Yeah, time to get back to X-com. Me saying "Bioware" was meant to be a joke you know .

Anyway, has anyone gotten a Blaster Bomb? Or did we all just skip the battleship?

I got a blaster bomb, I downed several battleships because hey, well, I dunno. I was bored. They only have 23ish aliens on them anyway, that's barely more than twice a small scout.

If you're looking for the awe-inspiring Fist Of An Angry God like it was in UFOD, you'll be disappointed. It does indeed make firing rockets a lot less of a pain in the ass, since it firing the thing creates a wibble-wobble sphere that will snake around at Gentleman Parkway Stroller speed before popping on the enemy with a wet thud. The damage increase is noticable but nothing worth the effort, going from 6 to 9. I would have liked a substantial distance increase but that didn't seem in the works.

Overall, capturing a battleship is more valuable for the Elerium you capture than anything else. I was expecting the battleship to be an incredible fight, but it is a lackluster dead-end to nowhere.

Think about it this way. Once you've knocked down a battleship, what in Xenu's name do you need those Fusion Lance weapons for? They never send anything bigger that you have to shoot at. Maybe if there was an option to use Fusion Lances to blow half of the Temple Ship away and that's what you needed to start the end mission... like, for example, if you needed to finish the game by, I don't know, building a Skyranger/Firestorm hybrid armed with Fusion Lances to blow their way into the Alien Base... naaawh, that's stupid.

But yeah, got the blaster launcher, and it sucks. But if you want to capture a battleship just before you finish the game (because you certainly won't be downing one long before then) I suppose it'll make firing those last 1-3 rockets a little easier.

The head writer from the first game was transferred to Bioware Austin work on The Old Republic. His replacement was rather hit-and-miss.

Okay, just beat XCOM's final mission. I was... not expecting it to be THAT bad.

I was expecting it to be bad. I was playing the mission and saw them slowly rolling out the badguys a handful at a time. The final mission and they throw me like half a Terror Mission worth of enemies in a map layout specifically designed to serve them up on a platter. From the commentary that Captain Gizmo was giving me, it seems he hates all them FAILURES and may have been just serving them up for us to kill, but by now I've seen them so many times he's gotta be pretty sure I've seen their insides outside before.

So after your casual stroll, since casually strolling keeps the enemies from doing anything other than flying in to die horribly, you finally run into the BIG BAD MOMENT... where you fight two sectopods. Okay. Then two elite mutons. Um, okay? I fight three of those in a small UFO. What the smucker's jam is this? The only thing keeping the sectopods from instant death is that my snipers had to move a bit to get LOS with their flying suits. After I did it was just silly. Then I walk forward a bit more and Elite Mutons bamf in via psychic cloud. They also die without any interesting results, not even getting off a shot. Err...

Okay, so you enter the final room. You get a little cinematic talking about how the Etherals are such FAIL and FAIL and MADE OF FAIL or whatever, which I don't disagree with, and promptly double-tap the commander in the head. Game over. After that you get a little bit of "Oh no! Will he--okay, yeah."

And then thats it. No dancing ewoks. No narrative from any of the staff about the alien's impact on humanity moving forward, about what just happened, no anything. No flaming UFO wreckage on the pyramids, though we get a momentary shot of debris falling back into the atmosphere. Not even a post-credits teaser about T'leth rising from the deep or Cydonia awakening or anything. This clearly took less than 6 minutes to make.

Also, DLC news. The first DLC is called Slingshot, and the "ally" you make is not, as was hoped, an alien of some other species--like Outsider--but a Triad member and the devs are calling him a playable character and "like a hero" character. So you too can save the world with the help of a morally obligated Chinese gangster, which doesn't sound so bad, except the Slingshot DLC is a set of 3 council missions revolving around Triad guy giving XCOM the plans for Blaser Bomb launchers. How he got them I do not care, I only find it hilarious that they buried this technology so deep in the tree that nobody gets it, and now they're essentially handing it away in DLC format along with a, presumably, super powered protagonist.

Oh, and also, the Slingshot DLC will make sure the Council mission that starts this train will be the first one you get, and will stick around indefinitely, so I certainly hope you need something a little stronger than bullets to complete the sequence and don't get that blaster launcher before you get plasma, otherwise this will be the silliest tech workaround I've ever seen.

