How would competition be handled? I mean, everyone's fighting the aliens, sure, but we're still human. If the Russian XKOMRAD can take advantage of an American blunder, well, why wouldn't they? I think some of the potential of this NES would be the tension between cooperation and competition. You want your neighbor to lose, just not badly enough so that everyone loses.
I'm imagining a global pool of money that is doled out by the UN, with more going to the higher-performing teams. There should also be a reasonably constant source of domestic funding to prevent bad teams from being punished too hard.
Also, I think tech sharing should have a downside. If team A wants to get access to team B's new heavy plasma tech, it should take team B's research/engineering time and effore for that turn to demo and explain it. Same thing with manufacturing capabilities. Teaching someone to build an Avenger from scavenged bits of alien alloy and Elerium isn't something you can do over the phone.
Yep! I agree with all of these points. Let me put them in summary just for the sake of clarity/posterity:
- Competition should be encouraged; you want your enemy to lose, but not cause the world to lose in the process.
- Global funding pool that is divvied up by the U.N. to the various X-Crops depending on preformance, diplomacy, and luck
- Domestic funding keeps the 'bad'(read: unfortunate victims of blaster bomb sneak-attacks) X-Corps afloat.
- Competition over resources AND technology; Tech-sharing can occurr, but it would see a (temporary) loss of brain/manpower in the form of loaning scientists/engineers.
Well, my ideas would be these:
- You start with 12 people: 5 soldiers (the guys you send into battle), 2 scientists (the investigators), 2 medics (they heal your soldiers), 2 engineers (they design new weaponry based on what the scientists discover) and 1 pilot (he takes your soldiers to the battlegrounds and can also intercept alien craft) (modificable).
- 1 turn would be 1 month long.
- Every turn, nations would be sending messages about missions, and each group could take two or three missions per turn. The reward from each mission would mean higher monetary support from the different nations, perhaps some intel and you could get your hands on the alien tech and bodies.
- Players would only have control over the squads in a mission.
- Players would be able to improve Earth technology or study the aliens' technology in order to be able to use it.
- Your idea for the stats sounds quite good.
- Soldiers would have four stats: Strength (health, carrying capacity and melée combat), Speed (how fast they move), Mind (their mental force, potentially affects their Psi ability) and perhaps Reflexes (their ability to react to the enemy's presence). They would also have five Weapon Proficiencies: Close Combat (melée and short-range weapons), Heavy Weapons (machineguns), Assault Guns (assault rifles), Sniper (sniper rifles) and Explosives (grenades, mines...)
- Engineers and Scientists would have just two stats: Theory (how good they are at understanding what's going on) and Practice (how good they are at actually making something out of it).
- Medics would have the Ability stat, which would be how good they are at healing the injured soldiers.
- Pilots would have Piloting (how good they are at flying the planes) and Reaction (to check how good they are at firing at the enemy).
- About each group, I'd say it could be a mix between your two proposals. Say, each player group comes from a local/national group, and has become part of X-COM, but they still retain their previous backgrounds, so part of their funding comes from X-COM (which means that you would have to share things with them) and other part comes from their past.
- Your suggestion for Faction Stats is perfect. Not sure if I would give all players the possibility of making more than one base, but it would be quite excellent (and it also makes for interesting possibilities, as you would have to keep soldiers on both bases, and you would have separate stats and weapon stores for each base).
Everyone: opinions?
+I always thought that the 'pilots' of the various X-fighters came bundled in with the fighter jets, and in terms of the transport-crafts it was the soldiers sent in who piloted them (as evidenced by the steering/command consoles/cockpits you can see in the ships). But even if it's not X-Lore then I would still bundle "pilots" into the fighter-craft/transport-craft to keep unnecessary management to a minimum. As for the rest I agree to an extent—why include medics? Why not just do it the old way and just equip your soldiers with med-kits and say "HEY. YOU'RE THE HEALER NOW." rather than consign people to specific classes?
+1 turn/1 month is perfect.
