The game just released. Looks like it is getting pretty good reviews. I pre-ordered on steam, but I am in the midst of a move and the gaming PC is not accessible so I can't play for a week yet. Anyone here play it yet?....what are your initial impressions?
I had a UFO assault today that didn't go too well. Yeah, I didn't know what size ship it was so I only packed one medikit. By the time I got to the last room and found the three Sectoid Commanders, my squad was in rough shape, and it wasn't helped by the fact that one of them got mind-controlled.
Gunned down the mind-controlled soldier, another got mind-controlled, eventually I pull my remaining four soldiers back. It's not until I get to the landing zone to abort the mission that I notice I still have five soldiers. Yay for mind control time limits.
This game did a One More Turn on me until 0300 last night. I got three hours of sleep before programming work. Stay away ppl
Have to say, I'm a bit disappointed by some of the later abduction missions. When there's like one building on the map where all the aliens are hiding, and invariably it's surrounded by cars and vans and stuff, it's very difficult to make any headway. In fact towards the end of my last mission I basically had to just abandon cover, run up and gun the last guy down at point-blank.
I guess I should bring more heavies and/or pack alien grenades so that whenever there's aliens camped out behind some heavy cover I can just blow it up (and do a little area damage to their health as well) but I'm at that point where I don't quite have all my guys in the powered armour so I'm making up for it with chitin plating. So backpack slots are at a premium.
So, the one time my brother brought a SHIV on a mission, he made the unfortunate mistake of using it to scout and ran into a group of Mutons who commenced to blow it to smithereens in the first round and he hasn't used them since. While I do see the usefulness in using them to scout(Afterall, I'd rather lose a robot than a Colonel.) I was wondering if anyone has used them as part of their primary strategy? We have the strategy guide, but it unfortunately lacks any detailed information, like how many HP or what their weapon damage is.
-Twi /)
Soldiers are cheaper. I suppose that I do go through a lot of Rookies/Squaddies, but even when I have to abort the mission I still get all my squad equipment back. So I'd rather use soldiers.
Supposedly the benefit of a SHIV is that it can't be panicked or mind-controlled, but as you know it can be damaged by regular weapons and in order to repair it at all you'll need an arc thrower. You can of course upgrade it using the Foundry, but it remains a rather iffy unit.
It's true enough that the Mutons - especially the elites, who all come with heavy plasmas it seems - can just as easily kill a soldier outright with one shot, but soldiers can easily be replaced. That's why you only bring the few officers that you need on a mission, pad the rest of the squad with rookies or squaddies. Taking the New Guy upgrade from the Officer Training School means that your rookies are automatically promoted to squaddies and you can choose from more than just standard assault weapons.
the problem is this feeling lasts only until you discover the many many flaws of the game
dont get me wrong, im still playing it but its not so fun anymore, its just depressing cause it "could have been" but its not
it inherits the usual firaxis problems, its clear the total lack of serious betatesting, i think no one at fireaxis ever really PLAYED it
what is UNEXCUSABLE is the destruction of strategic/managerial elements
NOTHING matters, lets go in detail
-research is TOTALLY useless, this is the biggest and inconceivable mistake, you never care of reseraching, you always have EVERYTHING given, ive never ever built a single lab, never ever taken a single scientist, NEVER i repeat, yet at 1/3 of the game i have EVERYTHING researched with my scientists sleeping
i mean its a joke right? reasearching is one the coolest features in strategic games and here is totally absent and irrelevant???
-money its TOTALLY unbalanced, you are always broke for few months, then suddenly you have 15 satellites and gg, you get 1500 each month and have NOTHNG to buy, trade or anything, there is no real market, old xcom was balanced by continous trades in and out, here they dumb down the market et voila' another resource becomes crap, they just never played a full game to see how it goes...
-government is so stupid, you had dozens of stats to check b4, now you have a bar and 2 possible status "im with you" " im not", also funds are so sad, you build satellite and you have it, you dont and 0 money... the quintessence of dumbing down things
basically its not a strategy game anymore becusae there is no strategy involved
a good player takes 10 15 minutes to figure out there is only one way of playing, all out money/satellites at start, 1 or 2 workshop to rush the early buildings and end
this is ALL the strategy you need and NOTHNG can change this, there is no option to play differently
its just a tactical fighting game, but at least same as in civ5 this aspect was much improved with new skills and a fight more interesting
but even here...
maps are so incredibly linear, you know where enemies are as soon as your ship lands... wheres the fun of exploring? where s the suspance of meeting aliens?
