Alien activity in the respective territories will increase the appropriate DEFCON counter, and activity in non-aligned states is split between the two.
Xenonauts 2 is free from those obligations and we want to make much more use of the time period within the game mechanics. This was mostly because I felt adding a political aspect to a game that was specifically intended to be a "remake" of X-Com would be going beyond my remit. Anyway, the net result of it wall was people ended up playing the strategy game the same way every time, which hurts the replayability significantly.įinally, the Cold War setting for the game was a rich and interesting setting that we did literally nothing with. Weapons were straightforward upgrades on their predecessors that did increased damage, which was necessary but again a bit tedious. Similarly, the research tree was identical every time and was effectively just a straight line of progression, gated by class of UFO. We tried to balance this a little by making some regions give more funding than others, but there's only so far you can go to counterbalance the annoying shape of the world and the distribution of wealthy countries within it. Australia) simply because some areas will cover far more territory than others. It also did not help that the way radar detection works meant that there were "good" places to put bases (i.e. Playing endless air combat missions and then never getting other than UFO crash site combat missions gets really boring really fast. This was a major balance issue, a major thematic issue (the ground combat is meant to be the "core" of the game) and also a major enjoyment issue. The biggest was probably the fact that your chance of winning the game was defined more by your skill at the air combat than it was the ground combat, as those skilled at the air war would receive far more funding and could even "get ahead" of the alien invasion and prevent the aliens building bases, launching terror attacks or attacking Xenonaut bases. There's a number of issues with Xenonauts 1 in terms of the strategy map.