Thanks to SoulFilcher
Description
Basic Description
A highly strategic and tactical game. Players will alternate between commanding troops and customising them. Plenty of equipment, strategies, and game settings provide tonnes of replayability.
Inspired by X-COMs designed by Julian Gollop
Game Concepts
- Easy to learn and play, hard to master
- Can have short games, roughly between 30 mins to 1 hr
- Can be played with plenty of friends (11 max)
- Very rewarding towards players that make strategic decisions
- Very dynamic gameplay that contributes to replayability
- Realistic, including a destructible environment
- Balanced gameplay
- Very enjoyable
- Very flexible in many ways, including game setups, competition, and the decisions available
- Risk-reward gameplay. Decisions come with advantages and disadvantages
Game Flow and Objective
Objective: Kill all enemy marines
Every players starts with 4 marines in any room. After 1 team remains, players can customise their marines in preparation for the next room/round. Each one can equip up to 2 guns, 1 armor, and 6 items. The game ends based on the majority vote on the win condition from the lobby.
Marine Equipment
Each one has their own unique strengths and weaknesses. The following are some examples:
Sub Machine Gun (SMG)
Very effective at wearing down armor. Only accurate at short ranges.
Plasma Rifle
Powerful and regenerates ammo. It is more expensive to obtain than other items.
Heavy Armor
Allows marines to survive several more hits. It's weight limits what else you could equip on the marine.
Personal Teleporter
Marines can instantly travel to a target location. There are limited uses and cooldowns in between.
Cloaking Device
The marine remains cloaked until they perform an action, that usually involves attacking, and cloak re-enables at the start of each turn. There are ways to detect cloaked units and taking damage also disables cloak.
Replayability
The following are sources of randomness:
- Which room the players fight in
- Lighting
- Where the mineral pickups are spawned
- Where players start in each room
- Firing weapons at long range
- Amount of armor that degrades after being hit by projectiles
- The game mode if random is selected
The following are what helps make the map dynamic:
- The large variety of marine equipment to experiment with
- The different research paths you can choose
- Different game modes for a different experience
- The interesting decision making in tactical battles
- Figuring how to beat or counter other players
- Learning how to adjust play style based on the amount of players
- Learning to improvise with what is available
- The behaviour of enemy players, especially if it changes often
- Weighing the risk and rewards of your decisions
Videos
Final Comments
This is not supposed to be an exact replica of the original X-COM games. Just simplified, multiplayer supportive, and my own spin on the gameplay. I've also used many game concepts and mechanics that I feel make the original X-COMs great.
A big thanks to all who helped make this map possible. This includes those directly involved in this project and the mapster community :D
The SquadCraft 2 Team
