Attn: XCOM shit in this thread.

[CaptHawkeye]

Then just put them in cover, don't let chrysalids or berserkers have a free go at my whole damn squad.

That's what pissed me off so much last night. I lost two vets instantly to Chrysalids because of their free move. Little fuckers can run half way across the map in a turn too. Worst of all, their melee attack is an instagib. Which is fucking stupid for about a thousand reasons.

[Zixinus]

But the fact that once you run across an enemy spawn point they get a bunch of free moves pisses me right off, especially if my guy who spotted them was the last move of my turn.

I hate that too. It's not a gamebreaker, but I am really annoyed that I can NEVER surprise the enemy. Sure, they can come out of nowhere and fuck my squad right up, but can I have a turn to fire a rocket when they are huddled together? No.

I'm playing on Normal, because I have never Played an XCOM game before. First it was very easy and then suddenly I'm only getting big UFOs with Mutons In them and all missions are rated Very Hard. I have only just equipped my soldiers with Laser weapons and Nano-Suits. Is this the normal progression or does the game change the difficulty by itsself? And I'm supposed to build a key now, does the game end after that mission?

DOn't think so. You should be getting Thin Men and stuff like that, with Mutons only occassionaly mixed in the group.

Worst of all, their melee attack is an instagib.

Not completely: I had seen one of my soldiers survive a direct crystalis attack. However, he went from full health to almost nothing in just one attack. So, yeah, it's annoying.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Put the Chrysalid armor item on your pointmen. 4 health and half melee damage.

I'm playing on Normal, because I have never Played an XCOM game before. First it was very easy and then suddenly I'm only getting big UFOs with Mutons In them and all missions are rated Very Hard. I have only just equipped my soldiers with Laser weapons and Nano-Suits. Is this the normal progression or does the game change the difficulty by itsself? And I'm supposed to build a key now, does the game end after that mission?

I have noticed the game's progressive difficulty ramp up considerably. I rarely get anything but Very Difficult missions now, infested with Muton Elites and the unholy overpowered fuck-shows that are Sectopods. It makes the occasional odd-ball Council mission filled with nothing but Thin Men a little weird. If you've got lasers though, you can handle Mutons.

I think one of the biggest hurdles I've noticed so far is that the game effectively throws a curveball around the midgame. Early on, aggressive tactics and Ramboing around with Assault dudes is extremely effective, and then it changes the game up almost overnight by making that a very suicidal thing to do. Instead, one has to adopt a much more prudent and conservative playstyle to keep pace. My current set up is 2 Heavies, 2 Supports, 1 Sniper, and 1 Assault. The Heavies are the bread and butter - they move first and either shoot what can be easily killed, or suppress what can't. The Sniper focuses on killing things once the Heavies are set up, and the Supports fill in the gaps, carry medkits, and pop smoke when shit hits the fan. The Assault always moves last if I can help it (I also equip my Assaults with rifles, not shotguns) as my Johnny-on-the-spot Swiss army knife.

The important thing to get used to for midgame and beyond is never dash. Always stop after a regular move and Overwatch or reload (or hunker if you're really neck-deep in shit). Dashing is for either reshuffling your formation (breaking your Support off from a flank that's under control to help another flank that just made friends with 3 Muton Elites, for example), or moving to cover in other emergencies. Never, ever dash beyond your squad's formation, because that's when you run into a bunch of aliens as your last move of the turn.

[Hawkwings]

OK, so the ending is pretty shitty. Spoiler

Bad mission and I really didn't understand why they were abducting humans. Plus, where's the ending reaction? Where's the news reports and the mourning and so on?

[Vendetta]

Then just put them in cover, don't let chrysalids or berserkers have a free go at my whole damn squad.

That's what pissed me off so much last night. I lost two vets instantly to Chrysalids because of their free move. Little fuckers can run half way across the map in a turn too. Worst of all, their melee attack is an instagib. Which is fucking stupid for about a thousand reasons.

