What did you like in Xenonauts?

[Arthanor]

In another thread, someone mentioned Xenonaut and I got curious enough (and I am bored enough with what I'm supposed to be doing) to look at it a bit more.

Watching the IGN review showed me enough to convince me I did not want to try it, but I am still curious to hear the opinion of others. Especially, I'd like to know what you liked in it, so that we can look into bringing it in OpenXCom as mods

Stuff the reviewers mentioned that they liked was:
1- Side doors on the transport
2- New/cool stuff with aliens, although I don't know what. Robots and regenerating lizardmen I think?

1- We already have that, although I liked how the transport was larger than the soldier capacity. Being packed like sardines looks a bit silly.
2- New aliens are always cool, if difficult to do on the sprite/special weapons side. But that's something I want to work on after the XAE.

I don't think we can do regenerating aliens. I remember someone suggesting we could get an option to set "negative fatal wounds" on aliens, so they start regenerating health, but that would have to respect maximum health too. Could make a cool opponent.

Robots? We have sectopods, but there's always room for more. Were they just resistant to AP and vulnerable to lasers? More variability in resistance could be interesting to add through races, since currently it's pretty much: shoot everything with plasma and shoot sectopods with heavy lasers. Don't shoot mutons with AP is kind of irrelevant since you're using plasma most of the time.

So, what else did you like? Twists in the research tree, weapons/armors/tanks/crafts? Even certain functions are possible to add, with enough work (ex.: color markings for armor).

[Yankes]

"negative fatal wounds" is easy doable.  Only problem would be sneak it in to official version. I could add it to my extended version when I done with my current work.

[Arthanor]

Well, the first step to "sneaking it in the release version" is for someone to code it If you're willing to do it, I bet someone will be willing to make a race mod to make use of it, even if it's only useable in the extended version. I might do it as an extension of the improved snakemen/chryssalid race I am planning to do.

It will need to be able to handle significant numbers though. Given the health and damage numbers in XCom, even regenerating 10 health per round is not very significant for an alien even though having 3 fatal wounds is pretty bad for a soldier.

[xracer]

Being packed like sardines looks a bit silly.

I guess you have never been in a CH-53 Sea Stallion, that is exactly how it feels, fully packed, i think sardines feel more comfortable.

[endersblade]

Super stallion is my favorite helicopter in the world :-)

What did I like about xeno? Hmm.

First faithful remake of xcom. Everyone else decides to change things up, 'reimagine', and basically just ruins it. Xeno plays almost exactly like the original.

Modding. Like OpenXcom, modding Xeno is pretty damned easy.

Graphics. They have a sort of 80s feel to them, but are very much updated compared to xcom.

Alien types, and the fact they're all color coded. Considering capturing live aliens outside of specific ones serves absolutely no purpose (which is a major negative for me), it's nice to be able to find the specific one you're looking for easily.

The UI. Being obviously done at a higher res than xcom, there is just so much more info available. Screens look cleaner because of this as well.

The behind the scenes stuff. The coding for aggressiveness, firing angles, chance to bring soldiers back alive when they were mortally wounded, what gets damaged in a crash etc. All of it is moddable, and it is really nice to see so much detail.

Air combat. Oh man. It isn't as simple as just pressing a range button and letting your ship duke it out. You can auto-resolve, but you can also dog fight the UFOs. It is such a highly detailed and fun system, one of the best things about the game.

Base defenses automatically upgrade when you research new tech. Missiles to laser, laser to plasma, etc. You don't have to destroy your current ones in order to build the improved ones.

UFOs, in general, are much bigger. Some of the end game UFOs take forever to clear out.

You have the ability to 'airstrike' a crashed UFO instead of having to either fight or ignore them all
 You get a decent amount of money from this, but obviously nothing recovered and no experience for your soldiers.

Leveleing up. Each ability can gain a point or more on every mission, all you have to do is use it. Move around a lot, your tus go up, etc. There is no random aspect to it. No convoluted rules. Use a stat, it goes up.

Things I don't like.

Capturing aliens. What's nice about it is, once you research a live one of a species, you get a 10% damage bonus against that species for the rest of the game. However, you really only need to capture like 3-4 specific aliens thought the entire game. Other than the damage bonus, nothing else comes from capturing them alive. As a matter of fact, any alien you capture beyond the initial of the species or the specific ones you need to progress, they automatically get killed at the end of the mission.

The engine. Xeno was built on the Diner Dash engine, and as such, has a plethora of limitations and innate bugs that this sort of game really shouldn't have.

It has the same issue with 'teirs' that xcom does. Like 4 theirs of weapons and armor, and only a tiny handful of alien types. You'd think with such an updated and expanded game they could've added more to it.

