Aliens for the players

[Matti]

I'm newcomer here and this has probably been mentioned years ago somewhere, but if it hasn't, here goes nothing: how about aliens as available playable side for the human player? Starting point for that could be with establishment of the first alien base on Earth. Has this already been said and done?

[Meridian]

It has been said, it hasn't been done yet.

The game engine is already powerful enough for this to be done... feel free to make the first steps

[Matti]

The game engine is already powerful enough for this to be done... feel free to make the first steps

First steps... is brainstorming. So player as (sub)leader of aliens sets up the first base on Earth and gets handful of small scout ships (and maybe 1 medium size). Alien equivalent of the Council gives player missions to perform and money & other benefits (like elite mutons) for completing them. Early missions could be abductions of humans & animals, messing up grain fields, shooting down civilian aircraft, the stuff. At first human opposition could be police with pistols and rednecks with shotguns and bolt-action rifles. Nothing handful of sectoids with plasma rifles couldn't handle. Step-up missions would be assaults against radars, missile sites, and recovering friendly ships that have got shot down. Here could be first encounters with proper military and X-COM. Then comes terror missions, which are better to get done before X-COM shows up. And last: rescuing downed friendlies from assaults of X-COM's heavy & flying suits & hover tanks and assaults against X-COM bases.

[Hobbes]

First steps... is brainstorming. So player as (sub)leader of aliens sets up the first base on Earth and gets handful of small scout ships (and maybe 1 medium size). Alien equivalent of the Council gives player missions to perform and money & other benefits (like elite mutons) for completing them. Early missions could be abductions of humans & animals, messing up grain fields, shooting down civilian aircraft, the stuff. At first human opposition could be police with pistols and rednecks with shotguns and bolt-action rifles. Nothing handful of sectoids with plasma rifles couldn't handle. Step-up missions would be assaults against radars, missile sites, and recovering friendly ships that have got shot down. Here could be first encounters with proper military and X-COM. Then comes terror missions, which are better to get done before X-COM shows up. And last: rescuing downed friendlies from assaults of X-COM's heavy & flying suits & hover tanks and assaults against X-COM bases.

What do the player (aliens) need to do to win the game? Invade XCOM's headquarters?

[ohartenstein23]

What do the player (aliens) need to do to win the game? Invade XCOM's headquarters?

And the Avenger equivalent is building a Skyranger copy to infiltrate HQ?

[Hobbes]

And the Avenger equivalent is building a Skyranger copy to infiltrate HQ?

What if the goal of the aliens would be to find and reactivate T'Leth, so you'd need to research and manufacture a 'Leviathan' UFO to reach it?

[Slaughter]

One idea I had in another thread (this one: https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,4317.0.html) is that the player commands a "special unit" of the aliens - you're not the aliens, you're just a elite unit with more leeway (so you can deploy mixed units and such). But because they've pretty much thrown all into the invasion, you're left with breadcrumbs to prove yourself.

So your first troops are human cooperators and the odd monster or alien - say, Cultists (disposable cannon fodder), MiBs (abilities varies like X-COM's), maybe some monsters. You're not even using elerium craft, but human craft from your allies, and maybe some human-alien hybrid tech. Sorry pal, but the other commanders are eating it all up.

What's your objective? Another player has entered the game. Strange(er) aliens are attacking and doing strange things. Your patrons like to remain convert, so they want you to use human puppets at first to find out what's going on (you don't show your best cards right at game start). Who are they? Well...

...remember the aliens from Apocalypse? Their star is about to go Supernova and they want out. "Out" means Planet Earth. Which you got dibs on. They don't seem to wanna talk (and by talk, I mean swear submission to you) about it. There can't be two alien dominations.

But you still have to fight the humans too, because there's a invasion going on, its a good way to test your forces and your competence. Failure to perform will result in your becoming nutrient sludge to feed your fellow clones.

Your starting foes are locals - farmers and ranchers, the odd militia, local police, gun-nuts, etc. Eventually you start fighting military types and the weakest Apoc aliens and their human thralls, then X-COM and other human organizations later on.

