Snakeman

It is kind of amusing ain't it? Sad, but also amusing. Developers and companies need to wrap their heads around the notion that you can't just market a game, you have to design the damn thing, and accept the criticizing that comes with it.

Yeesh, 70mb on a 56k. I'll let you know what I think next week Is this the same thing that's been out there on the web? (I'm referring to the online adventures thing, they're at episode 2 or 3 by now). Or is this for an honest to goodness standalone game? edit: I'm getting a download error: Problem encountered with internet connection (ARM1056, 12002) Have no clue what that means.

Like pretty much every fan of Trek, I was looking forward to this game. I was hoping that it would be a worthy successor to Armada II (which isn't so bad in its self in terms of mod support extending gameplay decently enough), but I don't think mods (presuming its even mod friendly to begin with) will save this title. I don't know why they went so wrong here. I can't imagine that something like contracts for voice talent for example, is an excuse for poor game production (I doubt this could sap your production money this badly). I still think its probably more to do with deadlines and pressures to meet them where franchises are concerned - because it doesn't appear to be because of lack of talent. I mean, if gameplay is so horrible, was there even a notion of a beta for this title to work out any kinks in the first place? As far as I know this game never had one. At least not a public one. Same was true of quite a few of the Star Wars titles. Too many game producers seem to rely on fixing their games after the fact with patches (but hey, a deadline was met on time so its all good?). What bothers me even more than that some games need patching after the fact, is not enough support after they release 'em before moving on to another product. ex. Empire at War and its expansion Forces of Corruption. Not bad gameplay with these so much as balancing issues however. About the only good points these two games have is that they are very moddable if your into the extra work that entails. If you just game, its frustrating however. Because now its not about anticipating the release of the game, but also about waiting for the communities to step up to the plate and make it more interesting.

Its that creepy accompanying synthesizer music, gets me every time.

I honestly don't know enough about some of these newer games to know one way or the other which is closer to the intent of the first UFO. The only reason I haven't tried them has mainly to do with money and computer specs at the moment.

Yeah but when it came to the Apoc timeline, it wasn't just environmental reasons people left, E-155 changed the way they looked at propulsion and that started colonization efforts - and I don't believe that it caused enviromental problems (but I could be wrong). To my understanding, the using up of most of the elerium between the 1st and 2nd wars kicked this off. They first found more eleirum in the Mars base, and that led them to the frontier in the other games that came out where apparently they did find ways to mine it and replenish what they needed from the frontier and shipping it back. As for the city represented in Apoc, I think Mega Primus or whatever it was called was the only mega city with plans for more if this experiment had worked. Your absolutely right though that the funding levels were skewed too low for what they were about and what their mission was in the original game's time frame. I imagined their funding level to be not too far off from say, what NASA gets - and that's already a fairly underfunded enterprise by most other program standards in use. Realistically they'd probably get a little more because it was internationally funded, not a U.S. led operation.

Well my conscious is clear on the two X-COM titles I did buy at any rate, pts1 and 3

How does profit work for the publisher by buying a copy from e-bay? If the point is to support the people who made it I mean. They only benefit by the guy or gal who first bought it. I'd guess that to do that, you'd have to hope the publisher still has it in their catalog to order direct as the most proper alternative. Personally, I really wish they would. I think all games companies and license holders for older games should have a game nostalgia website ordering system in place just in principle.

You raise a good point Slaughter that indies will want some kind of support for the business end of things. Perhaps one thing that might help them along could be a combination of other independents who know a little more, use webhosting and networking services to make it easier to form contacts, provide links to good resources and advertising tips, possible distribution channels etc. I suppose what I'm describing here is basically a consulting and support service of some kind for this particular group of developers. Anything that takes many of the business pressures away so they can focus on their work is probably key here.

I presume they did this not just to define what a planet is, but to even do so in the first place, they must have had to agree on a diameter of a body to fit the definition. I brought up the word planetoid because I'd heard it before (so it has to be a word right?!? ) so I figured that had to be one competing element to defining a planet besides orbital circumstances.

