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[Cthulhu]

Yes, for real.  I'm making it.  More specifically, I'm adapting the Chain Reaction 3.0 rules (Don't worry, the rulebook I linked was released for free) to the original X-COM.  That ruleset is extremely adaptable and so far it's going really smoothly.

I have a rough draft pdf of the Equipment section of the rules you can download here.  It's pretty tentative stuff and I'll need to do some playtests to see if everything is balanced.  A lot of the stats and stuff probably won't mean much for people who aren't familiar with the Chain Reaction ruleset so I'll go over a little bit of info so you understand what you're reading.

Range is in inches, and is self-explanatory.  Targets means how many shooting dice can be allocated per turn.  A gun with T3 can shoot three times per turn, allocating those shots in any way desired as long as it follows two rules:  You have to expend one shot per inch of empty space between two targets, and the shots can only be allocated over a spread of inches equal to the gun's Target rating.  Impact is the gun's power.  When you score a hit, you roll 1d6.  If it's below the gun's impact rating, the target is dead.

I'm tempted to start statting out the aliens and stuff and start making force composition charts, but I'd like people to be able to understand what they're reading and Two Hour Wargames books are notoriously hard to navigate, so I might write up a concise explanation of the rules first.

I'll also explain some of my decisions regarding the guns and how they differ from the original X-COM.  The first one is just a greater variety of conventional weapons.  This is mainly to give the game a broader scope.  If you wanted to play a game with civilian resistance fighters against the aliens, giving them all stock assault rifles wouldn't make much sense.

The game's made with campaigning in mind, so I tried to create a sliding scale of weapon strength.  Conventional weapons are pretty weak, though cannons will probably have a lot of utility through the whole game.  AP ammo will be great for dropping Mutons and Sectopods and the like.  Laser weapons are somewhat stronger, able to defeat Tier 1 armor (Which floaters and possibly snakemen will probably use), and have extremely long range.  Plasma weapons are just crazy strong in general.  Most of my changes are geared toward keeping the guns diverse.  The Heavy Plasma's been turned into a sniper/anti-armor weapon.  It's not the be all and end all of guns anymore.  The Blaster Launcher can only fire once a mission, mainly to keep things balanced. 

Armor's probably the iffiest thing, and will take playtesting to make sure it actually works.  Again, it's mainly designed to create a nice power curve for campaigning.  When you start out you're wearing coveralls and using assault rifles.  The aliens are hard to take down and their weapons ignore every form of protection available.  As times goes on your armor and weapons evolve until you're on an even footing with the aliens.

That's what I've got so far, and I'm working on more.  What I'm mainly looking for with the thread is feedback and ideas.  Do you have any ideas how I can make the equipment (And the other stuff I eventually put here) better?  What would be really nice is formatting advice.  I'm not a graphic designer, and I don't know how to make the PDF flow well.  Advice on that front would help a lot.

What's stuff you'd like to see in here?

EDIT:  Here's a big one.  What font should I use?  The font I have on there right now is Georgia I think, with Arial tables.  Both look really ugly when zooming the pdf in and out.

[Cthulhu]

Reserved

[Stargrasper]

Sounds cool.  Have you devised a mechanic for UFOs yet?  Naturally, several different types of UFO should be flying around along with your fighters and transports.  Capturing UFOs (preferably intact) is somewhat central to XCOM, not damaging them either while shooting them down or infiltrating them.  Terror missions would be interesting, too, due to the large presence of civilians and non-combatants.

As far as expanding human weaponry and other technology, I think that's cool.  I think you should have three distinct tech trees, all human tech, don't get too fancy here, all alien tech, this is where you get fancy, and hybrid tech, where you can get....creative.  With your human tech, as it improves, don't invent anything too futuristic.  It makes it look like you're using the alien tech anyway.

Formatting...honestly, if you aren't sure how to do it, just use Excel.  Excel has some really nice formatting to make it all pretty-like and then you can just export it as a PDF.  For font...use a serif font of some form.  Roman is fine, if a bit plain.  Helvetica is the only sans-serif font I would suggest for this.  I suggest this because I have a tiny little bit of typographic background to me...serif fonts are traditionally used for print media.  I can't remember what you're supposed to use for computers, but since these are just as likely to be printed out, use a serif font.  Just find one that looks easy to read.

[Cthulhu]

I haven't started on vehicles or anything like that.

