Attn: XCOM shit in this thread.

[Covenant]

I'd have been annoyed if it was an office plaza coordinating all the efforts, something about it just seems like begging an alien force to Independence Day you into the ground. The fortified bunker concept isn't so bad, but honestly, they're asking me to excavate NOW? EU makes it seem more glaring because not only do I need to dig THEN place a structure, which seems lame, it isn't actually a necessary structure, just a bonus, so it feels like such a waste of my time. They could have at least done something interesting with it, but megh.

Original X-COM had, at least, the excuse that the alien threat had been mostly ignored and that X-COM had a basic base and that it just was kinda shitty, but until that point you were wacky tin-foil hat UFOlogists. Early game UFOD started off with a few sectoids landing in farms to diddle the livestock like intergalactic Welshmen, which annoyed us but it wasn't an existential threat. UFOD sectoids could core one of your soldiers but it was actually quite a curbstomp in the whole "Three terrified big-eye Roswell Aliens versus twelve kamikaze soldiers bristling with high explosives" sort of way.

It was only after the first terror mission that they actually did anything serious enough to kill a handful of soldiers, let alone a wipe. Then it was floaters being an annoying joke, and then snakemen showed up to make you curse the game out. I really miss snakemen, and racially segregated missions. What's this nonsense of finding CyberDicks and Floaters and Cryssalids all chumming it up together?

I feel the difficulty curve in EU is a bit off. The game feels very rushed, without much of the prep time that I liked to have (at least not effective prep time, not enough shitty ufos to down and too many "three missions at once" things) before the storm, and that was important because UFOD's best time was that beginning phase before mid-game made it a slog. I don't get enough time to start developing new weapons and deciding on my strategy for the game, which I think is a shame.

[PeZook]

The "you can only respond to one crisis at a time" thing does sound like such a horribly artificial limitation ; Since, you know, a paramilitary alien-fighting organization would naturally attempt to upscale its response capability if it was continously being fucked on funding because of...inadeuqate response capability. Not being able to do that or even consider it reeks of gamey constraints.

They could've allowed it but made it expensive enough that getting the ability to deploy another team would be a resource allocation decision between that and research/production/more sats etc.

[Stark]

Aside from the 'choose one place to go and take penalties elsewhere' thing its not a problem for the player ingame, because while your little car is driving home nothing else ever happens. But its pretty silly that you can HAVE 30 soldiers but you can only deploy four at once, even if the whole world is about to quit the program and you need to do all the terror sites at once.

It just stuns me that one of their goals was to speed up combat and make it less tiresome, and they actually made it more frustrating than the original. Just as much as the first game, I saw terror sites as an annoyance to be rushed through so I could go back to managing resources and dealing with finances and make actual progress. I really looked forward to ten-fifteen minute battles, but with the mechanics forcing a defensive, cautious advance to contact so all your snipers can shoot through walls for the win, they drag out.

[The Yosemite Bear]

is the full version as choppy as the steam demo?

[PeZook]

Aside from the 'choose one place to go and take penalties elsewhere' thing its not a problem for the player ingame, because while your little car is driving home nothing else ever happens. But its pretty silly that you can HAVE 30 soldiers but you can only deploy four at once, even if the whole world is about to quit the program and you need to do all the terror sites at once.

Well, it might work, mechanically, or it might not ; I can't say since I haven't played it, but it just sounds artificial - and as I mentioned before, I heavily value immersion and touchy-feely stuff. You know how it is with stories - a writer can obviously manufacture whatever reasons he thinks are appropriate to make the story go forward, but when the reason is absurdly stupid then it just makes it so much more difficult to enjoy the movie/book/whatever. Games are somewhat similar, I can accept a lot of gamey stuff done for balance reasons if it's at least halfway believable...but this skims the line a bit hard, since you'd think X-COM would be able to borrow some extra "normal" transport planes or something to deploy their hundreds of dudes around when the EXISTENCE OF THE EARTH is on the line.

Why not just throw things at the player in large amounts instead? There's no reason it wouldn't work if you set it just right (IE. always slightly more to do than you can handle, unless you spend resources into making sure you can)

[Stark]

Man, the whole difficulty tuning thing is a problem, a longstanding one for the genre, driven by the core mechanics. This game doesn't fix them. If I told you the game is a race to 100% accuracy and lategame increases difficulty by increasing hitpoints, would this surprise you?

