Attn: XCOM shit in this thread.

[Vendetta]

Yeah the firing through walls thing gas started to annoy me now...

The firing through walls thing is because they've really abstracted line of fire, rather than drawing it from where the gun would be in a shot it's drawn from the model's head, and only needs to see a pixel of the enemy to count as having LoS.

So it calculates a valid LoS from a point somewhere above where the actual gun is when the firing animation is played, and so you get janky shots through walls and floors and such.

And I still think the overwatch fire is just playing at the wrong point in the enemy's run, so the shots are all gone before the square where you would have been able to see the enemy's pixel if they'd reached it. I've had times where I've overwatch shot stuff through a wall or door but the group ended its move where I could see them, so its move would have revealed it, my guys just shot before it did.

The former is because of how their abstraction choice interacted with their animation system, and it wouldn't be super easy to fix whilst keeping LoS simply presented (raising the question of "what do you mean I can't shoot it, I can see it?, but that could probably be solved by having free aiming and overlays showing your field of fire like any other TBS), the latter feels far more like they cut a corner on presentation because the effect would really be the same and they couldn't be bothered to go back and sync up the animation.


Still want Valkyria Chronicles with aliens though, because that solves pretty much all of the brute mechanical problems of UFO. (And it's own biggest mechanical problem, that spending all your CP on one dude to win*, is easily solved by, have it so that if you spend a second CP on a unit you get a half TU bar, but anything you use from that is also deducted from your next turn, so you have to pay for being heroic now by having to recover next turn, rather than getting basically two full bars for 3CP, and potentially 5 if you're anyone who gets a TU refresh when you run out)


* This is inherent to the mechanic. The tabletop skirmish game Infinity uses a similar system except with no limits at all. In an earlier rule version my mate quickly realised that taking one robit with a heavy grenade launcher and the rest of his squad as the cheapest dudes to provide actions for it let him win games in his first turn by spamming all of his CP on grenades. This has been vastly reduced in the new army lists because the new robits don't get the HGL any more, but "spend all your actions on the best guy" is inherent to that sort of mechanic if you don't place a hard limit on it.

[streetad]

Oh I understand why it happens (eg the game calculates the aliens move as one action and plays the reaction fire animation as soon as it begins to move rather than at the point that it actually enters your field of vision). It just seems a bit shoddy, especially given all the effort put into giving giving your guys character and having an 'action cam' to make it seem cinematic.

Having an overlay showing your troops field of vision would actually solve so many problems, especially with regards to all those times when you can't really tell which parts of a structure (typically a ufo) are transparent or permeable until you've already moved your guy there and the game tells you you have a shot.

[Hawkwings]

They considered having that sort of overlay, and also an overlay that showed where you could move your soldier to be able to see an enemy, but they deemed that it made the game too cluttered and messy, so they removed it.

[Nephtys]

Wel the demo was almost as unplayably choppy as Sword of the Stars II via steam...

The release version of XCOM is nowhere near as choppy. The demo was barely playable. But I haven't had release skip on the same machine.

[White Haven]

Er...choppy? The demo wasn't choppy at all on my end. Odd.

[Slacker]

I had the game freeze up on me once in the 20 odd hours I've played it and it's run smoothly while I'm playing. No complaints about stability here.

[GuppyShark]

Goddamned Mind Control. I hope that when my first wave of psionic test subjects get out of the tanks that they can do something to stop my squaddies murdering each other.

[Losonti Tokash]

Nope, I have literally never seen it fail, even on someone with 90 will wearing psi armor with a psi shield on normal difficulty.

[Covenant]

I had the game freeze up on me once in the 20 odd hours I've played it and it's run smoothly while I'm playing. No complaints about stability here.

I just had an odd error where I hit 3 mutons with a rocket, causing them all to use their Intimidate ability, which made the game unplayable from that point forth since it never gave me the UI back.

Mutons are not as scary as they were made out to be. At this point in the campaign I have max level soldiers, and with Carapace and Laser Rifles I'm never in serious danger. A mission or two before the Mutons appeared first I build the Office Training facility and added two more dudes to my squad, now it's almost a cakewalk. Two squadsight snipers make mincemeat of everything. Although my most badass soldier is an Assault, the first to earn a nickname and randomly assigned the appropriate "Hardcore," my favorite soldier so far is Support. Fast, powerful, useful enough abilities, and tons of great utility. Deep pockets is so handy.

Not looking forward to mind control since it always was a totally bullshit Unit Tax that only made the game a pain. I wonder if there's some version of the old Laser Pistol trick, some weapon and armor combination that'll keep your soldiers from blowing each other away?

[Stark]

It always working is ACCURATE TO ORIGINAL so doubtless nerds love it.

