this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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I genuinely really love XCom: Apocalypse and think it's sad it is rarely talked about.
The vision they had for that game is incredible. A full scifi megacity with a functioning economy. Every single building in the city is owned, every company is its own faction, and the police, and the gangs, and xcom. Relationships between everything. With gang wars and company wars and raids against one another and everything. It was truly in the same intent as the original xcom, to make a simulation.
The thing that bothers me about the newer games compared to the original is that in the newer games the geoscape plays like a boardgame whereas in the old game it feels like the goal is to have it play like a simulation. Apocalypse continued the goal of a fullscale sandbox simulation of a city with capitalist monopoly megacorps capitalising on an alien invasion coming from an alternate dimension all while you're desperately trying to advance your technology and stop this thing. Alien technology proliferates through companies and gangs if you sell it on the market. And they acquire it from raiding each other over time too. Need money? Go steal drugs and VR tech from the gangs and sell it. You might piss off the MegaPolice doing this though but that's fine really they're weak. Don't forget the cult faction actively working to help the aliens too.
It was cool as shit. In some ways it slightly doesn't meet that full vision. And it has to be played on the higher difficulties to get all the features.
Oh and combat is realtime strategy with squads and shit.
Really liked it. I wish it was talked about more it really feels like they were onto something. Battles in the cityscape (equivalent of geoscape) were waaaaaay better than basically every other game including the modern games and xenonauts.
That sounds dope, fantastic game-sim-thing that I would enjoy being bad at.
It's clunky because it's old, has next to no tutorial, but I recommend it.
One of the first things you need to do is ditch road vehicles though. The roads get shot out from under them and they instantly die no matter how strong they are. Hover bikes and hover cars are the early game craft to grab. You put rinky dink lasers on them and swarm the enemy.
The downside of this is that the quantity of city damage you do missing your targets will piss off basically everyone whose buildings get blasted to bits.
If you're familiar with xcom it's not too hard to work out though, it's a cityscape setup like the geoscape, then it's tactical map missions. Soldiers even use and fire from cover in realtime combat it's pretty nifty.
Probably some jerryrigging required to make it run on newer systems. Dosbox if I recall? I think there was a modscene for it too.
There was an Open Source project for it as well but I don't know how successful they've been: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/OpenApoc
It's such an obvious difference between all the modern attempts at the game and the originals when you put them side by side.
Even like... In the tactical battles. For example in the originals every single piece of every single bit of scenery has its own hp, burns, fire spreads from place to space, wind exists and smoke moves. If smoke exists between you and a target that smoke in-between is probably calculated as part of line of sight. But, in the modern variants of the game, smoke is just an aoe circle you sit inside that gives a negative debuff to accuracy of enemy shooters.
The levels in the originals? Tonnes and tonnes of actually random generation. Not premade maps.
The vision is creating a simulation. Not a board-game. The newer games can be fun, but even things like the removal of Time Units in favour of the move+action approach are a compromise to the idea of "simulation". They wanted to simulate real battle in a turnbased way and that's what led to the decisions they made. They weren't trying to make a boardgame. Not on the geoscape and not on the tactical battles either.
The direction I would go with these games would not to be to remove Time Units but instead to implement more team-oriented mechanics.
2 guys next to each other? Have a way to move both of them at once, as a pair working together covering one another.
4 guys stacked up on a door way? Breach and entry option for the full group.
3 guys in a corridor? 1 stands overwatch while 2 walk the full length of it.
1 Drone operator and a full group simultaneous movement buff where 6 soldiers all move together.
I'm sure tonnes of these can be thought of for tacticool moments.
These kinds of things would not only make the original systems feel better but actually make it feel like you're an elite agency with some of the world's best troops. Additionally it fills out options that make moving a large number of units less tedious, which is the main problem with the first games and Xenonauts. The remakes moved to a much smaller squad for the issue of tedious movement and control of soldiers too. Wrong approach.
Just look at how good the simulation is here: https://youtu.be/OIwWdXDdY8g
Yeah exactly. The point here is to try and make turnbased combat feel like an elite squad cooperating with one another rather than a bunch of individual pawns being moved around a chessboard. Context-sensitive team actions in a very widely implemented way would take turnbased combat in a direction that has currently been entirely unexplored, at least to my knowledge I know of nothing that has tried out the concept.
My thinking here is to not radically move away from Xcom's original sim-style but to build on top of it, to advance it. The remakes basically radically move away from it instead of truly building on it while Xenonauts on the other hand doesn't truly advance it in the way that I would want to see from a title trying to truly be a sequel rather than a fan-letter or expansion pack like TFTD was.
Unfortunately I'm filled with ideas without the technical ability to implement.
I would be so down for having groups of people move together without having to do your whole team at once. That's such a great idea and i've never seen it done. Being able to set up your breach and then have the whole team do their thing at once would be great.
Breaching in x-com was where i lost more troops than anything else.
This idea makes sense for turnbased when you've played Apoc. Because in the realtime mode you can move the units as a grouped squad and they'll move into cover by themselves if close enough to the cover. Obviously you'd want it more polished in a modern form, I see no reason you couldn't have some logic like moving 6 soldiers and the game checking for how many time units they have and giving you either a full run distance into cover for all members of the squad or giving you a squad walk + covering fire movement where they move up half and half. Or a run into a position of overwatch with reserved time units. You could do this pretty cleanly and a game could even optimise it for shotguns in front vs rifles in back.
I never played Apocalypse, i'll have to give it a shot.
Have you played Kenshi? It's nothing like X-com, but reading your scrip of Apocalyose has me thinking it's weirdly like x-com. Huge, complicated world, complex interactions between characters, and your little band of dudes going from losers to kung fo gods the very, very hard way.
I think gog's version of apoc works on modern machines.
I did play Kenshi. The same madness exists with the obsession to create a simulation. I would also say that Dwarf Fortress shares this madness. These are all games created by people with a like-mind for interconnected systems that produce emergent results. I would say Kenshi creates the least emergent results though, it's quite wide but lacking the depth of overlapping and interacting systems. It's fun in a different kind of way though. What Kenshi really needs is overlapping systems like DF has to truly make decisions and actions in the world by the AI have a wide variety of insane outcomes.