It’s such an obvious difference between all the modern attempts at the game and the originals when you put them side by side.
Even like… In the tactical battles. For example in the originals every single piece of every single bit of scenery has its own hp, burns, fire spreads from place to space, wind exists and smoke moves. If smoke exists between you and a target that smoke in-between is probably calculated as part of line of sight. But, in the modern variants of the game, smoke is just an aoe circle you sit inside that gives a negative debuff to accuracy of enemy shooters.
The levels in the originals? Tonnes and tonnes of actually random generation. Not premade maps.
The vision is creating a simulation. Not a board-game. The newer games can be fun, but even things like the removal of Time Units in favour of the move+action approach are a compromise to the idea of “simulation”. They wanted to simulate real battle in a turnbased way and that’s what led to the decisions they made. They weren’t trying to make a boardgame. Not on the geoscape and not on the tactical battles either.
The direction I would go with these games would not to be to remove Time Units but instead to implement more team-oriented mechanics.
2 guys next to each other? Have a way to move both of them at once, as a pair working together covering one another.
4 guys stacked up on a door way? Breach and entry option for the full group.
3 guys in a corridor? 1 stands overwatch while 2 walk the full length of it.
1 Drone operator and a full group simultaneous movement buff where 6 soldiers all move together.
I’m sure tonnes of these can be thought of for tacticool moments.
These kinds of things would not only make the original systems feel better but actually make it feel like you’re an elite agency with some of the world’s best troops. Additionally it fills out options that make moving a large number of units less tedious, which is the main problem with the first games and Xenonauts. The remakes moved to a much smaller squad for the issue of tedious movement and control of soldiers too. Wrong approach.
Something you made me think of - in Project Zomboid, you get a lot of contextual actions that aren’t just based on the thing you right-clicked on, but also the objects that are nearby, in your pack, in nearby containers, etc. If you had a dev team that was devoted to it, you could have a stupid amount of detail in a turn based system by implementing something like that which shows all of your available actions based on not just what you’re currently holding but the terrain around you and the things your nearby allies are carrying and so on.
In another comment someone talked about team reloads, which made me think of how some support weapons in Helldivers 2 become far more effective if another player assists you with using them, and that would be a prime example of what you could do with that kind of context-sensitive setup. It also opens up the door to snipers with spotters, more advanced fire and movement that happens simultaneously, environmental interactions like rigging a bridge with explosives…
Yeah exactly. The point here is to try and make turnbased combat feel like an elite squad cooperating with one another rather than a bunch of individual pawns being moved around a chessboard. Context-sensitive team actions in a very widely implemented way would take turnbased combat in a direction that has currently been entirely unexplored, at least to my knowledge I know of nothing that has tried out the concept.
My thinking here is to not radically move away from Xcom’s original sim-style but to build on top of it, to advance it. The remakes basically radically move away from it instead of truly building on it while Xenonauts on the other hand doesn’t truly advance it in the way that I would want to see from a title trying to truly be a sequel rather than a fan-letter or expansion pack like TFTD was.
Unfortunately I’m filled with ideas without the technical ability to implement.
I would be so down for having groups of people move together without having to do your whole team at once. That’s such a great idea and i’ve never seen it done. Being able to set up your breach and then have the whole team do their thing at once would be great.
Breaching in x-com was where i lost more troops than anything else.
This idea makes sense for turnbased when you’ve played Apoc. Because in the realtime mode you can move the units as a grouped squad and they’ll move into cover by themselves if close enough to the cover. Obviously you’d want it more polished in a modern form, I see no reason you couldn’t have some logic like moving 6 soldiers and the game checking for how many time units they have and giving you either a full run distance into cover for all members of the squad or giving you a squad walk + covering fire movement where they move up half and half. Or a run into a position of overwatch with reserved time units. You could do this pretty cleanly and a game could even optimise it for shotguns in front vs rifles in back.
Yeah I loved Xenonauts but pretty much every time it reminded me that it was “gamey” instead of “simulationy” I was disappointed.