a cool graphics and animation and music dont give a game replaybility, but i m not sure they really wanted it
ah i forgot one important thing
why would they make such a RNG game?
early game is the party of oneshots, its so incredibly bad that you have low chance of doing something massive, you miss n shots and then 1 shots the whole enemy
this is so bad
same with criticals, why make in the 2012 such a crit based game
plz developers of the future understand this:
*CRITICALS ARE BAD*
criticals shots is a mechanics of '90s
its old and bad
blizzard understood it
league of legends understood it
just dont make again this stupid mistake in the future
just make game based on tactic and skill not a lucky 5% chance that the gameplay is COMPLETELY changed
its not fun
You are writing in rage, but you have valid points. The replayability of the game is a bit limited. Lets hope there will be patching and addons. This is important for strategy gaming. The world needs to see that there are plenty of gamers who will pay for AAA strategy games.
I still love XCOM, but I will go back to FE pretty soon. Both games are good, but FE will give joy 10 times longer than XCOM.
I can see some valid points there too, but I do disagree on your outlook on criticals. Having that X% chance to deal massive damage has always been a fun addition to the games I've played. And as far as I know, Blizzard still uses them, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there...
first of all in pvp there are no crits thnx to resilience(or their damage highly reduced i dont remember)
second its a different approach, its not lucky crits but its sustain crits, the crit chance is very high, for some classes and certain abilities can be much more than 50%
then its no more rng
also you have to remember wow combat systm is based on giving MANY hits
rng is when you have 1 hit that means dead or alive, like xcom (at least early game without armors)
in wow you make like 1-2 attack each second (and pve fights last minutes meaning hundreds of hits), crits dont matter
anyway guys dont get me wrong, yes im raging because xcom is yet another delusion but its still overall a decent game, dunno 7/10 or so
if i never playerd the originale i would be more satisfied
UNFORTUNATELY the original is basically superior in ever gameplay mechanic apart maybe from combat
I'm so tired of people constantly saying the original was superior by slamming elements of this game when the original had almost exactly the same kind of mind numbingly stupid and pointless designs. (psi power + burster bombs = total and utter boredom and game over/inventory management of everyone scarring the same load out = WHY DO I HAVE CTS??)
It's nostalgia, it's not an accurate look at the two games, which are NOT SUPPOSED TO BE THE SAME ANYWAY. Look this new game seems to borrow some design elements from the new millennium. We all say we can do without the fancy gfx and cut scenes and that crap, but meh, to sell to a mass market that's what you have to take now. Also, the concept seems to be to play this game in ironman, more games seem to be going this route, they present you with sometimes impossible situations due to the fluctuations of the RNG (FTL anyone??? rougelikes in general???), but they also present you with a different set of challenges to manage. I like the fact that they stripped away some of the 'choice' (ala inventory and character development, because let's not kid ourselves, in the original there wasn't really any choice once you found the optimal builds) and made those areas smoother. I like the fact that you don't have total control over how to reduce panic in every country. I like the fact that you have to learn new strategies (even though once you solve that puzzle it's solved, but this is no different from pretty much any TBS ever anywhere).
I am hopeful that the issues with science/money being too 'easy' will be resolved through patch or mod. I am hopeful that the mob pulling strategy will also be resolved though patch or mod. Then again how many people are playing on the highest difficulty?
Sure, everyone is free to prefer whatever they want to prefer, but you simply have to take a step back and look at what the game actually is, not what you wished it to be.
And yes, I get that few people are outright slagging the game, most who 'dis' it are still giving it a 7/10, which is pretty good honestly for a 1st release, pre patch, pre mod, pre expansion. AMIRIGHT???
PS. This is Shadowtongue, somehow the site ate my old login info and I couldn't get it back
i dont know about others but for me its not nostalgia, its just pure logical analysis
i already said there are some improvements
but for every improvement in the actual game there is 1 step back at least
ironman is just shit, because of the excessive RNG, like i already explained, the game is not enjoyable in ironman impossible, its just frustrating
ironman just make you play different, in a super cautious and boring way, moving 1 step each turn, recharging the weapons even if you shot once and so on
it just makes missions last 1 h instead of 5 min
sure its more challenge
but its bad gameplay, you have to pay the price of boredome to have this challenge
these new stupid achievement just are wrong, first make a game that is challenging on its own then you can add some more thing if you want, but making games plain dumb and easy only to make some super long and obnoxious final challenge is not good game designing
anyway you are right about patching, i saw releases in a way way worse situation, we can hope for some big patch improving the game, its possible
even if here i dont trust much firaxis, they were so incredibly slow to fix civ bugs...
but ok, we will see
Diff'rent strokes for different folks. I played the original extensively and enjoyed it. I am playing the remake and I enjoy it. There are features of the original that I like more and vice versa. Of course, there are people who disagree and dislike one or the other (or both). But that's not because they're not reasonable. That's because there are no universal rules of fun.
