X-COM Firaxis - XCOM: Enemy Unknown + Enemy Within Expansion

I was thinking "when will I get alloy snipers, heavies etc. after that shotgun?" up until the last mission. Was pretty disapointed there was no such thing.

 

^What's more dissapointing, is when you realize that all the weapons are simple damage upgrade, nothing else grought to the table. Shame.

Had the same thing, it lasted me for exactly two full playthroughs, one to see 90% of the content, other to see the remaining 10% and realizing both games were fairly identical.

 

That's what happens with formulaic gameplay. You discover everything during the first couple of playthroughs and then it's pretty much over. They went overboard with the streamlining and cut out the soul of the game. I do have high hopes for a PC-only sequel though, since it seems the game sold like shit on consoles.

 

To be fair I don't think I would be able to play UFOD or JA2 as a brand new game for very long either after figuring out the essential gameplay anymore. A lot of my fun with those was about ignorance of them and ignorance of the nature of games in general. Like I didn't know how electroflares worked in X-Com when I played it, as in for fucking years - I assumed they worked like the light sticks would later work in JA2, that they would illuminate shit for aliens also. In truth they are a basically free and boring/tedious way to convert night missions to day missions. Or smoke grenades, which break everything. I just played too many games to make blithe assumptions, particularly naive realism assumptions, that obfuscate the core stupidity of shit like squadsight shooting anymore.

 

Really? I haven't seen any numbers, but the console versions are sold out around here. Perhaps Wellington is just wierd.

 

Gotta agree with the lack of auto-cannons and extra ammo types. I think this game is too explosive-shy, compare to the original where both sides thrown ridiculous bombs like candy and most battlesites are full of smoke and fire by the end. I think the cover system, which is nice, is to be blamed. I think they need to enhance it.
Also, only frag and smoke in bullshit. Stun, Flashbang, Incendiaries and maybe some Anti-Alien Gas (Toxigun, anyone?) would rock. EMP would be interesting (most enemies ARE cyborgs or robots, after all).

Shotgun would be a lot more fun if it was something akin to a Erszatz Neostad with two loads of bullets and lots of diverse bullets. Buckshot (for things like Chryssalids, Sectoids, Thin Men, etc...), Slugs (Mutons, etc...) and even EMP (For cyborgs like Floaters, Mutons and machines like cyberdics).

Agreed.
There was something... strong, emergent from the fact that combat is frenzyed death-fest where 14 of the world's most elite soldiers get slaughtered by a bunch of alien cyborg-clones who got super-guns, psi powers and gene-cibernetic enhancements that turn even the weakest Sectoid into a death machine. It showed how utterly merciless this whole thing was

There was always a interesting ambiguity in certain things, like the "interrogations." Maybe they are programmed for defiancy, but that would be kinda useless. Yeah, the aliens don't panic and berserk anymore, at least never seen it, fail.

There's a serious lack of emergent gameplay. For example, sometimes I stun a new alien but the mission is going to hell. Why can't I tell my rookie to stick the thing over his shoulder, pull a retreat and fuck off to the Skyranger, like we could in the originals?

Also, no ranked aliens is bullshit. Granted, it makes capture easier, because you don't need the mind probe to find out who's who's anymore, but ranked soldiers would go very well with the Research Credit concept.

 

Enemies don't panic, but they do retreat from time to time if their comrades are falling near them.

 

Unfortunately, that's what happens when you take a fully functional inventory and dick about to streamline :-/
So, my medic's down, why can't I loot his corpse for that last medikit?
Looting enemies for alien grenades and mags, that's out too.
etc. etc.

I don't really get why they ditched that one too. For one, it would expand the research probabilities (they'd have to ditch the South America bonus though), which are pretty much lacking atm.
I miss interrogating techies to learn the stats on the ufo craft. I miss interrogating medics to gain bonus autopsies (they could give bonus crit chance tickets for that, or additional information on the species),
heck, I miss all the flavor research we could do to learn more about the alien plans.
More alien subtypes with different stats, abilities and loadouts would only do the game good, imo. Right now, the muton is a muton, always the same and predictable.

Here's hoping for the mods... although I think there'll be some time before I'd want to replay this.

