StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So how's the political stuffski in the strategic layer? How does interaction with funding countries look, does it present any unique challenges or choices?

I got fucked early on and lost Brazil and South Africa. There's a bit of a catch-22 going on, in that you need money to build satellites, and you need satellites to get money, and sats are the main way to keep panic down. When abduction events happen you can only pick one of three to help, so if you get a lot of abductions, especially right before a Council meet, you're in trouble.

I'm pretty blown away by how primitive the combat is. Guy not attached to cover and visible through tiny gap in map geometry? Easy shot. To-hit rolls are back and they're STILL FUNNY.

I'm no fan of dice rolls either, since they only existed due to technical limitations. I guess the developers couldn't get away from every one of the old X-Com/90s TBT cliches. As for cover, I think part of what has also been abstracted is the nature of bullets and lasers and pew pews to penetrate through walls and thin objects. Meaning if you're not in cover, even someone just spray and praying into a wall will probably kill you.

I'm impressed with the destructible terrain though. I much prefer to blow down the side of a building then do quiet tactical entries and shit. Fuck collateral damage. We're at war!

Snipers and heavies really come into their own late in the game. I'm playing a classic game right now and when the big robot sectopod come out you need the higher pen from plasma heavy cannons and plasma sniper rifles to put them down quickly or they will massacre your entire team in no time. The sniper disabling shot is a god send for this since you will likely need 2 or 3 rounds of focus fire to drop one.

The most impressive part about the destructive terrain is where shots pass directly through objects or terrain to reach a visible target without affecting it. If a single pixel of a target is visible (by which I mean tile, because the idle animations exist to explain away extremely loose definitions of 'visible'), hit shots will simply fly from gun barrel to centre of mass, passing through whatever map geometry might be in the way. In some cases you'll at least get an animation of breaking glass etc, but if the shots pass through ground levels or huge blocks of concrete often there won't even be entry and exit decals, because its just assumed the shot was fired (and hit) during the single frame if animation where a single pixel was visible around cover, even though the game makes no attempt to show this.

Archangel suit + Double-Tap + Squad Sight means 1-2 enemies die every turn, period, barring close-combat situations. Sometimes even then, if you can preposition before you open a door. Early-game, Assaults are king, though, no question. Run-and-gun is the most powerful squaddie ability anywhere. On the flip side, Snap Shot snipers work great with In The Zone, once they're accurate enough to overcome the penalty (scopes help a lot here). You can just churn through an entire swarm of non-covering enemies like drones and such.

Almost as much fun as watching shots pass through two carriage length of train wall on a low oblique shot without even breaking the glass in order to show the to hit roll result. Or squad sight resulting in snipers firing through several levels of terrain and concrete walls.

But when guys are going to spawn behind you and get free moves when spotted, you can't expect much from a game. Over watch being a command you have to issue is probably the funniest feature of the game, however.

Given the choice between Overwatch and Hunker Down, that's actually a very important choice at higher difficulty levels. One doubles cover, the other gives you reaction fire. When you're in partial cover, all of a sudden flattening yourself behind that tiny little stump looks like a good idea...

Is that supposed to be a reply, and if so are you serious? If its a binary choice for what to do with your remaining action, it's pretty obvious only one needs to be an option you choose. If a player ends a turn without using all of a unit's actions, there is pretty much no reason why they shouldn't reaction fire beyond 'force players to press y all the time' or 'punish player'.

You know, Whiney, like in ALL THOSE OTHER GAMES LIKE THIS. :v

Oh man, double shotgun shot through wall; first shot 'missed' and was shown hitting the wall; second shot (fired at 90 degrees to the target, bizarrely) hit and killed the target without affecting the wall.

It's is all quite tactical.

The simplicity of the combat mechanics and the resultant abstractions remind me of a miniatures game, though I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. Like in a minis game, there's an assumption that a unit's position is only an abstract representation of what's "actually" going on, hence why LOS-breaking shots are possible. Familiar to a 40k or Flames of War or whatever player, not so much to someone more used to something like Silent Storm.

Once you get into the headspace it's easy to farm the spawn points and cheese the cover, but having such an active camera and destruction system makes the abstractions pretty jarring. I'm really just surprised the implementation is so primitive, because all that matter is range and cover, which is a bit sad.

So, snarky commentary on specific mechanics aside, is it fun?

First impressions seem to be good from most folks; but just wanna be sure before buying.

I'm always amused by how much you let a stranger on the internet bother you.

I found it fun though I have little experience with turn based tactics games and even less experience with the X-Com series.

Zinegata wrote:So, snarky commentary on specific mechanics aside, is it fun?

First impressions seem to be good from most folks; but just wanna be sure before buying.

I'm liking it, for the most part. It's a little on the simplistic side for me at times, like playing an automated version of glorified chess with pieces on a grid. The tactical game feels a little lacking compared to Silent Storm, Fallout Tactics, Jagged Alliance, and Chaos Gate. It makes up for this with the strategic component, I think, which outstrips all but Jagged Alliance. Building a base is a bit reminiscent of Dungeon Keeper (et al) lite, soldier management is interesting, and so on. If it was just a tactical game it would feel a bit thin, but combined with the strategic layer it's a fun game.

The strategy level is pretty neat, but even in hard I find there's too many resources. It's a lot more interesting than the cover dance of monster closets that forms most of the tactical play.

