transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Good evening, you're listening to Three Moves Ahead. I'm Len, I'm your host. I am here with freelance writer Jon Bolding.

Speaker 2:
[00:07] Hey, y'all.

Speaker 1:
[00:09] And freelance writer Sin Vega. And this week, we are talking about Xenonauts 2, which just released into 1.0 from Early Access. I almost said into Early Access, because I've been reviewing so many Early Access games lately. It's a throwback to the old school XCOM, which I actually never played like the original 90s XCOMs, which is one of those things that just scandalizes people when I bring it up. I assume both of you did.

Speaker 2:
[00:48] I did not play them at the time and can only imagine what kind of a sicko I would have become if I had actually discovered them as like a youth. But I did go back and play the 90s XCOMs around the time that the 2012 XCOM, I say reboot, but that's now like 14 years ago happened, right? I was like, this is really interesting. People are really excited about this. And it's a strategy game. I want to know where this came from. And then I was like, oh, snap, this is like laser squad because I had laser squad. And I was like, this is like laser squad, way, way different. And then from there, I evolved on to discover all the way up, played all the way up through XCOM Apocalypse, one of the greatest, horrifying Baroque masterpieces in all of gaming.

Speaker 3:
[01:41] Yes, it's my favorite in the series.

Speaker 2:
[01:43] It's a psychotic video game that shouldn't exist, but it should also definitely exist in like a Dwarf Fortress way where someone should still be working on it to get today.

Speaker 3:
[01:53] It was a talk of a remake years back. Well, somebody got partway through that, but I think that stalled, which is understandable because I mean, it was even-

Speaker 2:
[02:01] Pure madness.

Speaker 3:
[02:02] Even by 90 standards, it was very unorthodox. The fact that they had XCOM Apocalypse is had real-time and turn-based optional modes, which is fantastic. This is wild. Personally, I-

Speaker 1:
[02:15] XCOM with real-time.

Speaker 3:
[02:17] Yeah. I actually always prefer the real-time in APOC. I mean, they both had huge problems. I mean, inevitably, because realistically, you cannot balance both, let's face it. And they were very different games. Stuff like in real-time, dual-wielding weapons was like you could have two pistols or two rocket launchers.

Speaker 1:
[02:37] So this wasn't like Terror from the Deep where it was like an expand alone. This was like a whole different game?

Speaker 3:
[02:42] This was, I want to say it's totally different. It was probably more different than even XCOM. Oh, that's not a very great comparison, but it was honestly the best way to understand it is to play them both, which I appreciate is like that's a lot of work. Like they are very, very old and very arcane and getting them to work isn't too bad these days, but you know, the 90s UI and design and excellent, but with, you know, they have aged, they have aged. Well, less so than a lot of their contemporaries, but Apocalypse is fascinating for a lot of reasons, one of which is that it just, it really went for it. It had so many ideas and a lot of them were really good ideas and they just didn't have time to finish them all. And it's just, it's so full of personality. It's so all in on what it is. And I admire that very much about it.

Speaker 1:
[03:36] Yeah, that's the one Rowan keeps telling me I need to play. So, I don't know.

Speaker 3:
[03:40] I think it's probably the most capital I interesting in the original series. Because if you play the first one, yes, that's interesting, but you kind of essentially know everything about it broadly, because it's been done so often since Apocalypse was...

Speaker 2:
[03:55] Guarantee you haven't seen everything that's in Apocalypse. I mean, just even the difference in the overworld being a city that exists in real time, that you have to move your little people around rather than a map of the world.

Speaker 3:
[04:08] I can probably sell this to Len by saying, Apocalypse is the game where if you start bombing the government who fund you, not only can you keep playing as long as you can keep staying in the positive, your balance, but the mutant, the pro mutant and the pro robot civil rights groups will ally with you.

Speaker 1:
[04:32] Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[04:34] Which doesn't have any effect. It's a real shame because it's one of the things that wasn't implemented, but it's just, yeah, one of those things that's very much, oh, I see what this could have been and it was-

Speaker 1:
[04:44] Isn't Phoenix Point does something like that too, right? Where you can choose who to side with.

Speaker 2:
[04:50] Yeah, Phoenix Point has factions.

Speaker 3:
[04:53] Yeah, you can see some of that in the old, there were a series of games in the 2000s called the UFO. I always forget which, but after MAF., after Shock and after, I don't know, after 8 or something. They had a similar thing where they had factions was their big thing. As the series, there's three of them. The first one was, as they went on, they got a bit more elaborate and more interesting and still quite flawed. But yeah, the whole factions thing, some games did try to carry that torch and Phoenix Point is the most recent modern one that I'm aware of. I do wonder if they do do an XCOM 3, if that's something they will really focus on. But I kind of think, well, anyway, that's probably another subject.

Speaker 1:
[05:34] Well, so it's interesting because I kind of bounced off of the first Xenonauts. Maybe I would have loved it if I had been reviewing it and I had, as a condition of the review, had to finish it and stick with it. But I played through all of Xenonauts 2 and I finally, because I was one of the people that when the Firaxis XCOM came out, like the first Firaxis XCOM, that was my first XCOM and I absolutely loved it. And I hear all these people talking about like, yeah, but it's not as good as the old ones. And I was like, come on, really? What do you mean by that? Like this is one of the best games I've ever played in my life. But now that I've played Xenonauts 2, I'm like, yeah, OK, like, I get it. I get what you meant, like the bigger squads, the more in-depth, like action economy, like I do. I really I ended up really, really liking Xenonauts 2.

Speaker 3:
[06:28] It's a very kind of... Cards on the table, I hated the XCOMs, but I do respect them. And I don't think they're worse than the old ones. And I'm going to if I ever keep saying UFO, I'm referring to the 90s XCOM just because, I mean, it's just easier in my mind to differentiate in that way. But I don't... Okay, personally, I think the first, the old ones, I prefer them, but I wouldn't say they're better, better. They're just, they're different games. They're kind of... Firaxis games are very, very successful, very clever at what they do, but they're doing something different, and Xenonauts looks more to the old ones for what it's doing. So, yeah, I'm really glad that you enjoyed it. Like, it's really interesting to see, because I think there's definitely a bigger hump for, even for someone who played the original, the UFO, lots of other games since. There's definitely a hump with Xenonauts, and Xenonauts 2. I had a similar thing. I bounced off the first one a bit. Second one, it took me a minute. Like, it didn't grab me at first, but once I kind of committed to it, much, I kind of got used to it, and I definitely enjoy it a lot more than really most turn-based tactics games I've played recently.

Speaker 1:
[07:41] Jon, did you play the original Xenonauts at all?

Speaker 3:
[07:44] I did.

Speaker 2:
[07:45] I actually played a buttload of the original Xenonauts because it was a game that when I was working at the Escapist all many, many years ago, it was one of my streaming games between the release of original XCOM and XCOM 2. I did a bunch of Xenonauts because I did, you know, the name all the characters after people in the chat type campaign.

Speaker 1:
[08:11] Oh, yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2:
[08:12] And it was really entertaining and that I think pushed me through the original Xenonauts. It was so similar to XCOM that I'm not sure I would have gone out of my way to finish all campaigns of it otherwise.

Speaker 3:
[08:25] I just, before I forget, you reminded me of the renaming thing. Oh, I love this anecdote. The original Terror from the Deep, when I played it in like the late 2000s, found some old copy of it. It had the randomly generated sword names and so on. And one of them happened to come up with the name of my ex-girlfriend, who genuinely, genuinely accidentally got shot in the back of the head.

Speaker 2:
[08:49] Sure, of course.

Speaker 3:
[08:50] Of course it was an accident. It's just one of those things.

Speaker 2:
[08:54] A person.

Speaker 3:
[08:58] I was going to shoot her, I would shoot from the front, okay?

Speaker 1:
[09:01] Fair enough. That's the honorable way to do it.

Speaker 3:
[09:04] Plus I would want more than one gun because she was tough.

Speaker 1:
[09:08] So that's interesting, Sin, to hear you say that you had kind of a hump getting into it, because I also had that experience, but I thought it was just because I don't understand old X-Com.

Speaker 3:
[09:20] It's probably a bit of both, I think, not looking down on you or anything, but you probably had a bit of a more of a hump, because I'm kind of familiar with it broadly, so it might have been a bit easier for me. But then I also bring in perhaps more specific expectations, so perhaps because it wasn't meeting those and it wasn't doing exactly what I wanted, maybe.

