So, like many of you who played the original X-Com and loved the combination of punishing gameplay and exciting situations that made you identify with a bunch of identical-looking named sprites as they died in drove, this game is for you.
The setting:1 October, 1979: Unidentified forces presumed of extraterrestrial origin arrive in Earth orbit. Panic spreads globally when attempts at communication fail and initial attempts to repel the invaders are met with heavy losses and little success. The only successful interception occurs over the Baltic sea, conducted by modified interceptors which prove at least partially resistant to extraterrestrial weaponry. A clandestine organisation known only as the ‘Xenonauts’ claims responsibility, offering nations protection in exchange for funding and full freedom to operate within their territory and airspace.
For humanity, a glimmer of hope remains – if they can withstand the attacks long enough unravel the secrets of the alien aggressors, the Xenonauts may find yet a way to defeat the alien invasion. Should they fail, millions of years of human history will be brought to a close in mere months…
Set during the height of the cold war, Xenonauts offers both Warsaw Pact and NATO troops to command, as well as all the trappings of X-Com, UFO:Defense, updated for the modern day. Key for me, of course, is that troops are as fungible and death-prone as in the original. Same structure of TUs, accuracy, etc. as the original.
I am particularly excited about the updates and improvements they are making to the intercept process - you can have larger air battles and competent command is more important than in the original.
Xenonauts is a strategy game in which you control a multi-national military organisation defending a Cold War-era Earth from alien invasion, using small squads of persistent soldiers to eliminate the extraterrestrials and recover their technology in turn-based ground combat. A detailed strategic layer allows you to co-ordinate the defence of the planet, using your interceptors to shoot down UFOs and researching captured artefacts to learn about your foes and unlock new combat equipment to use on your missions.
Xenonauts is a spiritual successor to the classic X-Com strategy games from the 1990s. We aim to improve the graphics, add new content and streamline the interface whilst still retaining all of the key mechanics of the original games. Devoted fans should love this game, but we're also keen to introduce the joys of old-school grand strategy to a whole new generation of players who might not otherwise experience it!
The game is now in 1.0, but the team is actively squashing release bugs. The game is a steal at $20, for what is essentially the original X-Com, with improved interface and graphics, improved tech trees, really compelling and complex air-to-air combat, and a more realistic, "tactical" feel. In particular, you no longer feel like you are a bunch of historical reenactors doing "Stalingrad" when you breach an UFO. Now you get useful flashbangs, smoke grenades, and, crucially, combat shields, which gives you a chance to breach without getting mowed down.
I also particularly love the fact that the cold war is represented semi-realistically, with limited range of soviet armament available alongside NATO weapons.
Latest patchnotes
CHANGELOG:
Fixed the crash bug during the alien turn (for realz this time).
Soldier Equip screen crash hopefully fixed, or at least significantly reduced.
Removed a hang when you pressed Reduce Quantity on the Workshop screen for an item that had already had some built.
Combat shields should now correctly block all frontal shots, as there was a slight error in the angle calculation.
Xenonauts no longer lose the 3TU for the tile they were about to move into when their move is interrupted by sighting an alien.
Flashbangs no longer detonate explosives on the ground.
Building bases now costs $500k instead of $1m, and base maintenance reduced by $75k per month
Radar Arrays now cost $250k instead of $100k, and their maintenance is increased by $25k each
Ground Attack missions now generate events and income loss again.
Disabled Air Superiority missions temporarily, as I am becoming increasingly convinced they are responsible for at least most of the Soldier Equip screen crashes. We'll look into them in more detail and re-enable them soon.
Terror mission UFOs will spawn every 14 days instead of every 25 days, as they were too rare before.
I am therefore hoping that this build will be pretty stable, and will not include any of the invulnerable alien bugs or the soldier equip crashes in it. Let me know if this is the case...if so, I'll push it out to the Stable branch tomorrow.
Websites:
www.xenonauts.com
http://www.desura.com/games/xenonauts (comes with steam key)
Posts
Nope, not at all. That's a pretty ridiculous claim. The reboot was great.
This Xenonauts seems entirely uneccessary. If it's that similar to the orginal why don't I just play the orginal?
