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[Anvilfolk]

I'm confused about the multiplayer - is it just the battles? The description on the MP mission is unclear. It says it pits an alien player and a human player for control of the world, which implies the entire campaign in multiplayer, but that sounds unlikely.

Wasn't there an X-Com remake that had multiplayer campaigns, and then it was no longer available or supported? That stuff would be way interesting.

[GlyphGryph]

It says you can mix humans and aliens, so I doubt it's more than battles.

[Mephansteras]

Multiplayer is just skirmish battles. They played a bunch of them during the PAX livestreams. Looks fun, but it's just one-off battles. You do get to build teams with both humans and aliens, which is kinda fun.

[Virtz]

that would still show a stagnation in technological development

Actually that did happen... in real life.

What? When?

The threat of war or an ongoing war are things that really drive technological advancement fast forward, if anything. A lot of the stuff we use today was developed for the military first.

Like they only ever showed up in the 50s USA and got beaten back by the FBI with colts and tommy guns? Seriously?

Tommyguns and whatever they could make that would combat the aliens more effectively. Their alien nature working against them, which would make sense.

What are you talking about? "Their alien nature working against them"? Elaborate, cause that doesn't make sense.

"Oh no! Shitty inaccurate SMGs! Our one true weakness!"

Think of it as not a proper war, something more like Apcolypse where it really only seems to effect one small part of the world, and things are dealt with in the course of months, and none of it seems that unreasonable. No super weapons to develop against other alien types, just a limited amount of improvisation in a couple months, and the skirmish has been dealt with and the weird things held back, and the world itself decides to form an organization just in case something like this happens again.

It could simply be that it was never a proper war, simple the a few battles that made us realize dangerous stuff is out there.

(Of course, it's been fifty years, so it's not like X-Com would be super well funded anymore knowing the world govs, and if it was local most govs wouldn't even have personal experience. Who's to say X-Com wasn't doing research the whole time, though, and that's where many of our current advances in things like computing and such come from? And the troop delivery vehicle!)

That doesn't work either. Apocalypse happened after the whole world united to fight off a space faring alien race and now had its technologies. Humanity had conquered the stars in between X-Com 2 and 3 (Interceptor), and the city you were in was special as well. What the FPS seems to imply is that we've encountered an advanced alien species that travelled to our world, yet couldn't fight off a single country with 1950s technology. This is a scenario you play for comedy these days. Or horrible summer blockbuster titles. Either way it's awful.

I didn't mean the research was to be done by X-Com either. Anyone could've taken the technologies and done something with them. Like in Apocalypse it's mostly Marsec and Megapol that decided to do something with the technologies. Apocalypse X-Com ain't got nothing to do with what's available at the start. But X-Com still develops something even more suited to what they're fighting at the time (mostly horrible horrible bioweapons that ignore shields and kill their target in seconds).

[Neonivek]

What? When?

The threat of war or an ongoing war are things that really drive technological advancement fast forward, if anything. A lot of the stuff we use today was developed for the military first.

Some weapons were developed and flourished during this period and others have been almost exactly the same since the first world war. Obviously the kinds that would be used in this game would be the stagnant ones.

What are you talking about? "Their alien nature working against them"? Elaborate, cause that doesn't make sense.

The blob monsters being weak to fire for example... or the robot monsters that are weak to electricity. Both are creatures with weaknesses that stem from their alien nature.

[Heron TSG]

Humans are weak to fire and electricity. Are we thus twice as alien?

[Neonivek]

Humans are weak to fire and electricity. Are we thus twice as alien?

Yeah but we arn't really strong to anything except exhaustion.

[GlyphGryph]

That doesn't work either. Apocalypse happened after the whole world united to fight off a space faring alien race and now had its technologies. Humanity had conquered the stars in between X-Com 2 and 3 (Interceptor), and the city you were in was special as well. What the FPS seems to imply is that we've encountered an advanced alien species that travelled to our world, yet couldn't fight off a single country with 1950s technology. This is a scenario you play for comedy these days. Or horrible summer blockbuster titles. Either way it's awful.

Imagine a spacefaring race that HASN'T mastered faster than light travel, and is just disposed to being very very patient. They send off ships in hundreds of directions, hoping to get lucky, and the passengers deal with what they find when they arrive, but mostly plan on being settlers. Like the military outpost in Pandora, they lose because they aren't prepared for a war, and their best effort still isn't enough.

Like District 9, but the aliens are hostile albeit under equipped and with generally incompatible technology that isn't far beyond what we have now (since we could, in fact, do this same exact thing ourselves now with the technology we have, if we had the desire).