 

Thanks for funding the decline, guys. Meanwhile, I suffered 5 horrible defeats today, including 4 terror sites and one alien base and just managed to win a terror site against chrysalids and snakemen which saved me from getting shut down. Still, I got funding horribly cutdown and I'm surviving on manufacturing and selling laser tanks.

How do smoke grenades break everything?

That's why shit like 27m visual range should be gone.

 

tell us more about your awesome ability to play a game we've all played

 

Highest return on investment without ultra-lategame shit is laser cannons, nets about 95 bucks per engineer-hour IIRC (does not include initial capital or engineer wages/related upkeep). However the interface for manufacturing shit for sale is terrible and the capital investment to get it going is pretty big. I think it takes like a month or a month and a half to make back the money you invest in living quarters, workshops and on hiring engineers, and that's putting aside the opportunity cost that you could have bought a bunch of researchers or new radar bases with that capital instead and beaten the game. Looting supply ships for like 5 million bucks a pop is a lot less boring and the score you get from them easily counterbalances the penalty for leaving bases out.

They can reduce LOS distance, meaning you can compress the 20-square sight distance and all the broken shit it does to even less. So for example even if you do something like leave a scout way out on a limb with 0 TUs and 3 aliens looking right at him you can drop a smoke on him and the aliens will not be aware of his existence anymore on their turn. Or you can use spotter-sniper tactics in a small hallway in a UFO where normally there would be no room to hide anything. And they make by far the most dangerous part of a mission (getting out of the skyranger) 99% safe. TFTD actually did a subtle nerf to make smoke grenades less broken by making them only fill one tile on the first round they are out.

 

Yeah my turn around was even quicker. I started and thought it looked awesome, but after playing it for a day, I started to notice how on rails everything seemed even with hitting esc through all the cutscenes. Now if I boot it at all, it's just to play one mission and then shut it down. I've never completed the game. It did, however, inspire me to re-play Champions of Krynn since this game was so disappointing. So it's not a complete loss.

 

Yeah, but it's risk-free. Capturing downed big UFOs isn't.

I see. Well, generally, I have the opposite. I was using exploits and SFLing through missions when I was a teen. Now, I'm playing iron man and I'm playing "realistically" - avoiding the "sniper-spotter" LoS abuse and stuff like that.
Yeah, it's LARPing, but so is not reloading after every missed shot .

It's not 99% safe and it's a legitimate tactic which I have learned from the game manual (or hintbook).
From what I've seen, the smoke isn't that effective. I often lost soldiers when exiting Skyranger even when it was in the smoke.

 

It's pretty obscure to use it properly. Smoke reduces the number of tiles of sight range, but invisibly there is a "smoke thickness" variable that determines how much. The smoke from, say, a rocket explosion that happened a couple of turns ago is very thin and doesn't reduce sight range very strongly even if there is a lot of it. But the first turns of a smoke grenade have a very strong effect, like knocking off the majority of sight range if you are looking straight through an entire cloud. That means blanketing the base of the skyranger makes disembarking soldiers invisible to aliens they aren't completely on top of (and aliens do not spawn on the skyranger tile, so they would have to wander onto it in the turn you pop the smokes). If there is an alien looking directly into the skyranger when you land, you can just have dudes at the front prime and drop grenades instead of throwing them - that doesn't trigger reaction fire.

I don't know what it means for a tactic to be legitimate in a game but it certainly is effective and is another incidence of sight range fucking being in the elementary structure of the game.

 

I didnt even finished the game, i played for a few days, but due to no random maps, lack of complex tactics and other things, i just cant see myself to play this ...I might try the highest difficulty when i am really bored...
Its one way ticket, looks ok, plays ok for a while, but after 10-20 hours invested, you will know the spawns the retarded cutscenes with aliens, the horrible art direction, the camera etc, etc, bah fuck them all.

 

Yeah, I have it for 360 (crap pc) so I can't uninstall it, but I'm trading it in tomorrow. Should have saved the money and avoided the costume pack shit.

 

I mean that it's exactly what the smoke grenades are for. For preventing the enemy observation.

 

If someone feels the need to dress up the dolls, I found a simple .ini setting to enable armor tinting:

There, saved 5 jewgolds of DLC (that's quality value for your money, now I can have a full pink squad!)

