Xenonauts - the REAL successor to X-Com?

I don’t mind the actual size of the sprites when scaling is enabled, what gets me is the pixelation/graininess. For example, if a sprite is 16x16 pixels in size (I’m making it up, I don’t know their actual size) then that doesn’t leave much room for detail and as a consequence some elements are really hard to make out. I’ve tried the first mission and I suppose it didn’t help that I landed in a corn field but I couldn’t see shit. Guile haircuts simply meshed with the background. Same goes for Skyranger - are those wheels or an alien? I had to look closely at so many elements in the tactical view that it got bothersome and I just alt+F4d.

Ah well i never had a problem with the originals graphics, so the only issue i had with the high res settings was that everything got so darn small. I like the near original pixels, which is what my settings above give me on my screen :) Not sure about complete graphic re-texture mods, did they exist?

Hoooo boy, this game keeps on giving. I went into my ironman playthrough pretty much blind since I never got past the first 2 months of ingame time before. I had the basics down but with the Community Edition installed I wasn’t really sure what surprises await me. Turns out there are quite a few:

  • the AI is vicious. They will actively camp their corners if it means having a tactical advantage. This includes a skeleton crew that will always protect the interior of a crashed UFO. Attacking these without taking any damage or losses is almost an art.

  • you can lose your dropship to an UFO that lifts off unexpectedly (assuming it didn’t ‘land’ on your terms). Unfortunately I speak from experience. 3 months into campaign I lost my only dropship with my A team on board. Recovery took almost a month.

  • air game is super important. You have to go wide (with bases) pretty early on and make sure you have 4 interceptors at each base if you want to stop a good chunk of the attacks. Even then you’ll have to let some UFOs go because of the downtime due to rearming and refueling. This will be by far the biggest strain on your economy early into campaign.

  • daytime ops are not always an option. I had a terror site that spawned at the other side of the world. Getting there took nearly 24h with the starting dropship and when I actually arrived it was night time so I hung around waiting for sun break when the locals decided they’ve had enough of my shit and nuked the site. Massive penalty to funding and the civilian casualties skyrocketed.

  • game is tacticool as hell. I absolutely love the addition of vehicles. You can use them to scout and quickly mop up individual alien units that are outside the ship before moving on to the ship itself. They’re not very durable though so you have to use them carefully - they work great for spotting enemies so that your snipers and heavies can take them down. Also great for taking down walls when you cba to play a game of cat & mouse with the enemy on an industrial tileset. On infantry side you get pistols with riot shields, shotguns, rifles, lmgs and snipers. Each trooper can also carry a wide assortment of different grenades - frag, incendiary, smoke, flashbangs (very important for breaching) and stun. There are also a couple different armors available, each filling a different role so there’s really no one size fits all equipment in this game. Troopers in Predator armor for example can’t go up the stairs because they’re too heavy. You have to carefully assemble a balanced team to increase your chances of survival.

  • aliens will attempt to land and attack your bases. I had to give myself a pat on the back for having the foresight to build a couple missile batteries at each. Phew.

Bottom line, I’m enjoying the hell out of this game. It’s really making me wish I hadn’t missed the train on the original Xcom.

edit: how many scientists/engineers do you guys roll with? I’m at 45/45 at the moment but I feel like I could drop 15 scientists. It’s february and on the offense side I only have mag weapons left, all types of armor are also researched.

Bateau, what’s the Community Edition?

EDIT: Found it. So, basically, AI improvements, interface improvements, and new maps? I’m not entirely clear from that page why it’s community stuff and not stuff done by the devs. Did the devs just stop updating it at a certain point and the community took up the slack?

EDIT2: Okay, this explains a lot. If I wasn’t knee deep in XCOM 2, I’d jump in now. But I look forward to giving this a go eventually.

-Tom

Looks like you got it covered :). I hope you make Xenonauts a priority after Xcom 2, I’d be interested in hearing your opinion on two games that go after the same goal from two different angles (simulation vs abstraction).

I may be missing something obvious, but is there any way to check how many scientists/soldiers/technicians are in transit after you hire them?

There should be a number in the bracket on the hiring screen, right side.

I’ve just successfully assaulted an alien base, lost two of my best guys to friendly fire in the process. I hate berserking :(.

edit: One feature that I really like is that your ‘dead’ guys can get revived with a single hit point at the end of the battle, if they weren’t blown to pieces of course.

Oh, I’ve definitely played Xenonauts. It was one of my top ten games of that year. I just didn’t know anything about a Community Edition, which is what I was referring to when I mentioned “giving it a go eventually”.

As for its relationship to XCOM, I quite like them both for their very different approaches. If I were forced to choose a favorite, I’m pretty sure I’d lean towards Xenonauts. But I’m not sure I’d agree that there’s a simulation vs abstraction situation here. Certainly one is more detailed than the other, but I don’t really see a lot of abstraction in XCOM, at least not in the sense that I would use the word. Maybe streamlining might be how I’d characterize it?

