Quoting: fabertaweI so nearly bought XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen in the last sale but have such a backlog of games I put it off. Looks like I'll miss the free expansion now.

It looks like if you pick up XCOM 2 and War of the Chosen before December 3rd you'll still get this expansion for free? I'm not 100% sure but that's what it seems to be saying.

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Time to pick this up then! I was waiting for the issues to be resolved and the Linux icon to reappear on Steam. :)

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I helped Kickstart this game, then played a few hours and discovered I just wasn't as interested in it as I'd thought. I don't regret it, though, my little brothers got a lot of playtime out of it and I'm happy to have helped bring something to fruition that other people can enjoy in the future. :D

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Quoting: DraconicroseI've been following the development of this one for a while. It's funny, I really like it though it's a bit different than my usual games. Kinda reminds me of the old zoo tycoon: marine mania. :P Too bad we don't get whales. Anyway, just in case anyone is interested, have my let's play [External Link].

I actually bought Zoo Tycoon (and its two expansions) after being inspired by visiting a zoo (the San Diego zoo, maybe?), and spent a lot of happy hours with it. This looks like a great game, I'll check out your Let's Play while I wait for it to return to Linux. :)

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Quoting: "BTRE"It’ll otherwise feel a little threadbare if there isn’t more variety possible there for fan-favorite nations like the Ottomans or Prussia.

Note: I bought Dharma today but haven't had a chance to play it yet, but: I think I remember reading in the developer diaries that countries that had unique governments before now have unique government reforms. It might be just the initial one, but they'll still be unique. That being said, now that this new system is in place, you can be a hundred percent sure future DLCs will introduce unique reforms for a lot more countries now that it's so easy to differentiate them without having to code up a whole new government.

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The Communist Dogifesto has quite an amusing setting, with Russian space dogs aboard a space station becoming really rather intelligent and taking it over.

Hey, that sounds like fun! Something different, getting to play as a dog with a gun running around taking over a space station—

Now Laika has taken over and you are the only one left who can take back the station, or at least attempt to escape with your life!

—oh. Well, well it was a fun idea while it lasted. :)

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Quoting: Kels"Top" down in space. :S:

The best part about space is you can just pick any direction to be down, and it's right! :D

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Quoting: scaineI played a mission last night where I lasted a staggering 38 rounds - that's 8 rounds at the highest alarm level, which introduces a second and third enforcer (you get one at alarm level 5 too) AND pinpoints the location of all your agents! It's possible to survive these, but you do need a bit of luck if your game has gone off the rails that badly! I like to leave before hitting alarm level 5 usually!

I'm suitably impressed! I think the worst I've ever gotten to was level 5, and that was already more way more than I wanted to deal with. :) Though probably my fondest memory of the game was the time I got myself into a really sticky situation, and had to use all three of my turn rewinds in a row before I finally figured out a combination of actions on the last one that got all my agents out safely—it was nerve-wracking and tense, but also an incredible feeling and it might not have happened without that pressure.

Quoting: scaineAgree about the ending and it does lend itself to a natural sequel, but two reasons I can't see that happening. First, I'm not led to believe that it did particularly well commercially, and second, Klei have never really done sequels since their early Eets/Shank days. […] I can't see room for an Invisible sequel in that workload, sadly. Although I'd buy it in a heartbeat - loved the idea of making the game a more management-style spy thriller!

Yeah, I have no idea what the prospects of an official sequel are. Though it must've done well enough to warrant the Contingency Plan expansion it got, no? Regardless, it's not like the game mechanics are copyrighted or anything—now that we know just how fun a stealthy, turn-based game with almost no RNG can be maybe some other enterprising company can make the open-ended spy-agency-management game we'd like to see. :)

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I can absolutely agree that Invisible, Inc. (I,I.) is a fantastic game. The lack of RNG means you generally have no one to blame for your failures but yourself, and makes it incredibly tactical—you'll always be able to know if something you want to do is possible or not (once you've played through the tutorial and learned how things work).

I've always felt that the setting was a bit wasted, though. Much like many people wanted FTL to be more open instead of a railroaded drive to the end each time, I felt like the setting was perfect for a kind of open world freelance spy agency game. You've got a setting with multiple mega-corps all willing to hire you to sabotage their competitors, and it seems perfect for an open-ended game about running a spy agency, taking randomly-generated missions (much like the current game) and playing all the corps against each other. But instead, the opening cutscene has your organization in tatters and you on the run with a strict time limit at the end of which you either win or you die. I don't actually mind that in FTL because the ending is triumphant if you win, having saved the galaxy! But the ending in I,I. is really kind of a major downer from a story perspective (I won't spoil it though), and once you've seen it once you're like "Why would I want to play this again when I know the outcome?"

Still, maybe I can hope for an Invisible, Inc. 2 (II: II? :P) in the style of XCOM 2, set in that same world after the events of the first game but with a more open-ended and non-time-limited playstyle (maybe a sort of human resistance…?). That might ultimately be my biggest gripe with I,I., is the time limits. I know, they're there to up the tension and force you to keep moving, but I just don't enjoy that type of forced progression. If the time would simply not start ticking until you actually did something (rob a safe, knock out a guard, a camera sees you, etc.) that'd be great, allowing you to scout ahead and set up a plan rather than do everything on the run. (For those curious, the difficulty settings are VERY customizable and you can actually set up a playthrough this way if you want, but it's obviously not the intended behavior.) Ultimately that forced time-limit progression stress is why I've only played through it a few times.

One additional, huge, key difference to XCOM is how your agents’ rounds play out. In Invisible Inc, you can switch between agents at any point in an agent’s round freely. There’s no concept of an agent’s round being “spent” except when their action points run out.

And having mentioned XCOM, I just have to point out that that's technically the case there too, it's just that units in XCOM generally only have 2–3 action points so there's generally less switching between them in the middle of a turn.

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As someone with…[checks]…uh, 362 hours in FTL, Subset Games pretty much earned a free pass from me to buy whatever they put out next. As long as it had a native Linux version, anyway, so I'm really glad to see it's on its way. :)

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