Here's some ideas from that thread:

Damnit I had a nice reply typed up to you guys but I lost it. GRRRRRRRR

Just some (mostly human) enemy suggestions for prospective alien plays, I will try to re-create the detail again later:

- Locals (badly-armed, numerous civvies, to fight in Harvest and Research, angry civvies in terror missions, etc)

- Inquisitors (crazy anti-alien cultists, want to destroy aliens and their tech)

- Men in Blue (police forces and investigators - noisey Mulder and Scully types - working for X-COM/Governments. A bit weak on weapons, but good on numbers. Eventually go full SWAT because screw you. Also, their "terror" unit could be Attack Dogs!)

- Military (soldier types, complete with tanks, jeeps, the works. Militaries of nations. Lags one tier of weapons behind X-COM)

- Gray Ops (mercs working for unscrupulous corporations, power-mongers, shadowy manipulators, ruthless dictators - EXALTish types - who want to steal the alien tech to become rich/powerful. Had an idea that they could use primitive cyborgs or something unscrupulous)

- Rebel Hybrids (human-sectoid hybrids who rebelled against alien overlords using a mix of alien and human weapons, and psi. Want to overthrown the Sectoids but don't trust pure humans not to kill them. Could be the Alien game's equivalent of Ethereals)

- Enforcer Androids (Enforcer Androids created by X-COM's Professor Able Standard. In this timeline, Enforcer program was not cancelled and sorta the ancestor of Apocalypse's Androids. Tough, strong, no psionic abilities but invulnerable to psi as well. X-COM's mutons, so to say. There's a mod somewhere that adds Enforcers to Open X-COM - https://www.openxcom.com/mod/x-com-enforcer)

I'm not sure how X-COM itself would deploy. Of course, it should be the strongest force, and constantly evolve. One cool idea would be to get a lot of X-COM vets and have them create "deployment mixes" - think of different numbers of differently-ranked troops with a diverse mix of weapons, strategy and AI. It would be especially interesting if X-COM had access not only to vanilla but the new weapons modded by the community that are often seen in mods - shotgun, assault rifle, flamer, sniper rifle, grenade launcher, etc.

If you're doing something that has the aliens fight other aliens as well (Rebel Aliens/Aliens vassals of Micronoids/TFTD Aliens vs UFO aliens), then it gets easier, but I tried to do my best in thinking. Could even add Apoc aliens if you feel like it.

There's also the issue of ships and alien missions, but I will talk about it later.

Another group of enemies I had an idea for were YOUR dudes, but under Micronoid control. Imagine entire UFOs and then bases falling under Micronoid control. Eventually, they learn how to spoof being good little Sectoids (How do you do my fellow Sectoids! Praise the Ethereals and the Hive Mind!) and the Hive Mind gets scared as eff about it because it means they're the ones getting the other side of the alien infiltration game!!

[7Saturn]

In UFO the two sides, I believe, there are several lesser objectives as means to perform the actual attacks, like gathering food from alien harvest, finding ressources by alien research, cloning with alien abduction, and such things. You can't just simply build a big battleship right from the start and fly to 16 countries and be done with it, as you lack the ressources to build and use it. So in essence, you have to breed new aliens, when X-COM kills yours. You have to gather ressources to even build ships and maintain them. And that requires a lot of other missions, just to get one of the two big ones done, to infiltrate all countries or destroy all bases. So yes, there's a way to model that, and it has already been done - just not with OpenXcom as a base. I'd love to see that happen! =)

[clownagent]

Probably TFTD is better suited for this than UFO.

Your first base would be the dormant T'LETH and you would need to do research and missions to finally awake the city.

[Forez]

There is a game called Evil Genius from 2004, when we are put in the role of cartoonish evil mastermind figthing against James Bond types. And there was also Dungeon Keeper

So why on earth we do not get to invade Earth?!


We, the Aliens, would have limited sources coming out from the fact that we do not have enough Elerium-115. And that is why we cannot strike Earth with full force [Battleships etc.]

Out task could be to maintain bases and harvest minerals, geo-heat / cows / whatever. Our strike forces would perform terror missions and rescue mission for shot down UFO's [as most of the UFO's would be controlled by the AI]

Research would be for making hybrids, awakening of better alien races [as there was some malfunction / loss of data in alien world], building bigger ships


The ultimate goal would be to sign a pact with every nation and also to destroy every single X-COM base that would be left. We should also a some point have to defend Cydonia

X-COM with time would of course acquire alien technologies



The big question is: should alien soldier level up or be just random cannon fodder? There are so many races do what- we would have 30 commanders, split among them?

[Warboy1982]

Destroy all humans! was quite fun too