Also hilarious is that the press release talking about this says they didn't want to add new technology because that is a 'finely balanced pinpoint' or something, which is a laugh riot. Technology in this game is an absolute joke and there's no reason at all to build labs. Until labs are useful, technologies aren't going to be 'finely balanced' unless you consider 'last possible priority behind every other concern' to be result of a fine-tuned balance. Maybe they mean they wouldn't want to upset the delicately iron-fisted monopoly that workshops, power plants, and satellite uplinks have over nearly every square of your base layout for the first few months.

What annoys me, is that there is nothing really justifiable for the invasion from the game-theory or mathematical standpoint. In the last game, at least the excuse "we seeded the planet to later harvest it" makes a grim sort of sense.

Here... either the etherals are some sort of religious fundamentalists (most likely, with their talk of ascension) or are afraid of an even greater threat. The latter case seems more likely to me, with their talk of "physical perfection" (dude, you have awesome genetic manipulation tech, also, why care about your physical aspect when your mental ones can literately overcome them?) and "ascension". Some crazed idea of "genetic perfection" or whatever may be involved, which would at least explain the harvesting of humans (not just for food but for DNA and test subjects).

The former is... likely, especially if the game developers want a sequel. It would make some remote line of sense that the aliens are both harvesting us as resources and testing us to see whether we would be capable of resisting the Larger Threat. Perhaps even tie into the FPS/TPS/whatever-it-is-at-the-moment game. The problem is, that there is simply and utterly no real evidence to this claim. Not even visions of them, as far as I can tell.

Well, the original X-COM had a pretty stupid plot, if you ask me. The amount of work required to do what they were doing could have better applied elsewhere, with less effort, and without the risk of getting your whole operation blown to hell.

I'm guessing the etheral jabbering about preparing us for what was to come, and ascension, has something to do with a bigger alien threat yet to discover. Who knows what it could be, they may or may not want to dive into the T'leth nonsense of TFTD (but oh how I love that nonsense) and may opt to go into untrodden territory with their sequels.

The optimistic hope is probably that having built their nerd effigy, they can go their own way and make an actually good game next time. Either that, or the same game another dozen times like Sid meier's other games. :v

I'm not sure I share that optimism. I mean, if you're making a game called XCOM: Enemy Unknown then you're basically trying to copy(ish) a game that was made like 18 years ago, right? If you can't look at a game which was made almost two decades ago, improve on it a little, and market it to the people who wanted that... then what are you doing?

If they had been making an XCOM knockoff, okay. But where do they go from here? The best ideas in this game were very rarely the new ones. The old ideas weren't exactly holding them back. They stripped out base management (in all but name) and the interceptor bits, turned the UFOpaedia into an ugly wreck that is neither picture-laden goodness nor useful reference material, and streamlined the tactical combat into a monster-closet powered Muton Shoot with abstracted firing mechanics, visible health bars, a nonsensical panic model, and only 4 to 6 guys in a single team.

If this was their nerd effigy and now they can move on to making a "good game" unhindered by the detris of two decades of fan worship, then I really don't know what their next step is. Ditch the base entirely except as a menu screen, eliminate interceptions, and turn tactical combat into a three guys running around the map waiting for monster closets? Why not just make the damn thing first person again and call it a day?

They're either going to have to expand on the shells of a system they have, since nobody (new devotee or old fan) likes the interceptors and it is blatantly obvious that labs are useless and that the majority of your base is going to be full of Workshops, Power Generators, and Satellite Uplinks. The tech tree is stupid, but probably not much worse than the original, but the engineering/fabrication system is go hilariously WRONG that I'm surprised we haven't had a thread just about that. What the fuck do they mean that building 5 satellites takes the same time as building 1 satellite? What bullfuckery is this? What is this damn 'rebate' they give me? If there's efficiency from building multiple workshops why not reduce the cost rather than give me 2 stupid alloys back at the end?

Nearly without exception, and most of those exceptions are clustered in a few ideas of the tactical menu, the new ideas they added in are terrible. And just today it seems like they released an update that breaks all the mods. Well isn't that great.

I can hope than in XCOM 2 Unknowner Enemy the walls might work, at very least. Maybe there'll even be meaningful equipment choices and less game-useless features? By XCOM 3 Well Known Enemy I might even expect a decent strategic layer with meaningful decisions beyond those of a deck-building game. The wedding episode should have a base system that isn't fundamentally broken and useless.

I can agree they did some good things to the combat, but it being so broken on a basic level and the strategic level being almost dirt-useless (beyond artificial difficulty) isn't likely to change, realistically.