[Rekkon]

I had the game freeze up on me once in the 20 odd hours I've played it and it's run smoothly while I'm playing. No complaints about stability here.

I just had an odd error where I hit 3 mutons with a rocket, causing them all to use their Intimidate ability, which made the game unplayable from that point forth since it never gave me the UI back.

Mutons are not as scary as they were made out to be. At this point in the campaign I have max level soldiers, and with Carapace and Laser Rifles I'm never in serious danger. A mission or two before the Mutons appeared first I build the Office Training facility and added two more dudes to my squad, now it's almost a cakewalk. Two squadsight snipers make mincemeat of everything. Although my most badass soldier is an Assault, the first to earn a nickname and randomly assigned the appropriate "Hardcore," my favorite soldier so far is Support. Fast, powerful, useful enough abilities, and tons of great utility. Deep pockets is so handy.

Not looking forward to mind control since it always was a totally bullshit Unit Tax that only made the game a pain. I wonder if there's some version of the old Laser Pistol trick, some weapon and armor combination that'll keep your soldiers from blowing each other away?

No because there are no armor values that get subtracted from weapon damage before it is applied. The best way to deal with mind control is the same as the best way to fight anything else. Keep your squad close enough to support each other and blow the mind controlling unit away in the next turn. Barring that you can always run away and/or hunker down and wait for the mind control to wear off. I had one match where two of my five guys got mind controlled on consecutive turns. I had the remainder dash away out of LOS and just waited (no overwatch since that would trigger on my MCed units). The first guy got his free will back after another turn and conveniently found himself point blank behind the Sectoid Commander controlling the other guy and "oh hey I have a laser shotgun..."

[Zixinus]

I think I seen mind control fail once or twice, with very, very high-Will characters.

The fact that telepathy requires line-of-sight makes it far less annoying though.

[Zinegata]

You guys really need to clue up and get decent gear then

Gearing up had always been part of the plan. I got the Alien Assault mission very early in the month, and I was planning to do the assault at the end of the month after I research the laser guns and armor. But I got tempted and took a peak with the non-upgraded squad.

Ironically, the "actual" Alien Base mission turned out to be incredibly easy because the game decided not to spawn any Mutons at all; just a couple of Chrysalid swarms that died very easily to our shiny new guns.

[Covenant]

Just finished the most horrific mission I've seen yet. Just a standard abduction mission, but I had to do some serious savescumming because the deployment positions I was given each time were atrocious and I didn't feel like losing "just cuz," on this save anyway. I was playing Classic Ironman the first day I got the game and grew really frustrated with the sometimes arbitrary nature of things. I figured they meant Ironman in the sense that I can only save on strategic level, or just save-to-quit but allowing me to lose progress and go back a month if I did really badly and decided not to save. The autosave ironman mode is really frustrating. You can do everything right and still get hosed.

Anyway, the first mission profile was an office plaza, me in the courtyard with 2 stories on both 'top' sides. Windows lined with angry mutons and me pinned down without adequate cover. Yeah no. The next was a construction yard, with my guys dropped outside a small chokepoint with angry mutons on the 3 story structure on one side and behind the boxcar on the other. Again, yeah no. The third one I thought was at least a FAIR setup. It was the 'big flat road with water running down it' map, narrow. I took my time creeping up, and it seemed like there were no enemies at all.

Until I got to about 3/4ths of the way down, then hit like 6 monster closets all piled up on top of each other. Suddenly I had 9 mutons and 2 sectoids on my hands, but at least this was a relatively fair piece of terrain so I went with it. Lots of loads to learn from, still picking up eccentricities of the game, but holy shit. Killed like 18 guys that round. The first time I beat the neverending apeman parade I had 3 wounded soldiers from exploding cover, which was fine I figured, but apparently an hour after my Skyranger returns there's a terror mission. Gargh. Reloaded from battle just to complete it smartly. Interestingly, Shredder Rockets multiply damage from exploding cars too, and car explosion is counted AFTER rocket explosion. A muton hiding behind a car will die to a shred rocket because the car explosion will finish it off.

Enemies sometimes have unusually long range. Getting shot from halfway across the map is jarring, but it doesn't happen OFTEN, though it did a few times here. The monster closet explosion also showed me how absolutely ridiculous the "oh shit, x-com!" reactions can get. I had a bunch of apes run in from the darkness, spot me, then run right into the center of my squad. Blew his face off next round. I'm really liking the mutons. They're beefy enemies, but can die in one round to a single Crit, and since they usually only roll in packs of 3 it's easy to gun them down 6v3.