Speaker 1:
[09:42] Yeah, I think it's a really interesting contrast with Menace, because I felt like Menace, within two missions, I was like hitting the ground running.

Speaker 2:
[09:53] Yeah, this is a great contrast. Go, go.

Speaker 1:
[09:55] Yeah, exactly. Like I did in like Menace, I loaded into the map and I got my guys and I just kind of do what comes naturally to me. And, you know, with a little, maybe a little bit of stumbling, I felt like I was kicking ass pretty quickly. Whereas in Xenonauts 2, just doing what came naturally to me at the beginning was a massive fucking disaster. I got I got so many of like I ended up restarting the like after the first mission, because I got like six out of my eight soldiers killed, which if I had known how the strategic layer works, I probably would have just kept rolling with that. It's like you're starting guys are not that important at all.

Speaker 2:
[10:43] Yeah, a lot of them are bad even, which is very.

Speaker 1:
[10:46] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[10:47] Because you don't get to choose who you recruit in your random clowns.

Speaker 1:
[10:52] Yeah. And there might be somebody who has like a 15 in in time units or something, which is just like you don't want. Even as a colonel, that person is never going to be very good.

Speaker 2:
[11:03] So that is not a usable character.

Speaker 1:
[11:05] Right.

Speaker 2:
[11:06] Yeah. Part of the game is that a couple of guys die on a mission. That just is part of it. Right. Like there's even a there's even a special medal that gives a promotion bonuses to the people who survive a mission, where I think more than half the soldiers die. Right. Like you're rewarded for finishing that mission in terms of the actual game.

Speaker 1:
[11:26] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[11:27] I'm going to sound like the old lady here, but it is actually more merciful than the original. Which isn't very surprising. Yeah, because when soldiers die or go down in XCOM, sorry, in Xenonauts, then there's a flat percentage chance, based on difficulty, and you can bump it up with medical stuff, that they will actually just, if you survive the mission, they will actually just be very badly wounded.

Speaker 2:
[11:50] Yeah, they'll live, right?

Speaker 3:
[11:52] There's also the recruitment. You actually, in Xenonauts, you get like a, perhaps we'll get to that later, but you get like a short list of people to recruit and you see all their stats. Totally blind from the originals. If you hired five guys, you might get three who are just like, I've got nine bravery. And those guys, they are going to be, you know, how many bullets they catch.

Speaker 1:
[12:16] Exactly.

Speaker 3:
[12:17] Yeah, basically.

Speaker 1:
[12:20] I eventually got to a point, especially with the bigger drop ship, where the rookie's job was to just like face check the map. Like whoever is the newbie on the mission, you're the guy that's going to run forward and see what's in that first building. It's just a tradition. And some of them survive and some of them don't. The ones that do sometimes go on to have a great career in the organization.

Speaker 3:
[12:42] That was cruel as still, because not only that, but with the original, I'm getting the old ladies, but just to kind of give an idea of how Xenonauts is based, obviously inspired by the originals, but it's not trying to just do them again. It's changing things. In the originals, you could get it partway through the game. You've got all your guys who are the sort of 5, 10, 15 percent who've survived several missions, and now they've got a bit of armor, and they're actually kind of somewhat reliable, and you do value them somewhat. They're not completely irreplaceable, but you look after them. Well, you might find out once you discover and research Xenonauts, you might find out, oh, they've got like terrible psionic defense, which means that they are just a liability now. They will, sooner or later, they will just get mind controlled and kill everyone. So they are now more useless, but limited in use. So it was pretty brutal. And Xenonauts does, well, it pushes all of, what's it called? All the mind control stuff onto the single bravery stat, which works a bit better. But it also, Xenonauts, I understand that you never actually can develop psionics because it's going for a slightly more grounded thing. And in the originals, like once you've got psionics developed, took a long time to get it. But once you've got it, you've, that's it. You cannot lose now, basically. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:05] You're fighting the aliens on, it's the moment in the original games where you're fighting the aliens on even ground finally, right?

Speaker 3:
[14:12] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:13] You have their bullshit to use against them.

Speaker 3:
[14:15] Xenonauts also has some interesting stuff as well. And it actually has a system that the originals didn't at all, which was suppression. And you talk about the guy whose job is to look step around the corners, but you've got options like shields, as in riot shields, which could be upgraded as well. And you've got flashbangs that prevent most enemies from doing opportunity fire or from moving very far. It halves their action points and makes them more susceptible to melee attacks. So it's like there are actually some really interesting additions that make the game a bit more involved in some ways.

Speaker 1:
[14:52] Yeah, flashbangs are really kind of amazing in Xenonauts 2.

Speaker 3:
[14:57] They would be completely different names. Oh yeah. I'd say they remain pretty useful quite throughout. But I like as well like that and a couple of other things. Like they tempt you into over relying on the one thing, so that inevitably that thing that resists them or counters them will completely screw you if you have too much of a crutch. Yeah, I think it's really well designed in that sense. Like it's, I'm sure people have found the ideal strategies, but it feels like a much more kind of, because of, partly because of the depth of the systems and the nuance of the action points and the action economy, but also because of all the kind of some of the upgrades are quite incremental and some are sort of side grades. I think it offers a bit more kind of flexibility, a bit more room for personalizing in the way you like to play. Then I think both the Firaxis and the original XCOM games.

Speaker 2:
[15:56] Yeah, I definitely agree, especially the early game is more interesting, definitely, than the original XCOM games. To such an extent that like, the ability to decide like, oh, I'm going to get, I'm going to make a lot of this sort of early armor or this early weapon upgrade that uses some of my more limited resources because I know I'm going to play like shit and my guys are going to get killed, or you're like, no, I'm awesome at this. I don't need to spend that, those resources, I can ace early missions without needing to upgrade my armor and weapons. I think giving you those choices really helps to make the game more interesting.

Speaker 3:
[16:40] Yeah, I think it also gives you quite a few things that are just directly upgradable, whereas in the older ones, and I think some of the more modern takes on XCOM generally, once you've got something that's more advanced than bullets, you just throw away 90% of your stuff, but this is a bit more, especially if you're on a lot of your tech, is just like, no, we've upgraded, we've incorporated alien technology and we've got shotgun, but more shotgunny. We've got the shields, but reinforced with alien armor and not just direct, this is a thousand times better than the last one, but there's a bit more room to upgrade step by step rather than, and it's like as well that it's not just like, oh, this is a level two rifle, it's a bit more, well, this one, like early on, for example, some of your big weapon upgrades, you get, I think it's accelerated rifles, which is your harder hitting ballistics, and you also get probably soon after that, lasers, which are the main difference being lasers strip armor, whereas accelerated ones, they just a bit of it soaks through the armor, which is like, that's quite a small distinction, but it's enough that, well, you can have your preference and both have some use, and they have strategic advantages in the different costs as well.

Speaker 1:
[18:03] Yeah, the other thing with lasers is the ammo capacity is way lower, but you can eventually research an upgrade where they will regenerate a certain amount of battery every turn. Like, especially like the laser sniper rifle, I think it has three shots before you have to reload.

Speaker 3:
[18:24] Yeah, it's an interesting contrast. Yeah, like, it's funny. The main thing with those as well, they're heavy. It is a bit strange to me. Like, there are several things like this where all those upgrades are fun, but like so many of the stats, you know, just contradicting what I said now. Like, there's no accuracy or speed difference between all the assault rifles. So it's like, lasers are no more accurate than just regular rifles and stuff like that. And there were just some things I think could be differentiated a little bit more.

Speaker 2:
[18:57] Technically, the lasers are technically a little more accurate than the rifles, I think.

Speaker 3:
[19:02] I think it's only in burst fire, which...

Speaker 2:
[19:05] It's like 7 or 8 percent. It's not an impressive amount.

Speaker 3:
[19:09] Maybe I'm missing something because when I was looking at the floaty stuff, I may have just been missing it because some of the UI is a little bit like there are, when you're on the engineering screen, when you manufacture weapons and such, it's like sometimes you don't get all the information you need.

Speaker 2:
[19:25] I think the accelerated stuff is identically accurate though.

Speaker 1:
[19:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:29] Accelerated weapons and the lasers, I think they're identically accurate.

Speaker 3:
[19:32] Yeah, that's a straight upgrade.