Official support is done. No expansions or anything, ever. Patching is left largely to the community through what is known as the 'community edition' patch, which isn't much of a complaint as they are doing amazing things with it, but the guy behind Xeno basically just released it and moved on. I think he plans one final patch for stuff the community can't fix and then that's it.

Character faces, inventory screens, etc are cartoony and frankly terrible to look at. There are of course mods that fix this, thankfully.

The god mode plane. The final interceptor/craft weapon (that only it can use) literally one shots anything it touches. It annihilates even the toughest UFOs. No crash landing to go to, they get turned to dust.

The game is severely lopsided as far as difficulty goes. The aliens have (depending on difficulty) a HUGE advantage over you. I can understand making things challenging, but we're talking Dark Souls level of brutality.

UFOs on the battlescape aren't destructible. They are hand drawn (and look absolutely amazing) but the outer hulls are indestructible. The only way in is through a door, which usually is a great place to get ambushed.

The UFOpaedia has issues, and isn't all-inclusive. Some topics don't show up, others just get replaced with newer tech.

Overall, I absolutely love Xenonauts. I've sunk about 40 hours just modding the game, and several hundred actually playing. And I haven't even beat it yet. I would still be playing it had I not found out about OpenXcom!

[Solarius Scorch]

What I liked in Xenonauts?

- Dogfights. It was a very exciting and challenging system that I'd love to see in pretty much any X-Com clone. (Or maybe its turn-based version or something.) Not only it required actual tactics at the players' part, but also allowed for larger air battles against multiple UFOs!
- Suppressive fire. I'm not sure if it was done right, but at least it was there, adding to the tactical options.
- Maps making. It was an easy and comfortable system that allowed you to add and change maps or their parts (for example, you can make one house map and include several version of each room to be chosen at random).
- Some of the alien races were pretty cool. (I think I liked Androns most - killer robots FTW!)
- Soldiers are more personalized (they have names, but also nationality and service history; for example Russian soldiers could be veterans of Afghanistan, etc.).
- The entire late 70's ambience was pretty cool and there were several other features to capitalize on it, like UFO bombing various civilian or military targets (passenger liners, carriers etc.), not just doing city terrors.

Nevertheless, this game sadly had a number of problems that make it inferior to the X-Com franchise. To list some:
- The gameplay wasn't as exciting as I hoped. Battles were slow, aliens were tough, there was a lot of stalling and just laying cover fire across the street, because it was very hard to kill even the weakest alien with normal weapons. I found it rather boring and a bit frustrating at times.
- Some parts of maps (mainly UFOs) were indestructible. To me, this was unpleasant and hurt the immersion. It was so because the ships were painted in whole, and they looked nice, but I'd trade it any moment for destructible UFO walls.
- Modding was possible, but the system of weapon/unit sprites was horrible, as every single combination of weapon and unit was a separate spritesheet. Which means that if you wanted to add a weapon, you had to carefully modify dozens of pictures, or use something already in the game as a stand-in. (Bigobs were easy though.) Sure, not every game has to be moddable, but this clearly was supposed to be, yet for some reason they chose this solution.

[Phoenix7786]

Maybe it's the X-com Apoca lover in me, but I really liked the friendly NPC combatants in Xeno. The fact there are armed civilians, or local police, or local military that could distract them was a plus for me. It reminded me of Megapol cruisers being able to sneak in some pot-shots.

[Gifty]

Maybe it's the X-com Apoca lover in me, but I really liked the friendly NPC combatants in Xeno. The fact there are armed civilians, or local police, or local military that could distract them was a plus for me. It reminded me of Megapol cruisers being able to sneak in some pot-shots.

My favorite part of the Xenonauts NPCs was how they created these little stories in my head, where my dudes would have to put themselves in danger to save a farmer with no sense of self-preservation. I always felt bad when the incidental NPCs died.

[pilot00]

I tried it recently, and while the whole concept of the cold war alien invasion was what really intrigued me, I found it a bit "sluggish" In the battlescape. Maybe I will try it again at some point, but not for now.

[hellrazor]

I found the teamsize restriction stupid.
Your initial Craft could carry up to 18 Soldiers... but the game forces you to only bring 8...

Dumbest design decision ever.

[NuclearStudent]

I found the teamsize restriction stupid.
Your initial Craft could carry up to 18 Soldiers... but the game forces you to only bring 8...

Dumbest design decision ever.

In the alpha version, the troop transport carried 10. They decided to reduce the number of soldiers so that the final tier would not have Avenger levels of troops to micromanage.

[Rinnai]

In the alpha version, the troop transport carried 10. They decided to reduce the number of soldiers so that the final tier would not have Avenger levels of troops to micromanage.