[PeZook]

Man, the whole difficulty tuning thing is a problem, a longstanding one for the genre, driven by the core mechanics. This game doesn't fix them. If I told you the game is a race to 100% accuracy and lategame increases difficulty by increasing hitpoints, would this surprise you?

Disappoint, yes, but not really surprise

I suppose it's still head and shoulders better than the original, but the problems described here are serious, both from a mechanics and immersion standpoint.

[Stark]

While it definitely ditches some XCOM bullshit, I think it's so different in how it plays tactically that they're not very comparable. They're both tedious cheatfests, but in different ways, and ultimately UFO sucks because its old and ugly and XCOM sucks because its built on ideas I don't like. :V

But man I want you to play it to find out how your immersion handles shooting through walls happening literally every single turn. White Haven says mods are already on the job of fixing it, but that doesn't make me want to give these guys my money.

[Zinegata]

is the full version as choppy as the steam demo?

Both the PC and PS3 version have their share of choppiness from what I've seen; not sure compared to the demo.

[PeZook]

But man I want you to play it to find out how your immersion handles shooting through walls happening literally every single turn. White Haven says mods are already on the job of fixing it, but that doesn't make me want to give these guys my money.

Like I mentioned before, I am pretty sure I'll try to ignore it really hard and fail miserably because such things have a way of grating me to no end

And, well, since I'll have to upgrade my ancient shitbox to play it, I guess I'll pass for the moment

[Zinegata]

Well, it might work, mechanically, or it might not ; I can't say since I haven't played it, but it just sounds artificial - and as I mentioned before, I heavily value immersion and touchy-feely stuff. You know how it is with stories - a writer can obviously manufacture whatever reasons he thinks are appropriate to make the story go forward, but when the reason is absurdly stupid then it just makes it so much more difficult to enjoy the movie/book/whatever. Games are somewhat similar, I can accept a lot of gamey stuff done for balance reasons if it's at least halfway believable...but this skims the line a bit hard, since you'd think X-COM would be able to borrow some extra "normal" transport planes or something to deploy their hundreds of dudes around when the EXISTENCE OF THE EARTH is on the line.

Why not just throw things at the player in large amounts instead? There's no reason it wouldn't work if you set it just right (IE. always slightly more to do than you can handle, unless you spend resources into making sure you can)

I honestly don't mind having only one Sky Ranger so far, because in the old game I ran into situations where I would have to do a marathon series of very long and bloody battles (i.e. double battleship assault!). I personally justify the whole thing as there being only one completed Sky Ranger available in the whole world and remind myself the pain of the big battles. :p

I also like the scope of the new battles - being tight skirmishes, but I'm not sold on the whole cover mechanic thing yet. Stark has beat it to death and ground the corpse into hamburger patties, but he's right that it definitely has issues and it's rather pervasive in my playthrough. I suspect some mods tweaking the mechanics would help.

[PeZook]

I am reminded of UFO: Afterlight, which was the only decent game of a terrible series, which tried to do the whole "limited resources in a fight for your life" thing but failed until a fanboy tweaked some config settings and HOLY SHIT it suddenly became a MUCH better game.

[Zinegata]

I am reminded of UFO: Afterlight, which was the only decent game of a terrible series, which tried to do the whole "limited resources in a fight for your life" thing but failed until a fanboy tweaked some config settings and HOLY SHIT it suddenly became a MUCH better game.

The "Second Wave" thing people mentioned already seem to have some ideas that would make combat more interesting already - like the greater chance of critical hits if you flank, more deadly die rolls, and some variations in trooper stats.

Basically, what I want is to retain the same scope (small, fast firefights of a handful of units on each side that last only 15 minutes or so), but with tweaking of the actual firefight mechanics. I can't exactly pin down yet what I want to change (and I haven't even unlocked most of the cooler gear yet - I'm still basically using starting gear), but the current combat system both charms me and annoys me at the same time over and above the graphical issues.

