My suggestion: cooperative tabletop games.

Wing Commander is a universe of WW2 dogfighters and aircraft carriers; this spiritual sequel hews pretty closely to those conventions.

What about... http://xkcd.com/413/

"What's wrong with Perry?"

I'll admit, a lot of the story ends up of your own making. But that's the great thing...the game facilitates that. All the raw material was there - the nickname, the events, and so on.

Here's why you should play XCOM: Colonel Margeet "Scotch" Bakker.

I totally agree. You empathize with Lara tremendously in this game. The character animations, the detailed sound effects, the comments she makes as she navigates the world - the end result being that it's not a faceless protagonist the bad guys are after...it's you.

Perhaps the sniper and medic achievements suggest that aliens will pick up some kind of class system. That would be interesting; it'd mix up the later missions a lot more instead of being all mutons and heavy floaters with a robot thrown in.

Item #2 there is a viewpoint that I have never been able to understand. Do you assume that any other intelligent/sentient/whateveryouwannacallit species wouldn't have any of those behaviors? That's a rather humongous assumption.

What strikes me the most is how the ships from the same franchise tend to look very similar. Like how all the Warhammer ships look like variations on Jabba's Sail Barge, and all the EVE ships look like...I dunno...termite mounds?

It's too big to fit on the chart.

Saga was terrific! For a fully voice-acted fan-made production, it had remarkably few fourth-wall-breaking moments, too. (Like, seriously, it's nice that one of you can do a "House" impression, but...really?)

Ah. Try bringing a sniper with In the Zone and a plasma rifle to a terror site. Groups of cryssalids become three free kills - and you still have both actions left for whatever your original plan was. :)

So, I know I'm dredging here, but I've been playing a lot of XCOM lately specifically with the goal of trying some new things out, and here are my thoughts on your trees:

Awesome. That right there is XCOM at it's best: making you tell a story.

Because it forces a choice between Snap Shot and Squadsight, and that's an interesting choice. I usually go for the latter, but Snap Shot + In the Zone can be frakkin' amazing.

Gotta love that Adagio for Strings set against monstrous space relics.

To be fair, the Galactica does both look and behave like an aircraft carrier rather than a spaceship.

How about the Genesis probe? It collected solar wind particles, with the aim of returning them to Earth.

That landing system was actually the least risky landing that would accomplish the mission. They evaluated and rejected many other architectures before settling on the SkyCrane, and then they tested the crap out of it before it went to Mars.