Speaker 2:
[19:33] The basic ballistics are less accurate. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[19:37] I do like as well, one of the things in the engineering screen, the workshops, is that some things are one and done. Instead of having to do the logistics of manufacturing loads of craft weapons and we're not using the old ones, we're using the new ones. Basically, you've got some projects that are just like, this one is, instead of making 10, 5 grand rifles, we are just flat fee 100 grand. All of our rifles have this from now on, which I think is a good compromise because one of the main areas that Xenonauts is better than the originals, I think is it does cut down on some of the not interesting logistics, like stuff like infinite ammo and grenades. Once you've paid for the upfront cost of the upgrade, you don't have to worry too much about that kind of thing.

Speaker 2:
[20:26] Not having to buy every bullet.

Speaker 1:
[20:27] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:28] Yeah, it's worth saying, like, if you have tried to go and play the original XCOM games because you've always wanted to, but they make you suffer, consider, consider Xenonauts. Yeah, like, yeah, there's a significant... It's still decidedly that same kind of game, but there is significantly less suffering once you figure out just whatever little weird UI quirks exist, because there are plenty of them. There are things that you just are are not what you would expect them to be, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[20:58] I think it's kind of a good happy medium, because there's weapons and armor are you make one of these and you have one. If you make one gun, you have one of that gun. If you make one suit of armor, you have one suit of armor. If that guy gets destroyed in a plasma explosion, that suit of armor is gone. But ammo, grenades, medkits, all the accessory type stuff, once you've researched it, you just have an infinite number, which I think is a good balance between you have to care about logistics somewhat, but you're not micromanaging everything. It does still have five tiers of weapons, which is different, which is more than I think at Firaxis XCOM just has ballistic laser and plasma. Xenonauts 2 also has accelerated ballistics, which is like the second tier, and then it has gauss weapons, which are between lasers and plasma. And lasers and gauss also have, like you said, that advanced version upgrade where you just research it once and it upgrades all weapons of that class.

Speaker 3:
[22:03] I do prefer that system, I have to say, because the Fire XSX was full of the original model, and that is like, yeah, ballistics to lasers to plasma, and it's like straight upgrades. And there's some nuance in that, like lasers have advantages, that plasma blah, blah, blah. But generally, by like midway through the game, you've got everything all plasma and everything's quite standardized. And that's true broadly for the sequels as well. I mean, Apocalypse is its own chaotic world. You start out with power swords and all sorts, it's ridiculous.

Speaker 1:
[22:35] But then OK, you could have said power swords, too. That would also be a way to get me to play.

Speaker 2:
[22:43] It takes place in like a judge dread ass Megacity one.

Speaker 1:
[22:46] OK.

Speaker 2:
[22:47] Environment.

Speaker 1:
[22:48] Yeah, the the scenario for Xenonauts 2 is kind of interesting because I understand from what I understand, the first one was like set during the height of the Cold War.

Speaker 2:
[22:56] Yeah, the first one is 1989, I think. Right. Like the Soviet Union is getting ready to fall. And then the aliens show up. Right.

Speaker 1:
[23:07] Yeah. And this is like, I think it's 2009, but it's in a world where the Cold War never ended.

Speaker 2:
[23:13] Right. It's just getting worse and worse and worse.

Speaker 1:
[23:15] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[23:15] It's really fun, but I don't think they do much with that.

Speaker 2:
[23:18] No, no, they certainly do almost nothing with the story in this.

Speaker 3:
[23:23] I'm going to pick with it. Sorry, go on, join you with the thing.

Speaker 2:
[23:27] I just think they they do very little with the story. It's broadly disappointing. Yeah, I don't think a lot of people are here for the story as the first course, but it's just there could be a lot more interesting emergent gameplay in this. And it's just not there. And that makes me kind of sad.

Speaker 1:
[23:44] I mean, there's one little twist, which is like when you find out where the aliens actually came from, where it's like, aha, but you weren't expecting that. But that's like the one story moment that I think was actually interesting.

Speaker 3:
[23:59] It's a shame because it does have some really fun ideas. And Jon's right, the story is not why you're there, Bob, but going back to the UFO and also after the shock series, the plots were, they were part of what kept you going because you were curious, you were intrigued. And the idea of the enemy being unknown and mysterious, it's like, yeah, that's part of the interesting part. But you wanted to know what was going to happen. And Xenonauts does have some actually fun ideas. Like I like, I guess spoilers for the end of the prologue, if you're that bothered. I like that when you get, there's an initial big countdown where people say, oh, something's going to happen, we don't know what, but it's going to be... Well, the aliens just announced themselves to Earth. That's like when the game properly starts. That's fun, that's really cool. I like that. But then it's like, doesn't matter really? Like you don't have to worry.

Speaker 1:
[24:50] And stuff like- I did kind of miss the X-Files sort of like secret government agency part of like early for Axis X-Com. Like I do like that part where you're working in the shadows and humanity doesn't know what's happened.

Speaker 3:
[25:04] 100% because the prologue is so strange because I feel like they had this really fun idea for this organization of like secret human collaborators. And it's like, you, I've got a bit of a bone prick with it, but the one issue that I think is definitely a bigger issue is that this prologue before the aliens say hello is like a month or two in game. And it's, and it's like, instead of what you're doing is you're told, oh, there's some weird stuff going on with aliens, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of a, like a low temperature start up to the game, where you've got a doomsday clock where it's going upwards. The more you scroll up and down, the more, the better you do.

Speaker 2:
[25:41] And yeah, the aliens are trying to kick off the nuclear war, right?

Speaker 3:
[25:46] Which is great, fantastic. And initially your main kind of concern is these guys, the cleaners, who are humans. And that's fun, but they don't do anything with that. That's such a fun thing that you could be doing. That could extend for much more of the game. And it's actually something that's kind of its own game. There are XCOM, as in UFO mods, there's one called the XCOM files, which is like, it is literally bridging the gap from before the original game, where you start out with two agents in a car, investigating chupacabras and possibly aliens and stuff. I've not played it very much, but it's very, very, very absurd. It's a little bit like X pirates.

Speaker 2:
[26:24] But if you think the long war is long, the XCOM files is like, you're starting as like Boulder and Scully, you've got two guys and a car. There's no helicopter, man.

Speaker 1:
[26:36] Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2:
[26:37] I love that.

Speaker 3:
[26:39] And it's like, Xenonauts has taken a little bit, although I'm saying they're copying that, but it's like they've got a similar idea, but they don't do much with it. And the bone I have to pick with it is that I skipped the tutorial and then it did that thing where it says, are you sure? And I said, fine, I'm going to review this. I'll see the tutorial and the tutorial starts with press W, press zoom in to continue, zoom up. So no, I'm skipping that. I'm skipping that, that can go to hell. So I start the game and I'm not told what's going on. I've got a base and I'm researching the cleaners. Okay, whatever. What I kind of inferred was that in the tutorial, your base gets attacked by the cleaners. And what it actually says in the kind of Xenopedia entry for the cleaners is this organization is seen throughout the world, wherever their alien incidents are, you know, abductions or whatever, the modern sky stuff, these guys show up and they clean up. Great. That's cool. And then it says something like, oh, people who investigate them tend to disappear. So we didn't look into them. And I'm like, what?

Speaker 1:
[27:40] What do you mean?

Speaker 3:
[27:43] We exist to investigate the aliens, but we didn't because we're scared. We're scared of the bad men. Well, why is the point? Of course you got attacked, you deserve to.

Speaker 1:
[27:52] Well, after chapter one, that doomsday tracker goes away and it just turns into the regular terror tracker from every other XCOM game. And I think it would have been really interesting if that had stayed around. Like the aliens are still trying to kick off a nuclear war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact for the rest of the game.

Speaker 2:
[28:12] Or even, I love the, I was sad when that went away too, because I loved the idea that my assumption was that it was going to transform into stop humanity from trying to use nuclear weapons to stop this from happening, right? To stop the alien invasion, because you'll still ruin our planet, you clowns.

Speaker 3:
[28:30] Yeah, you could do the Jeff Goldblum and Independence Day thing, you know? But yeah, I don't know if they, I've not seen confirmation in the second game yet, but in the first one, when you screwed up a mission or you quit a mission, like especially terror sites, yeah, the local governments would just nuke it, flat out nuke the area, which is always a bit of frustration when you died and there was like one alien left, so they nuke the area, but like, but that could be fun because then you get-

Speaker 1:
[28:56] To get rid of one sectoid.

