TheHammer wrote:Again, point being most games have exploitable cheese, or overpowered tactics. But you can as a player choose to make a game more challenging for yourself by not resorting to them.
Honestly, this isn't as dumb as some people have said it is, in the sense that if I want to play a game where I do XYZ, and I'm allowed to do XYZ, but ZZZ is BETTER... I'm still not forced to ZZZZZZ the game into the grave and then complain about play experience. What I'm saying though is that it isn't a cheese strategy that breaks the game, it's that the core strategy is at odds with itself. Lemme clarify a bit:
PeZook wrote:It's one thing to impose limitations on yourself for additional challenge, but another one entirely if you have to do it if you want to have a proper tactical experience in the first place! Not that it would help, anyways, since from what Covenant says the problem is generated by the combination of monster closets which harshly punish attempts at actually experimenting with flanking and maneuver, and the fact combat results are all about to-hit rolls.
This is the problem here. Flanking and maneuver are the core precepts of the game's "Do This To Win" theory. In fact, some of the non-enabled "Second Wave" functions further emphasize flanking bonuses. Also, the game ORIGINALLY had a free-fire system where you could aim wherever, like with the rockets, but Firaxis found that people were gunning down cover instead of flanking or trying to maneuver around it, so they nixed the free-fire system and kept the flanking/cover system. That's a pretty stupid thing to do, since the solution is clearly to fix the flanking system.
To clarify, when "flanked," you not only get your cover reduced, but as a result the crit chance goes way up. The enemy is nearly assured of a crit against you (especially on Classic) when attacking a flanked Operative, and when you flank a foe your chances skyrocket. The numbers bear it out as just insanely effective. For example, consider a Muton hiding behind Full Cover, who is getting a +10% defense from his natural armor and +40% defense from high cover, and then is at range. That's enough to give a Rookie with ideal positioning a 15% chance to hit, and even a badass veteran non-sniper around a 35% chance to hit or less. So about one in three shots are likely to land, and without a critical hit you'll need about 2-3 Laser Rifle shots to bring him down. So on average you'll need around 5ish badass veterans to kill such a target in one turn or one guy will require 5ish turns to kill it. Or, in the game's logic, one character could flank the target and kill the fucker in ONE TURN all by himself.
To me this sounds not just reasonable, but
brilliant. By making smart play 5x as effective as dumb play it allows the game to throw 4x the number of units or 4x the strength of the units, or 2x the number AND strength of the units, and still be assured of the player's complete ability to come out on top. And if you really want to challenge them you subject them to the same behaviors, and things like flanking are very very easy for an AI to understand how to do, since it's just math and angles and preferences for distances to targets and such. It's a really great setup, it really is, and applied properly it would make the game a lot MORE tactical than XCOM was.
But the whole thing crashes down because of the limitations the game has placed on the players. Maps are too small for tactical maneuvering because of the arbitrary walls placed around the 'action zones' where monsters are supposed to be, and attempting to maneuver through the 'action zones' of the map itself often leads the player into another monster spawn. This isn't a terrible thing (heaven forbid the aliens try to defend their objective!) but remember the whole reason we were spreading out in the first place was so that we could flank an enemy position. Now all I've accomplished is doubling the enemy force arrayed against me, possibly forcing
myself into being flanked, and exposing myself to more danger.
This is exacerbated by the movement, downtime and revelation behavior displayed by enemies. When not revealed by the player, 90% of enemies will not move. It becomes impossible to "ambush" a patrol to open up a flanking position because enemies do not reliably wander the map on patrol, and when they do wander they still perform their "surprise" reaction upon coming into contact with XCOM operatives. At least they nearly always do, I've seen a patrol of Sectoids not do this once, which was a rude surprise. For people who don't know, and for the sake of the debate, let it be known that when you run into a monster patrol or monster closet, the enemies go "oh fuck!" and then get a free move in order to dash to a defensive location. This is sometimes helpful to the player (when a dangerous foe rounds the corner on THEIR turn and then is forced to waste their move running for cover) sometimes detrimental (when your attempted ambush is foiled by enemies galloping away to full cover despite being surprised), but ALWAYS ridiculous.
