I really like how Xenonauts doesn’t restrict civilians to terror missions and even more importantly has armed civilian forces that will run occasionally take down alien forces even without your help. It makes me feel like, while I am clearly using the best force to handle the aliens, that I am not alone. The native populations of the areas I am protecting will fight alongside me to protect their homes. It is an element that I can’t help but see as missing from XCOM now I have seen it here. I realise it changes the character of terror missions slightly, but not too much given that the aliens still completely outclass these local forces in almost every situation. You are still needed here, but the civilians aren’t entire defenceless either.
I hope that in Xenonauts 2 the alien forces make more use of these forces too, interactions that don’t necessarily involve killing either. It would be pretty cool if aliens exploring the map would do things like attempt to take prisoners and be seen herding subjects to their ships for purposes as yet unknown. Psionic aliens could use them too, imagine having one of the random police officers that had been wandering around fighting along side you suddenly turned on you. Forcing you to take a score/success hit in attacking him or to try to avoid him while you seek the source of the alien puppeteer.
We have started to encounter another tier of enemy ships, the new bomber, new interceptors and a carrier were all spotted this episode, though unfortunately I accidentally let the carrier wreckage expire while waiting for material to arrive from another base. That was silly.
The Ranonauts Project would like to congratulate:
- The local forces for dealing with almost half of the alien forces off screen while we worked our way to the scout vessel
- Narmio for taking out as many aliens as the local forces did.
To date Ranonauts has:
- defended the earth for 6 months and 20 days
- lost 47 soldiers
- killed 437 aliens in 49 ground battles
- captured 51 aliens
- shot down 119 alien spacecraft
- had 5 aircraft shot down
- received $15,361,425 in funding