Speaker 3:
[28:58] Yeah, which is bad, but like I, to be fair, if the first sectoid gets new, they probably wouldn't come back. But the thing is, yeah, that could have been really fun because it's like, not only do you have, oh, I've got 30 panic in the region, but it's like there could be some kind of, oh, there's some political response from the other side or, yeah. And I don't know. There's also a system wherein there are six regions, and each region has four, what's the best way to call them?

Speaker 1:
[29:30] Supporters is what they're called.

Speaker 3:
[29:31] Yeah. You've got like four slots per region where, by default, they didn't do anything. But if you pay operation points, which we'll get onto, like a thing that counts up over time, you can influence it a little bit. If you pay operation points that vary depending on the region and the individual slot for that region, you get various benefits. You become a supporter. Typically, you get like a reduction, monthly reduction in panic for that region. And something like plus 5% research speed or you get more operations points over time, that kind of thing. But if the aliens or somebody corrupts them, they become infiltrated and they count against you. And that's another system that just like, it's okay. And it has its appeal and it has its like, it does add a little bit of room again for how are you going to integrate that into your strategy? Because you can play it several different ways. Because not only do you get a bonus for each supporter, but if you get fill all four slots in a region, you get a bonus that varies with that region. So that can affect where you prioritize, where you build and so on. That's fun. But that seems to be the extent of it. It doesn't tie in to anything you're doing. You don't get... And there's even tech saying sometimes a supporter or a potential supporter is more expensive to get because they're well guarded. But you don't get to like...

Speaker 2:
[31:04] It changes every month. It's just a modifier.

Speaker 3:
[31:05] It doesn't mean anything. Yeah, but you don't get like, oh, okay, he's well guarded, so we have to bust in and break him out. You don't get anything like that. Maybe they tried that and it didn't work, or it became too much to manage. But it just feels a bit like, yeah, it's one of those things like Jon mentioned. It could have been, it could have been a, it could have run most of the game.

Speaker 1:
[31:25] Well, the way it works is at the start of every month, every supporter, there's four per region, six regions, will either have, they'll have no modifier on them, they'll have a red modifier on them, which means it costs more to recruit them, or they'll have a green modifier on them, which means it costs less to recruit them. I actually liked the system because it means every time you play, you're not necessarily going to have a set build order.

Speaker 3:
[31:50] Oh yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[31:52] If it was just totally flat cost all the time, you would just go for the ones that give you more operation points first, and then that would be every single game. That's just the optimal way to play.

Speaker 3:
[32:03] It leaves room for opportunism.

Speaker 1:
[32:06] Yeah, opportunism, but also the red modifiers can be like, do I really need this panic reduction right now, or can I wait till next month to recruit him for our cause?

Speaker 3:
[32:16] Or you can just attempt to counter it by, well, I can kick him out, or I can recruit the other guy to not fully counter him, but partly counter him, and I'll get a benefit. Yeah, and that ties in as well to where situationized him, where it's like, I really need to get North America under control, a box quote. But also, for the same, more or less the same cost, I could get the third guy in the Southeast Asia, and that gets me closer to the bonus there. And so you do get that kind of, there's actual decision making basically.

Speaker 2:
[32:58] Yeah, and those bonuses are good. They're enough to get you to not do the optimal thing, right? Like the regional bonuses are things like half the cost for all of your engineers, a quarter off of all your base upkeep, five hires points in every stat on everyone you recruit, right? Like they're meaningful.

Speaker 3:
[33:15] The one I started with in Africa was made me feel like I have to do the sensible thing. And Africa's bonus is, I believe it's plus 30% sale cost for everything you sell. And that meant for me, I am filling Africa up before I do anything. A, my base is there, but B, yeah, that's great. Cause I'll just hang on to everything. I will spend the first couple of months scraping, so I can get maximum money for those things. Cause a fun thing it does actually is when you sell gear, the prices go down over time. They do stop, there's a flaw to it, but it does mean that I was kind of gaming that. So that's actually not just me being weird. It's like there was actually an efficiency there.

Speaker 2:
[33:57] That's interesting because I felt the same way about the North America bonus, where it was like, all of your troops are going to start with higher stats.

Speaker 3:
[34:04] That's big, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[34:05] And the higher stats a troop starts with, the higher cap of stats they can get.

Speaker 1:
[34:10] This is really interesting because for me, it was Europe. I wanted the plus experience gain right away.

Speaker 3:
[34:16] This is really good, do you see? This is the thing, both of those could also, even in just in raw numbers, they could end up actually just ultimately costing less in the long run anyway. So it's like it's, and I don't think it should come down to numbers exactly, because that makes it more interesting. I can definitely see, it's one of those things where that's something where like how it kind of gets you into the fantasy of being a person running things, because you're making those kind of operational decisions that are like, you can imagine that conversation you have with yourself being with some of your advisors kind of thing, which is fun.

Speaker 1:
[34:51] I think it was just enough, like the strategic layer stuff, I think it was just enough to give me some interesting decisions to think about, but not enough to be overwhelming, like with the supporters specifically, I felt like...

Speaker 3:
[35:03] True, that's true.

Speaker 2:
[35:05] It also is definitely more interesting than the like blind click around to manage panic of many of the other XCOM games, right? Where there's nothing's really happening on the world map other than you waiting for the time to click forward. So your research project is finished, right?

Speaker 3:
[35:23] Well, are you all doing the clever thing of early on when you haven't got enough bases to cover up? It's quiet. Let's send a plane out to scout around and just fly around, see if we get lucky. We've catch a UFO being naughty or...

Speaker 2:
[35:36] Well, yeah, because you get these little events that'll pop up around the world. It'll be like, oh, a civilian airliner has disappeared over the ocean.

Speaker 1:
[35:44] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[35:45] And it'll show you where that was. And you're like, well, maybe I should fly a jet over there and see if we can find a UFO, even though it's at a radar range.

Speaker 3:
[35:51] You can try to anticipate what path they're going in, which is fun as well.

Speaker 1:
[35:56] Where did everybody put their starting base? Africa. Like, where in Africa?

Speaker 3:
[36:02] Sub-Saharan, I forget exactly where, but roughly around, not on Madagascar, but the sort of, I'd say, basically around...

Speaker 1:
[36:11] Like Mozambique area?

Speaker 3:
[36:13] Yeah, uh, South Africa. I can't remember exactly where I put it.

Speaker 2:
[36:17] Interesting.

Speaker 3:
[36:19] It's cheaper.

Speaker 2:
[36:19] I put mine in the very boot of Italy. The heel. The very heel of the boot, right? Because I was like, OK.

Speaker 3:
[36:25] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[36:26] Because for me, at least, my brain is like, no, you can't put it in, say, like Africa or the Middle East, because you can't justify not covering that much of the world's population. With your with your radar.

Speaker 3:
[36:39] The opposite of that is you can go to the beach. You know about a bad day, you can go to the beach.

Speaker 2:
[36:42] Yeah. And it's just like, well, here's the beautiful Italian coast. Right. Unfortunately, my desire that the aliens would actually focus on doing things and abducting people where there are actually people is not true and is one of the silliest and funniest things in this entire game.

Speaker 3:
[36:57] Well, you can make a case that, yeah, but you would go where it's quiet as well. Right.

Speaker 2:
[37:01] Is there really anyone in Kamchatka worth abducting?

Speaker 3:
[37:05] Hey, he was a hero.

Speaker 2:
[37:06] Probably not.

Speaker 1:
[37:07] Such disrespect to Kamchatka.

Speaker 2:
[37:10] I had like a series of like rescue VIP epic battle missions that were randomly generated on like literally the north coast of Siberia. There is actually nothing there.

Speaker 3:
[37:23] Yeah, but it's the Cold War. Of course, that's where the VIPs will be in Siberia.

Speaker 2:
[37:28] Yeah, it was believable when they were like, we need you to go rescue this crank ass journalist because it turns out all of his alien conspiracy theories were right. That mission was very funny when it was in the middle of nowhere Siberia to me.

Speaker 1:
[37:39] So the first campaign I played, which I actually lost, and I'll get into why later. But part of the reason was I didn't know how this game worked. So my first base on my first campaign was in Keflavik, Iceland.