And don't buy things from Steam because they might turn into assholes some day? Seriously?
As the OP briefly notes, UFO interception is a lot more interesting. More maps, more textures, more weapons, more aliens, more kinds of ships, authentic period small arms. So, a lot more to do and think about than the original. Also, a higher resolution and a modern UI, which would be worth the price of admission even if it was simply a reskinned x-com.
edit:
Damn your ninja editing. Monopolies don't do good things. But that should be a different thread.
This has to be the most idiotic thing I've read on the internet in a while...
Yeah, you'll get a lot more positive attention to the game if you remove the Steam and X:COM slams.
Of course they don't. But Steam doesn't have a monopoly; I have agood 3 other places I buy digital games from on PC.
But that said, its pretty fucking easy and some of the changes, while understandable, remain unpalatable to old codgers like me. For example the change to only one base fucking infuriates me. I bet a lot of players don't even notice, but for some its a huge change to the way they played the original (if I cant mass produce laser cannons in a manufacturing base in Antarctica then I'm gonna sulk).
The new Xcom was good, even great in places. But to say that Xenonauts is "entirely unnecessary" and then suggesting to just play the original just makes you look like a fucking jackass, which is impressive considering the other comments ITT that people are already arguing about.
Actual Xenonauts content:
I'm still fairly early into it, so take everything with a grain of salt.
- Its hard. Fucking old school Xcom hard. Whereas in the remake it was pretty much impossible to lose more than 4 guys a month unless you let your dog play, expect to loose rookies like inhibitions at Mardi Gras. And this is on normal.
- Combat rules have been expanded. For example, heavy weapons (including sniper rifles) get a huge negative modifier to hit if the operator has moved that turn. Some items also have negatives like body armor causing a smaller sight radius.
- Some QoL improvments include pre hire screening (no more rookies with less than 50 bravery!) and improved equipment loadout screens.
- You now get cash post mission, which is gained from selling artifacts on the black market. Pretty much what you did before, but now automated. I can practically here your next question from over here.
- Early Research Spoilers (If you don't want to look, just know its different)
Where oXcom had basically three research tiers, this has a lot of subteirs. For example there is another earth based interceptor you can produce to replace your flimsy originals
It does not appear that you can use plasma weapons from aliens. The old "how the fuck does my dumbass rookie know how to use a gun made for snakemen" no longer applies. I assume you start to make your own facsimiles soon enough, but I'm still too early.
TL;DR Xenonauts has a lot of potential going for it. If you're a fan of the original and had some misgivings about the reboot, then you should check this game out.
Steam point well taken - it is derailing things. I don't know why saying "mixed feelings" about the new X-Com is axe-grinding - I enjoyed the reboot, but I found the old game far superior mechanically. This game will appeal most to people who felt the same way; people that enjoyed the new X-Com but not the old one will find this one similarly daunting and not fun.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
I see a promise in xenonauts, I already like the maps and the interception. Damn I missed that part from the reboot.
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Initial impression is that, if the devs keep this up and get this all nice and finished up properly, I am in some deeeeeeeep trouble.
Oh shit, just did my first intercept. The intercept screen is also a strategic combat where you can send in up to three fighters to fight at once.
DEEEEEEEEEEEEP trouble.
EDIT: Holy shit, these tiles look REALLY nice. My brain can't quite wrap its feelers around what this game is supposed to be the sequel to and the scenery actually looking really GOOD.
One survivor.
If the LP is taking place earlier in the game, there's actually an in-game explanation for that.
Also, enemy AI is actually pretty aware of cover and will reposition if exposed, which is what causes a lot of the running. But even on normal, a shot or two of the early alien weapons will put you down, so they don't have to hit very much.
I am supremely impressed with this game. Yeah, lots of unfinished bits due to being Early Access, but some fantastic stuff here. For instance:
Yes, that's a custom deployment screen for the dropship. Plus, even the initial dropship has multiple exit points; that scout tank can clear out of the back, while troopers can come out the sides.
Another nice thing for Xenonauts is that certain unknown items are researched automatically. You've got to manually research things like alien weapons, but shoot down a ship and you'll automatically be given the info about it after a little bit, and the same applies to killing aliens and their autopsies. Not a game-changer, but a nice touch that allows you to research important things while still getting the fluff.