What’s your take? Does Xenonauts make it hard for you to enjoy XCOM? I haven’t been in the XCOM 2 thread, so for all I know, you’re in there proclaiming your fondness for both games as well. :)

-Tom

Not so much Xenos as JA2. What can I say, I like to go tacticool to the max. New X-com (first, haven’t played the second) plays too much like a board game for my tastes and that’s the main reason why I didn’t buy X-com 2. There are a few things that I’d lift from Firaxis’s version in a heartbeat - perks/abilities are a great addition, as are PSI and MEC classes. But there are so many mechanics that I just can’t come to terms with - I don’t like that there’s no proper line of sight system, how cover only provides a penalty to aim for the enemy (because the projectiles aren’t real, they’re only simulated, meaning they don’t have a flight path and can’t hit cover on the way to the target), how the enemies are linked into pods or the 2AP system. I’m a little torn on locking troopers into classes, it makes sense but I love the flexibility that Xenos provide by allowing you to change each trooper’s class based on their stats or your needs/gear availability.

Re abstraction vs simulation - both games are obviously abstracted but Xenos at least tries to maintain the illusion of simulation. For one, projectiles are properly implemented, there’s directional line of sight, night time missions are a thing, etc.

I’m currently on another base assault in Xenos and oh man, you could cut the tension with a knife. I love how many different map tilesets are in the Community Edition. It’s worth getting for this alone.

Oh and Sentinel armor kicks so much ass.

Yes, Xcom is more gamey/abstract. It works perfectly mind you, but you can see it just looking at the basic fire & movement rules: it’s a game where you can move and shoot in a turn but somehow you can’t shoot and move. Or a soldier because he is of class X he can spend all his turn firing but that other class can’t even if it has on his hand an automatic weapon. It’s a game where 3 +2 is different from 2+3.

I always thought it was partially at least because it was designed for console gamers. They knew console gamers haven’t a lot of previous experience with strategy games, so they thought of rpg games. They know rpgs!

So they reworked the game capabilities in soldier classes, with specific abilities (which in some cases allows for the equivalent basic action in ufo defense) which can be used from time to time like in rpgs , with perks, etc.

I think it comes down more to the Firaxis design team really liking board game mechanics. They’ve pretty much been a part of almost all the Firaxis games since forever. It wasn’t designed for console gamers, it’s just what they wanted to do. They saw the aliens shooting out of the blue and killing your guys where you have no recourse to be absolutely unfair, that the AP system didn’t really add a whole lot of nuance(it tended to result more in standing and shooting than anything else). I know this because i’ve played both. As long as you have LOS in X-com, you really shouldn’t move at all, instead trusting in the power of heavy plasmas or explosives at long range, depending on which stage of the game you’re in.

I like both Xenonauts and XCOM. I think they both have their perks and i’m looking forward to the next iteration of Xenonauts as well as enjoying XCOM 2.

Thanks Bateau, for mentioning the Community Edition of Xenonauts and for writing your thoughts about the game. Really sparked my interest to put some time in after I finish XCOM 2.

I can also add the word tacticool to my vocabulary now as a bonus!

-Todd

Glad to hear it! I’m getting towards the end of my run, it’s now May and the enemy stepped up their air game in a way that I can barely keep up. For reference, my monthly income has been raising these last few months and I was at a 600k increase in the last month due to the excellent performance in air battles but now I’m barely keeping it at 0. In hindsight I should’ve built the good interceptors a bit earlier because condors just can’t match the speed of enemy ships that appear late in the game. However, they remain competitive damage wise because the weapon upgrades are applied automatically to your entire fleet.

Couple things I’d do differently if I was starting again:

  • take better care of my starting game vehicles. I must’ve lost at least 6 or 7 in the first two months and the costs to build new ones really added up.

  • offload the research to one of the fringe bases (don’t forget to build 2-3 defense batteries). With 2 labs and 3 workshops at my main base I barely had enough room to keep one squad at full capacity. Now that I’ve got my best dropship I can’t even fill it up because I don’t have enough soldiers. I’d still keep the production at main base so you can equip the soldiers as soon as equipment is manufactured.

  • only recruit soldiers with 60+ bravery and try not to let them die. Protip: once you get Predator armor strength becomes a nonfactor for Heavy Weapons users. If you see a candidate with decent TU, HP and bravery you should recruit him for HW duty asap.

  • interceptors pay for themselves pretty fast. Each condor costs 100k and each airstrike on a small crashed UFO nets 25k. If you can somehow fit 4 interceptors at each base early on you’ll be destroying the enemy and that should provide a good boost to your overall economy.