Skipped my first battleship, then took the next one after finding out about the blaster launcher... then got lost for a while, which was the most frustrating part about the battleship compared to smaller UFOs, though this admittedly means that I had been hoping for a more "obviously" linear map.

I have to say, one thing I liked about JA2 (not Back in Action) compared to XCOM: Enemy Unknown was that if you weren't in combat, i.e. no enemies seen for however many turns, the game would have actions take place in semi-real-time without action point costs, would have preferred that insofar as "getting to the action".

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"Yee's proposal is exactly the sort of thing I would expect some Washington legal eagle to do. In fact, it could even be argued it would be unrealistic to not have a scene in the next book of, say, a Congressman Yee submit the Yee Act for consideration. " - bcoogler on this

"My crystal ball is filled with smoke, and my hovercraft is full of eels." - Bayonet

Stark: "You can't even GET to heaven. You don't even know where it is, or even if it still exists."
SirNitram: "So storm Hell." - From the legendary thread

should I mention hav \ing a sniper on the roof in the demo, and killing the last enemy THROUGH A FREAKIN BUILDING??? It was some sort of floater, but like I said there was a freakin building blocking LOS

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The scariest folk song lyrics are "My Boy Grew up to be just like me" from cats in the cradle by Harry Chapin

Wow, nobody has mentioned shooting through buildings before! The consensus is that it is a per-bullet trajectory simulator with very few abstractions.

And man while laughing at XCOM for missing decade-old genre mechanics, can you imagine the hilarity of realtime? You'd be walking along, triggering monster closets and enemy spawns left and right. Given the AI has a dubious pathing logic anyway, having them attempt to move to engage before you see them would be priceless.

I would love to see them adapt this into a simultaneous turn-based. Less messy than real time, but just as much opportunity to show off the glitchiness.

At least the mod community on PC is finding a bunch of stuff and working on unlocking/fixing the combat mechanics.

I have to wonder if they'll even try to patch some of this stuff officially, or if they just accepted it because otherwise their game wouldn't work.

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What is Project Zohar?

Well, the definitive version of Civ 4 was essentially designed by a modder.... :p

Some of it they wussed out on, since they've already patched it in a recent patch of the retail version. But not all of it, and as far as I know not the wall shooting LOS nonsense. This doesn't happen often in the PC version, I think it is the result of bad LOS mechanics on some maps. There's a bunch of that, some maps have problems with enemy spawning on top of you, some have terrible LOS problems, some have cover that make it impossible to flank guys (or so it seems) and general glitchiness.

They probably didn't "rush it out the door" but they clearly set some "realistic design goals" before shipping it out to us. Some of these bugs are clearly bugs and would clearly have been everywhere in a playthrough, like the glitchy ceilings in UFOs, which are really super terrible. Their "high vs low" height stuff is godawful bad in general.

Also, the game doesn't run on windows XP unless you tweak a file. I have XP, so I downloaded a modified file, hex edited the .exe to accept it, and bam, it runs. They could have fixed that before launch with a secondary install but nope. Why? I dunno. Gotta be laziness.

Even if the shitty ending was a 'creative' choice all these code problems weren't, so they were probably them just deciding to suck up the "broken on release" press from people and make their boatloads of money anyway.

....

I thought it didn't run on XP because of technical issues, but turns out that it runs, they just disabled that one? WTF?

EDIT: Oh, right. You have to tweak a system file. That actually makes sense

Yeah. But I figured you could just send that along with the game. I mean, all I did was edit the exe (no biggie, they coulda' done that) and had an alternate file in their directory to run it off of. Not sure what's so hard about that.

The thing is the glitchy UFO ceilings could easily be fixed by simply adding a transparancey on/off button option (which I hope someone is smart enough to add in either as a mod or as a game patch at some point).

The game (at least the PC version) isn't broken though, for the most part it works, hasn't crashed once. I know the console versions haven't been quite as fortunate. I would definitely like to see changes, I think the cover system is a good basis, but there should be an option to kneel down or go prone as an action as it was in the original.

I must say though, from the PC side if you haven't played the game in Ironman mode I don't think you are fully enjoying it. Some of the most fun/tense moments are saving a mission that has "gone bad" either by getting your last survivor back to the skyranger, or making the smart gamble/tactical move to turn the tide when you've lost a couple guys early.

I've never seen an alien group spawn on top of me in the PC Version. Sounds seriously like there's a difference in builds, and they haven't patched the consoles yet.

Also, going prone kinda is what 'hunker down' is for. It greatly enhances your chances of avoiding being hit.