Speaker 3:
[37:55] Why?

Speaker 1:
[37:57] Because I didn't know how much base location would matter. The one I actually won, and I won almost entirely on one base, I called the base Troy, and it is basically exactly where we think Troy was.

Speaker 2:
[38:13] That's a great spot.

Speaker 1:
[38:14] That's a really, really optimized spot.

Speaker 3:
[38:15] Oh, that's perfect if you get infiltrated as well. You were asking for it, come on!

Speaker 1:
[38:21] And then, of course, my second base was in Colorado Springs because that's my hometown.

Speaker 3:
[38:26] The aliens have left us a giant metal bee. Let's bring it into the base.

Speaker 1:
[38:32] Also, where Stargate Command is in Stargate SG-1. So, I had to do it.

Speaker 2:
[38:37] You know how to do it to them.

Speaker 1:
[38:39] Exactly.

Speaker 3:
[38:40] One thing that's interesting is that your second base, you pay for it, or your other base, you pay with operation points, which is that thing that ticks up every day. There's limited things you can do to increase that, and it has to go to other things. But some of the uses of that are quite good. You can get money, you can get some alien resources. That's a nice option if you need it. But I think what I had trouble with that, I had trouble there is that in the originals, it was based on money, quite a lot of money. It felt like, I don't know, like starting, it made stuff like, if you want to start in Iceland, that feels not viable because it would just be too long before you get, you can spare enough operations points. It's just like you might do a little base, you're starting base somewhere obscure and then do a second base in Spain or something, or somewhere in the middle of China and it's.

Speaker 1:
[39:36] My Asia base was Kagoshima, so it was like the very southern tip of Kyushu. And that's also very good.

Speaker 3:
[39:44] Which region did you just think, nah, let them have it, screw it.

Speaker 1:
[39:48] I didn't really, I didn't have anything in the southern hemisphere, really. I was very dismissive of the global south. I mean, statistically most of the world's population lives in the northern hemisphere. I'm not just being colonialist.

Speaker 2:
[40:05] I I repeated my Xenonauts 1 strategy, which worked just as well this time, which is as soon as you can afford it, when you've got the money train rolling, you build a base covering all of Africa and all of Latin America. And those bases are just fighter jet hell and T aircraft defense hell. And they don't have to put troops, they just murder alien spaceships.

Speaker 1:
[40:27] No, my base in Turkey had all of my engineering, all of my science and all of my soldiers and my North America base. And my Japan base were just for launching fighters. That's all they did.

Speaker 3:
[40:38] Specializing is interesting.

Speaker 1:
[40:40] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:41] So what you can do, there's a little, you know, there's a little base minigame of placing down facilities and they get adjacency bonuses.

Speaker 3:
[40:47] Yeah, I think that they did fun things with that, like because not only is it adjacency, but it's like, yeah, it means it works. It counts irregular shapes. So you don't just have to do a square of four. You can just trail like power generates through the whole base if you want to, like little tetris blocks and stuff, which is fun. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:05] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[41:06] It's quite generous for some things as well. Like if you want to just demolish a thingy, a base, a room, you get partial refund and stuff like fighter jets are similar. You just sell them. Well, so you get a partial refund and they can't actually be destroyed.

Speaker 1:
[41:21] And when I like, I really liked that the anti air batteries get adjacency bonuses because the one type of mission in this game, I hate with every fiber of my being is base defense missions. They are a micro management nightmare. But if you have four adjacent, like in a square anti air batteries and they're upgraded with the latest technology, your base is never going to get attacked. You're going to shoot down anything that comes near that before they can land.

Speaker 3:
[41:50] Oh, Len, I want to see you live, like doing a UFO game live, where 26 guys on the most advanced ship or your base.

Speaker 1:
[41:58] That's the thing.

Speaker 3:
[41:59] Everyone is fighting. Everyone is fighting. I love the base defenses. You've got 45 guys, bitch. And they can't.

Speaker 2:
[42:06] I love the base defenses for exactly that reason, because I am exactly the kind of pervert who's like, yeah, I'm going to micromanage all 40 of the XCOM personnel in Bauer right now. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[42:18] I forgot I rebuilt 25 robots. God damn it.

Speaker 2:
[42:22] Yes, and you build a fuck ton of the defense drones, too.

Speaker 1:
[42:24] That's what I did. That's all I had. All of like any time I did a base defense, it was just like 20 automated sentry guys.

Speaker 3:
[42:31] Oh, this sounds fantastic.

Speaker 1:
[42:33] They get they are they get higher priority for like the base defense roster than the soldiers do. So if you build like 20 of them at every base like I did, it's all sentry guns. That's all.

Speaker 3:
[42:46] Hitting the aliens, killing the 17th one, going, where the fuck are the humans?

Speaker 1:
[42:51] Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2:
[42:52] The one guy watching the ammo counter tick down in the.

Speaker 3:
[42:56] There's one guy just like playing, playing.

Speaker 2:
[42:59] Speed up. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[43:01] Squad size is an interesting metric, because, you know, like Firaxis, XCOM, it's like.

Speaker 3:
[43:05] Hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it. I'm sorry. Yeah, one of the things I hated about that.

Speaker 1:
[43:10] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[43:10] Squad sizes.

Speaker 2:
[43:12] Yeah, me too, because they're like, you look at that thing and there's at least room for two more people.

Speaker 1:
[43:16] Yeah. So I get into Xenonauts 2 and like you start with eight on like the starting. It's not called Sky Ranger for the Sky Hall.

Speaker 3:
[43:25] I think of it as a Sky Ranger.

Speaker 1:
[43:26] Like, yeah, I still call it the Sky Ranger.

Speaker 3:
[43:29] It's one of those. It's it's it works. It's it's a you say Sky Ranger. People will probably know it. Well, you know, it's a thing that is quite that has outgrown its games. I don't like that.

Speaker 1:
[43:40] I was like immediately. I like this better. I like eight is great. You get an upgrade to 10. I was chilling with 10. The very last upgrade you get gets to 12. And that's where I was like, I got this is too many guys. I think 10 was my sweet spot. Like on the very last mission, you can bring 16, which I didn't mind as much because it's like, well, this is the final battle. We're going to throw everything at it. But I do think like for just like your standard UFO mission, I felt like 10 was a really good squad size. 12 was starting to get a little bit too much micromanagement.

Speaker 3:
[44:16] I delayed doing the upgrade to 10, the second upgrade, SkyRanger upgrade. I delayed upgrading to SkyRanger. I did find that once, the reason I went to it wasn't like, oh, I need more guys because everyone's dying. It's more like, I just need more firepower. You get the point where I need to be able to have three guys shooting at this guy and not two. Also, I found as well that something of an annoyance is that sometimes, and especially in like, terror sites in particular, the terror missions where the alien shawans split everyone. Sometimes I was reloading saves, not because I have, not because I've been a sore loser a little bit, but it's more because I've lost two guys, two more guys than I want now, and that just means this is going to take so long to do. Yeah. It's going to become a slog. Sinonauts in most cases does have ways to get around that. So if you're doing landed UFO or crash UFO missions, instead of clearing them up, you can just occupy the UFO over three turns. Although I find whenever I do that, whenever I get in the UFO first, especially if there's only one guy left. I had one guy. You've all had that one mission where there's one guy just becomes a god, where he's going to do it and he's fought through the UFO. He's the only guy left. There are more of them out there. I could wait for three turns to win this, but no. I'm going to loot a body and I'm going back out as well.

Speaker 1:
[45:45] Yeah. But I'm sorry. Yeah, it's really interesting because the RNG is so unforgiving, but it also produces aberrant results in both directions. So like I said, I usually have the rookie that is like the door checker. And on some of the later UFO missions, you have to use a teleporter to get to the upper levels of the UFO. So I had a mission where like four of my best soldiers had already died. We're in the UFO. People are like bleeding because I had a glitch where I didn't realize med kits were a thing till half through the game. They didn't have an icon in their life.

Speaker 3:
[46:24] I think that's been fixed. A lot of them have health insurance.

Speaker 1:
[46:27] Yeah, exactly. It was very American, honestly.

Speaker 3:
[46:30] We get good dental, but we don't. That's all we get.

