X-COM

Fans of XCOM should give Xenonauts a try. It's pretty close to the original, but the new penetration and building destruction mechanics make it really enjoyable in combat.

If you are a big fan of the XCOM OST, I think you might enjoy the XCOM 2 Tactical Legacy Pack OST, which is a reimagining of the original's soundtrack. I played through XCOM 2: WotC with this and it was fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLydXsA6zXiitzsl9JBCFs...

One of my favorites is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZv1brsTE_A

If you want to play it on PC, there's always mods to solve any issues you have with the game ;)

Of course it's a matter of personal taste. But disclaimer, TFTD was indeed my first entry to the series. And yes, I hate the ship as well.

The atmosphere is absolutely terrifying. It really made me clutch for the life of my soldiers as if it was mine. It was unfair, but not without reason, as even today our submarine warfare would pale against T'Leth. So close yet so powerless.

The superb work on the graphics brings me deep into the abyss. Just look at how well the battle maps fade into the darkness. The various aliens are actually scary for once, and their shared past with the human species is realistic yet particularly disturbing. We all came from those same oceans, after all.

I already spoke about the music, but it really seals the deal.

I know this might sound it's all about the assets and the mood. But the game was already quite good, and TFTD gave that engine the content it deserved.

I will hazard a rough comparison – UFO Defense feels more like Starship Trooper, while TFTD is more like Alien. Intimate and downright scary.

A few years back I had the problem of how to apply the x-com model to, of all things, the Left Behind franchise. Turns out that the strategy/tactical layer separation works pretty well with large scale PNPRPGs, too!

http://f3.to/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=LeftBeyond.QuestRules http://f3.to/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=LeftBeyond.Quest2Rules The gist of it is, it makes sense to decide a strategy interval (it was 1 year for the first quest, which had to span a century, and 1 month for the second, which had to span 8 years), and then "zoom in" on tactical actions at the end of the interval, with each being its own little dungeon instance. The tactical stuff would autoresolve if only nameless mooks were on scene, but would be roleplayed out if one or more of the heroes were there.

One of the tasks that could be given to said mooks and heroes is "stand by" and react to another faction attacking out of turn; if nobody was on standby, defense ability was reduced.

It was a pretty weird pair of games given that the enemy is supposed to be literally God, but the story came out well, and the players had fun.

> I always felt the serialising that X-COM enforced to be an artificial limitation.

I was about to argue that it might have been a technical limitation too, but Dune II, the first real-time strategy game, came out two years before X-COM so technically that can't be quite right.

On the other hand, it also requires a certain set of programmer skills and specialized knowledge of how to simulate such systems, and opens up a combinatorial explosion of scenarios that can be much harder to design around if you also want to include lots of complex possibilities. Serialized turn-based design is much easier by comparison.