I have to disagree with your assessment of ironman.
You are supposed to fail missions in ironman, and you are supposed to occasionally lose the entire game as well. The alternative is constantly reloading every time you get a bad result, no matter how trivial. Now, to each their own, but reloading doesn't make a game harder or easier, it just makes it pointless (my opinion obviously).
Then again I came from playing rogue (yes the original one from the 80s), so my expectations of any game are not to be allowed to simply respawn or reload everytime I do something stupid, or the rng nails me. If you can't handle an rng then play chess or something like that. Sometimes you will miss a 97% shot, and sometimes an offscreen alien will crit you. That's life. Well it's a different mindset to a lot of gamers anyway, and if it happens all the time it gets annoying and frustrating, but on the other hand if it's happening all the time it may not be the fault of the game either, it may be a fault with the tactics being employed by the player.
In any case, my hope is that patch/mods allow for more customization of difficulty levels. I think there are already some mods which do this to varying degrees, but I have not actually bothered to look into them because I just don't have the time to even play the game through right now...
me is sad... busy, but sad...
and its perfectly fine!
but what you dont get is that i have to fail and lose games... FOR MY POOR STRATEGY
i dont have to lose games because both me and aliens have 4 shots with 50% and sooner or later i get 4 miss and aliens get 4 hits
this thing shouldnt happen, its a bad game design
Agree to disagree then. I don't think it's bad design, I think it's just a different design than you may be used to.
Anyway, the best comp for XCom:EU to me right now is really something like Fire Emblem, at least as far as the tactical portion is concerned. And frankly, I don't hear a lot of people complaining about Fire Emblem (or Advanced Wars, though I've never played AW).
I think the mods/patches can easily address some of the strat layer issues. I think some tweeks can happen on the tactical side as well, but mostly it is already what it is going to be. Complaints about linear maps and such are valid, but I imagine they will fall on deaf ears none the less. I didn't find the so called 'random' maps of the original to be that exciting either. Visually everything was identical anyway (however many tile sets they had...), but once you started, it was quick to identify the choke points, or the likely enemy locations. It was still often a grind. At least in the new game I don't find much grind which is awesome to me, since I really hate grind missions which don't accomplish anything as your team was largely already maxxed and you rarely lost anyone (moreso if you didn't do ironman). Yet you had to do the missions else the panic levels in the countries they were in would go up...
The new game is a different design, it presents you with different optimization questions, and it forces you to make some 'hard' choices. I never felt there was a 'hard' choice in the 1st game, it was simply about finding the time to do everything.
I have a fairly good success rate with missions on Ironman. Not a clean sheet by any means, I have had to bug out a few times, and I've lost the whole squad once. What you have to remember is that once you've made a move you can't take it back. Just because you can go of the offensive doesn't mean you should. Sometimes knowing where the enemy is at (and so where to place your ambush) is more important than inflicting damage.
First thing is to have field medics along. Having three medikit uses instead of one makes a huge difference to how long you can keep taking damage. But don't go nuts, if you only have one field medic total, you don't want to risk them on an Abduction mission where they're probably going to die. As I said above, take only the officers you need to succeed. It may be a bit more difficult without all the special abilities that higher-ranked soldiers get, but the only way you're going to retain an edge is by deliberately hoarding some of your good soldiers.
Second is, you know that the RNG can be utterly sadistic, so make use of abilities that let you fire again (like Bullet Storm, or Rapid Fire). At the same time, minimise your exposure. If you have a team member that might get shot at but you don't need them to move or fire or overwatch this turn, get them to hunker down. You get immunity to criticals that way, and the doubling of your cover bonus is not too shabby either. Too bad the default keyboard shortcut for that doesn't seem to work.
Third is, have you ever noticed how you run out of ammo at the worst possible time? Reload your weapons if there aren't any enemies in sight, there's no rush, unless you're on a terror mission. There's an Ammo Conservation project available at the Foundry after doing a Muton Autopsy, it effectively gives all your weapons more ammo capacity (except consumables like rockets and grenades).
Finally, you've seen how annoying the enemy can be with lobbing grenades, shooting at your soldiers who are leaning out of cover, and so on. Don't bunch up if you're fighting Mutons, Cyberdiscs or Heavy Floaters.