  • prioritize aircraft weaponry and infantry armor over infantry weapons. This goes for both research and production.

  • don’t bother with riflemen. Assaults (shotguns/carbines), heavy weapons and snipers outclass them at their intended roles.

  • if you see an enemy hiding in a house level it to the ground. I recommend you equip early game vehicles with rocket launcher for this purpose. Most of the cover and walls in this game can be destroyed with both infantry (not necessarily launchers, other weapons do the job as well) and vehicle weapons. I’d recommend this over SWAT tactics, especially if the enemy is one floor above you.

Jeeeeeeeeeesus. I assaulted an alien fortress (largest enemy base there is in the game) just before I researched Operation Endgame. It was going so well until the last third or so and then dominoes started falling and I lost 5 guys in less than 5 turns. The buttclench™ is real, tension on that mission was insane.

Now I’ve boarded the alien dreadnought and I got my entire squad of mostly rookies AND my goddamn hover tank ready to open the door and start the mission…

Damn it Bateau, I haven’t finished with Darkest Dungeon yet. I wasn’t keen on XCOM EU, in fact it made me go back to (Open)X-COM which I loved for the most part. I think Xenonauts would scratch the same itch and the CE sounds terrific.

o7

(Normal Ironman, pretty much my first real attempt at the game)

Last mission was brutal. BRUTAL. Like bring not one but two tanks brutal. Bring your full A++ team loaded up on steroids and adrenaline shots, wielding RPGs in one hand and miniguns in the other (cigars optional) brutal. Holy shit.

AAR

[spoiler]
The layout for the last mission is relatively simple. It’s a long hallway with two small wings on each side. Each opens up into larger room that holds a power core. If you want to extract your soldiers you have to blow up both cores. Each wing is protected by 5 elite soldiers. Easy so far. Main hallway is defended by roughly 8 enemies (at this point everyone is elite so I’ll stop pointing this out). Throne room had like 10-15 defenders, I honestly lost count. And as I learned midway through the mission, you’re on a timer. About 8 turns in reapers (Xenonauts equivalent of chryssalids) start spawning where your team started.

So I split my force (10 soldiers + tank) into 3 smaller groups. I open the main door and I’m immediately greeted by 4 enemies who were dug in by some heavy cover right in the center about 15 tiles away. I roll in with the TANK (pats self on back for bringing this puppy) and blow up two of them right away. I rush in with all my soldiers and have my Brotherhood of Steel Predator armor wearing machine gun totting übersoldiers privates (I really shouldn’t have attacked that alien base) shred them to pieces. Excellent start. I position two strike teams at both doors that lead to the power cores. Rest of my guys move up the hallway along with the tank. Next turn I open both doors and eliminate the first guards on both sides with surgical precision, like clockwork. Main attack force is slowly moving up while taking fire and eliminating the hallway guards. One guy bites it.

Couple more turns and I’m in the main rooms of both wings. Took some losses on one side but both my grenadiers are still alive. One side has one heavy and the other has two. Main force is now at the throne room door. I start playing the door games with the AI and slowly whittle them down with the tank while my guys sit behind corners like some b*tches seasoned veterans that they are.

At this point both wings look great, there are no more guards alive so I turn back all my heavies so they could join the main force at the throne room party. Meanwhile at the said party I’m taking some heavy losses. All my asaults are now dead, my tank is low on health, one of my snipers is about to bleed out and I only have one healthy sniper left. Fuck it, balls to the wall time. I roll in the tank (pats self on back again) and get a lucky LOS on the lieutenant bastard in charge of this invasion. BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR as the MAG cannon on my precious shreds him. And then I fire again at his corpse, for good measure. Both of my snipers move up and each take out the remaining two defenders in the throne room. At this point I’ve pretty much won and I start moving my heavies up so they could evac.

And then it starts. I’ve been getting hit with dread (reduces unit’s TUs by half if it gets debuffed, Bravery stat is the only defense against it) throughout the mission but now I get the worst RNG possible. One of my grenadiers is completely unable to throw grenades because of it so I turn back one of my heavies so he could shoot at the core (at this point I’m crossing my fingers that it’s a valid option and I won’t need explosives). At least the other side should be good, right? WRONG! The other grenadier threw like a girl (in her defense, she was a girl) and missed a fucking 5x5 core the size of a small truck with BOTH grenades. FFFFFFFfffffff-. I turn back another heavy and start marching the grenadier girl back to the evac zone.

Back at the main party I rush in my sniper to the evac teleporters. Except he runs out of movement points 1 tile before he could get away. And what’s this? Not one but TWO enemies camping the corners (there were only two corners)?? Are you fucking kidding me. In hindsight, I should’ve known. The AI in this game is vicious. Vicious! In any case, I got no other units in range to save him. o7 brave sniper and the only guy I’ve had since the start of the game, you will be missed. I bring my tank and the other sniper (who was luckily carrying a medkit so he hasn’t bled out) as close as I can so I can finish finish off the enemies in the following round. And then it happens. My sniper rolls a hard 20 and dodges 4 shots in a row. He’s suppressed so he can’t move but I manage to make swiss cheese out of the remaining opponents with my tank - without killing my sniper in the process. Excellent.