Man, I set off a monster closet of Chryssalids and they all instantly ran next to one of my guys.

Fortunately, it was now my go and my whole squad was positioned to shoot the living shit out of them, and the guy they were next to was an Assault with a laser shotgun, but they really are huge assholes with their free move right next to you when you set them off.

[Stark]

A combination of loading not resetting bad guys properly and free moves can be quite amusing. Guys can charge at you, THEN get their absurd posing camera shot, and then move AGAIN.

Then again, on the extremely infrequent times you can get LOS on a group without crossing their line, you can blow them up and kill them first. Then guess what happens? The camera plays the OMG FACE OF SECTOIDS cutscene anyway... Over the corpses.

It's all quite tactical. I think we're lucky the corpses don't get a free move.

[The Yosemite Bear]

yeah, but does the whole thing crash if you capture and interrogate a snakeman navigator?

[Simon_Jester]

Worst of all, their melee attack is an instagib.

Not completely: I had seen one of my soldiers survive a direct crystalis attack. However, he went from full health to almost nothing in just one attack. So, yeah, it's annoying.

Isn't that pretty much how they were in the original? Massive hand-to-hand damage and helluva fast?

That's how I always remembered them.

[Vendetta]

Man, I think the fact that muton berzerkers get a free move towards you when you shoot them is supposed to make them dangerous.

But actually it just means that you can use your guys as retard magnets to draw them right next to a guy that's going to murder them with an Alloy Cannon.

[Zixinus]

Isn't that pretty much how they were in the original? Massive hand-to-hand damage and helluva fast?

Yes, but there were two factors that made them actually less dangerous than the ones in the new game: first, you could get the drop on them. They did not get a free move when you spotted them, no, you could shot the fuckers before they raped your men.

The other was the flying suit. It gave penalties and there was the problem of cover, but those motherfuckers were helpless when confronted by it: they just stood there, looking dump at as the flying man above it shot it apart.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah, that free move on spotting is kind of off-putting when I think about it.

[Vendetta]

The free move on spotting is annoying, even more so when it happens in the enemy turn because the enemies are on a patrol route, because it means they move at you then spot you and move at you again.

Though late game when you have all sorts of plasma and overwatch cheese and everyone can basically one-shot Chryssalids it's not so bad.

Of course by then you hardly see them anyway, it's pretty much all mutons and ethereals.

[Stark]

Reaction fire target selection is pretty strange - putting aside the constant lols of shooting through walls, your guys will react fire on strange enemies in a group. They'll ignore the guy at the front in the clear to shoot another member of the group behind several walls whom they can't see. They'll ignore high health guys for low health guys and waste the team's fire. Exactly when reaction fire happens is also a bit strange, and the slow motion effect only affects the target so his buddies just run past.

But yeah, it's entirely as annoying as the ratio of HP to damage you have. It becomes a joke to trigger sectiod groups because they just die, and crysalids are only dangerous until you can reliably one-shot them at which point they join the ranks of the useless guys.

It's almost like abstracting everything to a damage/to-hit game means all that matters is enemy hit points vs gun damage and to maintain challenge you have to constantly increase the hitpoints of the bad guys! Who could have POSSIBLY GUESSED?

[Vendetta]

I think the shoot through walls business happens because the game figures out if the enemy is going to be visible at any point along its path, then if it is does overwatch, but it actually processes the overwatch fire at the start of the path no matter where, and for how long, the enemy would have become visible.

The game really is a sci-fi skirmish miniatures game, it's basically playing like Infinity or Urban War.

I still think it's OK, but secretly still think they should have just skinned Valkyria Chronicles to make a "modern" X-Com tacticalz. (which, lulz, even has time units, albeit only for moving)

[Stark]

Yeah the choice of when reaction fire happens is kind of annoying, but I don't think it's due to being visible at any point. At least, the reaction fire happens in stages as they enter each units' LOS. When reaction fire DOESN'T happen (as with wall scaling mutants inside your group) is even more strange.