Speaker 1:
[46:32] Our base was in Turkey, but we were still on the American, you know, HSA system. So, but what was I going to say? Yeah, so he pops up to the basically command bridge of the UFO, and there's like four aliens there. Dodge is the first plasma burst. Dodge is the second plasma burst. Dodge is the third plasma burst. He got like clipped by the fourth one, but survived through a flashbang, teleports back down. That guy was with me and survived to the end of the very last mission. Even though he was sent up there as a sacrifice to be like, just see what's going on and you'll probably die, but it's whatever.

Speaker 3:
[47:14] They're always the guys though. I've got like a soldier loadout. If I've got a guy with low bravery, which to me is most of them, because I just take whoever. Obviously I take the good ones first, but you know, these die. And I'm not paying to recruit, to get a new short list thing. But yeah, I give them a loadout called Cowards Must Die and they get a pistol and a big glove. And it's like, it doesn't matter if that is like, if he should really have a short gun, because you know, it's not a strategic thing. It's a culture of the organization thing, you know. It's got to do with his time.

Speaker 1:
[47:52] I never recruited anybody who had below 45 in any stat. I would just reroll a new batch of recruits.

Speaker 3:
[47:59] It's interesting that there is a thing, there's a thing you can manufacture that gives them a bravery bump, which is quite fun.

Speaker 1:
[48:09] Yeah, it's the one that it's like a psychic shield. So it also protects them from mind control. Bravery is also tenfold.

Speaker 3:
[48:16] If you are, you know, the base is in the Soviet Union. It's like, we don't have that, but we've got a little vodka, you know.

Speaker 1:
[48:27] Yeah, it's interesting, like when you talk about like the UFO missions, where you can occupy the UFO, I was the person who every single time, I tooled around the entire outside of the map and like cleared every structure.

Speaker 3:
[48:40] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[48:41] And then would line up everybody with reaction shots before we opened the door to the UFO. Like, I'm a very, very careful.

Speaker 3:
[48:49] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:50] It's way too much fun not to.

Speaker 3:
[48:51] Yeah, I found as well the aliens are not very good at defending. Thankfully, not very good at defending, but using their own cover and stuff. But like, I found that early on, like there's, I found there's like a big, in a lot of UFOs, there's a big like hovering brain monster thing, that's like the controller. And that's a tough bug, especially on. But I found that early on, I didn't, I wasn't able to autopsy it because I kept capturing them. Like it was easier to capture everyone because if I'm going in there, I'm flash banging everyone and I'm clubbing them. Because I found when I played in, played during early access in about mid 2023, I found that my go-to strategy was shotguns and billy club.

Speaker 2:
[49:37] Yeah, you have to be the cops.

Speaker 3:
[49:39] I loved as well, it gave me this fun mental image of aliens hunkering down in their UFO waiting and the door finally opens. And they think they're going to get a show off. But no, they're going to get five flash bangs. And they're going to get blood jams unconscious. And if anyone survives, they get smoke grenades because that way they can't clearly see who's shooting. It's just like, I'm just passing this entire place. Nobody's dying in there. Everyone is coming home, including you.

Speaker 2:
[50:08] I think it's very funny to just open the door of a UFO and throw in like eight smoke grenades and then close the door.

Speaker 1:
[50:15] Oh, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3:
[50:16] It's like, oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[50:19] Yeah, it's it's you do have to learn the fan formation because if somebody takes a reaction shot and there is an ally in the way, that ally is almost always going to die.

Speaker 3:
[50:31] That must be crazy. When it's standing one, you can shoot over a crouching guy if he's directly next to you. That's cool. But if you're standing, if you're both crouching and you shoot, you will shoot your friend in the back of the head. And it's like, oh, there is a setting.

Speaker 2:
[50:46] If that frustrates you, you can. It doesn't actually change the game rules. It just makes it so your guys won't take reaction shots when there's a chance of murdering their friends.

Speaker 1:
[50:55] I didn't even realize you could do like a Napoleonic one line of people crouching with people.

Speaker 2:
[51:01] That's the wonder and glory of the Ballistic Shield, right?

Speaker 3:
[51:03] Yes, yeah, 100%.

Speaker 2:
[51:05] Guy in front with the Ballistic Shield, person behind with the weapon.

Speaker 3:
[51:08] That's one of the ways that even a coward can be useful. It's like, the shield, if they're carrying it is very heavy and he may not be able to carry anything else, but that's fine. It's fine, comrade, just stay there. It's going to be fine. It's all going to be fine. Just stay there. Do not move, because if you move, I will shoot you.

Speaker 1:
[51:27] Oh, man.

Speaker 3:
[51:28] But I do find it very funny, and this is definitely from the old UFO. When your soldiers miss, the range of misses is so funny. It's like, sometimes it's very irritating. Every now and then I do reload, because it's fine, fairly fine happens, misses happen, but it's like, I don't mind, 98% chance they're hit, you can still miss, that happens. But if you miss, and you're off by 30 degrees, and you shoot someone in the head, it's like, okay, that guy was no way in your line of fire.

Speaker 1:
[51:59] That's what it's like. We're going to have a court martial about this, and maybe you'll be acquitted.

Speaker 3:
[52:07] I find it especially funny when it's a machine gun, and you've got ten burst shots, and the fourth one goes 40 degrees off to the left somehow. I was like, how did you even do that?

Speaker 1:
[52:18] We're only getting three of them go 40 degrees to the left.

Speaker 2:
[52:22] That's one of my beefs with the adoption of this 3D environment and ballistic model in Xenonauts 2. I mean, I like it, ultimately. I think the change was good, but a lot of the time spent developing this game was, let's change all the game mechanics from a flat 2D plane into a rotatable, isometric 3D world.

Speaker 1:
[52:46] Oh, I changed the- by the way, I don't know if like old school Xenonauts, Grognards are going to consider this heresy, but I changed the camera settings immediately to free rotate the camera and to have the mouse wheel zoom in and out and shift to change levels.

Speaker 3:
[53:01] I tried to do free rotation, but I found the angles were a bit- I mean, fair play to them, they even say it's not- it's meant to be isometric, so it does look a bit weird off isometric. I just found it a bit too distracting that it felt so-

Speaker 1:
[53:14] See, I couldn't play it with the fixed camera angles.

Speaker 2:
[53:17] That was really interesting.

Speaker 1:
[53:18] It was driving me insane and especially not being able to scroll in and out with the-

Speaker 3:
[53:22] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[53:23] By default, you have to hold shift to scroll in and out with the mouse wheel in the default behavior when you're not holding shift.

Speaker 2:
[53:29] Yeah, I'm going to be honest. I didn't even know you could move the camera position like that.

Speaker 3:
[53:34] Oh, gosh.

Speaker 1:
[53:35] Yeah, no, I thought it was.

Speaker 2:
[53:36] I thought it was fixed, rotate, move up and down levels. I didn't know you could like-

Speaker 3:
[53:39] I'm hoping Len, you probably didn't get as badly then, was that? Some very often, actually. It's really hard to see guys behind obstacles. And not just that. Sometimes, I've missed entire paths because I just couldn't tell from the angle.

Speaker 1:
[53:52] No. Yeah, no. With free camera, I didn't have that issue at all.

Speaker 3:
[53:56] It's funny when you're on a separate-

Speaker 2:
[53:58] It's really frustrating.

Speaker 3:
[53:59] Yeah. There are times when it's like, I just genuinely did not know that one of my- could not see that. Well, okay, that can be fixed in patches and stuff, but it was sometimes quite frustrating. And also, there's some minor issues with, sometimes you've got one target and you've got a target behind them, and you accidentally click on the wrong one because the kind of, I don't know what to call it, dead zone, I guess, is slightly-

Speaker 2:
[54:23] Yeah, the camera, the priority of what you're trying to click on. Like I've had that where I'm trying to click something and I'll open a door, things like that can happen.

Speaker 1:
[54:32] Yeah. Or like the other thing that I found kind of annoying is that, like, there's the hover, there's the unmanned vehicles you can bring that are basically tank drones or whatever. Yeah. And if you don't tell them not to, they will blow through any cover between where they are and where you told them to go.

Speaker 2:
[54:51] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[54:52] And there's later, there's another unit.

Speaker 2:
[54:54] Their whole job.

Speaker 1:
[54:55] There's another unit that does this later on that I won't spoil. That's even more annoying. We're like, you have to micro them click by click around the cover. If you still want to be able to use that cover for your squishy guy, it's like it's it's very.

Speaker 3:
[55:09] It is. It is.

