True, and I'd have no problem using their craft as my new standard. However I think the game should then start stacking alien opposition against you the beefier you make yourself. I liked your idea too on the gradual increase where base defense becomes more taxing on you. First time through like fourth, 1 Battleship attempts to land at your base like normal, then the more you successfully keep blowing them up with your base weapons, more Battleships start to stack with increased odds of breaching your outter defesnes to land.
What this does of course is liven up and increase the odds of more battlescapeish base defenses happening with your troops, but what it also does is make you decide "Do I scrap this base and start over a few miles away to slip under their noses or stay and fight it out?"
I mentioned this in another thread, but if it could be carried out well, I'm all for anything new that let's me think about more things tactically then the first game allowed.
Edit: Just to reiterate my point above again about the using of borrowed alien ships, the one about limitations where maps/missions come into play. Now I'm not certain how big the maps for Xenocide will be with the first or even in subsequent planned version releases, but I'll explain what I mean with regard to the larger ships that aren't the small, medium or large scout variety (i.e. whatever would squeeze into the standard 4 square X-COM hanger that thus, shouldn't pose as much problems where map generation/placement of objects goes)...
What I'm referring to is limited uses for using the much larger craft. You'd almost certainly have to develop larger maps for example if we were to be able to use something as enormous as the Battleship for "routine" crash recoveries since then your ship takes up a huge portion of the map. This rules out Battleship reocvery I'd think since then you have two Battleships squeezed into that map. Well, the "traditional X-COM map" anyway.
This point aside, there are in my mind two possibilites if the idea was to eventually truely use such large ships for your more routine recovery operations...
1) Stage Play - By this I mean the old Cydonia style 2-maps per mission angle. The mission isn't complete until you do both. What I'd propose here if this was the case is to have some maps made that when there's an appropriate trigger (because the player has chosen the Battleship as his vehicle of choice) that places the crashed UFO he's after underground on a separate level of its own. Meaning if that ship is chosen to be used, every map site is two stages or...
2) Simply has more
levels to it (like bases have and buildings do on the battlescape, only now your taking subterrainian into account where appropriate). The basic logic behind each one, no matter which would be used though, is that ships that crash at high velocities (forgetting for a moment the explainations for any alien survivals at all

), chunks of ships will inevitably wind up under the surface. What this also presents is a bit of a reason to throw more aliens to shoot at, even if the ship you shot down was small. That reason is since the map is now a couple or more levels that you have to navigate, that gives the opposition time to have sent recovery teams of their own to investigate. More opposition as a pricetag (among others sited) for using a large ship sounds fun to me.
But even though this would be helluva fun, I won't go into the economic failures of doing so, such as, "Why recover a small UFO even if its intact with a Battleship class ship? Expending more Elerium to get there for one possible payout of one powersource isn't worth it." Its a choice, albeit probably not a sound economic reason for doing so

That said, maybe missions could be made that offer a bit of a payout for deploying one.
However I do see possiblilties for specialized usage. Battleships we know have the ability to withstand a bit of a beating and are perfect for assaulting bases. In X-COM the aliens didn't have outter defenses, but now there's a reason to give them some not to mention the inner defenses discussed in the other thread and more bodies to target. Another was infiltration as was discussed. One thought here too could be that maybe you don't want to risk that Battleship you made right away, so you set up an infitration mission. Select a unit to do the infiltration in whatever alien garb he'll have then select the base he's to go to. His objective could be to disable the outter defenses so you could land or at least give you targetting data so that a bombardment might be more effective than just blazing on in.
Edited by Snakeman, 30 November 2004 - 12:02 AM.