That is perfectly sensible. Even if they HAD sent a scout first, he would have reported a planet with no civilization to get in the way of colonization when he returned! Why would you bother giving a bunch of civilians tons of advanced weaponry when they'd just end up killing each other with it? It's a colony run, after they get fabbers set up they can make their own if needed, but even that would take dozens of years...


And all of this is moot, because the aliens didn't cross a ton of anywhere, they were supposed to be extradimensionals like the Apocolypse kind, and the "attack" could simply be a probing attack to determine "is this area worth invading" (and your job in game is to convince them its not worth the cost)

None of these are really all that far out there for scenarios, and none require the overwhelming force or supertech the other aliens earth would encounter later have.

[Neonivek]

Don't forget GlyphGryph that much of their technology may be incompatable with the trip or simply be unable to do it in bulk.

For example in the Terminator, the first, they couldn't send their super weapons or vast arsenal over to attack. They had to send a specialised unit built to survive the trip (sorta)

[Virtz]

What? When?

The threat of war or an ongoing war are things that really drive technological advancement fast forward, if anything. A lot of the stuff we use today was developed for the military first.

Some weapons were developed and flourished during this period and others have been almost exactly the same since the first world war. Obviously the kinds that would be used in this game would be the stagnant ones.

Weapons in use by the military during the Cold War have totally changed since world war 1. Also, there's a difference between a weapon being developed and a weapon being popular.

What are you talking about? "Their alien nature working against them"? Elaborate, cause that doesn't make sense.

The blob monsters being weak to fire for example... or the robot monsters that are weak to electricity. Both are creatures with weaknesses that stem from their alien nature.

Both weaknesses shared by humanity, hence no advantage to either side.

Also, I guess the electric gun would be totally useless in X-Com 1. If only electricity helped stun things. Then a ranged weapon that did that would be totally more useful than the stunrod. But alas.

Imagine a spacefaring race that HASN'T mastered faster than light travel, and is just disposed to being very very patient. They send off ships in hundreds of directions, hoping to get lucky, and the passengers deal with what they find when they arrive, but mostly plan on being settlers. Like the military outpost in Pandora, they lose because they aren't prepared for a war, and their best effort still isn't enough.

Like District 9, but the aliens are hostile albeit under equipped and with generally incompatible technology that isn't far beyond what we have now (since we could, in fact, do this same exact thing ourselves now with the technology we have, if we had the desire).

That is perfectly sensible. Even if they HAD sent a scout first, he would have reported a planet with no civilization to get in the way of colonization when he returned! Why would you bother giving a bunch of civilians tons of advanced weaponry when they'd just end up killing each other with it? It's a colony run, after they get fabbers set up they can make their own if needed, but even that would take dozens of years...


And all of this is moot, because the aliens didn't cross a ton of anywhere, they were supposed to be extradimensionals like the Apocolypse kind, and the "attack" could simply be a probing attack to determine "is this area worth invading" (and your job in game is to convince them its not worth the cost)

None of these are really all that far out there for scenarios, and none require the overwhelming force or supertech the other aliens earth would encounter later have.

No. We couldn't do that now. We have troubles sending shuttles to and back from space. Imagine sending out something large enough to sustain itself and the people on board for light years of travel. Just imagine the heating bill to keep people warm when they're out of reach of any sun. And the way we manufacture things right now it couldn't hope to last a hundred years, let alone light years. It'd critically malfunction before it got a hundredth of the way there. And imagine the resources and finances it'd take to make more than one of these. There's just so many things that simply wouldn't work with this plan.

Also, considering the events of X-Com 1 and Interceptor, it'd be a really crappy investment. Like a couple decades later, we've got fast and reliable space travel. Whoever they sent out into a deep space voyage for thousands of years would be easily caught up with.


Alright, so they know how to travel through dimensions. That's actually worse for your argument, cause it suggests they can send more shit without the agonizing wait.

The two of you mention being under-equipped and not having the technology to surpass 50s America. But as far as the gameplay videos have shown, they have advanced beam weaponry, vehicles that alter their own geometry and force fields that'd make the Apocalypse aliens gurgle with envy.

How is 50s USA a match for this shit to the extent where they could contain and cover this up? The very same USA that later couldn't win a war against a bunch of commies hiding around in tunnels with crappy weaponry.

[GlyphGryph]

Because this time we'd be the commies with rifles, and the aliens would lose for the same reasons we did - by making beating us simply too expensive to bother with.