I've got two snipers, a support, a heavy, and two assaults. The support is my favorite guy by far, in terms of overall usefulness, but the sniper+assault combo is just game breaking once you add in squadsight and lightning reflexes. Run in to spot, ignore all reactions, shoot them both, run back. I also scoff at the shotguns, my assaults use laser rifles and it does a great job of making them just awesome. My best assault has a scope and his laser rifle, so he can bean an enemy almost as well as a sniper can.

[Covenant]

This game has some strange difficulty elements. I would say that even Classic is more difficult than UFOD's or TFTD's Superhuman was, given how important character advancement is and how woefully hamstrung you become when someone is laid up in the hospital. The fact that many basic UFOD tactical elements are gated behind class skills (things like firing back at an enemy when they fire at you, being able to use ally vision, etc) makes the game dull and unfair with rookies, but absurdly over-generous once you get high level soldiers. Once soldiers START getting kills it is very easy for them to keep getting kills, given how fast you level up and how effective a leveled soldier is at dispatching foes.

Mutons slow that down some by becoming Laser Sponges, as do Cyberdiscs. Piling on the hitpoints seems to be hint that I should look into developing plasma weapons. I feel the HP growth is higher than it has to be though, since I still am not doing anything remotely tactical. Not that I used brilliant military strategems in UFOD, but I had a very unique and precise set of UFOD tactics based on the game's rules that made it feel tactical, since I had to do XYZ in the battles (even if XYZ make no RL tactical sense) whereas here I just generally shove my snipers somewhere and creep up slowly.

I read about people using "multiple teams" and "trying to flank" and "using your brain" when in reality the way LOS and Monster Spawning happens means you're rewarded for creeping up slowly and only spawning one group at a time, since the aliens never (at least rarely) call for help, and when you advance against units that were "pulling back" you never find their allies in a defensive position, they're just standing around looking at the green-spiderweb coated schmuck on the ground. Trying to be smarter than that will trigger multiple spawns and turn it into a giant clusterfuck.

So the difficulty curve is odd. The game wants me to be using flanking to eliminate alien cover bonuses, so it makes enemies and maps and contrives game mechanics to support the 'flank and eliminate' approach with lots of cover and enemies that have such big HP values that you need the flanking Crit bonuses to kill fast.

But then the game itself negates the value of flanking by throwing spawns randomly around, making maps too small (which only increases the density of the spawns you trigger while trying to flank) and being--might I say--a bit too generous with the accuracy-at-range of high-damage alien weapons. Nothing has a greater chilling effect on my tactical curiosity than having a Muton fire past my first and second rows to grease a sniper I had felt was far enough away. Since I do not HAVE to be clever to kill everything easily, and get no BENEFIT from being clever, I just choose not to be, advance my four Peekers slowly, and let the Snipers do most of the heavy lifting. In fact I'd say I'm generous to the AI since I do not always pull back out of their LOS and force them to walk jauntily into autofire.

I feel like my individual soldiers are far more vulnerable than they were in X-COM, since instead of using spotters to give people range (aliens and humans having both short visual range but infinite aiming/weapon range) the majority of them need to expose themselves to enemy fire to get a shot on. And since heavy cover is seemingly unreliable (not worthless but not good enough to bank someone's life on) the amount of casualties you suffer through "no fault" tactical choices is a lot higher than regular ol' UFOD. Until enemies in UFOD had mind control and blaster bombs you were more or less assured that most of the time you'd be able to clear maps with a minimum of casualties... assuming you understood how reaction fire worked.

Here you can mostly ignore enemy reaction fire as a problem, not only due to assaults blatantly removing any chance of it, but because you just back up and let snipers do it. On the same token you HAVE to, since enemies are so capable of firing long distances to hit targets and do 10-15 damage to a guy who was seemingly safe. I'd even consider that sparing if it were not for the "Critical Wound Penalty" you suffer. Your soldiers get a permanent WILL reduction after a terrible wound, making them useless in all but name, since we all know a low WILL soldier might as well be a primed grenade.

I think this could have been a really interesting game if the flanking had worked better and if cover was more effective. Like the guy who mentioned Company of Heroes earlier, I'm getting some vibes of that. But in CoH, units in heavy cover were more or less invincible against one other unit, it was flanking them that exposed them to the lethal fire and eliminated them in seconds. Here my cover is usually pretty shitty, sometimes explosive, and it is too easy to die while in heavy cover (let alone light) and near impossible to flank a target without triggering MORE enemies and making things worse. Until they tweak some of the values though, its going to remain a game where it seems like you have one method of clearing the map that makes you invincible and no other options that don't send you home in bodybags.

[PeZook]

It's interesting that the mechanics to make it cerebral and tactical seem to be there and the major problem is basically scripting and config options such as accuracy values and monster closets...

