stoopher

cool, four guns? pistols are dead inaccurate anyway. at ten feet they can be regularly up to a foot out. the accuracy penalties should be there but they should be insignificant any way. Half life made me laugh. the magnum was so accurate it had a laser sight. what tosh. they only good thing about a magnum is it's power. the gun was actually built about the bullet. the magnum refers to this single huge penetrate-anything bullet. There are good rifles thatfire magnums. you can put a hole in an 18 litre truck engine with a magnum rifle at point blank. still i wouldn't want to be shot at with a pistol, at any range.

I never bothered with any defence systems on the base. I alway went straight to base defece. They come in throough the hangers. So put the hangars in a separate bit to the rest of the base accessibl;e only by the access shaft. what does this do? Lets you put a trooper in either side hidden in the first base facility after the access lift armed with motion scanners. Sit there and pass go until you know (by scanner, that there is an alien in the access sheaft. blaster/plasma. pref:plas. keep this up until they are gone. you never really see them and so they ever really psi- you. I never got into psi it took too long. I completed in 215 missions. takes ages to build up psi in troupers.

known human kind explosives will have to be purchased fromthe manufacturere of such an item. This would have to be done through a agency who would be appraoching mining and drilling firms for their excess, or through military contacts and possibly even the black market. In house manufacturing is so expensive. there is something called economies of scale. If we are not a major producer then the major producer can undercut us. (Could bea financing mechanism). Or we could sneak into all the mafia and black market connections and through bugging and subterfuge, hijack black market deals. We'ld be the cowboys holding up the cowboys in the great train robbery! it'ld be like being robbin hood but better as no one would know your good cause, and so you'ld have to be sooo secretive. I love to be able to monitr and track all the worlds produce and see where is goes mssing. Clamp down on all occasions where it is not us. Be a black market player, and get into trouble with the interpolice, who is covering our backs? There are so many avenues for storyline here.

1 you do not talk about xcom 2 you do not talk about xcom 3 No shirt no shoes no belt (it is an alien) 4 an assault mission will go on aslong as it has to. 5 if they aliens go limp tap out the fight is over 6 Only two sides to a fight 7 (forgotten) 8 If it is your first assault mission you have to fight

Nar, In xcom1 you play a sort of god who directly control every poor sod troopers moves and can see anywhere on the whole globe and spin in like a base ball and accelerate time. Really if you weremanaging this sort of project you would have a location in a base and some missions you would be able to skip and some you would have to simply not be present. Some missions you could control from the drop ship, by seeing images from soldier headsets, andriod eyepiece live feeds and also and cameras you may have on the drop ship or suspended from gantries/ballons/antigrav devices. You could walk and and fight amoungst the men or you could commandeer an android and play with the mouse and keyboard in the drop ship like you were playing counter strike at home - this lets you still tactially guide your men. , or you could walk out the craft and fight amoungst your men. This lets you assign a trooper to guide then men so if you down't want to you can leave then craft and go kisk donkey. The ideal mixture of brain testing or outright death&slaughter. Perfect for a relxing evening in

city night light are visible from the moon and satellites, check out my link or type europe at night into the google image engine.

Seriously if there are hidden weapons then as darkon says they need to be a realistic item used in a novel way. stuffing toothpaste in a sectoids nostril means he/she/it cannot breath and passes out. Seems a bit slap stick like off dumb and dumber. Still there is room for humour. Remeber when the aliens panics and shoots himself? His buddies? Or better still an exploding cyber disk amoungst a crowd of his mates?

3d engine is good, esp if the last hope mod were ported in asthe mission engine. Do you see some work load disappearing?.....

I like the articles about personalising the troops. It would be good to have a little text string engine which creates sentences based on the troopers histroy. The style of the test could be like a sports commentator, that would certainly give it a slightly comic feel, and I don't think that would be out of place. A bit like the commentator from the pod race in episode one. Alternatively it could be the general (gamer) military style with military lingo. This would keep up the high pressure side of the game. An equaly valid alternative. Could even have a module that turns soldier data pages into trump card you can print out (Oh yes Perleeeaase!!)

Can the soldier be rendered in a 3d engine and rotating as we equip him the equipment appear on him? If the image is generated from the 3d engine then at least that will be less work for the artist even if it is not roatating.

Is it not that a team of people will work together and get to know who is boss? Not if they die loads I suppose. What if rank is tatoed? Every promotion earns an addition to the tatoo. Ranks should be generic to most armies, and not too many. What about different classes of rank respecting the backgorund each person comes from? Or is it that people no-longer have any connection to their past when they join xcom?

I think the logo needs to be very "could be any military really". It needs to be understated and look like any other so when you drop into urban areas the logo on the dropship is not memorable to civilians. It needs to be samey and look possibly even washed out. Infact maybe we should approach it from the "unmarked helicopters" angle, to remain anonymous. Character 'X' in X-files. the unknown. Anonymous. Unknown force secretly taking on an unknown enemy. "No J, a person is clever, people are stupid. They are dumb jumpy panicky animals with a penchant for totally misinterpreting how things really are. There is always an intergalactic virus about to wipe them all out or a battle cruiser ready to paste the planet, or galactic bulldozers waiting for authority to plough the earth out of the way for a highway. They only way these people can comfortably get on with their lives is by not knowing about it." tommy lee jones MIB - Sadly I did just quote a crap film but it was a good sentimetns never-the-less.

Hang on wasn't the last xcom game duke nuke'm with a robot? cybervoisce: "I'm here to kick donkey and chew gum, damn I'm all outta gum." "I'm gonna rip your head off and sh1t down your neck!" "You're an inspiration for birth control" "Damn you're Ugly!" There are lots of option for the interception bit I think We need to find a real killer idea. I think kamikaze is out though. The game should be hard and tight andlosses cannot be afforded. It is as much about the minimanagement as it is about the missions. In I reckon is morre about what goes on out of the missions. And so I think the gamer should play a character. So if the character goes on the mission the gamer plays it. If not then not so. It would mean mission which could be simulated from a distance. With distance management.

Gotta disagree with you here, my main homeboy kenshiro. Code cheats are out. I'm a working stiff too. But I love the challenge. Out of the game managing one's priorites should notbe affected by the game. Shows a good game though....

Kenshiro's analysis couldn't be more right with everyword. Get that man on board on the design squad!! I echo it all. I add this: When something unexpected happens. 'Hyperwhat's?' - 'Psionics? Is that like pressure gauges or some thing?' - 'My trooper is a sodding zombie!?! AArgh!" - "Is that giant brian pulsating?" - 'Hey I didn't think my guy would react in the alien's turn and shoot his own crew?!? Is that a combination of fast reactions and shockingly poor accuracy, no wait he's counted as an enemy!!! What The &*^k?!!' When what you expect does a somersault and you realise for the tenth time that this enemy you are fighting moves the battle to totally new areas with some regularity. Areas it knows too well and areas you are new to.