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

Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,879
Location
Italy
he said something different. he said the floaters used their turn to move in the middle of his team to be mauled during the following turn. a case of retarded ai, different from cases of retarded programming of spawn points teleporting around because consoles can't keep track of more than 5 single entities and console owners even less.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
That was my experience as well. Basically, those enemies that do move do so by teleporting along predefined points. And if you squad happens to be on that point, they would just appear out of thin air and do their free move-into-cover animation. Even if they happen to appear in the middle of your formation.

I'm not sure since it's been a while, but I think this effect was actually a bug that got fixed.
My experience anyway was that they entered your LOS and then got their run-for-cover action. Don't remember if they still executed an attack on top of this, though.
 
Joined
Feb 11, 2007
Messages
2,951
he said something different. he said the floaters used their turn to move in the middle of his team to be mauled during the following turn. a case of retarded ai, different from cases of retarded programming of spawn points teleporting around because consoles can't keep track of more than 5 single entities and console owners even less.
Hmm, yeah, could be he was talking about that.

I did read in the patch notes that enemies appearing in the middle of a squad is a bug that "was supposed to happen much rarer now", but unfortunately that wasn't my experience - even after that patch enemies would cheerfully appear out of thin air behind or even between my soldiers. One time two fucking groups of mutons did that at the same time, just teleporting right next to me, while I was fighting a third group. That was actually kind of a fun fight (but then I wasn't playing iron man). At least they still had to waste their first turn on hide in cover animation - a couple of times I had an enemy do that trick of appearing right next to my troops, ignoring my overwatch (because the game thinks they haven't actually moved there) and immediately start firing. That was less fun.
 

Lorica

Educated
Joined
Mar 6, 2013
Messages
302
Yeah, I think one of the major complaints was that the teleporting glitch wasn't actually fixed, must mitigated a bit. It only really gets annoying for me when a patrol teleports past your zone of control to an already cleared area.

On the other hand, the only truly challenging fights I've had in this game have been the ones where every enemy in a downed supply ship bum rushed my starting position due to the wonky teleportation system. Multiple sectopods and several squads of elite Mutons. :)
 

Gozma

Arcane
Joined
Aug 1, 2012
Messages
2,951
In my experience almost all aliens except things like the "command squad" that always waits in the same room had at least a small ranging patrol of teleport points.

The main gameplay (as opposed to graphical) bug with teleporting aliens is that they are supposed to show aliens walking in from the previous patrol point if some check decides someone in your squad should be able to see it. But it's apparently tricky and fails constantly (especially if you use "hunker down" a lot, which you do use constantly at higher difficulties), so they just poof and appear. They don't get their "HAY WE SEE XCOM" move until they're actually at the point, so you get absurd shit like they teleport inside the center of mass of your squad and then run to flanking positions on everyone. It actually rarely matters since you end up with a bunch of easy short-range kills and I played both classic and impossible ironman games with it happening constantly, but it is janky as fuck, on the same level as enemies falling through maps and getting killed a la Daggerfall or something.

There are some other things that are also "teleport bugs" with different etiologies that I thought would be really easy to fix (teleport bugs with specific maps caused by having too few spawn points for the impossible difficulty level) but I haven't played since like the first patch so I dunno if they actually did it.
 

Brinko

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2012
Messages
884
In my experience almost all aliens except things like the "command squad" that always waits in the same room had at least a small ranging patrol of teleport points.

The main gameplay (as opposed to graphical) bug with teleporting aliens is that they are supposed to show aliens walking in from the previous patrol point if some check decides someone in your squad should be able to see it. But it's apparently tricky and fails constantly (especially if you use "hunker down" a lot, which you do use constantly at higher difficulties), so they just poof and appear. They don't get their "HAY WE SEE XCOM" move until they're actually at the point, so you get absurd shit like they teleport inside the center of mass of your squad and then run to flanking positions on everyone. It actually rarely matters since you end up with a bunch of easy short-range kills and I played both classic and impossible ironman games with it happening constantly, but it is janky as fuck, on the same level as enemies falling through maps and getting killed a la Daggerfall or something.

There are some other things that are also "teleport bugs" with different etiologies that I thought would be really easy to fix (teleport bugs with specific maps caused by having too few spawn points for the impossible difficulty level) but I haven't played since like the first patch so I dunno if they actually did it.
Going off of this link: http://xcom.wikia.com/wiki/XCOM:_Enemy_Within it looks like the bug was never fixed for the base game and you better cough up those shekels if you want your broken piece of shit fixed.
 
Dumbfuck
Joined
Feb 2, 2012
Messages
7,056
Codex 2012
Fuck! These 2KGames fagg0ts have forced Abandonia to remove X-Com 1 from their websites

I can't believe these assholes are still trying to make money
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
The secret dice rolls of XCOM: Enemy Within. How Firaxis fudge the numbers

You've probably done this in XCOM: quicksaved before a risky 10% chance to hit shot, missed, guiltily quickloaded to before you took the shot and tried again. Except it doesn't work. XCOM cleverly saves the seed of its random number generator after every turn, meaning that you'll always get the same result even if you reload a previous save game. There are loopholes of course. You can reload and force the enemy AI to take the same crappy shot you would have taken, knowing that their dice roll will miss and your next one will probably succeed.

Named after the term Firaxis affectionately apply to players who abuse quickloads to force the results they want, the Save Scum option in XCOM: Enemy Within will re-randomise your chances of successfully landing and attack after a save game is loaded. That is to say, you can miss your shot, reload your game and see a different outcome.