I personally think that one of the best ways for independent game developers to succeed apart from advertising in the right places, is hosting their own game for download (some have options where you can download it but also get it in CD form later for those of us who like hard copies of games). If any innovation is going to occur though, in terms of high quality games, it'll come from independents. These guys aren't in it for the big bucks most of the time (though they do need to eat like any of us), they actually retain their love of games through all these business shananigans taking place. For any of it to succeed for independents though, much of the innovations will probably have to stem from advertising and distribution capabilities mainly.

If Pluto is not a planet, then that makes it a planetoid right? Does that make its moons planetoidlets then?

I think your right, it makes it harder to stand on some moral high ground in justifying a war when a previous conflict saw our indirect particpation cause more problems. More Cold War fallout bites us in the ass. We help guys like bin Laden during the Russian war with Afganistan - it bites us in the ass later. Russia helps the Vietnamese, it turned out relatively well for them. China helps the North Koreans, ended in a stalemate that's lasted 50 years. We help Iraq fight Iran, it bites us in the ass again. Seems to me remote control wars work less often than not. Mopping up our problems isn't so easy is it.

I've always thought it was a blunder for the administration to use possible chemical weapons posession as an excuse for the war. Or they shouldn't have worded it that way (or the press shoudn't have focused so much on it either way). Considering too that the UN has no real muscle other than sanctions to enforce its directives, I personally think they ought to have hyped this angle. Sanctions didn't work so well or as well as they'd hoped as a deterant. Neither did diplomacy for that matter - didn't they boot out weapons inspectors on more than one occasion? I think the bottom line here is that, the enforcement of UN resolutions. If they've been broken, there's only so much you can do. I also think this event probably has set a new prescedent in terms of trying to figure out what the UN's purpose should be in this kind of thing. There's also another issue, and that's countries who may be up to no good who aren't members or bound by their decisions. What do you do? Default to some kind of moral high ground and take necessary action anyway? And who leads the charge?

Sorry about that, after the forum rearrangements over there, I had a harder time digging it up but its under the Laboratories subforum - X-Lab: Alien goals/motives, Storyline http://www.xcomufo.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=4041 A lot of the material here are either ideas for Xeno's backstory, after version 1, or just things people would want further elaboration to where the originals are concerned.

Maybe I'm must mixing up the timeline, but I thought the events in Interceptor (or was it enforcer?) or prior to it was when the Patton disappeared, then the stuff in Apoc happened - and wasn't Genesis supposed to be about returning to Earth from the frontier to save it? I dunno what to take as canon beyond what has already been out. TFTD I'm shaky on just by virtue of not playing it beyond its demo many years ago. So forgive me if I'm not up on lifeforms such as micronoids or whatever a psilord is Also I just thought I should chime in for anyone who's visited the Xenocide forums. Under the thread about alien motivations or whatever it is, there's a thread titled "Why?" I think that has a lot of similar dicussion in it that might be interesting.

Absolutely Zombie. The aliens' strategy remained the same probably because it was the safest way to cause chaos while not risking the ecology they also needed, and X-COM really couldn't go on the offensive very often early in the campaign but their campaign could change over time. I do have a bit of a nitpick when it comes to the disclosure of the alien threat to the public though. If enough terror attacks in major cities happened, there are bound to be survivors who just won't believe the government hype. The more people that witness the aliens first hand, the harder that coverup becomes. And to my knowledge those men in black guys don't have the mind erasing blinky flashy thingy While X-COM most likely stayed secret until the end of the war, I can't believe the alien threat could stay that way the more aggressive they became during it. Another thing not touched on in the game books or novels is enough info about collaborators with the enemy. Countries that sign pacts clearly know we're not alone in the universe and only did so for the false hope and protection that aliens and their technology would leave them immune from their overall agenda (I've noted that infiltration missions, abductions and terror missions still occur in countries even after having signed pacts). In addition, I would have thought there would have been several sideline wars taking place between nations who sided with the aliens vs those who hadn't. I mean it does fit with the alien agenda of making us waste our resources in futile engagements besides all their political misdirection.

I was still editing while you two posted heh. Good point Zombie, biological weapons or widespread type doomsday weapons makes no sense for the aliens to use. They seeded the planet after all, and a war like this will affect everyone if it dragged out into a conflict if attrition longer than the typical estimate it took to kill the brain. So between the aliens being "careful" as well as you in the conflict - keeping things more so than not on a special op scale to missions means to me that both sides were buying time. You were buying time to come up with other ways to fight and help Earth fight, and they were buying time to either teleport in more ships or their clones to come online from Mars labs.