[Covenant]

As an X-COM hardcore fanboy who was working on a remake before the rest of my development team wanted to strangle me to death and decided to make things for money instead... the game is very mixed. On the one hand, I really like a few of the changes, since they were changes I was working on as well. On the other hand, I feel like they didn't do most of their "big jobs" well.

Really, I feel like the things that XCOM does best are the things it didn't need to do at all. The storyline moments are well done, I like the contextual animations for jumping through doors, windows and taking cover. The bouncing grenade stuff is nice. I like the elimination of time units, inventory management, and I like shrinking the crew sizes dramatically. I especially like them spawning enemies in groups and having them act as groups.

But there's a very long list of things they did wrong, or didn't do at all. So many things gall me to no end. Not minor things, but big design choices, and I think it is clear that while Firaxis talked a good game about the tactical combat they entirely dropped the ball on the strategic level.

The main issue for Strat level isn't the layout of the base (which I hate and find unnecessarily difficult to navigate), or even the existence of a sole base (my remake was going to feature a single real base and then small firebases as well) but the complete obliteration of anything resembling a strategic world map to interact with. I feel like a large part of my victory came down to adequately covering the world in successful bases, using different teams of guys to respond to multiple threats across the globe at once, feeling stretched when my soldiers were wounded or in Psi-training or one of my HWPs went down and didn't have anything to replace it with except rookies...

That's all gone and it's just so stupid. Yeah, they have UFO v Interceptor moments now, but they might as well be pre-scripted. There's a little gamesmanship you can do by withdrawing one interceptor and sending another, but it isn't like you're tracking 2 different ones or they actually have missions you can interrupt. One of my greatest joys was teching up to a point that I could interrupt a terror mission, even at the loss of an interceptor, and it was a really important strategic/tactical element because knocking those down before they landed was a great way to keep the funding nations happy.

I'm not sure why they took that part out, replaced it with little more than a tip-of-the-hat to the simulation of the original, and then made the somewhat insane choice of limiting me only to a single skyranger. Well, not even that, okay so let me have one single skyranger but please let me go on more than one mission at once. Let missions at least have a duration, so if I land, kill the aliens, and evac in short order I can get back out.

Hell, let me do something like have one skyranger to start with (holding 4 people) and then once I get two skyrangers, let me send A-team and B-team? Why not? Anyway...

The list goes on and on and on. The strategic layer made a few baby-steps in the right direction (changing the way the money-factory engineers work was a good one) but took so many steps back I can't even give them credit. Any moron could have thought up a solution as simple as "Let's not let people manufacture items they can sell" but it takes a real special moron to think about removing, in entirety, the strategic aspects of alien mission interception, interruption, and airspace control.

[White Haven]

It's unsurprising that one of the very first mods adds pre-mission interception back into the game, yeah. No argument there, I was highly disappointed in that myself.

[Covenant]

That's what really kills me, personally.

The guy making the game laid a concrete foundation of "Trust me, I love this game, I'm going to make sure it is as good as the original even if it doesn't play the same way," and I'm okay with that. And, if you enable ALL the hidden options, I would actually be pretty okay with the way EU came out. Not perfect, not 100 percent, but I would be 'okay' with it in the sense I don't want to kneecap the fucker.

But to actually add in all these features, say "nah, fuck that, let's just say shit happens all at once and make the player deal with it," not only strikes me as a nearly INCOMPREHENSIBLE and entirely reprehensible game designer failure in the highest terms... but shows me that someone along the line made the game way more fun, and then some fucking shit-for-brains came along and deliberately decided to remove (not change, just disable and rip out) awesome and clever content to create an antithetical, weak-ass experience. That they had it, and then disabled and hid it, is so much more worse than not even developing it at all.

The same goes for the other "Second Wave" options that were supposed to unlock after winning, I think? Didn't win yet so I don't know. Google the "Second Wave" stuff for a look.