Back in the wings my heavies blew up both cores and I start making my way to the evac zone. As I turn the corner with my grenadier girl I immediately realise I’ve added an extra unit to the enemy’s army as reaper’s pointy legs pierce her armor and transform her into a hideous zombie. Should’ve learned how to throw, damnit! At this point I know that the remaining 3 soldiers in the wings are lost. I still want to kill as many enemies as I can while my remaining guys evacuate. In the following turn 6 reapers swarm my lonely heavy who guns down 3 of them. You’ll be missed, V.J. Dax private whose name I can’t remember. The other side had two soldiers so their chances looked a little better. Unfortunately a little better x 0 is still 0. As my two soldiers valiantly defend against the flood of incoming reapers I manage to hit a side wall while shooting at one of the targets. What do you know, there was a hidden passage there all along! I quickly rush in both of my guys, shield (grenadier) in the front, heavy in the back because he’s a littler slower. I’m moving up the hidden passageway (pretty much a vent), not knowing where it leads. I realise my heavy won’t make it so he makes his final stand. My grenadier keeps moving up. Heavy goes down in the following round after taking down two reapers. o7. My grenadier is still moving but the way the passageway turns I instantly know that this won’t end well. Indeed, he runs into a wall in the following turn. At this point I only have one heavy left to evac so I press end turn. Two reapers get to within one tile of my grenadier who now has his back against the wall. There’s only one option left - I throw a grenade at his feet and press end turn o7.

The mission concludes with my last heavy getting to the evac zone.

[/spoiler]

I’m playing finally this, with the CE version had integrated an unofficial patch with lots of improvements, improved art and map packs. I’m at my fourth ufo crash.

i have to say it feels a bit too old. And not because of the comparison with the modern Xcom 1/2… ok, that too: Not being able of zooming in/out is a pain in the ass, as not being able to rotate the camera. The thing is, I could swear some other 2d tactical games had the ability of zooming in. But it isn’t only against these modern games, it’s also lacking some QoL stuff and some features standardized by Jagged Alliance 2 like los tools or being able to climb in what, 1999?
Missions I have to confess feel a bit repetitive, though maybe that too is because all these years playing Ufo / Xcom games and clones, it isn’t a fresh experience anymore. I’m actually missing some of the ‘extra objectives’ like deactivating bombs from the modern games, to spice up things.

That’s what I was afraid of, Turin, with regards to this and Original X-Com. I was worried that perhaps our expectations in terms of game design, interface, and pacing might have passed them by. :( Are you going to stick with it? I’ll be interested in hearing whether you mind those issues less once you get invested in the characters and progression.

-Tom

Well, I have no idea if I’m going to “stick with it” until the end, who knows. For now I’m playing, it will be in a few days (in the weekend?) when I will truly see if I’m going to go on or just leave after some days.

The good point in contrast with the previously mentioned stuff is the extra freedom in both the strategy layer (in fact I worry I may have started the second base a bit too early) and in the tactical layer, where you can give precise move and fire orders to your heart’s content. And in fact you must, I’m finding out that the mix of lethality, the fact that aliens seem to like to hide in any unsuspecting corner and the restrictive fov (your soldier seem to be wearing horse blinders :P) mean you have to micro all their movements. stopping at every corner, clearing every house, crouching, using every piece of cover, advancing in tandem, using smoke nades or flashbangs when appropriate, etc.
It’s at least at differentiating point, modern Xcom is still tactical but it has a more… macro feeling?

I would like for the game to have a better help. There is no proper tutorial, it’s lacking in tooltips in several areas, in others there are proper entries in the ‘xenopedia’ but the game doesn’t like to it (for example right click on a building title in the facilities list should direct you to the entry in the xenopedia, but it doesn’t). It also needs markers for last enemy sightings (you have to remember where they appeared in the enemy turn, if they finished their move out of your sight), and it also would be useful some system with “last events” in the left or right side of the screen, like some tycoon games have. Oh yeah, and inexplicably, I don’t see any financial screen in the game?? It has some budget info integrated in the main world map, but maybe I’m too dense but I literally have no idea of what money I’m going to have next (ingame) month.

In general terms, let’s be honest here, the problem is less “it’s too old school” and more that it’s an indie game and it’s the first game done by the devs that previously were just amateurs.

I can only think of Commandos 2 (which had 4 camera angles too). Maybe Silent Storm as well but I never gave that game a real chance after I learned about the Panzerkleins.