[streetad]

I don't really mind the whole 'top secret world-saving organisation with massive logos all over everything and about a dozen guys in a hidden underground base' thing - the obvious design aesthetic they are going for is the Saturday morning kids cartoon eg GI Joe or Mask and those things are practically mandatory despite making no sense.

And it's not like the base design in the original was much better - you could just use your infinite laser cannon money to build seven bases with exactly the same optimal layout around the world and hire as many staff as you wanted to fill them. If you got bored of base invasion missions two fusion launchers and a gravity shield would make the place untouchable.

I've only played a couple of hours of the new one so not really qualified to judge but I am finding the strategic element somewhat lacking so far. Only one thing happening at a time and the fact that ufos don't actually seem to be up to anything tangible that I can actively put a stop to seems like a step backwards.

On the tactical level I am enjoying it so far - haven't noticed enough of the 'shooting through solid objects' thing for it to become irritating and liking the shorter missions. I do miss the ability to deliberately level the entire map with fire and high explosives.

[Vendetta]

X-Com purists will be happy to know that psionics make the late game complete broken cheese by messing with the AI's target choices.

Since the AI will prioritise targets it has flanked, and if you mind control one in the middle of a group the rest will be flanking it, they will happily turn around and murder the turncoat, wasting their turn of shooting.

[Covenant]

I've only played a couple of hours of the new one so not really qualified to judge but I am finding the strategic element somewhat lacking so far. Only one thing happening at a time and the fact that ufos don't actually seem to be up to anything tangible that I can actively put a stop to seems like a step backwards.

In truth, the UFOs actually ARE up to stuff. I believe the normal ones are harvest operations, and then there are also Abduction UFOs (why don't they abduct people? Why do they drop those drop-pods?) as well as Terror Mission UFOs at least. But because some asshole at 2K decided to disable their visibility, you never see nor can intercept a UFO enroute to mission. If you download the mod you can see them again, and instead of having 3 abduction missions at once you can shoot two of them down and only have one abduction mission on the ground to do.

Why not just throw things at the player in large amounts instead? There's no reason it wouldn't work if you set it just right (IE. always slightly more to do than you can handle, unless you spend resources into making sure you can)

They do, and they could, and they did in UFOD as well. In the original, there were a few months early on where you had a little radar coverage so you couldn't see all the stuff going on, and so you'd only see a UFO once and a while and you never felt stressed. It wasn't that the aliens weren't sending in several UFOs, you just could only see in the tiny region of the continent you were on, so you had no clue of where the rest were and what they were up to. That's similar to how EU works, except that when aliens go on a mission people call you on the telephone to ask for assistance.

I like that, that's not a bad idea, but why not extend it so that now we get reports from across the globe whenever there's a UFO buzzing a city and conventional interceptors can't catch it? Now instead of using radar/satellites as the sole source of detection we can use them to grant bonuses, or detect what their missions are, and so forth. Some kind of bonus. Now all of a sudden you aren't twiddling your thumbs waiting, you're being inundated with calls from around the globe, asking you for assistance, but you only have two skyrangers, two interceptors, and are working on getting a third one in a firebase in Russia and you can't keep up with demand...

...that feels more stressed and tense than now, yeah? UFOD you hit that point around the time you got Hyperwave Decoders, since now you saw absofuckinglutely everything and by that point the aliens were pissed and very very active. You were shooting down UFOs so often that you might have to let some go because you can't spare the interceptors, and when you DO shoot them down you might just decide to pass on the UFO recovery. I know I did, especially if it was Etherals or something awful, I'd just pass and say "Eh, let's just keep our heads down until something serious happens."

So if they REALLY were serious about their objective, they should have thrown more tasks at the player than they can handle, and use their quite decent balance between "wounded and dead" to make soldiers often laid up in hospital when a new mission begins. Now you can either pass on the UFO recovery, or deploy the skyranger with some shitty rookies and risk getting them blown to hell. There's no need to restrict me to one skyranger when two or three skyrangers are still not enough to cover EVERYTHING. I just think it's blatantly OBVIOUS what they're doing when they throw down three missions at once and say "Choose the one you can do!"