And again it goes for the fact that they HAD the option for free fire on their rifles, and that beta-testers were happy to fire at cover and blow it up and get at the aliens for flanking bonuses and everyone was having a blast.

But that made Firaxis sad, because somewhere someone was more interested in shoehorning their asinine cover+flanking system into the game than they were in maintaining a tactical depth. So when faced with players saying that the cover system was for shit and flanking was stupid and impossible to do without gunning down cover (which they happily did), their solution was to keep the shitty cover+flank system and take out free fire. It boggles my mind and makes me really angry because that is a stupid, short-sighted and selfish idea. Somebody made a choice to make the game more Gears of Warsy with lock-on cover and shooting from walls and neither hell nor high water nor player feedback in the form of people saying it sucked would make them decide not to have it in. And to scrap a beloved, iconic feature to hamfistedly shove the cover system in?

Really unconscionable. The cover system is a dismal failure. I like the sticking to cover thing, but I do have to say I'm very tired of getting shot through walls.

[Stark]

I was pretty blown away that you couldn't send more than one interceptor at a time. It's also a real shame that each thing on the geoscape totally pulls focus - only one thing happens at a time, and you have to wait for it to finish before you do anything else. It really does reduce the juggling of priorities, which in other ways is the strength of the strategic level. I have to disagree about the story stuff, though - I find it amazingly lame (torture guys to death + OMG WHAT ARE THEY DOING TO HUMANS WHAT COULD THEY HOPE TO LEARN = lol) and incredibly constrictive, basically removing any replay value the game might have beyond 'race through tech tree faster'.

And man the free-fire cover destroying is still evident in that firing through walls due to lazy bullshit never damages them, but missing a guy in cover (or shooting past cover) frequently destroys that cover.

But seriously, the game isn't 'Gears of War-y' because in Gears of War, you don't regularly shoot through fucking walls at people you can't see. It's more fucking Matrix wizard powers.

[Zinegata]

Got the PS3 version (the PC version was asking for 20 GB in HD space and my HD was old and mostly full). And so far it's been quite nice. And if anyone's interested, as far as I can tell there's no difference from the PC version (a friend of mine let me watch him play on his PC before I got my copy)

It's very different mechanically from the old X-com (and I'm liking both the combat and strat layer so far, but I'm beginning to see some frays and edges), but the "feel" and presentation of a top-secret organization trying to save the world from alien doom is very well done.

Also, did anyone find the base excavation thing kinda cute?

Edit: And did anyone also dig the soundtrack, which is very reminiscent of Steve Jabosky for some reason? (HBO was playing Transformers right after my first session and was struck at how similar the music was)

[Covenant]

I found the dig-out mechanic to be flawed, both in concept and in execution. They took out a very simple and functional system from UFOD and replaced it with this MORE complicated, LESS meaningful one that simply drags out building and highlights how little I enjoy seeing my base sideways.

I really don't get why took out free-form base construction and "streamlined" it into a system where I can build only on certain parts of certain horizontal chambers after unlocking them and then digging them out and then building a thing on it. That not only does not seem streamlined at all, but it seems needlessly complicated and stupid. Why have the digging at all? Why even have a build grid at all? What's the point? Is it another stupid time and money sink to limit my growth by throwing some fairly arbitrary roadblocks in my way? It isn't fun to have to build an access shaft and then build off to the sides. They could have just given me the 3/4ths view instead of the ant farm and I'd be happier. Or make it an ant farm it it must, but why even ask me to dig it out first? Why do I have to dig it out? Why does it have to cost more? Why do I need to fuck with power? Why can't I just have a god-damned nuclear reactor?

Even on its own, without the references to UFOD making EU's option seem poor, the added drudge of digging out the layers doesn't make me feel anything but annoyance. It may have been a cute idea, to dig out the base to expand it, but it makes no sense. Now, if I was handed a fully functioning complex and they were like, "Commander, it seems this is the the only facility the aliens haven't knocked out from the sky. We're not sure if its the rocks or the experimental sensor-proof subterranean dome designed by Dr. Valen, but XCOM-1 seems to be the last X-Tech facility in operation. We downloaded what we could before the Area-51 servers melted, and since most of our manufacturing facilities are slag and the same goes for our research labs, the Council has proposed that we dig out the layers below us and upscale our operations dramatically..."