Speaker 2:
[55:11] You just have to remember who is the Kool-Aid man and who's not.

Speaker 1:
[55:16] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[55:17] So who's going to bust through the wall and scream? I actually find it. That's that is a thing that I was disappointed about because Xenonauts 1. It wasn't like drones. The vehicles you brought with you, they were like fucking tanks.

Speaker 1:
[55:33] Did they actually have like squad mates in them or?

Speaker 2:
[55:37] They did not.

Speaker 3:
[55:37] They took the place. Was it? They took more?

Speaker 2:
[55:39] They took the place of two soldiers in a in a drop. And I loved them and I thought they were really funny. But they took that away from me.

Speaker 3:
[55:50] And yeah, they had to let the APC guys, didn't they?

Speaker 2:
[55:53] Yeah, I guess I can forgive them, but also I can't. Well, that's why you're a drone guy, but one of my hovering main battle tank back was blowing open the door of a in a UFO with like your hover tank was cool as shit.

Speaker 3:
[56:07] It was fun.

Speaker 2:
[56:07] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[56:09] No, I love I loved using the the. Oh, and the vehicles because they are sevens.

Speaker 2:
[56:15] That's what I want back from Xenonauts 1. They're everyone had it. You could bring RPGs, right? Like single shot fucking RPGs. And you have a guy who just like runs out, shoots his RPG, throws down the launcher and continues about his day. Much less burden. That was so fun. Why don't they have they were placed in a breaching charge, which is now they were placed with the grenade launcher, which I had until quite far in.

Speaker 3:
[56:40] I wasn't using. And it's it's weird because it was actually going to say this. It's kind of get it from a design perspective, but it is weird that you've got grenades that hurt, but they do nothing against all my grenades or something. But then you've got like essentially C4, which annihilates armor and cover, but it doesn't kill really. Like it's just it's quite weird that it's wrong. And also, this is something I had a bit of an issue with. And again, I get it from a design perspective, but I've rarely used grenades because like it, they're very, when you throw a grenade at, even early on an alien, it slightly hurts them, unless it kills them, in which case, it annihilates their atoms, which is just like...

Speaker 2:
[57:26] Yeah, and you lose everything.

Speaker 3:
[57:27] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[57:28] It's such a you.

Speaker 3:
[57:29] I wasn't using grenades because they were both, they were either not powerful enough or they were way too powerful. And the grenade launcher was more useful because it's longer range, but I very rarely used it until I needed to strip armor. And it's not even, or strip cover as well, I guess. And I do miss the rocket launchers. I do wish as well the aircraft, the Sky Rangers. I wish you could carry a bit of extra gear on them.

Speaker 1:
[57:51] Yes, I do too.

Speaker 3:
[57:52] I wish you would not have an emergency rocket launcher, a handful of flashbangs, smoke. Spare ammo, like just in a box somewhere.

Speaker 1:
[58:02] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[58:02] It's very true.

Speaker 2:
[58:04] The grenade launcher, especially, I wish you could do that with because like on the missions where it is useful, it's almost mandatory. You're so happy you brought it. That is 10% of missions. Every other mission you bring it, you'll be like, why did this useless asshole even come with us?

Speaker 3:
[58:21] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[58:21] And that's, I guess, ultimately the point of squad size upgrades, right? So that you can bring a guy whose whole job is actually to just sit on the chopper with his pistol until someone needs him. And then he goes sprinting across the map and fires his grenade launcher.

Speaker 1:
[58:34] OK, he's the guy that's I actually I didn't realize until partway through the campaign that you didn't need a guy to carry the captured aliens back to the Sky Ranger.

Speaker 2:
[58:44] Oh, my God, what if you're going to evacuate the mission?

Speaker 3:
[58:47] I love kidnapping a guy. It's so funny.

Speaker 2:
[58:50] So like, yeah, the you can pick them up in your inventory, right? And then go back to the Sky Ranger. If you're going to leave the mission before it's completed, right? If you're going to retrieve it, you can do that to retrieve the bodies of your own people who might still be alive, as well as to get kidnapped aliens or whatever back with you.

Speaker 3:
[59:11] Or if you just like, you bug it, you go into a terror site and you think, okay, I've killed a guy, I want his gun. I'm, we're bugging out. This is getting a little... It does bring me to, it does bother me that terror mission. If you are not a hundred percent definitely going to win that terror mission, you are better off ignoring it. Because if you go and you don't...

Speaker 1:
[59:28] No, I ignored most of the terror missions and I just spent operation points to lower panic.

Speaker 3:
[59:33] Yeah, I did sort of go towards that because the first few I was doing, but then it's like, if I kill most of the aliens and I either fail or I abort, you get nothing. And you get worse than nothing because you lose everything that you... I feel like, okay, I get why you fail, the panic levels still go up, but I feel like this should be, as in the first game, like a points thing where you gave it a go, you get credit for trying. Because there is a difference between aliens just effortlessly destroyed everything. And aliens won that battle, but it cost them, like it's...

Speaker 1:
[60:06] Right.

Speaker 2:
[60:07] I totally agree.

Speaker 3:
[60:08] Because it just means that it's spread out. I'm partway through a terror site and it's like, it's not even worth quitting the mission because I've lost everything anyway. So I might as well either just pretend this never happened or let's just all in, you know, let's custer this, let's all die.

Speaker 1:
[60:26] I was going to say that the true role for the regular frag grenades, which I discovered, is that there's the big hovering death eggs. That like they turn... Yeah, they're impervious in a 180 degree frontal arc to all damage, but they always turn to face whatever the last sound they heard was. I figured out, like the second or third time I was fighting those guys, you can throw a frag grenade behind them, and it damages them, and they turn around, and then you just open fire with a machine gun into their back, and you can solo those guys with like one heavy. It's amazing. It's awesome.

Speaker 3:
[61:05] Those guys are so loud. Those guys are... What I like is that they're like... They kind of read... What's the word? Remixed of the classic cyberdisc, which was like horribly armored, big power plaz... Like one sniper cannon thing. Awful. Massive, terrifying, ridiculous explosion on death. What I do like actually is when stuff explodes, or especially these guys, these robots, when you kill the cyberdisc, they explode and they do a little bit of damage, but the animation, they just pop. Things don't explode in this game, they just burst.

Speaker 1:
[61:41] Also, I think their weapon is interesting because it fires, it's like four or five blasts of plasma, and wherever they land, anything in a nine tile radius gets completely annihilated, like do not pass go. You're not, there's not going to be enough left of you to carry to the infirmary, but it's very inaccurate. So every time they fire it, it's terrifying, and you might lose three squad mates on one turn, but it's so inaccurate that you're just clenching the whole time.

Speaker 3:
[62:13] I found as well with that, it's fun because they go before it can happen. It makes sense because they destroy cover and then the aliens kill you, which I hate, but it's clever. I do find that it's like the grenades thing again, they would destroy everything around you, but if it only hits you once, you put a pretty good chance of surviving, which makes me laugh because you've got this wily coyote guy standing there covered in soot. What I found of that is I realized, well, early on, sometimes my strategy with them was like, well, I'm going to stand in the open then, because this guy's going to get a shot of me, because I don't have the time to get out of his way. The more coverers around me, the more stuff there is to hit. So if I stand in the open, he's less likely to hit me.

Speaker 1:
[62:58] Yeah, really, you're not going to get hit twice. It's more important to just be spread out. Like it doesn't really matter if you're in cover.

Speaker 3:
[63:06] I stare him down and say, no, I'm not afraid of you. It will be a quick death. But I do love as well the civilians. A, you get civilians on missions that quite often will fight back, and they're so gung-ho, but I love how-

Speaker 2:
[63:20] It makes the civil happy. I love it so much.

Speaker 1:
[63:22] One of my first missions was on like a chicken farm in Mississauga. Oh, yeah. There's just a guy with overalls and a shotgun running around shooting aliens. I was like, hell yeah, man.

Speaker 2:
[63:32] Those are my neighbors, and then they would do it. That's all I have to say.

Speaker 1:
[63:36] You want to join the Xenonauts project?

Speaker 3:
[63:39] When I was playing in early access, I was like doing my pro. Okay, we're a turn or two away from the ship. You want to go on there though. Let's bring everyone up, reload everything, get ready. And while I was doing that, this guy just barges in, the door shuts. And on the alien's turn, I just take gunshots and aliens scream.