EDIT: And using alien tech is no longer a matter of researching the equipment and then going straight to using it. I CAN use plasma weaponry, but it's also less effective for human troops because it wasn't made for them.
EDIT EDIT: And they've captured the meatgrinder style of the original XCOM combat more or less perfectly here. Getting attached to rookies is a very poor idea, and getting attached to veterans only a slightly less poor idea.
It's not ridiculous. That is exactly how I felt about the Firaxis XCOM. It was fun for a couple playthroughs, but it doesn't have the staying power of the original. And there were certainly limitations imposed by the console-centric development. There are many people out there who wanted a modern version that captured the original's complexity, so it is definitely not unnecessary.
After seeing some of the LP's of this, it has gone to my must buy list. Here is one Rock Paper Shotgun did in case anyone is interested.
youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AJu9JW3_08E
edit: also @Ninja Snarl P what is the combat like? have they expanded on what you can do? Can I put soldiers on overwatch, use suppressing fire and blow holes in buildings like the old xcom? can the soldiers go prone?
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
I'm hot for these logistics and informational upgrades to the old UFO Defense formula.
Yeah, Enemy Unknown was definitely a sequel to the XCOM franchise, not the first couple of XCOM games. And honestly, I don't begrudge buying the Firaxis game at release; I liked it quite a bit, but it's barely recognizable as an XCOM game in terms of the gameplay. I've beaten it a couple of times now, and there's just no staying power to it for me; all the shortcuts they had to make and extra things they had to grind off to make Enemy Unknown play nice with consoles stick out like a sore thumb for me, and the gameplay is simple enough that there are easy, ultra-safe ways to win the game. It's still a good game, it's just not the XCOM sequel I would've preferred.
In contrast, Xenonauts is basically a direct sequel to the original game, with improvements that vary from good to incredible. Aside from the sake of pure nostalgia, I don't see any reason why I would ever go back to the original now, because Xenonauts is that much improved. And it's not even really finished yet. Heck, even the flavor text and autopsy stuff is ten times more on-target than from the Firaxis sequel.
To me, the original X-COM and the new XCOM had approximately the same staying power: one game, give or take. I'd wager that perceived staying power in the past is due to having different tolerances at the time (a young kid can watch the same movie fifty times, the same applies to games), and current staying power can be attributed primarily to nostalgia. These "shortcuts they had to make for consoles" is total nonsense and I'd love to have you actually name one that isn't actually just a rant at "casual gamers". As for easy, ultra-safe ways to win the game... clearly you're forgetting that the original X-COM was completely broken by using spotters and shooters, since there was no limit to your range and enemies wouldn't be able to take reaction shots against you? It occasionally threw you a total fuck-you (like turn-one grenades or blaster-bombs... assuming the game's glitches didn't cause the aliens to blow themselves up with them, as often happened), but randomly losing doesn't satisfying difficulty make.
I don't think liking inventory and ammo management and complex base building makes me "hardcore" anymore than I think enjoying simpler games makes someone "casual". I like my kind of games, which the old X-Com was and the new XCOM is not. Which is why I think Xenonauts is great. As to staying power, I play through the original at least once a year and have for about the last 20 years. And I played the new one twice through. Of course what is fun is subjective, but in this case nostalgia has nothing to do with liking the old one better, lack of features in the new one has everything to do with it.
It is from earlier levels, but they are constantly running away, not forward. It seems like they're a bit too aware of cover, as they'll move towards it even when they can't reach it, and thus get shot in the back rather than taking a shot.
But if you're saying they stop being terrible later on, then awesome. But as it is, I just watched a mission where the aliens didn't take a single shot because they kept running left and right to get better cover.
I'd be a little more generous with staying power for both, (got more than a couple of runs on both old and new) but generally, I'd agree.
And that's even ignoring how much more broken old X-Com psychic powers were. Once you had those, you'd won. Yeah, the enemies with them were worse (my best run of the game had half the team wipe when recovering a sectoid leader, and one of the survivors spent the entire mission gibbering and wetting himself) but then you had no LOS required total control of the map from the safety of the skyranger. And Blaster bombs? Hooboy.