No. We couldn't do that now. We have troubles sending shuttles to and back from space. Imagine sending out something large enough to sustain itself and the people on board for light years of travel. Just imagine the heating bill to keep people warm when they're out of reach of any sun. And the way we manufacture things right now it couldn't hope to last a hundred years, let alone light years. It'd critically malfunction before it got a hundredth of the way there. And imagine the resources and finances it'd take to make more than one of these. There's just so many things that simply wouldn't work with this plan.

Pffft, of course we could. We won't, obviously, because it is hard, and expensive, and super reliable, but we could. If our race had different priorities, we might have already started.
(Also, the heating bill would be practically nonexistent thanks to the lack of an atmosphere in space that would leech it off. Vacuum is the best insulator in the known universe. If anything, we would have to find a way to dissipate the constant heat generation of the people on board)

And there's absolutely no reason we couldn't make it last well more than a hundred years, as long as we had the money to be redundant and the willingness to suffer a 50% failure rate or something. Again, the technology would be enough for aliens-who-are-not-us, humans wouldn't find it acceptable but an alien easily could. And given, say, the combined military budgets of the US+China, plus a national industry dedicated to the pursuit of this situation... I don't see any of your problems being problems, so much.

Final alternative: The alien tech is SO advanced we simply lack the ability to reverse engineer it.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Final alternative: The alien tech is SO advanced we simply lack the ability to reverse engineer it.

Or you could do what TFTD and Apocalypse did and disable the alien tech through plot. That could also explain how the lasers were researched so quickly, since they took the concepts they learned and appilied them to earth technologies or something.

[Virtz]

Because this time we'd be the commies with rifles, and the aliens would lose for the same reasons we did - by making beating us simply too expensive to bother with.

Problem is that no longer applies when the gap is sufficiently high. For example, the US basically drove over the Iraqi military. What do you think a futuristic army could do to the 50s US, then? When it's an army versus an entire planet, it's somewhat more ambiguous (unless we're talking Spehss Mehreens).

No. We couldn't do that now. We have troubles sending shuttles to and back from space. Imagine sending out something large enough to sustain itself and the people on board for light years of travel. Just imagine the heating bill to keep people warm when they're out of reach of any sun. And the way we manufacture things right now it couldn't hope to last a hundred years, let alone light years. It'd critically malfunction before it got a hundredth of the way there. And imagine the resources and finances it'd take to make more than one of these. There's just so many things that simply wouldn't work with this plan.

Pffft, of course we could. We won't, obviously, because it is hard, and expensive, and super reliable, but we could. If our race had different priorities, we might have already started.
(Also, the heating bill would be practically nonexistent thanks to the lack of an atmosphere in space that would leech it off. Vacuum is the best insulator in the known universe. If anything, we would have to find a way to dissipate the constant heat generation of the people on board)

And there's absolutely no reason we couldn't make it last well more than a hundred years, as long as we had the money to be redundant and the willingness to suffer a 50% failure rate or something. Again, the technology would be enough for aliens-who-are-not-us, humans wouldn't find it acceptable but an alien easily could. And given, say, the combined military budgets of the US+China, plus a national industry dedicated to the pursuit of this situation... I don't see any of your problems being problems, so much.

Final alternative: The alien tech is SO advanced we simply lack the ability to reverse engineer it.

Uh. If heat couldn't escape in a vaccum, then Earth would be a fireball. It's heated by the sun, and technically insulated from the rest of the universe by vaccum. Problem is heat is transferred by radiation as well. As in, we radiate heat, and receive heat radiated from the sun. When you've got no star close enough, you're gonna be losing heat (albeit slowly).

But even without heat concerns, there's still other problems. Like dragging enough fuel into space to keep the thing powered for hundreds of years and then have enough to actually land it somewhere. Getting enough water there and the means to recycle it without loss. Some means of food. Oxygen recycling. And so on.

And I'm still not convinced it'd actually be possible to make something that'd last a hundred years. Though I guess that's just speculation since nothing produced these days is made to last, cause it pays more to have people regularly buy new models once the old ones break down. But then I don't think there's anything out there that could possibly last this long without constant maintenance.

As far as the final alternative goes, wouldn't they dig out this technology later on? Like once they got to the 90s, they apparently wisened up as to how to reproduce alien technology. With the alien incursions going on, it would've probably been a good time to pull out that shape-shifting thing and try and understand how it works.

[GlyphGryph]

Our reverse engineering of Martian technology was... not exactly complex. Certainly less than the stuff you described. We managed to reverse engineer plasma weapons, learned to work with their alien alloys (but notably never figured out how to produce it), and how to unlock our own psychic potential, which is probably the biggest thing. But that was basically based around them TELLING us how to do. We couldn't figure it out on our own.

[Kaje]

Are you guys actually having an argument over how/why we haven't reverse engineered alien techology?