So, I'm going to try and install these second wave mods. I haven't had time to finish the damn game yet, but the mere act of restoring the abduction and terror ships is going to change the entire thing dramatically. A lot of mods probably could fix stupid shit too, like making the labs double research speed or something, while making the projects take tons of time longer.

I was playing Classic Ironman the second I got it, but found it intensely un-fun, so I played a savescum-heavy run of Classic without Ironman anywhere in sight and had a lot more fun and learned a lot. But sadly, the aliens are just too shitty at the game for saving to be necessary, and the ability to save in-mission is a bit overkill. I did get a lot of save use to avoid stupid stuff, or at least stuff I consider to be fairly stupid, such as discovering enemy abilities for the first time:

"Oh, so Cyberdiscs flip out into a wacky long-tailed bug monster that can throw grenades with its tail? Well... oookay."

And while that experience may be part of that whole XCOM thing, well, the second time you see it you're expecting it so whatever man! Can only be surprised once! Once I knew what things could do, I basically went through the entire game with my soldiers barely getting a scratch. I usually then loaded to remove these scratches to see how it COULD be done properly. Sadly a lot of the strategy boiled down to avoiding LOS, not bunching up, and using snipers to the abuse of the enemy since again Range and Damage and Accuracy > Anything Else. As an aside, I know one source of rage about the game is the pre-seeded RNG but I love that. I want to know that I'm not just getting a 'better' roll the second time.

In any case, the loss of soldiers to enemy fire is and is not really a source for tension. Losing a soldier 'just because' doesn't increase tension unless the 'just because' is done in such a way that it makes it clear the situation is so out of control that there's no fault on the player's end. If the player is at fault, they're going to resent being punished for something that happens without any warning or feedback. Those things are kinda bullshit, and while they can happen from time to time without ruining things I think total bullshit out of nowhere should be kept to a minimum. I consider this game's Panic System to be, in most ways, total bullshit out of nowhere.

Soldiers shooting other soldiers, especially snipers with that long, slow windup and aim, just looks retarded and has no similarity to the "Berserk" state in the original. In that game you DID at least have some warning. Before going Berserk, unless someone was Psi-Panicked to hell and back, you'd have soldiers starting to panic, drop their weapons, etc. You'd have buildup and you had a depletion of the Morale stat. You KNEW it was coming, or it came out of nowhere because suddenly 6 members of the squad were dead from a grenade. Shitty but at least explainable. It's much harder to explain how a soldier goes batshit insane after taking 2 damage. Aren't these the best of the best? Have they never taken a hit in combat? Or been prepared for one? Furthermore, I've seen people get hit, be okay, and their BUDDY goes batshit insane. They should have absolutely SEEN a buddy take fire before, even if they haven't ever been in the line of fire themselves.

I expected the panic system to have soldiers doing the "head down" or "hunker down" a lot. I thought that would be reasonable, especially if the enemy is using a suppression ability on them, I could see them ignoring an order to move or shoot and just stay there until bailed out. Or if terribly wounded, going into freak-out mode and screaming for medical help. But sobbing that they "want to go home" after being shot once seems... unseemly for my soldiers, robs me of my immersion, and totally distorts the balance of the game.

THAT SAID, once you know how to avoid enemy LOS and deny them any chance at all to shoot at you, you're well on your way to taking them down without ever suffering more than some casual damage. And then it just is kinda dumb.

I'll play on Ironman again soon, since I think I can do it this time, but it saddens me how shallow the game is. The 'tense' action of possibly losing a soldier to this game's brand of horseshit is okay but it still doesn't feel satsifying. I don't really get the feeling I'm really doing anything 'wrong' in this game. It's mostly about not having sufficient information that, once gained, makes the next step easy. That's like playing Minesweeper with infantry. Not really a strong tactical foundation.


You'll need to play in offline mode. Yesterday they invalidated all the mods by asking the game to call back to home for the ini rather than letting people use the local one for singleplayer. Herp a derp I guess.

I've been playing on the PC and had the enemies spawn on top of me thing happen quite a lot so it's not a purely console problem. It's a real pain in the ass when a group of mutons suddenly appear inside the ring formed by your squad since everyone is then instantly flanked, bonus to irritation if the group includes a berserker.

