Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters - Grey Knights turn-based tactical RPG

[Galdred]

Square-based squad-based mission-driven *not to mention podbased* game with light RPG mechanics and base building that add static bonuses rather than full-flegded management + coverbased ranged and limited itemization and character customization? Seems obvious to me that the game was inspired by it or at least that it follows the trends of the time especially concerning structure and itemization, and I’m decently sure the devs even said so during the Kickstarter.

Sounds very superficial to me. For starters, nowadays everyone mentions nuxcom as an inspiration to score recognition among the normies, including Galdred with Zodiac Legion.

Second, calling bog standard running around the map to clear out encounters 'pod-based' is at the very least a yuge stretch, as well as citing 'mission-driven' as a common feature, given that King Arthur doesn't have procedural map generation and the missions are also much more story driven.

Mentioning cover-based ranged combat is also somewhat... odd, given that this is anything but among the game's focuses and you can just about play this game without even paying attention to it.

Finally what stands out the most is that King Arthur features much less lethality than nuxcom, and most importantly its combat is deterministic. Having a guy stand in the open to make everyone focus on him is not something you'd ever consider in nuxcom, or even doing something like leaving him to tie up some target and eat a power attack to the face because he is sure to survive it without problems. The moment-to-moment gameplay of these games is just completely different.

The X-COM inspiration for the earliest prototypes of Zodiac Legion predates the announcement of NuXCOM. That said, the focus here is very different, as the idea was to translate the X-COM overarching campaign structure into something fantasy, without retaining much of its tactical mechanisms. When I started, I was hesitant between fantasy X-COM and turn based hard scifi space ship combat (ala Children of a Dead Earth), but I went with the former because both Dungeon Crawlers and tactical games with a dynamic campaign were dearer to me (also, realistic space combat felt very hard to convey in an interesting way during prototyping).

On a sidenote, Chaos Gate feels much closer to nuXCOM than King Arthur when it comes to campaign structure:
You get a cast of quasi infinitely replaceable random characters, get to take decisions to tackle random missions and events, and you have a flying base of operation, ala XCOM 2.
The combat system itself is closer from Gears of War, though, with the same 3AP and execution system.