X-Com Cydonian Strategy

[Covenant]

I'm pretty sure there's no way to keep the entire game premise, and still keep it balanced, without making one or both sides completely retarded.

I wouldn't go that far. It is clear that the aliens have been doing some alien/human hybridization work, and that they don't want to destroy Earth's biosphere. If we forget the idea of T'leth from X-Com II then we have to assume that the aliens want to colonize Earth and use the humans, not obliterate them. Furthermore, we've seen that the Aliens do not attempt to kill Earth's leaders, but infiltrate, bribe, or replace them. Read the Alien Mission techs--they talk about the aliens offering to give the humans technology and cease operations in a territory that agrees to work with them.

It could easily be that not only do they want to avoid obliterating Earth, but they also do not have the capability of doing more than strafing cities and landing 50 or so soldiers at a time--hardly impressive. These are essentially alien commandos as well. The idea is that X-Com operates covertly and the alien menace is kept off the front pages, so this is hardly a full-scale operation.

Also ask yourself, what notification have the nations of Earth had of the alien attacks? I'm not positive, but it wasn't Muton Attack like the intro showed--that was clearly not an actual bit of storyline, because that also assumes X-Com was up and running before. So it seems like the Committee of Funding Nations had been aware of an alien menace for quite some time, had set up X-Com, and kinda left it on the back burner for a while. Possibly the first incursions were Roswell-style easily knocked-down saucers and a few diplomatic liasons asking for the people of Earth to aid them in exchange for advance technology. When this tact failed, they began launching terror attacks, increasing activity, and X-Com woke up to handle it.

So if you make it not an alien empire, but imagine the Cydonians as an alien X-Com organization with steadily-improving clone army and big fleet of UFOs, it becomes more sensible. We never see anything to suggest there's more than a few thousand aliens. The Cydonian force could be like the Rag Tag Fleet of nBSG, with the Hive Mind as their Adama looking for a home after Mars collapsed and they went into deep freeze for a while.

[Stark]

Frankly, this was done with the WotW game in the 90s; the Martians were in dire straits themselves and were forced into the invasion, suffered political dissension, have limited resources etc. Indeed, simply by making it less black and white it works BETTER. They're forced to work behind the scenes and in roundabout ways, and the deployment of battleships to silence XCOM is a mark of desperation.

But then, the game is clearly a superhero anime show, so any remake had better have Mutons leaping 50 feet into the air while firing from the hip etc. Add in the enemy doing their own 'research' (human information, cultural, technological, etc through harvesters/terror sites/infiltration) and the game is even playable both ways with differing goals and methods.

Wait, did Cov and I just turn the genre on it's head? Sorry!

[Zixinus]

I'd have to ask: what would it cost for the Cydonians to shoot out our satellites?

[Steel]

I'd have to ask: what would it cost for the Cydonians to shoot out our satellites?

Precisely what it costs them to fly by one on their way down and flush their toilets.

[Darth Smiley]

It also costs them the ability to deal only with the leaders of human nations; it exposes them as hostile to the entire world and at the very least quadruples X-Com's budget, if not more, and could very well bring in national military forces into the picture.

[The Defenestrator]

One thing you could try is to make the game a little more over-the-top, and give XCOM employees more exaggerated abilities, so they feel more like the best of the best of the best. Similarly, the scientists could be played as more "the world's top geniuses and mad scientists" and the organization would be using top secret prototype aircraft. All that would help explain why the associated governments of Earth can't do what you can, if you can get across that normal soldiers would be massacred by the aliens, normal scientists couldn't understand the technology, normal jet fighters couldn't keep up with the alien spacecraft, etc.

[Stark]

I think the game already suggests that as much as it's limiations can; if you take the stats and the cutscenes and art style as 'intention', it seems clear that the game is meant to be an anime-style super-soldier game where every soldier and scientist is a 'character'.

Like many games, adding actual superpowers would be awesome. UFO + Freedom Force-style interactions = win. If you think of XCOM as Terrahawks + International Rescue + every thinktank Tom Clancy ever invented it's far more awesome.

That's something else that'd make lategame better; orbital bases. They can TRY to attack it, but with lategame tech they'd get slaughtered and it provides a useful FREEDOM STAR for XCOM.

[Cykeisme]

I think you guys have it.

That's what it should have been, and if they ever do a remake, what it should be.

[Covenant]

Your wishes have been noted!

But yeah, while we can twist the story to make it sensible, as it stands the aliens have more than enough firepower to just strip the planet of all human life and seemingly braindead motivations. They may want to seize our world and reason with us in a more roundabout fashion, but they do this by going to cities and unleashing large furry monsters on an America that has seemingly given up it's love of firearms. I'd imagine the first time a Reaper shows up in a Texan city, fifteen yokels plug the thing full of .30 holes and watch it flop over in disgrace.

I think the idea of infiltration was a good one, but combining shadow war against humanity with massive alien spacecraft slamming into the countryside on a mission to unleash Cryssalids into a civilian population... doesn't jive. They should have made X-Com into a sci-fi anti-alien GI-Joe.

[RedImperator]

Perhaps the terror missions could come later, after X-Com has started successfully interdicting their infiltration missions, as an act of frustration or a change in tactics. Or maybe after they have successfully infiltrated one or more nations, in order to "encourage" others to fall in line. Or maybe--this might be fun--as retaliation for X-com destroying an alien base, committed against one of X-Com's sponsoring nations--"We cannot let X-Com's unprovoked aggression go without a response".

[Darth Smiley]

I would think the best way to keep balance is to think about it as if it was a multiplayer game. As some have noted in the "Lets Play X-Com" topic, there really isn't any sort of balance between the various option open to the player, and the aliens are more obstacle than enemy.

My take on the terror missions is that they are meant to be a simple, easily understood message: "We can show up whenever we want, and kill whoever we want. And there's really nothing you can do about it". The aliens don't show up and kill enough people to actually force the world to rally against them - 12 to 15 people is hardly anything. But the fact that they can show up and kill and retreat with no consequences is a chilling one (unless, of course, X-Com comes into play). But I do agree that they shouldn't resort to terror until closer to the endgame. One possibility is to make terror missions much bigger, and have what we now call terror missions just be a heavy handed abduction/harvest.

My sort of semi-design documents for this sort of thing (boredom produces such wonderful things, no?) have a couple of ways to balance out the alien/human asymmetry. One thing that helps is to give them access to local military forces and systems. X-Com radar and interceptors have the best chance of detecting and engaging a UFO...but it's not like the RAF or USAF are going to just sit back when X-Com isn't around. In the early game, X-Com has access to plentiful, if low quality, reinforcements, as well as some fairly heavy artillery. By the midgame, X-Com has enough resources to do a good job on its own, and the national militaries are no longer able to compete as well. By the endgame, the military has started to catch up to X-Com in terms of weaponry (who do you think was buying all those laser cannons?) and the battle will be beginning to verge on open warefare, so they become more useful again - assuming, of course, that they haven't been infiltrated.

The biggest problems are that (1) defense is too easy for a competent player and (2) the aliens can't lose if they are careful. Some sort of constraint on the aliens needs to be in place. A good one is a time limit, or rapidly diminishing supplies, such that the aliens must meet at least certain benchmarks by certain dates. The key is to make the benchmark easy to reach, if one tries, but involved enough that in the process conflict with X-Com is inevitable.

[Lord Woodlouse]

I'd like to see different size scales of battles. Most missions would be as in X-Com, but alien base assault missions and terror missions would be bigger scale, in which X-Com coordinates the defence or attack. Maybe working on the basis that each X-Com officer you have works as a multiplier in terms of regular non-X-Com grunts to work with.