...well, if they said that, I'd feel a tiny bit better. I can pretend that, but I can also pretend that I'm on a space station or on the moon (my preferred idea), which would make just as much sense as this. The original I'll give a pass to because I could build as many bases, and in whatever layout, as I could afford. It also never felt like a legitimate governmental agency, more like a paramilitary team of mad scientists drawing their soldiers from death-row convicts with no combat experience.

But no, I don't like the digging.

[Stark]

BCG mentioned Dungeon Keeper, and if you had actual decisions to make on investing in branches of your base rather than BUILD ADJACENT ROFFLE (which just works to increase costs) it would have been way better.

[Zinegata]

BCG mentioned Dungeon Keeper, and if you had actual decisions to make on investing in branches of your base rather than BUILD ADJACENT ROFFLE (which just works to increase costs) it would have been way better.

Yeah, the adjacency was a little weird and one of the frays; to the point I restarted after I realized I messed up the layout of my first base (when a few minutes of thinking would have resulted in the optimal layout). I think the intent is that it's supposed to be something of a mini-game on its own, but it's a very, very light mini-game as it stands and screws you over only if you're completely unaware of it (like I was at the start).

But I still found the whole excavation thing cute. Maybe I just like seeing the little excavator icon.

[Covenant]

Dungeon Keeper Smudgeon Sweeper, what's the point of keeping a dungeon if we're not going to have anything invade it?

If they want to nix base invasion, that's fine by me, it really is. But right now the game has no choice in base building and no reason to include it at all. And before anyone would jump in and say it does (assuming anyone is vocally defending it right now) the problem comes down to the deterministic base design principle of Containment+Satellites>Workshops>Power>Anything Else.

You want to get your containment ASAP so you can capture things for the research benefit. That's pretty obvious. You then want to get as many satellites as you can. And when you have spare power, you want workshops. And that's it. There's not many structures to build and there's zero reason to ever build a lab. Sad as it is, you just never need to make a lab so long as you're capturing aliens. Your only reward for researching faster is, due to the godawfulstupid resource limitations, being able to stare longingly at a tech you can't build yet due to an asinine "Need X Techs" requirement. How moronic!

I really hate these resource limits. They don't make it more fun for me and they don't increase the level of tension, they just feel like they're binding my hands. They think that limiting the money is a very X-Com way to increase tension, but they're wrong and it shows that they didn't play the game right.

An astute viewer of the game mechanics would see that the game, very obviously, encourages you to sell stuff you don't need and to manufacture goods that can be sold on the black market for a profit. A slightly more astute viewer might think this is a stupid loophole that only existed to let you avoid the entire funding question! This is incorrect!

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!

Some things could be farmed out. I'd make research and design plants with just a mind shield, one hangar so that UFOs could be constructed there, and then shittons of workshops, labs, stores and housing. But because that required building a whole new base, you really needed to make sure you weren't going to lose it (since such a base is more or less unguarded) and it required time and money too.

In EU you never worry about Stores or Housing, so even if you build 5 labs for the costs reduction you never need to build any extra housing to house them, and you technically don't need any more workshops. I guess these engineers work off-base and telecommute in or something? I'm not arguing for realism, just that instead of creating 100 awful, boring, limiting, un-fun and frustrating forms of limiting my ability to build everything I want, they COULD have just... ya' know... gone with the original flavor but just fixed the 'for profit' engineering factories. Which they DID but didn't actually make it work.

[Stark]

They kept the old aesthetic of the 'secret' organisation with HUGE FUCKING LOGOS in underground bases instead of going with a more modern office building coordinating worldwide effort. I'm sure people would have been cross if they'd changed this core idea (more cross than they are about constant cheating anyway).