[TheHammer]

It's interesting that the mechanics to make it cerebral and tactical seem to be there and the major problem is basically scripting and config options such as accuracy values and monster closets...

That would lead one to believe that mods and or add-on content might increase the tactical experience. Honestly, I'm enjoying it for what its worth.

For people who find it too easy because of x-y-z cheese factor, you do realize that you don't have to use those tactics right? Just like "Ironman Mode" was originally a self limitation of the original UFOD, you can choose to play a game without resorting to cheese. If its too easy with snipers, don't use snipers. Too easy with Plasma weapons? Limit yourself to lazers, or go bold and use no laser weaponry at all. Obviously you have to eventually build plasmas for your interceptors to be worth a damn, but I would prefer that you not be able to use plasma based ground weapons, or at least were limited to maybe one in your squad. Same with the flying suits. Grapplings hooks on skeleton suits actually pose some very interesting tactical possibilities witout being overpowered.

I know self limitations may be counter to your particular nature, but every game out there has exploitable AI, and once you figure it out its going to lose a lot of its challenge. But the game can certainly be more challenging under the right conditions. If you play it in ironman mode where you won't be allowed to reload when your kick ass Colonel Sniper guy gets picked off by a flanking Chrysalid, or a lucky shot from a mutoid or whatever.

BTW, anyone tried multiplayer yet?

[Stark]

A product should be good, it shouldn't require the player to insert the goodness. XCOM isn't a terrible game, but it's not a very good game either, and the more people talk about that the better.

Blaming the victims for FIRAXIS' decisions is just sad.

[PeZook]

Oh man, the "self-limitation!" defence

It's not the developer's fault cheesy tactics are rewarded! You can just not use half the game's content!

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.

[TheHammer]

A product should be good, it shouldn't require the player to insert the goodness. XCOM isn't a terrible game, but it's not a very good game either, and the more people talk about that the better.

Blaming the victims for FIRAXIS' decisions is just sad.

Oh man, the "self-limitation!" defence

It's not the developer's fault cheesy tactics are rewarded! You can just not use half the game's content!

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.

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. I'm not arguing that the game is perfect, but it is and can be fun and challenging and I look forward to the inevitable improvements they make with the platform.

[Stark]

You as a player can also just go play a better game. Its what I did. Its not a customer's job to find any way to enjoy something that's broken.

The best part is the implication that these horrible decisions by Firaxis are only a problem because of CHEESY PLAYERS. I love that part. Quality control? Playtesting? Nah, just play the whole game with the first gun lol.

[Nephtys]

The real question is: Has there EVER been a turn based squad game without cheesy exploitable tactics? What is this 'better game'? Seriously. This shit hasn't been implemented.

Original UFO? LOL OVERPOWERED PSI FORCE, SCOUTING + SNIPER, BLASTER BOMBOMOMOMB THE WORLD
Apoc? DUAL WIELD DISRUPTOR CANNON RAMPAGE. TOXIGUN NONSENSE.
JA? SNIPING HUNDREDS OF ENEMIES AS THEY WALK THROUGH THE SAME DOOR IN THE HEAD
Chaos Gate? DEVASTATORS STAND BACK AND SHOOT EVERYTHING TO DEATH WITH OVERWATCH.
Incubation? TAKE TWO STEPS, OVERWATCH, REPEAT.
SS? BRB, ROBOT STUPIDITY BATTLE ALSO SNIPING WITH MACHINE GUNS.
Valkyria Chronicles? ALICIA DESTROYS THE WORLD WITH SPRINTING.

[CaptHawkeye]

Most of those games are only broken because of dogmatic adherence to shitty, established mechanics.

[Stark]

What's the better game; the game with a problem that is ten years old, or the game with a problem that is brand new?

Wow, that's a tough one. Can I have thinking music?

Maybe we'll just declare that discussing mechanics and the success or not of those mechanics is forbidden, because you should just avoid things that don't work and appreciate any game for the unique flower it is.

[Nephtys]

You as a player can also just go play a better game. Its what I did. Its not a customer's job to find any way to enjoy something that's broken.

I asked what the better game was that you were referring to.

Yes, most of the flaws in these mechanics are due to dogmatic sticking to old shit without critically thinking it through. But so, what exactly are people even asking for? I'm not a fan of 'I just fired through a wall', but what do people want? More bullet trajectory simulators with tons of obfuscated numbers? Something different than a random to hit roll?

Honestly, I've never seen any game that did much for the 'random to hit roll' problem on both computer and board. You're adjusting probabilities in your favor, but I've rarely seen it done in a way where 'moar stats' didn't solve all problems. Except maybe Heavy Gear Blitz. But that has other issues entirely.