It’s such an obvious difference between all the modern attempts at the game and the originals when you put them side by side.
Even like… In the tactical battles. For example in the originals every single piece of every single bit of scenery has its own hp, burns, fire spreads from place to space, wind exists and smoke moves. If smoke exists between you and a target that smoke in-between is probably calculated as part of line of sight. But, in the modern variants of the game, smoke is just an aoe circle you sit inside that gives a negative debuff to accuracy of enemy shooters.
The levels in the originals? Tonnes and tonnes of actually random generation. Not premade maps.
The vision is creating a simulation. Not a board-game. The newer games can be fun, but even things like the removal of Time Units in favour of the move+action approach are a compromise to the idea of “simulation”. They wanted to simulate real battle in a turnbased way and that’s what led to the decisions they made. They weren’t trying to make a boardgame. Not on the geoscape and not on the tactical battles either.
The direction I would go with these games would not to be to remove Time Units but instead to implement more team-oriented mechanics.
2 guys next to each other? Have a way to move both of them at once, as a pair working together covering one another.
4 guys stacked up on a door way? Breach and entry option for the full group.
3 guys in a corridor? 1 stands overwatch while 2 walk the full length of it.
1 Drone operator and a full group simultaneous movement buff where 6 soldiers all move together.
I’m sure tonnes of these can be thought of for tacticool moments.
These kinds of things would not only make the original systems feel better but actually make it feel like you’re an elite agency with some of the world’s best troops. Additionally it fills out options that make moving a large number of units less tedious, which is the main problem with the first games and Xenonauts. The remakes moved to a much smaller squad for the issue of tedious movement and control of soldiers too. Wrong approach.
Just look at how good the simulation is here: https://youtu.be/OIwWdXDdY8g
Something you made me think of - in Project Zomboid, you get a lot of contextual actions that aren’t just based on the thing you right-clicked on, but also the objects that are nearby, in your pack, in nearby containers, etc. If you had a dev team that was devoted to it, you could have a stupid amount of detail in a turn based system by implementing something like that which shows all of your available actions based on not just what you’re currently holding but the terrain around you and the things your nearby allies are carrying and so on.
In another comment someone talked about team reloads, which made me think of how some support weapons in Helldivers 2 become far more effective if another player assists you with using them, and that would be a prime example of what you could do with that kind of context-sensitive setup. It also opens up the door to snipers with spotters, more advanced fire and movement that happens simultaneously, environmental interactions like rigging a bridge with explosives…
Yeah exactly. The point here is to try and make turnbased combat feel like an elite squad cooperating with one another rather than a bunch of individual pawns being moved around a chessboard. Context-sensitive team actions in a very widely implemented way would take turnbased combat in a direction that has currently been entirely unexplored, at least to my knowledge I know of nothing that has tried out the concept.
My thinking here is to not radically move away from Xcom’s original sim-style but to build on top of it, to advance it. The remakes basically radically move away from it instead of truly building on it while Xenonauts on the other hand doesn’t truly advance it in the way that I would want to see from a title trying to truly be a sequel rather than a fan-letter or expansion pack like TFTD was.
Unfortunately I’m filled with ideas without the technical ability to implement.
I would be so down for having groups of people move together without having to do your whole team at once. That’s such a great idea and i’ve never seen it done. Being able to set up your breach and then have the whole team do their thing at once would be great.
Breaching in x-com was where i lost more troops than anything else.
This idea makes sense for turnbased when you’ve played Apoc. Because in the realtime mode you can move the units as a grouped squad and they’ll move into cover by themselves if close enough to the cover. Obviously you’d want it more polished in a modern form, I see no reason you couldn’t have some logic like moving 6 soldiers and the game checking for how many time units they have and giving you either a full run distance into cover for all members of the squad or giving you a squad walk + covering fire movement where they move up half and half. Or a run into a position of overwatch with reserved time units. You could do this pretty cleanly and a game could even optimise it for shotguns in front vs rifles in back.