"It's called Save Scum," explains Anand Gupta, lead game designer on XCOM, "in honour of what Jake Solomon [XCOM's lead designer] likes to call players who do this. It resets the random number seed whenever the game is loaded. For people who really want to keep shooting until that 80% shot hits."

As well as giving a break to players who really can't stand firing over aliens' heads, the designer also explained how certain shot chances are not what they seem. There is, in effect, a secret "luck" modifier that can overide the shot chance displayed on screen.

"On Normal and Easy modes, there's a bad streak breaker," says Gupta. "It's stronger on easy. On Easy, it's very hard to actually lose soldiers, and the fewer soldiers you have the stronger this effect becomes, so if you start losing it builds to compensate. Of course, the aliens themselves have weaker stats on Easy and Normal too, and on Classic or higher difficulty settings this effect doesn't exist. Believe me though, on Easy, if you miss three times in a row you're not going to miss your fourth shot. It can be a 1% chance to hit and you're not going to miss that shot."

So there is an XCOM god, and he is a benevolent one, but only if you're really bad at XCOM. Take a look at our XCOM: Enemy Within preview for more things about trousers and stats.

:M
 
Unwanted

Hornawkawk

Unwanted
Joined
Sep 4, 2013
Messages
362
There are loopholes of course. You can reload and force the enemy AI to take the same crappy shot you would have taken, knowing that their dice roll will miss and your next one will probably succeed.

This is bullshit for many reasons.
 

Brinko

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2012
Messages
884
God that is so fucking stupid I can't even believe it. But what I find super lulzy is that they are adding in the ability to save scum in the expansion through that second wave thing.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,284
God that is so fucking stupid I can't even believe it. But what I find super lulzy is that they are adding in the ability to save scum in the expansion through that second wave thing.

Saving the RNG is a pretty normal thing for these kinds of games.

There are loopholes of course. You can reload and force the enemy AI to take the same crappy shot you would have taken, knowing that their dice roll will miss and your next one will probably succeed.

This is bullshit for many reasons.

As described, yes. But it's possible to keep replaying a turn until you find the actions that cause the RNG for the enemy turn to miss all shots.
 

Brinko

Arcane
Joined
May 7, 2012
Messages
884
I was mostly talking about the bad shot breaker. That concept just seems so damn dumb and hand holdish.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,396
The secret dice rolls of XCOM: Enemy Within. How Firaxis fudge the numbers
You've probably done this in XCOM: quicksaved before a risky 10% chance to hit shot, missed, guiltily quickloaded to before you took the shot and tried again. Except it doesn't work. XCOM cleverly saves the seed of its random number generator after every turn, meaning that you'll always get the same result even if you reload a previous save game. There are loopholes of course. You can reload and force the enemy AI to take the same crappy shot you would have taken, knowing that their dice roll will miss and your next one will probably succeed.

Named after the term Firaxis affectionately apply to players who abuse quickloads to force the results they want, the Save Scum option in XCOM: Enemy Within will re-randomise your chances of successfully landing and attack after a save game is loaded. That is to say, you can miss your shot, reload your game and see a different outcome.

"It's called Save Scum," explains Anand Gupta, lead game designer on XCOM, "in honour of what Jake Solomon [XCOM's lead designer] likes to call players who do this. It resets the random number seed whenever the game is loaded. For people who really want to keep shooting until that 80% shot hits."

As well as giving a break to players who really can't stand firing over aliens' heads, the designer also explained how certain shot chances are not what they seem. There is, in effect, a secret "luck" modifier that can overide the shot chance displayed on screen.

"On Normal and Easy modes, there's a bad streak breaker," says Gupta. "It's stronger on easy. On Easy, it's very hard to actually lose soldiers, and the fewer soldiers you have the stronger this effect becomes, so if you start losing it builds to compensate. Of course, the aliens themselves have weaker stats on Easy and Normal too, and on Classic or higher difficulty settings this effect doesn't exist. Believe me though, on Easy, if you miss three times in a row you're not going to miss your fourth shot. It can be a 1% chance to hit and you're not going to miss that shot."

So there is an XCOM god, and he is a benevolent one, but only if you're really bad at XCOM. Take a look at our XCOM: Enemy Within preview for more things about trousers and stats.

I don't know who is the worst retard. The guys that pay Money for this ape or the people who can't see how retarded this article is.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
I was mostly talking about the bad shot breaker. That concept just seems so damn dumb and hand holdish.

I guess that's the natural result of expanding the audience. All the casuals that complain that even on easy the game is still too hard have to be shut up somehow.
 

Jaedar

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 5, 2009
Messages
9,883
Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Honestly, rigging the dice seems like a decent way to make the game easier. Considering that most companies do HP bloat, it's nice to see firaxis seem to have made the game with classic in mind and then added mechanics to make the easier stuff easier. That's not to say there is no hp bloat though.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,284
If it was any other way the consoletard crowd would rage that the game is rigged as soon as they miss 2 75% shots in a row. Classic is legit, anyone competent isn't playing easy or normal.
 

Multi-headed Cow

Guest
I like how the game journo and the lead designer on the shitty new expansion act like "Save scum" is some out-there alien term.
 

Gozma

Arcane
Joined
Aug 1, 2012
Messages
2,951
The indian guy probably thinks that Jake Solomon coined it

I think it's kinda weird that they would use the term in-game as it's, you know, an insult to a subset of game purchasers.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
They probably expected the guy to know the term and not to use it, at least not like that.
After all, the more common "save scumming" sounds much less offensive to your fans.
Internet drama incomming?
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
May 13, 2013
Messages
6,242
Location
Space Hell
XCOM_EW_EXALT_CovertOps_Screen3.jpg
 

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