No more excuses, we have 42.05 LNP is out. I think by the time my turn comes, I'm done playing XCOM2, hehe.
Terror from the Deeps.... LOVED Xcom!
You ever wonder if that game could've been the "Planetary invasion" template for 4X space games like the Space Empires franchise?
I mean, have this whole drawn out invasion sub-game that just goes on and on, turn after turn, with the rebel planetary populations on one side trying to repel the alien invaders from the other side who are infiltrating the various nations and governments...
Then another alien race comes into the system and is able to get some of their agents landed on the planet, and now there's this three way war for the thing... It'd be so awesome! That's why invasion troops numbering in the hundreds could subvert a planetary population in the millions: infiltration and subversion of authority structures that are already there. I could see battles actually being for control or destruction of various facilities built by Players who claim the world - different races each attempting to carve bits from the surface as the populations of various nations are used as just another resource to be exploited...
oh, it would be this deep and involved game, having the starships doing their thing between the planets, while the planets themselves were fought for in orbit, air and on land. Do it all with both various renewable and non-renewable resources, so that things like food, population (labor) and "organic" resources would be able to be "harvested" and then slowly regrow once again, but things like minerals or other non-renewables would become more and more difficult to extract from each planet, so that while a planet rich in non-renewables might be contested hotly by the various space-faring races, that eventually it would be ceded to one or another race that specialized in tech that removed the traces of non-renewables that the planet had been mined of already. Whole alliances could be grooming planetary populations for harvesting when they need more farmers for the new colonies, or slave labor for the new off-world whatevers... Pretty grim for the various populations, but then you could have mismanagement of a facility (or induced active agitation by another Player) for those populations to go into revolt, and become another NPC Player in control of those self-same facilities, possibly becoming a new space-faring race as members of that population on other worlds hear about the revolution...
Heck, that kind of revolution might be exactly how new Players enter an ongoing game: they pop in and choose some subjugated population, become a rebellious faction of that population and attempt to wrest control of various facilities from the Players who currently control them, maybe building other facilities in secret or destroying ones that they are unable to infiltrate and take over, until finally they themselves begin being able to build their own fleet of star-ships, and the cycle continues.
Can you just see it?