+Missions I agree with, them coming from governments I do not. If the governments are sending missions... then X-COM is not doing it's job. The only time I think a government should send a mission should be in the event of a terror crisis. Missions coming down from the U.N. (specifically some super-secret U.N. Alien Security Council), though, could easily replace this, so I do not know why I am picking at it so much. However, I disagree with the doling out of "intel" and tech via the same council—why would the U.N. pick and choose when sending out tech stuff would benefit all humanity? Keep teching in the hands of X-COM scientists!
A further note on the mission structure: a way we could generate them would be to have the 'mission pool' consist of the missions that players actually detect and report. That way individual X-Corps could keep certain missions to themselves and steal all the glory, though if they fail horribly the U.N. would be pissed about this. To model this at the end of every turn private stats could be sent out detailing what activity the players likely will detect for that month and let players contribute to the pool.
+I am not quite getting you on this point. Why wouldn't they have control of all of their squads if they belong to that particular X-Crop regardless of combat status? Or is it that you are suggesting they be able to give blow-by-blow orders for battle (which seems pretty impossible to model in a NES, imo)? Or that there is a communal pool of troops that we choose from?
+I agree, to a point. Improving earth-tech should totally be doable, but only up to a certain level. I think alien tech should always be more powerful than Earth's tech given the time-frame covered in the NES (likely a few years, it would take a lot more to push earth tech to be on a same level as alien). The + of earth tech would be that it is easier to manufacture and could be more reliable (it being 100% understood by humans). Alien tech, on the other hand, is the quick and dirty way to get us some plasma cannons and go to town. Researching alien tech would be as you said it, studying it to use it. Understand it is a whole different level and at best I would say that it still backfires on humans more often even at '100%' studied (which would be, like, 30, maybe 40%). + of the alien tech would be that it is powerful. Ridiculously powerful. It is, after all, the tech that aliens are using to invade us.
+Strength stat, I agree with; Speed I do not because you have a lot of situational factors there: terrain, weight/encumbrance, wounds sustained, etc.; Mind/Psi--yeah, it is all good, though should be hidden till players discover psi-facilities/psi itself; Reflexes should definitively be in, though I would expand it to be more than "reactions" and into "dexterity" in general--in fact we could probably rename it to dexterity. Also. Bravery! You need bravery in there to represent how much the soldiers are liable to break! The atmosphere of X-COM was so great because it was, for the most part, a losing war that you fought; a war filled with all sorts of crappy alien horrors!
On the weapon proficiencies: I would shy away from them because it is a lot to model for soldiers who (should) be pretty expendable (excluding the rare Rookie-to-Commander stories).
+Engineer/Scientist stats is an interesting thing to include, actually. I agree on the Theory/Practice divide, however in the effort to make it not just one scientist or one engineer doing all the work I would instead split engineers/scientist into two new stats:
Scientist/Engineers--This is just a # and the general workforce assigned to various projects.
Brilliant Engineers/Scientists--Now here are your Einsteins and Carl Sagans, these dudes could be named and have the aforementioned Theory/Practice stats. You start with either a notable engineer or a notable scientist, but as your dudes research/build more stuff you have the chance to get some more ones.
+Again, I would shy away from medics. Just assign a general recovery time, perhaps altered by players teching/building advanced medical centers in their bases after getting to a certain point of human & alien tech (cause alien biology is utterly not human, but using a plasma-based macgruffin to stitch up a soldier would be pretty doable).
+Again, I would shy away from pilots and just wrap them into the vehicles so as to limit micromanagement.
edit: In general the only things I hesitate about in your proposal, Milarqui, are the things that seem to make the NES more about special soldiers/about earth just sticking it to the aliens. Desperation really is key to X-COM's atmosphere! Having your soldiers die off in droves; knowing that eventually you'll have to abandon some of your laser rifles for plasma rifles, but all the while worrying over your stocks of elerium; knowing that in some cases it will take teams of ships to bring down a single alien craft, or that certain alien craft are nigh impossible to defeat in the sky; knowing that, sometimes, you have to let a few civvies die by letting a terror squad land or outright carpet bombing a residential neighborhood infested with Chrysalids, or simply abandoning a whole town to their sorry fates because, well, you just don't have the manpower/resources to save them all, now do you? That's X-COM! Making it to Mars and whooping some extraterrestrial butt becomes all the sweeter after knowing you did it only by the skin of your teeth.