It was still a stupid decision. Taking away player agency just dumbs things down with these games. If I want to micromanage a large squadron of soldiers, cool. If I don't then I don't bother. It's one of those enigmas of developers who make arbitrary decisions for the player when it's no at all necessary.

But it's only a somewhat significant blight on an otherwise decent game.

[endersblade]

You know, while I used to agree with that (I loved having Avengers full of troops to just blanket a map with!), I've come to accept and even enjoy the smaller squads.  Most of the X-COM clones out there do it that way, and I've been playing them all for so long that I got used to it.  Even in OXC I only use up to 10-man squads for bigger jobs, and only about 5 for smaller ships.  I've found it's just much more fun that way.

It was one of, if not my biggest, complaint about the new X-COM game from Firaxis.  Maximum of 6 soldiers?  What?  But after a while, you realize it makes sense for that game.  Each soldier you have is a freaking wrecking ball, especially once they cap out their talent trees, and the missions are just smaller and more intimate.  There's just no need for anything more.  I've been playing this game with The Long War mod, and they allow yup up to like 10 or 12 soldiers on certain missions, and I just feel like a lot of them are superfluous.  At least half of them never even get a shot off.

That's the issue with bigger squads in OXC I'm finding.  For a lot of missions, 4-6 squaddies will sit in the back of the bus the whole mission and never take an action, because I just didn't need them.  So I shrank down to 5-10 total, and now every soldier is worth their weight in ammo.

The same goes for Xeno.  I've actually modded the game to allow for bigger squads, and it's just not worth it.  I guess if you've been playing with 20+ troops in Avengers for the past few decades, then I can see how it would be a shock.  But you get used to it after a while.  It's because you're trying to project X-COM onto Xeno, and they simply aren't the same games.  It's a clone for sure, and a damned good one, but there are several dynamic differences that mean you have to play it differently.

[kharille]

There was a sale for this game recently but I decided I didn't want to bother, not unless they accept the fluff from my pockets for payment.  I think if I had time I'd get into long war or the new openxcom final mod.

Saw a youtube playthrough, I think it was metal canyon but I lost interest.  I hate the simplification of the new xcom.  In fact, I avoided it until I saw a facebook post by Julian Gollop.  Then I decided to try it.  I spent 400 hours on it but I felt you just had to stick to the same strategy.

I have a nasty habit of save and reloading.  With openxcom I don't need to, not when I got an avenger stuffed full of rookies with rocket launchers.  Thats my playstyle, superhuman all the way.  I guess it'll take too long to get into Xenonauts, and with the work being done here, OpenXcom will outclass all the others in features and gameplay.

[pilot00]

You know, while I used to agree with that (I loved having Avengers full of troops to just blanket a map with!), I've come to accept and even enjoy the smaller squads.  Most of the X-COM clones out there do it that way, and I've been playing them all for so long that I got used to it.  Even in OXC I only use up to 10-man squads for bigger jobs, and only about 5 for smaller ships.  I've found it's just much more fun that way.

It was one of, if not my biggest, complaint about the new X-COM game from Firaxis.  Maximum of 6 soldiers?  What?  But after a while, you realize it makes sense for that game.  Each soldier you have is a freaking wrecking ball, especially once they cap out their talent trees, and the missions are just smaller and more intimate.  There's just no need for anything more.  I've been playing this game with The Long War mod, and they allow yup up to like 10 or 12 soldiers on certain missions, and I just feel like a lot of them are superfluous.  At least half of them never even get a shot off.

That's the issue with bigger squads in OXC I'm finding.  For a lot of missions, 4-6 squaddies will sit in the back of the bus the whole mission and never take an action, because I just didn't need them.  So I shrank down to 5-10 total, and now every soldier is worth their weight in ammo.

The same goes for Xeno.  I've actually modded the game to allow for bigger squads, and it's just not worth it.  I guess if you've been playing with 20+ troops in Avengers for the past few decades, then I can see how it would be a shock.  But you get used to it after a while.  It's because you're trying to project X-COM onto Xeno, and they simply aren't the same games.  It's a clone for sure, and a damned good one, but there are several dynamic differences that mean you have to play it differently.

I doubt anyone was deploying fully loaded avengers (italics and bold for emphasis) in standard tactical missions. That said, doing so under certain circumstances, like etherial landed battleships or base assault missions under specific races might be a requirement. In superhuman epsecially casualties after a certain point mount up. Same for 2012, I cant fathom several situations (especially in the higher difficulty levels) than some more bodies wont come into use. Having only 6 is another "magic solution" to make the game more steam lined and artificially difficult.

It all boils down to taste and options. Options are always good.