Why I fear the ocean.
Overall, I guess the original X-COM represents this thing I've come to loathe... that a game can simply throw mechanics at the player and, regardless of whether they actually work together in an interesting way, people will seem to be entertained purely by their perception of what the game is like. All the little fiddly bits add up to nothing particularly interesting, but it seems like it does and so people eat it up. I'd like to say that people enjoy figuring out complex systems, but then people say things like "I've played this same game for 20 years" and I'm at a loss, because surely by that point they've discovered the optimal solution, and that should be that. So, I just don't know.
But that's why the original still hangs around, even in the face of the new X-COM: it's an organic experience. The Firaxis game has very much has an optimal combat approach: stay in cover, advance a scout a mild distance, never advance past the scout, abuse the highly artificial "surprise, enemy cluster!" system to pick the opposition apart. And even in your first playthrough, you're likely to get map repeats, so the mystery factor disappears real fast.
The original X-COM, on the other hand, allows you to hedge your bets but nothing is "safe". You can be doing incredibly well, only to have the aliens kick in your front door and destroy your base. The developers aren't trying to guide the player down a second-rate story, so they don't have to shoehorn the player into scripted base invasions. Maps may have similar elements, but enemy placements and map structure always varies, so you never really know what the area is like if you aren't invading a UFO. So each game is a new game, requiring dynamic adaptation instead of a perfect tactical approach or getting satellites up right away to get ahead of the curve.
And from that perspective, Xenonauts is very, very strongly in the vein of the original X-COM. It is not, however, the sort of thing that would have been popularly received, because it is very complex and often unforgiving, but without simply jacking up enemy accuracy or hitpoints. Xenonauts fills a very, very different niche than Firaxis' game, and in a really good way.
EDIT: An additional great change in Xenonauts is that you will actually come across armed citizens, and they will actually shoot at aliens.
Again, this is only when you get to the "optimal loadout" stage, and even then you might want to remember medkits, motion scanners, perhaps stun rods, maybe stun bombs... you're going to need to capture an alien commander, remember, if you want to make it to Mars. And you should bring along some flares for night missions, right? And smoke grenades never hurt anyone. But before you get to the optimal loadout stage, all of this is being balanced against how much money and storage space you have, where you've shipped your new equipment, and so on. So it's hardly busywork - there are genuine tradeoffs to make with a big impact on how you play (how you choose to stun stuff makes a huge impact on your tactics).
Once you're into "small garrison" range you're into "aliens can attack you" range, so now you have to choose if you want to build defenses, and how much stuff to put there, and what floor plan is easiest to defend, and where to locate your manufacturing to minimize the alien stuff you have to ship around, and where to stick alien containment facilities because they're the only bases you can launch capture missions from... you're missing out on a lot of the strategic nuance if you think base building had no meaningful decisions.
There's a lot of nuance in the geoscape. How much money you get depends on which countries you protect which depends on where you build your bases and intercept things, and whether or not you can avoid night missions depends on where you can launch missions from, and you have to choose whether you want to spread out the veteran soldiers as you expand or run a base with a complement of rookies, and you have to decide if you can budget for setting up a new base and paying for all the construction before it gets online and becomes a profitable manufacturing center... there is a lot of interesting stuff there.
Really I think what happens is that you've missed 80% of what's going on under the hood because you think you've found the one right answer, when really there's anything but, and then you've dismissed the game for not offering stuff that it definitely offers.
I haven't tried the new XCOM but one of the reasons I haven't is that I've heard it streamlined a lot of stuff. By focusing so much on the "core" X-COM experience it looks like they tried to build that. The problem is, the core X-COM experience isn't an experience in the sense that it's something you can create artificially. The X-COM experience is what happens when dozens of interlocking systems work together in a coherent systemic unity that is infinitely manipulable by the player but at the same time held hostage by the capricious nature of the random number generator and the brutal unpredictable lethality of the aliens. There are margins for error that grow and shrink in conjunction with a dozen other variable, whereas in the new XCOM it seems like they've tried to tighten it down to a few well-oiled parts. I don't deny that they've done a great job with the parts, at least from what I hear, but at the end of the day those parts are just a facsimile of what I really want: a working, interlocking whole. Everything from how aliens establish bases (send out scouts, send out base building ships, send periodic supply ships) to how the dynamics of attacking a landed vs. shot down alien ship work, in X-COM, helps make everything feel organic and also make each campaign different each time. Does the new XCOM provide that sort of thing effectively?