Even better than the ground penetrating special effects is that loading the game sometimes doesn't de-spawn (or deactivate monsters) and thus you can have guys miles away shooting at you. You can't close up because it'll trigger more monster closets, and you can't hang back unless you're high level.

Brother-Captain Gaius wrote:

Zinegata wrote:So, snarky commentary on specific mechanics aside, is it fun?

First impressions seem to be good from most folks; but just wanna be sure before buying.

I'm liking it, for the most part. It's a little on the simplistic side for me at times, like playing an automated version of glorified chess with pieces on a grid. The tactical game feels a little lacking compared to Silent Storm, Fallout Tactics, Jagged Alliance, and Chaos Gate. It makes up for this with the strategic component, I think, which outstrips all but Jagged Alliance. Building a base is a bit reminiscent of Dungeon Keeper (et al) lite, soldier management is interesting, and so on. If it was just a tactical game it would feel a bit thin, but combined with the strategic layer it's a fun game.

I agree with Gaius. It may be a bit simple, but it's a lot of fun so far.

As usual, Stark is just trying that much harder on his quest to find Peak Jaded. Ignore him, most everyone else does. The game has its flaws, including a truly bad final mission, but I've been having quite a lot of fun with it.

If you'd like to highlight anything I've said that's incorrect, go ahead Whiney! I'm eager to hear your feedback, if you've got any more than 'simple game is fun'. Firing the wrong direction to hit a guy behind solid walls (and his body ending up on a completely different square closer to the firing unit, ffs) is hardly the mark of amazing tactical gaming. Perhaps the shot went all the way around the world and hit the enemy FROM BEHIND.

The shallowness of the decision-making during combat (and cheese either way when you either do it wrong or play the system to win) is a shame, because many a fatnerd felt that a successful turn-based game with a lot of depth could have revitalised a dead genre or put strategy games in general before a broader audience or made console kiddies smarter or whatever. Instead we get a game where the most fun you get is managing your base and digging out your tunnels, and the battles end up just as tiresome as they did in the first game (although, thankfully, much smaller). This'd be more fun if you didn't get so many materials or if the tempo of decision-making was higher.

The spawn cheese is probably the most offensive play element, simply because all the cover abstraction and fruity to-hit rolls could have been a fun romp, but they put in so much cheating it isn't.

CaptHawkeye wrote:I'm always amused by how much you let a stranger on the internet bother you.

I found it fun though I have little experience with turn based tactics games and even less experience with the X-Com series.

It's less bothered and more of there's too much snark crap on specific mechanics to wade through. I honestly can't even make heads or tails of where the cover system fails despite several paragraphs of raging on it; especially since people are apparently not even playing at the same difficulty / game modes!

It's getting in the way of a simple "fun / not fun" overall evaluation, which is what I'm interested in before buying.

Thanks for the evals. So concensus is "simplified, but still fun". On the buy list then.

Did you really just say its bad for people to talk about mechanics if its too complicated for you to understand?

However, the combat makes it a shame the demo sucked so bad (simply being the first two missions). If it had been even the third and fourth missions, it would have given people a much better idea of how the cover thing works (ie minitatures abstracted dice style and not 'draw bullet see where it goes' style). But hey, you can have my copy. :V

Stark wrote:Did you really just say its bad for people to talk about mechanics if its too complicated for you to understand?

No, I'm saying what you said was near-incomprehensible. For instance it took Gaius saying the rules are like a minis game for me to "get" that cover in this game is apparently not based on true line of sight; but on simply a set percentage.

And such pendantry avoids whether or not the game actually works and clicks together and is still fun.

But hey keep on uselessly putting words in other people's mouths.

Stark wrote:Did you really just say its bad for people to talk about mechanics if its too complicated for you to understand?

Well, it's an important thing for me, since I have no taste and can overlook a lot of mechanical faults if the game "feels" right, but what you're describing sounds like it would grate me to no end.

Stark wrote:However, the combat makes it a shame the demo sucked so bad (simply being the first two missions). If it had been even the third and fourth missions, it would have given people a much better idea of how the cover thing works (ie minitatures abstracted dice style and not 'draw bullet see where it goes' style).

It's pretty funny because a game from the 90s (JA2) had a cover system of sorts where it mattered where the fire was coming from, so shooting through a window at a guy hiding behind a file cabinet would have made the bullet hit something along the way, even if you could actually see the guy.

Stark wrote:But hey, you can have my copy. :V

Uh....dibs?

PeZook wrote:It's pretty funny because a game from the 90s (JA2) had a cover system of sorts where it mattered where the fire was coming from, so shooting through a window at a guy hiding behind a file cabinet would have made the bullet hit something along the way, even if you could actually see the guy.

I'm actually okay with not relying on true LOS for bullet path determination because of instances like this in JA2.

Yeah, not as "realistic", but given that I don't actually have a soldier's eye-view of the shot it becomes very frustrating to realize you just spent 4 turns and a ton of AP shooting at something that you would never have hit in the first place due to cover.

Zinegata wrote: Yeah, not as "realistic", but given that I don't actually have a soldier's eye-view of the shot it becomes very frustrating to realize you just spent 4 turns and a ton of AP shooting at something that you would never have hit in the first place due to cover.

I guess you should've gotten the hint after the second or third turn?

How is it in any way better/more tactical to ignore the terrain altogether when the smallest sliver of the target is visible? If it matters how much crap is between you and the target, then suddenly position becomes important and you're forced to flank/use grenades/supress and close.