Something you made me think of - in Project Zomboid, you get a lot of contextual actions that aren’t just based on the thing you right-clicked on, but also the objects that are nearby, in your pack, in nearby containers, etc. If you had a dev team that was devoted to it, you could have a stupid amount of detail in a turn based system by implementing something like that which shows all of your available actions based on not just what you’re currently holding but the terrain around you and the things your nearby allies are carrying and so on.
In another comment someone talked about team reloads, which made me think of how some support weapons in Helldivers 2 become far more effective if another player assists you with using them, and that would be a prime example of what you could do with that kind of context-sensitive setup. It also opens up the door to snipers with spotters, more advanced fire and movement that happens simultaneously, environmental interactions like rigging a bridge with explosives…
Yeah exactly. The point here is to try and make turnbased combat feel like an elite squad cooperating with one another rather than a bunch of individual pawns being moved around a chessboard. Context-sensitive team actions in a very widely implemented way would take turnbased combat in a direction that has currently been entirely unexplored, at least to my knowledge I know of nothing that has tried out the concept.
My thinking here is to not radically move away from Xcom’s original sim-style but to build on top of it, to advance it. The remakes basically radically move away from it instead of truly building on it while Xenonauts on the other hand doesn’t truly advance it in the way that I would want to see from a title trying to truly be a sequel rather than a fan-letter or expansion pack like TFTD was.
Unfortunately I’m filled with ideas without the technical ability to implement.
Something you made me think of - in Project Zomboid, you get a lot of contextual actions that aren’t just based on the thing you right-clicked on, but also the objects that are nearby, in your pack, in nearby containers, etc. If you had a dev team that was devoted to it, you could have a stupid amount of detail in a turn based system by implementing something like that which shows all of your available actions based on not just what you’re currently holding but the terrain around you and the things your nearby allies are carrying and so on.
In another comment someone talked about team reloads, which made me think of how some support weapons in Helldivers 2 become far more effective if another player assists you with using them, and that would be a prime example of what you could do with that kind of context-sensitive setup. It also opens up the door to snipers with spotters, more advanced fire and movement that happens simultaneously, environmental interactions like rigging a bridge with explosives…
Yeah exactly. The point here is to try and make turnbased combat feel like an elite squad cooperating with one another rather than a bunch of individual pawns being moved around a chessboard. Context-sensitive team actions in a very widely implemented way would take turnbased combat in a direction that has currently been entirely unexplored, at least to my knowledge I know of nothing that has tried out the concept.
My thinking here is to not radically move away from Xcom’s original sim-style but to build on top of it, to advance it. The remakes basically radically move away from it instead of truly building on it while Xenonauts on the other hand doesn’t truly advance it in the way that I would want to see from a title trying to truly be a sequel rather than a fan-letter or expansion pack like TFTD was.
Unfortunately I’m filled with ideas without the technical ability to implement.