The original has an optimal approach too. A pretty obvious one.
Spotter/sniper. Move one panel at a time so you don't draw reaction. Then, when the enemy is in sight, the sniper downs the tango. Nice and clean. And once you have lasers, you can make them the loadout for everyone with minimal problems. So, that's maybe a month of difficult decisions. After that, one laser rifle and medkit a soldier, with anything else being basically season to taste,
There's still the chance of randomly getting screwed over, and if you do night missions then you're in deep shit, but that's why you never do night missions. Night missions are for suckers.
Old X-Com was more organic, and I will gladly admit the geoscape kicked the pants off the new one's model, but the battlescape had, at most, the same number of good choices as the new model combined with a lot of traps for the unwary (again, night missions) that vets would just ignore on non-challenge runs.
Why I fear the ocean.
You don't get superhero-soldiers (well, except for psychics), just guys who you'd rather not die and guys who have numbers instead of names. They're just minions in the hands of a callous commander, so why bother with the boring, ultra-safe route? They're all (mostly) expendable. If you end up losing, it won't be because you lost that one rocket soldier 3 fights ago so he isn't here now to prevent a squad wipe with a second rocket, thus leaving you with a rookie team that can't handle anything.
And so far, Xenonauts seems to at least be attempting to correct some of those issues. Laser weapons aren't super-accurate and don't have infinite ammo, so spamming free shots isn't an option. I haven't come across any items you can manufacture for profit yet, so the old cheese-a-million-laser-cannons route might be out, which would mean no more ignoring places because you've got a manufacturing base making millions every month. Don't know for sure yet, though.
Thanks to Enemy Unknown I might be willing to try Xenonauts. Without it, I'm pretty sure I'd just forget about this game as probably just another X-Com, a game with much more ambition than design quality.
Probably the single most obvious improvement is the massively improved visuals. I mean, you go from this in the original, which is very nearly the original resolution if not at it:
to this with Xenonauts:
Which is pretty severely downsized by Photobucket from 1920x1080 on a 32-inch screen, where it looks great. That's an absolutely massive leap in playability right there, because one of those looks like jagged ass and one looks really good. It's so much less of strain to actually play Xenonauts, instead of trying to interpret the extremely blocky images of the original.
Lugging around a Heavy Laser (which is otherwise pretty much useless) in order to provide effectively one-to-two extra persons of firepower against exclusively Sectopods does not seem like a good choice. Laser Rifles are totally inferior to Heavy Plasmas, even against Sectopods. As for the early-game, it's a pretty steady progression of rifles -> lasers -> heavy plasma. The fancy little bits and bobs like Heavy Lasers or regular Plasma or all the pistols are essentially distractions, as you breeze past them pretty much immediately and are worse than the weapons that come both before and after them. Compare to XCOM where there's a balancing act (though just the one) between Lasers and Plasma, where you try to weigh how much you need Laser Sniper Rifles / Shotguns right NOW versus how much extra research you could get done if you manage to squeak by without them until you reach Plasma. Each weapon has a specific place, rather than a bunch of numbers thrown together without much thought, even if it's less "organic".
Most of that goes out the window thanks to the abysmal item limit, but ignoring that, smoke is generally unreliable, though it can be useful on exclusively the first turn to help clear out a little bit of space. Once you have a bit of breathing room you can just go back to using one scout and a team of snipers to clear everything without any danger. Motion Scanners are also largely useless, as again you are not in any danger if you move one tile at a time and have enough snipers handy. Night missions are always avoidable, and the stun weapons are vaguely a choice since Stun Bomb Launchers are so unbelievably powerful, to the point where, excepting the ammo issues, they can be a replacement for any other weapon (in fact, they're probably more effective against Sectopods than anything else).