I think the aliens must have had a secure way back to where ever they came from before Mars. I like the idea as well that the Sectoids might have been the only indigenous intelligent Mars occupants before the planet died. If nothing else, it helps the argument for the idea that because of the events in Apocolypse, the fact you could hire hybrids of the Sectoid race tells me that at some stage between the first war and Apocolypse, either a treaty was made or an entirely separate sect of Sectoids was at play that had a different agenda than their take-over-the-world counterparts. As a side note, I saw another science show about magnetic flields and it discussed the possible dangers or pitfalls in losing one for a planet. Scientists put forth the idea that if the molten core of the planet isn't rotating or something, it affects over thousands or millions of years, a planet's ability to retain its atmosphere or to halt the affects of radiation. For the purposes of a backstory, something relating to this, it could have been a doomsday scenario (i.e. the other aliens beat the good Sectoids into submission with this as the result) or it was a completely natural phenomenon. The other arguments, besides that the "face" of Mars might represent them as the original residents, could be too that the bad element of that race simply shared the goals of the big brain and the "good" Sectoids were a minority or were in some way suppressed or out of the picture. Also it never says specifically that the brain ever controlled Sectoid actions the way it says about Ethereals and that they in turn controlled Mutons. Anyway, I think those facts makes them the perfect candidate for any kind alien alliance that happened (if one ever did, just speculating again - the hybrids showing up in Apoc supports one, or if nothing else cloning technology). Speaking of clones, there is an original game ufopedia entry that mentions how those cloning techniques could be adapted for human use. Because you yourself as a player could never make use of the technology, there's an additional argument for more trooper numbers made by other parties. I also wonder, might there have been secondary fall back positions in the event of any of your bases being overrun? Maybe they were nothing more than giant storehouses of surplus gear, some might have had special modules built, or training centers, factories or the beginnings of clone production - its just that the war was progressing in such a way that you found the alien's Achilles Heal first and thus didn't have to enter into the ethical ramifications of things such as cloning. The downsizing of X-COM after the war also probably wouldn't allow for further efforts on that front more than whatever might have been accomplished.

I'm gonna guess, simply based on an average of hirings, sackings, and finally some retention of good soldiers and the fact you can only employ 250 max, that probably the max number of X-COM troopers might have been up to tripple this max - slightly more if you drag your game year out to the years mentioned in those game texts. But I would say under a thousand if not slightly more total - this includes washouts since, presumably they were good enough to be recommended to the program and hired before being evaluated then sacked by the Commander, just not good enough to be retained longer than most. Nevertheless I consider these types 'briefed' on the war, and probably hired on by third parties with the security clearance to know of the war prior to it becomming common public knowledge. They had to have gone somewhere, so that's my speculation for them. The scale of the war was I think miniscule as viewed from X-COM's perspective certainly. However, once the brain mission was accomplished (since I do not know the actual time table between this mission and disclosure to the public - or even whether it was before it of the alien threat), its quite possible more veterans appeared who may not necessarily been solely X-COM operatives. I would think that any base or alien mop up missions after the brain one could very well have been coordinated with other nations' militaries. I'd like to think that there were several tasks being undertaken that maybe we aren't supposed to be privy to aside from any "X-COM" game book canon. Just a for instance - what was being done with all that surplus gear you sold? Certainly enough stuff was sold over the course of five or six game years to equip several more squads for several more bases you don't have jurisdiction over. Another for instance - If enough UFO component material was sold, what might have the scale been of battles in our solar system if any? Presuming plenty of engineering capacity at any parallel outfits akin to X-COM. Even if this is supposedly low to non-existant apart from your Mars sojourn to kill the brain, what about Interceptor or Skyranger technology proliferation if any? I would think that there would also be plenty of behind the scenes equipment like this in the hands of people just like you doing what they could. I remember in one of the introductions to the first game, it mentioned Japan's failed attempt to thwart the alien menace prior to X-COM's formation. Its planes and so forth couldn't keep up with any craft and no progress happened so they disbanded their effort- stands to reason any friendlies to the cause would adopt any tools necessary if it knew of the threat facing Earth or even had access to material on the black market for whatever it couldn't manufacture or find for themselves. Also concievably, blueprint proliferation for the kinds of modules you've made for your bases could have occured at some stage. I sort of view the first war's dynamics this way, that essentially you were not just at the forefront of it but that you were buying any other Earth forces uncompromised by the threat time to build up. An example here is probably the construction of the carrier types talked about slightly before and after TFTD (one was transported out to deep space which I think was part of the backstory for Interceptor). So these things I think were going on beginning with the first war, with some of these things not appearing until after it was done. I'm pretty positive that (while I'm not sure how well documented it is - it just makes sense to me) after the war was over, there would have been a period of time where there was serious military build up.

