[swede123]

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I have no idea how a multiplayer version would work. Multiple human factions competing for the honor of fighting the aliens? Hmmm. Actually. That might have some potential. Different companies vie for the funding of the world governements and gain or lose it by outperforming the others. You lose when you run out of funding, or when the aliens kill you off. Well, the problem is the time elapsing outside of combat is quasi-real time. You'd probably have to discretize the passage of days some how. I'm not sure how you'd deal with multiple teams getting a chance to detect, shoot down, and raid the same UFO. And if you aren't the one who gets to raid it, what do you do while the other guy is? Do you get to raid the UFO at the same time? Take pot shots at the other guy's men?

Really, though, this was a game that was written for 386's running DOS. I wouldn't mind a version that runs on Athlon 64's running WinXP.

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You could have some added levels of complexity when it comes to missions. For example, two different players could investigate a crash site, and possibly end up fighting each other as well as the aliens. You would get scored based on your interactions with other players as well as success in dealing with aliens.

How about having some diplomacy options, ala Masters of Orion, where you could ally with other players or choose to directly attack their bases. If an ally you could share tech research, choose to share resources etc. Of course there would be much more complexity involved in this type of system, but I think it would be fairly easy to expand the alien types, space craft types and so forth. Deeper tech trees and more varieties of aliens would push the inevitable martian battle back a ways, leaving more time for multi player stuff.

Actually, the more I think about it the more I think it would kick ass if it still were single player, as long as there was more to the research and technology aspect of the game. A huge part of the charm playing the game in the first place was doing the research and finding out which tech trees were useful and which were not. Another great part of the game was discovering new and more dangerous aliens (Mutons and Etherals) as the game progressed. Imagine having a ton more aliens to figure out and beat.

Basically the combat engine is perfect the way it is, so you wouldn't have to tweak that at all. Just add to the complexity of the tech trees and the alien models and spice up the graphics a bit and I'd definitely buy this game in a heart-beat.

Swede