XENONAUTS
STRATEGIC PLANETARY DEFENCE SIMULATORXenonauts is, well... it's a modern day X-Com. Possible the truest successor to the classic UFO: Enemy Defense, it's a brutal game that requires effective play at both the tactical and strategic levels if you want to have a chance for victory. The corpses will quickly begin to pile up, but if you stay ahead of the technology curve and invest wisely in the skills of your troops and their equipment and facilities, you should be able to maintain air and land dominance and hopefully, eventually, fight off the aliens.
Personally, I have not been successful.
The core of Xenonauts is the tactical ground combat, with missions that are often tense, dangerous, and incredibly satisfying.
(source:
http://www.coffeebreakgaming.co.uk/pc-game-reviews/review-xenonauts/)
Whether responding to terror sites, seizing downed UFOs, or invading and attempting to either destroy or capture alien bases (depending on how willing you are to put the lives of your troops on the line for material reward), tactical combat is the core of Xenonauts gameplay, and you'll probably be spending most of your time here.
A good tip for doing well hell: Suppression is amazing, as it eliminates the enemy ability to reaction fire and limits what they can do on their next turn. Flash grenades are useful tools for storming enemy choke points, and heavy machine goods are great for keeping enemies in more open areas under control. Of course, suppression doesn't work against enemy mechanical units, and make sure not to suppress your own troops in the process!
Of course, ground combat isn't the only thing you need to excel at if you wish to succeed in Xenonauts. The best troops in the world won't save you if the enemy is given dominion over the skies - the aliens even have the opportunity to launch aerial terror missions, extended bombing campaigns that only your superior custom technology can stop. Thankfully, the alien ships are interstellar craft that are ill-suited to operating in atmosphere even after extensive modification. That still leaves them capable of overpowering most conventional anti-air defenses, but, so long as you adopt a breakneck pace of development and construction, air superiority is a something you will need to achieve if you want to keep your funding nations happy.
While you might autoresolve easy battles, the tougher ones mean you'll be better served taking more direct control of your aircraft, timing your missiles and evasive maneuvers while trying to keep your units out of the enemy firing cones and keeping them in yours.
Finally, there is the strategic layer. Research, production, and management of bases and base facilities are all crucial to the long term success of the Xenonauts project. Everything costs money, and no matter how much you get you'll always want more. More bases and more radar stations means better coverage and more hangar slots for interceptors, but it means you'll be paying cash every month to keep those facilities operational. A larger research team is practically required to keep pace with the enemy advance, but they don't work for free, and the engineering team's wages are probably the smallest cost in construction, and you'll likely be constantly be having to decide between increasing the survivability of your ground troops and maintaining something approaching a possibility of air superiority with whatever money is leftover.
Get the game here:http://www.xenonauts.com/pre-order/I previously mentioned that you should download Fire In the Hole and the Lore mods, but I know advocate installing the Community Edition, which has lots of bug fixes and major usability tweaks and improvements.
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/11312-Xenonauts-Community-Edition-0-24-changelog-and-downloadsOnce the mods are compatible with it again, I will put them back on the suggest list.
The game actually has a fairly robust and officially supported modding community, and it's well worth checking out the mods available to expand on and improve your experience.
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/forumdisplay.php/27-Completed-Game-ModsIf you want to see what the game is like, alway recommends...the following youtube videos, by Scott Manley.
https://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg/videos