 

On my version, it only allows me to color the armors, no decals or messer chef helmets. Still, this arguably was the only useful feature in that thing, so here, have a brofist, mang.

 

Yeah, just the color... you still have to pay if you want helmets.



Still useful for color coding classes, easier to track on the field.

 

Agreed, the new inventory system is bullshit. No room for improvisation during the battle. No picking stun rods off the still hot bodies of dead soldiers to pass them towards the troopers assigned to GLORIOUS STUN-ROD DUTY! It makes no sense because its not like any of that non-class exclusive equipment needs training to use - any X-COM rookie can use a arc-throwner, or a medi-kit. There's no reason why you can't pick shit off your dead comrades.

Oh yeah, no bullet clips sucks, a better inventory system + different firing modes (rather than just the XCOM "all auto shots" weirdness) + finite bullets with real clips would make much more sense and be much more interesting.


In fact, I think it would make much more sense if soldiers were assigned a class the moment they were recruited, rather than going into somekind of test/hazing where they need to pop some moles with a rifle until the high-ups magically realize their potential to tote large machine guns/sniper rifles/shotguns/support the team. Don't those people receive some TRAINING before being sent to fight aliens?

I like the idea of finding alien weaknesses by learning straight from their own's mouths how they are made and what is weak on their design.

For example, it would be interesting to see ranked units acting like any ranked units would do in any sort of military structure - Say, some sort of Seargent or Officer critter (of course, bred exclusively for combat) giving orders, rallying the ranks, manifesting as abilities/bonuses for the enemy, which you could weaken by taking down the Seargents/Officers. Medics on enemy ranks would be interesting, too, there were medics in the original but we never saw them healing and, you know, doing medic stuff. I liked how in the OG having your higher-ranked officers get killed made your squad more frightened than a mere rookie getting shot casually, and having them stay alive allowed your team to resist panics better.

Not to mention that in the OG, the average footsoldier alien was essentially a organic robot, who was uploaded some sort of programming that told it how to shoot, duck and follow orders and not much more. The average Sectoid was pretty much a robot with flesh. They panicked, through, which is probrably because having soldiers with no inbuilt fear/caution is stupid. The higher ranks were all bred for intelligence and initiative, and they were given extra info and brains to act on their functions, which is why capturing a commander was important.

 

I'm sure someone's already mentioned this, but they're making xcom easier...

Yep, that's right. It's being made easier!

 

This game is frustrating : The combat system is good (I prefer that to the old TU system anyway), or would be, if it wasn't plagued by the map design and the stupid MMO-like pull mechanism, which turns everything into a cheese fest.
Maybe if the maps were big enough for the spawns to make some sense, that would feel ok, but now, the main focus of firefights is downing one group without "agroing" another one. I much prefer WH40K : Chaos Gate approach of fighting a battle over a big map instead of having 4 micro skirmishes over very small portions of the map.
Impossible is mostly about learning map layouts because of that. They replaced some things they should have kept (All I wanted was a good inventory interface, not a crappy interface for chosing 1 inventory item...), and kept some things that don't fit their combat mechanics at all (cover destructible by everyone's weapon when the game is all about cover? Come on! Same goes for 15 meter visual range).

That and they replaced the geoscape with some mission generating script, that generates insanely hard missions in the beginning, and trivial ones during the second half of the game...

That said, I spent a lot of time with the game, so I cannot really complain about it not being fun. It's just sad that it feels like they were close to make it a really great game.

 

Meh, it's easy difficulty they are making easier.
Indeed, no idea why that would be necessary, but ultimately, who cares...

(MHC posted this some days ago, I think)

 

I sailed the seven seas, finished the game once and haven't returned to it. I played the demo to see if I were willing to pay full price and came to the conclusion that, no, not without sampling the game more.
After playing and completing it (I'm a compulsive completionist, even with crappy games), I'm not returning to this particular turd until it's at least half price or less. I can afford it, yes, but I feel this is so far from what I wanted it to be that I'm not about to reward Firaxis for it.

Normal difficulty is well and truly easy enough as is. Don't know why they'd bother making easy difficulty even easier.. Hope they rename it to "toddler difficulty".