenonauts won't have any hard choices to make, I'm sure it will. Anyways..)

So now the Counsel is your enemy. They will attempt to force you out financially(I remember raiding the cultists in Apoc) by harassing your plans to save humankind. Since the Council is operating as a secret organization within world Governments themselves, they have their own private army of agents and black suits who will attack you while you're on a Ground Combat mission. These agents will show up once in awhile and at any time during your missions in black SUVs in an attempt to wipe you out to prevent you from capturing Crash-Sites. The Aliens will also attack them so it's pretty much a free-for-all. Madness.

Without the Counsel to do all the side work of bringing you the best connections for cost-effective arms and recruits, Xenonauts will now directly deal with black-marketeers and in interviewing and hiring potential candidates for Operative/Scientist/Engineer spots. This is where the difficulty ramps up a bit Money. As a fellow OXC member mentioned:

"You can no longer hire personnel [Except you can hire from Criminal organizations, mercs, resistance and other Freedom fighters as Luke said], purchase interceptors or skyrangers [manufacturing], and costs of all purchasable human weapons are increased by 2x or 3x. Additionally, the money you get for selling alien corpses/weapons/etc is decreased by 2x or 3x. This represents the fact that the program has been formally shut down -- and you can no longer get things easily through various national governments. The reduction in money from selling recovered alien artifacts is due to there being some sort of proviso in the agreements between the council of funding nations and the aliens regarding this stuff. Basically, all the stuff you recover becomes radioactively "hot" on the black market, and this is reflected in the going price. Essentially, it's no longer worth it for Jimmy the Blackmarketeer to pay $84,000 for the Plasma Pistol; because selling it now means he attracts all sorts of unwanted attention [from your enemies who want to cut your profits], so he won't pay the premium prices he did before."

Eventually the Council will feel it is time to attack your known bases, the bases that were built while they were funding you. They will attack you when you reach a certain decent high score.

These kinds of base defense missions will involve Special Military Forces. Hopeful these missions can be fun since these Military forces will be using standard human weaponry and armor so you would have fun slaughtering them if you have Power Suits with no need for cover. No exactly, they're gonna be the best of the best, so they'll be smart to bring rocket launchers and lots of explosives, with high Reaction, so we'll see.

If you can add 2-part missions, the 1st part of the Mission will be for defending your underground base. After you clear them out of your base, the 2nd part begins, on the surface. The Military created a Forward Outpost Base near you, so you'll have to wipe them out one last time. After you complete this mission, they may take a very long time before attacking another known base.

Since you no longer have to appease the Council with positive scores, you have the option to defend terror-sites or avoid them. It's up to you now, you don't have to worry about them. Also expect police and military personnel to fire at you indiscriminately during Terror-Sites, because you longer have the "jurisdiction" to take command of the city's local operation. Local forces will probably receive orders from superiors who are contacted by your new human enemy(CFN) to fire at anything coming out of a Chinook.

I can see the Council as being or becoming like the secretive group from the X-Files, The Syndicate. A ruthless brutal group in charge of different parts of the world. They'd be pretty ticked off if you went against there demands. They're gonna want to shut you down even if you're doing well... Because these kinds of men, they wouldn't like to see X-COM/Xenonauts become greater then they are, even if you multiply the gifts for them.

Comments, suggestions, compliments, complaints?

[Darth Draken]

I have yet to find a manufacturing product to build that makes a profit.

[MrPyro]

It's an interesting concept, but at the moment the game is in the final stages of balance and polish; this would be a major set of new development that would set the release date back by 6-12 months.

At the moment there is no capability to make money outside of raiding/airstriking UFOs and your monthly funding; there is no profitable manufacturing scheme. This was deliberate to prevent people from ignoring the funding nations as could be viable in the OG.

[thixotrop]

Nice setting, sounds interesting and thriller'esque.

Your concept reminds me a bit of another "old" game: Syndicate.

Though not in all aspects. In Syndicate your "mission" was to bring down corporations that were ruling the world. You had soldier upgrades (implants, drugs, mechanical prostetics and so on) and everybody was your enemy, at least after some time.

There is another indie game dev team at this, see here.

In general I always liked to have games with multiple game experience levels, though they will get pretty complex pretty fast. I guess a Xenonauts version with this will jump up in complexity once you take that path. If you then can still focus on the "real task" to defend your world against the alien invasion is a tricky balancing of game programming. I could imagine that when the game speeds up and you need to battle the alien that in that instant you base will be sacked by Council forces or your precious final missions "messed with".

Nevertheless, in my youth a "dream game" would be a forced hybrid of civilization, sim city, railroad tycoon, battle isle or XCom/Ufo for combat (why not with vehicles too). But talk about complex...

[Dranak]

The devs have also deliberately designed the game so that you can not continue if too many nations back out. But this could be an interesting idea for a different project.