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

SquadCraft 2