Anything less artificial than that would have helped. If the aliens had adapted to your strategy, and better yet if Dr. Valen says they're adapting to it, and THEN start doing multiple missions at once to keep you from being successful... okay. That shows the aliens are being clever-er, like when they send in Mutons. Honestly though, shouldn't the Mutons have been first? Anyway, over and over and over. Gets me mad. UFOD had a clever little string to it and this one does not seem to.

[Vendetta]

The "you can only respond to one crisis at a time" thing does sound like such a horribly artificial limitation ; Since, you know, a paramilitary alien-fighting organization would naturally attempt to upscale its response capability if it was continously being fucked on funding because of...inadeuqate response capability. Not being able to do that or even consider it reeks of gamey constraints.

The problem isn't that you can only respond to one thing at a time, the problem is that there is almost never more than one thing to react to, which makes the abductions, the only "choose one, screw the others" choice that actually exists, even more transparently artificial.

I think there have been maximum about two times in the game where there were two live events in the same game day, and since there is no turnaround on the squad in this game it was easy to do one then come back and launch for the other.

Having one squad isn't a big problem, I've played the first game with only one squad/skyranger, because missions stuck around for 3 days in the old one except terror missions (and landed UFOs, but you could easily park an interceptor on them to shoot them down if they tried to leave before your dudes had their 24 hour nap and got back on the bus, interceptors had pretty long loiter time). The thing that took the time in the old one was that even when your skyranger got back to base you had to wait 24 hours before you could send it back out, that turnaround's gone now, so events would have to be much faster to give the same feeling of not enough time to do everything.

The biggest problem on the strategic level though is that there's way too little alien activity and none of it is meaningful. Even with full worldwide detection you're unlikely to see even two UFOs a month, whereas in a game of UFOriginal you would get ten or so easy, and whilst the only ones that really had a tangible effect on shooting them down were terror ships (All the other Alien "missions" were either guaranteed to succeed no matter what you did, or had no ingame effect.) at least it gave you something to shoot for in the strategic phase. The majority of the missions now are the popup missions, abductions, terror sites, and council requests. If they had built up the alien missions concept from the first one, so for instance you got a wave of abductor craft and had to manage your intercept capability to the point where you could shoot them down to stop the abductions, then it would feel like you were making progress in the strategic level in a way that was emergent from the game itself, not imposed by the story structure. Likewise the point in the first game where you could stop terror ships was always a big point (because it also meant you could shoot them down and wait for daylight for the assault, rather than having to fight with limited visibility because NVG wasn't available in the future in 1994), but it was an emergent piece of progress.

As it is, detection in the new game is basically only about getting more money, and the only flow in the strategic phase is the storyline, which greatly reduces any benefit from replaying the game because it lacks the emergent nature of the original's geoscape.

The real limiting factor in the game isn't money or elerium or anything, it's Housing and General Storage. These two assets are taxed by every nook and cranny of tactical and strategic play (ammo and weapons for tactical, fuel, ammo and components for strategic) and they must exist on the base they're used by. Want to have 200 engineers, like some people do in EU? Well, you're going to need a few workshops to be sure, as well as several extra housing areas. Want scientists? Labs... and more housing! How about soldiers? Well, bunches more housing! Well shit, looks like you're out of space to put housing. Too bad now you don't have any room for general stores!

Except that was trivial to do in the old game because you could just use your infinite laser cannon money to build whole new bases just to hold your purloined crap (that you didn't sell for more infinite money, even without infinite laser cannon money you could have more than you'd ever need selling corpses and infinite plasma rifles), scientists (which only needed a hole in the ground), and engineers. It wasn't an interesting strategic challenge unless you view working out your household finances in Excel an interesting strategic challenge, it was tedious accountancy.

Base building in the first game was really just as mechanical as it is in the new one.

[Nephtys]

There's stuff that's good, and stuff that's not so good.

I do actually enjoy the tactical combat model. It's very up-front, and you can see the modifiers going into each attack, know how far a move is, and see the value of cover from XYZ directions. Great. It feels like a tabletop game, and I'm not counting TUs. Likewise, when aliens shoot at me, I'm expecting the Big Green Ball of Death to hit Col. Guile and kill him. Even six soldiers isn't as irking as I had expected, since combats are faster and the maps are smaller. I don't 'REALLY' even mind the encounter move aliens got. They aren't allowed to attack after it, and it just moves them to positions where they'd be anyway if they were moving from cover to cover like your guys.