The tentative plan I have for technology is "research points."  X-COM gets so many points each campaign turn, based on the number of researchers.  Captured alien technology, bodies, etc. give small one time bonuses to RP and live aliens permanently increase RP income.  Various technologies can be purchased for RP, but you have to fill the prerequisites.  The heavy plasma might require a live snakeman engineer in order to research, you get the idea.

It's all tentative stuff, we'll see.

[_DivideByZero_]

I usually prefer georgia myself--I love using it on school assignments. Laypeople can't seem to tell the difference between Georgia and Times New Roman, but Georgia is simply cleaner and easier to read. I'd experiment with cambria or century schoolbook, those are the two main serif fonts I can think of right now.

Arial--meh. I would personally use verdana for practicality, or tahoma if you want closer spaced text.

[Jervous]

You should either go with...  papyrus or comic sans ms. Or Helvetica!

[Cthulhu]

Helvetica's not bad.  I'm not expecting it to be printed out too much and it's a casual thing, so I ended up going with Arial for tables.  I might use Verdana or Tahoma for the actual text.  The problem is a lot of it doesn't zoom in and out very well.  That's what I'm really looking for, a font that won't look ugly at certain zoom levels.

Also, another section , the opening section this time.  I'm going to probably write the section on how to play (Abridged, but clear enough to give you an idea how to play since the core book is hard to understand) and then start on the force organization charts and such.  Once the game is playable on an individual skirmish level I'll start working on campaign rules.

Some explanations of stuff.  There are two Attribute Tables, both because the number of attributes is hard to make a table around using only d6, and because the last three Attributes should be rarer than the others.  The attributes not on the table are mainly for aliens to give them special powers.   Berserk is for Chryssalids and makes them charge into melee all crazy-like.  Big Head is for Sectoids and makes their weakness more pronounced.  Huge is to make the stuff like Reapers and Sectopods harder to kill.  Flyer is for Floaters and the like (Concern:  I think the penalty for falling might be too high.  I might change it so they have to take a Rep test to prevent it.  Otherwise getting hit while flying is automatic death), and Infravision is for Celatids, who can see through walls in the lore.

I've already found two big problems I'll fix for the final drafts of this stuff.  The Special Rules for Stars thing says there are four rules.  There's an extra one called Star Power I didn't use because it's gratuitous.  Stars don't need three ways to avoid getting hurt.  The other one is making it more clear that rolling a 12 on the attributes table means to roll on the Rare Attributes table.

[kerlc]

nice.

[Pandarsenic]

I am interested in this.

[warhammer651]

watching with interest

[nenjin]

A couple things occurred to me.

GWS has quite a few campaign driven games. You might want to poke around their rules systems to see if there's something you could use. Mordheim and Necromunda both average about 11 guys per squad, not all of which can always be fielded in one game. If you want more guys, shoot for a lower level of per-unit-complexity.

Second there was this old ALIENS (as in the trade marked movie) table top game that I think dates back from the 80s. I remember playing on a custom-built table top set up this one guy had made. It basically consisted of a wooden box about 4" x 2", and the interior was mapped out into tiles and had furniture and stuff attached to it. The scenario was literally a squad of marines trying to make it across a large room alive.

I mention all that in case maybe you can find rules for it, because the rules system tended toward LETHAL. (Think Space Hulk levels of needing firing angles to cover yourself and how dead you are in melee combat.)

[Stargrasper]

The must have been an awesome custom-built box.  Seems like you could accomplish the same thing here through creative use of Legos, though.  Building tabletop levels with Lego actually sounds like a good idea...makes for easy construction and, when you start blasting holes in walls, destruction.  Also ease of assembling fields on the fly.  Just keep track of what the players can and can't see and where things they can't see are.

How's development coming along?  Do you have anything more to show than your little pdf that really doesn't say anything useful (no offense)?

[Cthulhu]

I'll probably have the force organization charts and unit stats done and uploaded by Friday at the latest.  I'll run a few solo games and once skirmishes are playable I'll do ufos, figure out crash recovery, and then look into campaigning

[nenjin]

The must have been an awesome custom-built box.

Thinking back it was actually pretty elegant in its simplicity. Granted, the guy had carpentry tools so he could assemble the box. But once that was done he literally just painted the bottom of the box with grid lines and started adding furniture and other sundry details.

I guess it just seems simple to me after all the 40k and such terrain I've done. It was pretty charming for how self-contained it was. (The game was actually pretty fun too. Almost like a race to reach the other side of the room alive. Team mates? Yeah, those are the things you try to get ahead of so they get eaten instead of you )

edit - somehow quoted the wrong person there...

[Cthulhu]

Is the thing you're talking about this?