Probably similar in many ways, but ideally I would like to make it as or more in depth with other features from something like xenonauts.

Youve got resources such as vehicles of differing kinds you may choose to deploy or not, but you have to store them somewhere and also be able to repair them. All this comes from pools of funding from at first probably just completing a mission according to guidelines, but some things take maybe an R&D program or just outright raiding a rival faction or something.

Maybe you want to go a more special forces type route and have a few exceptionally well trained / equipped soldiers and leverage things like helicopters to do infil and exfil and leverage the element of surprise.

Maybe you want to act more like a conventional military and go with larger numbers with decent equipment and a wider array of possible vehicles and support systems.

Maybe you want to focus as much as possible on gathering intel before missions, maybe you want a more intelligent active battlefield info you can access in mission via various sensors.

So... what I am aiming for is something that eventually allows for a more broad array of mission profiles and sort of map archetypes, which, depending on many factors, will have surprises that may occur, like an enemy force having the ability to call for reinforcements that maybe you did not know about, and might force you to withdraw.

Or maybe some missions will take place with a relatively high number of civillian AI running around and your org you work for/run will suffer massively if you just go scorched earth.

I dunno, these are all ambitions at this point, and Im going to focus on at the very least getting a functional combat prototype done first, and then testing out how well that and what I can make combat AI actually do actually works.

Its possible I'll find some kind of thing that really works well, or really doesn't work, and change scope significantly.

So far all I have really figured out is that a near future setting would seem to work best with the scope of either my minimal working concept, or a more extended version of it.

???