Speaker 1:
[63:56] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[63:57] Oh, okay. Yeah, he's got it covered.

Speaker 1:
[64:00] That is how an alien invasion of the rural United States would go. There would be people with shotguns.

Speaker 3:
[64:06] I love this. Well, I love how happy everyone is to dive through windows. It's so funny to me. I had a guy in a school or something. I was going down the corridors. And somebody just dives through one window and dives through another, like across my bathroom. He knows where he's going, you know?

Speaker 1:
[64:25] Yeah, because we have to do the action movie dive in Rolls-Royce.

Speaker 3:
[64:28] It's a hilarious moment as well. When I was clearing a building and I'm like, you can on terror missions tele a civilian next to you. Hey, head back to the ship. So I've got a guy like, I love a magic. This is one of those games where it does sometimes live in your imagination a bit, where you just picture, you know, soldier opens the door, comes into the office room. You're in, you're hiding down there. So the person hand on your shoulders, hey, we've cleared a path behind me, points to the door. And then look, and then you're like, you know, if you head back to the ship now, you'll be fine. And he's like, yeah, got it, boss. Dives through the window.

Speaker 2:
[65:00] And just immediately, immediately.

Speaker 1:
[65:04] This is like an accountant or something. And he does like a John Wick.

Speaker 3:
[65:07] I didn't say anything. You can see him immediately gets closed down by the alien. I didn't know he was there. Cause I haven't cleared there yet. I was like, the door. I know it's slightly slower that way.

Speaker 1:
[65:18] He just came through. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[65:20] I love them. They're just child.

Speaker 1:
[65:22] It's great.

Speaker 2:
[65:24] They're living their best lives.

Speaker 1:
[65:26] Jon, would you recommend Xenonauts 2?

Speaker 2:
[65:30] You know, I think that it's impossible for me to not recommend Xenonauts 2, despite the like frustrations with little things here and there. Like, yeah, this is still just a completely unique kind of game that other things are not doing. It just is, right? For all that this is just Xenonauts 1 remade in a new engine with a bit of a remix of equipment and enemies, there still isn't a competitor to this game, right? There still is no... Other than going back and playing the original XCOM games, there's just nothing really like this.

Speaker 1:
[66:06] And Sin, I know you had like a little bit of a rockier start with it, but how are you feeling about Xenonauts 2?

Speaker 3:
[66:12] I did, it was strange. It was coming back to it in 1.0, where I was a bit, I found it a bit frustrating. But no, I've got a few, well, no, not a few reservations, but I think I agree with Jon. Yeah, it's got its issues, it's got its annoyances, but that's the genre, man. They're all like that. They've all got their thing. And I think, yeah, absolutely represents a more simulationist, but not kind of all in super awkward and gnarly with it. It's a really good remix of Xenonauts, and it's a good modernization of UFO that sticks with the kind of simulation and the nuance and the complexity, but strips the worst parts of that away and introduces some new things. And I think they've done a really good job. I will quickly add that my big issue, once I'm over my grumbling, is that the research system I thought was a bit disappointing. Like, it's very, you just, A, you get, for me, I wanted less information. And once you're committed to researching something, if you quit, you lose all your progress. So there's just very little decision-making there for me. And I wanted a bit more, I wanted to know less. I wanted more options at the same time. And I wanted the head scientist. I wanted to lock him in the room with the engineers and tell them, anyone who makes him cry gets a million dollars. I hate him.

Speaker 2:
[67:45] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[67:46] Sorry.

Speaker 2:
[67:47] I genuinely also wanted nothing more than for every NPC in this game to shut the fuck up.

Speaker 3:
[67:52] I hated him in particular, because it's genuinely, you've given me this shot. First thing he says to you is he gives you shit for being late. And I'm like, okay, me? I'm the commander now, yeah? I come into this little organization. This is our head science guy? No, it's not. And I would shoot him in the head.

Speaker 1:
[68:07] Well, he requires a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty, so.

Speaker 2:
[68:13] Oh my God. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[68:14] He does not have geniuses here. We have a team. And it's like his report, he's constantly insulting the engineers. And I'm like, mate, go and say that to their face. And I just go and say it to the face.

Speaker 1:
[68:28] The engineer, the lead engineer is daddy.

Speaker 3:
[68:33] One detail I do love is when you can upgrade the workshop. So it's double the work speed. You're a Soviet guy. He gets like a mecha wrench and an eye.

Speaker 2:
[68:41] Yeah, that's really great.

Speaker 3:
[68:43] I love, there are some really cool little details. And I do love it. It does have those hits of personality.

Speaker 1:
[68:48] I think he looks like he was from that dream daddy dating.

Speaker 3:
[68:52] He does. He's got the pose. He's a bro. He's my guy. He's my MVP. Yeah, thank you for letting me on that tangent. Yeah, I mean, I'm enjoying Xenonauts 2 a lot. Yeah, I think really the only other thing compares to it recently, apart from some UFO monsters. And even this is very different. It's probably Jallagad Alliance 3, because they have that similar kind of complexity and suppression. And there's a degree of, there are things that are optimally in Xenonauts. You can hide stuff like the damage you're doing to aliens. I just feel like this, I'm really glad. I think this came out well. I'm hoping maybe they can expand on it a little, but I think it's maybe a sign that, yeah, the kind of slightly gnarlier, less board game-y side of Tactics games is starting to catch up a little bit. I'm very, very here for that. So, yeah, I'd recommend it.

Speaker 1:
[69:47] Yeah. I also noticed that fully half of our episodes this year have been hooded horse games about fighting an alien invasion, which is interesting.

Speaker 3:
[69:58] I think so many games, I'm like, oh, I should cover that for my club.

Speaker 1:
[70:01] Tera, Victa, Medus, Xenonauts 2.

Speaker 3:
[70:04] I love as well that everyone is doing their own interpretation of it, and they're all doing different things, the plot and the themes and the settings. It's like, it's fun. Now, can we do an XCOM game set in 1800s?

Speaker 1:
[70:16] Oh, that would be cool, like Cowboys vs. Aliens.

Speaker 2:
[70:20] Napoleon vs. Aliens would be very funnier. I will play the shit out of Napoleon vs. Aliens, whoever wants to make a...

Speaker 3:
[70:27] Focus on, like, you can't do as much research because the infrastructure isn't there, but you can do a lot of get rid of warfare. Do you recommend it then?

Speaker 1:
[70:38] Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. I really liked it. You can go read my review on PC Gamer, but I gave it a 91. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 3:
[70:47] I enjoyed that review because I feel like it's a hard game to kind of... I'm still kind of framing mine because it's like, I could see a lot of angles. I think that you did that. You cleared that gap. It was good. As for why people can find me at the moment, I'm still writing on a paper shotgun, at the time being, and done a couple of bits for the new website by some former RPS staffers called jank.co. It's a little blog by Graham Smith, Brendan Colwell and Jon.

Speaker 1:
[71:23] Good people. I think Nick Rubin is over there now too.

Speaker 3:
[71:26] Yes, and they're partnered with Total Playtime podcast as well. Well, they're more of a news thing than strategy games, but, you know, I'm going to be petitioning them to to be more annoying.

Speaker 1:
[71:38] Hell yeah. Jon, where can people go to find you?

Speaker 2:
[71:42] You can find me on blue sky for the most part at John Boulds and haven't put out a lot of other things right now because I'm working on a fantasy novel that I feel comfortable saying exists out loud now that it's like, almost it's almost 80,000 words. So worst case scenario that gets just fucking self-published sometime later this year. Best case scenario, anybody knows good book agents, you know, just reach out.

Speaker 1:
[72:15] Yeah. Awesome. Three Moves Ahead is hosted on the Idle Thumbs Network. You can find us there at idlethumbs.net/3ma. We're also at 3MA on Blue Sky. I'm Len, or 3MA.bsky.social, whatever it is. I'm Len.bsky.social. We're also supported by you, our listeners on Patreon, patreon.com/3ma, where you can get access to tons of bonus episodes. Most prolific the podcast has ever been in terms of bonus episodes. And our Discord server and all kinds of cool stuff like that. Special thanks to our Patreon producers, Mark M and Bucktown. That's going to do it for this week. We'll be back soon with another hooded horse game about fighting an alien invasion probably. For Sin and for Jon, this is Len saying good night.