Actually one was successfully tested on a mission to investigate an asteroid a few years ago. '02 or '03 I think. Anyway, I can't remember the craft's name, but I'd seen a show about it on Discovery or the Science channel not too long ago. From what I gather its a very finicky technology. It can get up to incredible speeds but it takes forever to get up to speed in the first place. Also even the smallest bits of debris (in this case, left over from construction I believe) can render the engines inoperative. I don't even know how they got around this but they did and the mission went ahead. I don't know what state ion engine technology is in now, but this mission did set some records and now they have data to work from. I think you answered the dilema in your statement. First, even if you had the technology, you have to make it attractive for people to choose a life there, that means jobs, a good stable home, a decent income and education. Don't force anyone to live anywhere, just make as many places as possible like this attractive to do so or provide incentives to move there. It'll be the same for space colonization, might as well work out the kinks to it in a (relatively) safe environment here on Earth first, then move onto the Moon and Mars or do these things in tandem together. I still however think that we're several generations away from serious population problems, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't look into concepts for dealing with it before its major.

I think perhaps 2 of the three things you sited - some world conflicts (that involve territory or resources as driving factors) and emissions could be solved by whatever model of energy independence can come about that involves reliable clean technologies. Whoever does it first will probably either be loved and their methods emulated or hated or mistrusted or both. Also there's potential there for whoever does it to become an economical powerhouse (not just energy or the distribution of it but money, jobs and/or influence on the world stage). The question of overpopulation may have a few alternatives before we delve into trying to populate the solar system with colonies, and that could be our oceans. I read an intersting article recently over on the popular mechanics website that talked about various military technolgies and one of them was for the U.S. Navy. The technology in question relates to the advances that stem from oil rig designs to come up with modular sections that could be floated out to any destination and then assembled. Barracks, air flields, workshops, labs you name it, this thing would have it. They also talked of a rating system for it that relates to the kinds of waves and storms it could hold on through that I forget off hand. Anyway, it makes sense that the military is researching this potential before there could be civilian applications to it - after all, there are usually impressive bucks going into militaries these days, might as well let them foot the R&D expenses to such a thing first. And it wouldn't be the first time civilian applications for things stemmed from the military or even space research. Still, I hope that there would be enough money going into space or oceanic/climate research to find other alternatives. Because one alternative I can think of is hard to accept - the fear that legal abortion or euthanasia for the old or dying would take center stage in an extremely overpopulated world scenario.

Well recently when I play, I try to avoid night time missions simply cause I hate the space even a handful of flares takes up. Besides, on a training ship like mine, that's an extra pistol or rifle clip. Anyway, against my style I did a supply ship mission when it was on the verge of daylight. I completely forgot the distances involved in spotting something in daylight vs darkness. To me, its like finding them almost on top of you before you can see them.

All I know of throwing anything is that after a certain point, I've had occasions where the throw couldn't go through because the game I would suppose, want a large arc for throwing. The soldiers I've been training up in a recent game, I've found the sweet spot to be somewhere between 40-50 strength with a throwing accuracy in the low 80's.

I just pictured this (an artist might have fun rendering this): A half limp looking Floater, with Xs for eyes, semi upright in the air with an armored X-COM trooper (like a child would ride on an adult's shoulders)- a pistol in one hand, and a string around his other free hand's index finger attached to the Floater's jerry rigged propulsion unit.