But some parts of Strategic mode bug me. I for one, fell into the trap of not realizing what a goldmine satelites were, how long they took to get up, how useless labs were and how vital workshops and engineers were. I did what any UFO vet would. I build that second damn lab, so I could get my tech up. Only to find that I was drowning in scientists from abduction and council missions, who didn't need an extra lab. While my engineers couldn't build a laser rifle in two months, simply because there were 10 of them on staff instead of 12.

So... I basically skipped most of the midgame gear. My troops are running around with carapace armor and plasma guns, since I could never even BUILD the damn lasers. I've also lost 4 countries, due to not knowing that it takes 20 days minimum to toss up a satelite, so it actually took me around 40 to get power up, things dug out, sat uplink built and sats out of the workshop.

On the plus side, I do like how every tech gives some sort of advantage. Even corpses. And I've got to make some hard loadout choices in that damn utility slot. I do admit to being irked at how rare UFOs are, and how apparently I can't stop goddamn abductions. But if that could be modded back in, then I'd be really happy.

Why? Because I'm actually having FUN playing a turn based squad game. That hasn't happened in a really, really, really long time.

[Vendetta]

I looked around the interface, saw that satellites = moniez and immediately dedicated my initial resources to build more satellites to get more money to get more satellites.

As a result I trickled new gear into production a little at a time, but never really felt the resource pinch because I knew I'd dedicated it to getting more money in future.

I found it pretty trivial to get 100% coverage and keep all nations onboard, and I'm sitting at endgame waiting for a battleship to spawn so I can get the last techs from it with a full squad of guys with titan and plasma, two firestorms in every hangar because I can, every foundry project done because I can, and an income of £1500 a month which is basically infinity money.

[Stark]

Since the pace of events is so low and nothing seems to change until the events occur, once you're past the initial startup I'm not sure how the game can get away from you beyond 'mutons spawned in the middle of my team' or 'my good soldiers got shot from across the map through five walls'. I don't think I saw more than two blocks of panic after the base attack took it all away.

[Vendetta]

So I think the only challenging thing in the latter half of the game has been assaulting an alien battleship, where I started a fight with like a million guys at once (8 mutons, 4 berserkers, and a sectopod all in one room). This is the first time in, I think, two or three game months where anything has gotten through my titan suits, let alone put a guy down (my Assault got punched out by a berserker, but he was only crititcally wounded so I could pick him back up)

And that has actually put me to some sort of exercise of target priorities and making tactical decisions and business.

Unfortunately, since most of the game is about opening monster closets one at a time and then horribly murdering the things in them because you outnumber them 2-1 or worse I doubt this will happen again. (Especially since as soon as my dudes heal from this mission I'm going to be doing the end mission.)

[CaptHawkeye]

I've lost interest in the game already. The combat never gets more interesting than the start and piling HP-heavy enemies on the late game is not something I like to see. If this is how the series was is in the hands of semi-competent developer god knows how it was back in the 90s.

[Stark]

Like I mentioned a while ago, it's a shame that the great white hope probably wont bring strategy to the masses or revitalize the genre or whatever. Jut imagine how the game would review if it wasn't called XCOM and you can imagine what reception a similar off-brand BMW would receive. The shame however is that rather than an accessible yet complex and emergent game that makes a few sacrifices to achieve a good balance, it's a 'ok I guess' kludge of ideas that entirely drops whole concepts and glues it to a story.

I mean peoe can play JA2 or Silent Storm and feel positive about those games compared to XCOM, which is outrageous. The problems with those games - and the whole genre - are I believe well understood. XCOM doesn't solve them.

[CaptHawkeye]

It's just sad to me that freaking tabletop games are better designed and more interesting than turn based tactics games made by multi-million dollar development teams. Video game developers tend to get caught up in "traditions" and "established design" too much.

[Stark]

If you wan to be mean I'm pretty sure by using tokens and cards I could convert an alien defense game into XCOM in a weekend. Maybe I should start a kick starter!