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"Prodesse Non Nocere."
"It's all about popularity really, if your invisible friend that tells you to invade places is called Napoleon, you're a loony, if he's called Jesus then you're the president."
"I'd drive more people insane, but I'd have to double back and pick them up first..."
"All it takes for bullshit to thrive is for rational men to do nothing." - Kevin Farrell, B.A. Journalism.
BOTM - EBC - Horseman - G&C - Vampire

I would tend to agree that it seems we're not all experiencing the same game. I haven't seen any of this "spawns on top of you" issue either, but maybe I've been lucky. The second wave stuff intrigues me as well, and on my future agenda.

As to "hunker down", my main issue is that you can ONLY do that in cover, and quite frankly in that instance you'd probably be better off either firing your weapon or going in overwatch. But sometimes it might be beneficial or neccessary to have a soldier out in the open and for the sake of a movement action he should at least be given the option of doing something other than standing there. Giving a sniper the ability to go prone in the roof of a semi for example would seem both realstic and useful and should provide a cover bonus. The original also offered the option of kneeling to add an accuracy bonus. I would think adding functionality like that would enhance the tactical aspects of the game and really shouldn't be too hard to do.

Speaking of Monster closets, I don't know if its coincidence or if they stealth patched the game, but it seems to me that in my recently started ironman mode game they are actually in many cases taking pre-emptive action prior to my stumbling upon them. That is in addition to the scripted "X-rays advancing on your position" stuff from some of the missions.

The pathing is kind of crap, but I'd hope that would be something they could patch to fix. They should at the very least allow you to specify a path if the AI isn't going to be smart enough to walk AROUND poison clouds or other obvious obstacles to get to your specified destination even when it would be perfectly capable of doing so.

I'm guessing coincidence. If they had done this on purpose it'd have been greeted warmly and would have been a big patch note.

Monsters do sometimes roam. It is rare but they do, and when they do they will often run in from the fog, see you, and grab a position. Rarely if ever will they attack before seeing you, but of all the fucks who do it, its the Thin Men. They'll stand out of position, invisible, and shoot at you from odd angles. I've found them standing in the air next to supposed cover, shooting at me through the top corners of windows or something like the God-Damned Spiderman or some kind of horrible boogieman.

This is clearly a bug, but whatever. At least now I have a new hated foe now that the Cryssalid has been reduced to an absolute, pathetic joke.

You can also find monsters that will move in groups as you approach areas. I've had Floaters fly out of UFOs, or Mutons who do the same. I don't know what triggers them, but it is a refreshing thing when it does. My guess, judging from when it happens, is this:

1) Aliens have monster closets that they exist in. They sometimes are assigned one and sit there. Sometimes they are assigned a patrol route, where they will move between 2 different spots. You can sometimes notice this from the "grrr--what was that noise?" business that happens when one bamfs in nearby and makes noise. This will sometimes occur for two rounds, then the source disappears to another location nearby and makes noise there.

2) Aliens who are near to your LOS but not in it yet will move forwards something like a half move to discover you. Floaters will do this randomly occasionally since their move is relatively so long, and Cryssalids do as well, but Cryssalids are more predictable whereas floaters often do this from fucking nowhere.

3) Aliens who have escaped and run off sometimes join forces with other aliens. I swear, sometimes this lets them ignore the "oh shit!" cinematic effect and sometimes does not, or sometimes does for that squad but not one, or something. It is very strange, but I have seen Mutons run in apparently in support of other mutons.

4) Combined, sometimes monsters will swap between closets (like in Monsters Inc, which I believe is what this game is based on, right? Mutons are like big Sullies and the Dr. Waternooses are Cryssalids?) and appear near a squad. They will then want to move towards this squad. This allows the aliens to take offensive action occasionally, but rarely.

5) Since XCOM operatives can sprint like madmen, they will cover so much ground on average that critters get no chance to swap to a nearby closet nearly ever. I once had some floaters appear in an spot near by snipers, then get gunned down instantly in hilarious fashion, but that's rare. So this appears never to be the case. Also, there's usually a clear area around XCOM's landing squares, and very limited map size, so aliens are by their very nature usually clustered together.

6) Lastly, some aliens are always going to spawn in certain spots. There's limited spawn locations for them, so on certain maps you can always use certain strategies to maximum effectiveness. /sad

That's prolly a result of thin men having the number one cheat attack of cheese: poison. Yes, they can shoot it though walls at guys they can't see to drop it on as many of your guys as possible.

What of it?

I await denials this ever happens. I'm actually tempted to rent the game from EB again just to make a series of hilarious videos. I'll call them the FIRAXIS Sucks Installation, 2012.