Defenses are bad and so you pretty much never build them, except possibly at the point where you've unlocked basically every technology (at which point, one wonders why you are spending a month building defenses instead of finishing the game?) Location of the manufacturing is basically meaningless... it's either at your main base (which it probably is) or it isn't (which might be the case if you want to make a large laser cannon farm... which doesn't need defenses anyway due to how the game works). Alien containment does not require multiple facilities so you just plop one down in your main base, done. There's no actual nuance here, just fiddlywork and maybe a couple traps for newbies.
How much money you get is based primarily on random chance. Oh no all the aliens were on the other side of the map, guess you're fucked for Month 1. There's no real pattern to it so there's no nuance there, just "cover more -> get more money probably". Night missions are always avoidable in every case, though some edge cases may require a bit of an exploit to keep the terror mission alive while you wait out the night. Again, bases are essentially either your main base, radar bases with maybe some interceptors, or Laser Cannon Factories. I don't see the issue with Firaxis simplifying this to a customizable main base, explicit satellites, and then removing the utterly broken weapons dealing.
I suppose another explanation for "why do people prefer pointless, arcane complexity" is simply that they have not actually tried the streamlined version they seem to rail against. You could try it, I suppose, but I think you've already made up your mind and will hate the game regardless. I'd say Firaxis doesn't have any pretense about what their game actually is and how it plays.
I can play this game too, why do people want "dumb downed common denominator simplicity"? You came in here and made your point, your point was refuted and now you are throwing veiled insults. Seriously, if this game does nothing for you why are you in the thread? It seems pretty damn clear to me that "you've already made up your mind and will hate the game regardless".
The new x-com gives you more real choices than the old x-com did. The old x-com was full of false choices which are neither interesting nor fun. As noted there was a very obvious and dominant strategy (specifically; always let aliens land so you can take their craft intact with the most xp and resources[this also voids bae assaults since failing to shoot down a ship is the trigger], never do certain terror missions, build a laser farm, build secondary bases as necessary, use spot and shoot advancement ). Many choices only seemed like choices because you could bring all the inventory you wanted/never had to worry about the council when you could just manufacture your own lasers for the black market/blaster bomb the entire landscape.
The new x-com actually does a very good(though imperfect) job of forcing you to make choices both strategically and tactically where there is not always a best answer. Sure it would have been nice to have an involved goescape. But maybe it was for the better
And sure the enemy discovered mechanic seems wonky but its actually necessary to make the game interesting (seriously if you don't believe me turn it off) because enemies that you spot first while not i. Cover are not a tactical challenge.
The 'LOL dumbed down lowest common denominator console game' game is basically how the thread started.
The only thing I can really add to all of this is that no matter what game you play there is always an optimal stratagy. And no that optimal stragtegy is not the only stratagy. I have played many, many games of the original xcom before I ever knew about selling lazer cannons in mass or even bothered to use anything but laser rifles/pistols to finsh the game. Its a game thats open to those less than perfect ideas that allows for expermentation and dosn't just funnel what you can do.
Its where a one base strategy is an intense fun game because you have to watch the UFO Activity charts and then activily scan the regions under attack with interceptors to try and maintain some semblance of world order. Not one thats forced on to you because more people have will have fun if they optimize the game around just running one base.
And that sadly i think is the crux of the matter. Allowing the player to screw up and find his own ways of dealing with the game are what makes XCOM a fun game. Its what makes any open ended game fun to play. Dwarf Fortress is eminetly fun game once you get past/used to the interface and or graphics. But is it for everyone? Hell no. But damnit it all there are a lot of people that want that old time feel that XCOM IS. That really seems to be shaping up here in Xenonaughts. I have bought it on steam and played a for few hours and its just got that feel to it. I waiting for them to finish up the art assets though before I really dive into it.
In any case I really think that if you are wanting a streamlined fun game with the xcom "idea", you got it! Its here in the brand new xcom! Otherwise for all the rest of us that want the good old days experience, im starting to really believe that we finally got what we have wanted after 15 freaking years.
I know right? So lets not continue that? Yes? whats that you say? I continued that? ... fuck. So lets stop now. I guess?