Combine this with the elegant but unsupported Two Action Turn and you have a lot of situations where your soldier, looking for an enemy, will run forwards past a point where he could have stopped and been unseen (as sometimes happens, allowing you to get a free shot) or sometimes even dash right through an enemy swarm in a totally nonsensical maneuver that could have been solved if your character was allowed to entire complete or cancel their move action upon entering LOS with an enemy. This is a minor quibble, but when you combine it with the above problems (flanking required to finesse-kill a group of bunkered enemies, small and densely populated maps making flanking maneuver difficult to do without triggering unseen enemy spawn points) you have the following situations:
1) You cannot (without prior knowledge) successfully maneuver, redeploy, or reconnoiter the enemy's location without being spotted at the same time, triggering a monster spawn and giving them a free movement point, making it impossible to reliably flank opponents and nearly always a better solution to simply stay grouped and slog forwards like a bulldozer.
2) Most enemies do not move, advance, reposition, retreat, call in support or withdraw from the map unless first observed by the player, despite what damage the player has done to their forces thus far. Enemies that have been spawned by player LOS may or may not advance on the player should the player withdraw out of their sight, but since this seems to be done on a Unit by Unit basis what often occurs is two mutons deciding to hide behind mopeds while one charges heroically into six different overwatches. Enemies within a short radius of other enemies under attack may )(appear to) come to their aid, and sometimes alien spawns do patrol, but these situations are very rare and often still trigger the "Oh shit!" reaction camera and waste their turn. Because of this, the AI is designed in such a way that it cannot NOT be exploited to its detriment and abuse. The enemy's obsession with wasting their own turns WILL doom them to failure UNLESS you trigger them AND stay in their line of sight WHILE avoiding the urge to let your Overwatched Squadsight Snipers blow them away the second they spawn.
3) The cover system functions in such a way that cover is unreliable, damage is either extreme or none at all, and the only finesse 'Non-Cheese' strategy for eliminating dug-in enemies revolves around some flavor of flanking. Flanking fails as a core mechanic however, due to a combination of small map size and the above inability to redeploy. Given that enemies will never get help from the other group 20 feet away unless you spawn that group yourself, you are also further discouraged from even TRYING to flank or reposition or divide your forces because all you will accomplish is triggering more monster closet "Landmines" that put your group in further danger. This requires the player to trade RNG rolls in order to eliminate the enemy, and all things being equal, this favors the aliens more than the player--as it was designed to, in order to encourage players to make intelligent use of the cover dynamic.
4) At later levels, the accuracy of both XCOM operatives and Alien monsters rises to the high 90's, at least from what I've seen. Enemy accuracy is unpredictable since the exact characteristics of the enemy, its weapon, and so forth are obscured and I haven't the data on-hand. Though safe to say, their accuracy is usually quite good. Occasionally you can be shot by aliens you do not see, which not only does not trigger their "oh shit" reaction pose. Sometimes enemies will display very high levels of accuracy at long range, since accuracy does not seem to alter range much. And finally, alien weapons are usually a tier or two higher than the ones you are using, making an equal exchange of fire a losing proposition. You must strategically outmaneuver the enemy or make use of powerful special powers to put them down.
5) You cannot afford to have a soldier critically wounded because it incurs a permanent and massive WILL loss that renders the character undesirable for any further play. A simple thing to keep in mind...
All tallied, you're faced with being asked to trade punches with a never-ending horde of very competent enemies, try to flank them and in the process usually trigger even more of the nasties (especially on Classic or Impossible), or simply stay as a dense kill-team, trade land for security, use the overwatch and your special abilities, and facepalm at how stupidly the game behaves. I still have fun, but it would be incorrect to say that I'm merely using a cheese tactic that takes all the smart and fun out of it. I could either not use the snipers the game hands me and rewards me for killing things with, restrict my weapons to pure ballistics to give the enemies a greater effective hitpoint edge, choose not to use my abilities or choose ones I deliberately believe to be poor, or I can play the game the way it is begging me to play it and just watch it fall over at my feet (or grind me into a red pulp) because of the incoherent design sense that tasks you with spreading out to flank foes, but punishes map exploration with monster spawns.