Part of why I played vanilla, despite adoration for 1.13. Vanilla is perfectly fine for me.
The devs here addressed all this.
It shouldn't be up to them who gets the first turn. The side that surprises the other should get the first turn. It's natural, it makes intuitive sense, and it's fun. You plan ambushes while covering your ass. It worked great in the previous games, and they shouldn't have messed with it. I'll concede your point about managing a squad in real time sometimes being annoying. That's the number one thing that didn't work about it. But there's a perfect solution, which is to introduce pausing outside of combat, and they should have done that instead.
I don't experience this weird feeling of yours at all. Combat is done in turns where one side spends its AP and then the other spends its AP. That's how it worked before, and that's how it works now except for the first turn, which needs some little pseudo-turn jammed into it for some reason. It's inconsistent, and it makes it so that you and the enemy aren't playing by the same rules. That should be avoided as much as possible.
It sure has. It's been redesigned into a neatly packaged easily-balanced frustration-minimising box. Surprise shouldn't be Surprise with a captial S, it should arise naturally from the interplay of systems.
Nah I'm still somewhat excited. Just tempering my expectations.
I acknowledge this point of view but don't subscribe to it. Good challenge, good gameplay, respecting the player's time, a million other things are more important than "the realism" or whatever. But I'm already well documented as not really caring about the perfect simulation so yeah we're gonna disagree here. Actually you're not even advocating realism but PvP boardgame fairness, which .... I absolutely do not care about good PvP in a PvE game. Again I see why you want that but it's meaningless to me.
I probably shouldn't have included that sentence without backing it up. The only reason I'm insistent on this here is because I sincerely believe it does lead to better challenge and better gameplay. It's not realism for its own sake, it's realism in service to gameplay. This is clearly a very hard thing to get right, but the JA series did and I want anyone making a sequel to give it their best effort. For me it's a defining feature of the series, not because realism itself is an ideal but because it results in such good gameplay. But like you say, different strokes.
I also favor game mechanics that are applied the same way to both the player and the enemy.
Fuck nuXcom and nuXcom clones, JA is not supposed to be anything near it and seems these devs forgot that.
What is that people shit on JA:BiA but it was closer to JA2 than what this is going to be. You were only shitting on it because it was not TB.
"More slavishly followed the previous game" is not the same as "good". The things Back in Action got wrong made it a bad game. It was a drag. It wasn't fun. It didn't even capture the spirit of the originals.