If you're trying to keep your medic or wounded soldiers out of the enemy field of fire, don't have them lean out from cover, have them one tile in along something - preferably something that doesn't catch fire and explode.
Yes, you are better off staying in cover, any kind of cover, but you have to consider that the enemy is going to have a go at shooting green stuff your way even if they only have a 10% chance to hit. Sadistic RNG. If your guys just lean out from cover on Overwatch in the vain hopes of getting a reaction shot, you're wasting your time, the AI will fire from where it's at wasting the Overwatch unless you have Covering Fire. In a slugfest with Mutons, you will lose.
Don't get me wrong, Overwatch is great and all, but you need to manoeuvre so that the enemy has to come out of their cover. Which is great because although you're getting the Aim penalty (except for Snipers with Opportunist) you're shooting at them when they're not in deep cover, so you have a better chance to hit overall.
Which is why I complained about some of the abduction maps being so tiny. Just one building? Why are we not just airstriking the one building?
I am trying the game too. Its fun but the new action system is kinda restrictive. In the original series i could stand still and start shooting the aliens that was coming to my ambush spot but with the new one i can only shoot once. Generally thats not necessary bad, i just need to adapt to the new play style but what really annoys me in the game is that barely make any crit shot and some times miss the target with one tile distance and 95% to hit, while the aliens have the habbit to hit with crits more often and have little problem shooting and hitting from afar.
But to be fair, its a nice enjoyable game. The original was amazing, true, but the remake its also good in its own way.
Yeah the random misses at high hit percentages can be annoying. For those life-or-death situations you either want to get it all the way up to 100% to hit (flanking is good for this) or use a rocket or grenade, or create more chances to hit (sniper standing by to execute using Squadsight, for instance).
You can still shoot twice in a round, you just need to be a Heavy with Bullet Storm, or an Assault with Rapid Fire (granted it's two shots at the same enemy with an aim penalty).
Or a sniper with double tap, or support with that overwatch ability that lets you overwatch two times.
Good all round game.
Just finished it. Time for Classic Ironman.
Yeah I started that as well. It's not going so well but in Normal Ironman once I'd sussed out a strategy there didn't seem to be much chance of losing the game. Classic Ironman takes your proud achievement, tears it up, burns it, and tosses the ashes while grinning at you like a maniac and saying 'You want some more, sir?'
Playing Classic without Ironman after already completing the game would be a cop-out, to be honest. The sheer in-your-face brutality will send you running for your earlier saved game. And I'm not talking about tactical missions (although having witnessed someone saving and reloading in tactical, that's another reason) but all those mistakes that you make at the geoscape level.
Also of note should be the number of mods activating various 'second wave' and 'marathon' functionality. Seems there was a bit more in there that didn't quite get 'in', but was left 'in' and now is getting unlocked by modders.
Hopefully the additional options allow for a bit of tuning for individuals to set up the game more in the way they think it should go
I been playing in Classic Ironman from the start. I lost/quit like 3 games and then after an irritating bug decided to play Classic without ironman and only load the game when such a bug appears again. But I didn't
So after a while I was so imba with 2 squad sight snipers with plasma rifles the game became boring and too easy so I restarted in classic ironman again. Only this time I knew what I was doing and I got a perfect game going where I lost 0 countries, I got full tech and equipment. I am even making it difficult for my self by not using squad sight snipers. I only got one snap shot sniper in my team.
I recommend this to anyone. The game is so much more interesting and challenging. You actually have to employ real tactics and do proper planning and placement. You cannot count on your unable to miss double tap squad sight flying snipers on the other side of the map to solve your problems. I had so many more interesting fights and encounters because of not using these snipers.
My squad consists of 2 assaults, one defensive one offensive. Only thing they got in common is both got double shot and both got immunity to criticals. Both use Alloy cannons and use Ghost armor and chitinous plating.
They I got 2 Heavy, both offensive with Bullet storm and shredder rockets. They both carry scopes.
Then I got a Support that is into healing and reviving. He also has a ghost armor and carries an arc thrower in his second slot when I need to catch something, otherwise a scope. Ghost armor also helps him get to people that need healing faster.
And last but not least is my Snap shot In the Zone sniper. He also has ghost armor and scope. It lets him get into flank positions so he can get a bonus out of that In the Zone ability.
So, Classic Ironman hasn't gone so well. I got to the point where the Doom-o-Meter was at seven and admitted defeat. Ground combat has been very hit-and-miss, and especially because the success of ground combat determines what extra resources will be gained between months, my progress was painfully slow.
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