The consensus is to play with the Community Edition mod.
There is a popular XDivision mod, but it changes a lot of stuff.
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KickStarter Phoenix Point - the new game from X-COM creator Julian Gollop
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
There is a popular XDivision mod, but it changes a lot of stuff.
Van-d-all
Erudite
Community Edition is a must at this point. Plus bonus tilesets like Tundra or Jungle.
XDivision on the other hand I wouldn't recommend. It's a bloat mod. Adds stuff for the sake of adding it, and without much rhyme or reason. It adds xenomorphs from Alien movies FFS...
Puteo
Learned
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2018
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- 171
Xenonauts is ok, but it's almost a complete x-com clone. It has some nice innovations like being able to move units simultaneously and adding a decent cover system that's not full retard like nuXCOM. It's worth trying.
Silent Storm is excellent. There is a balance problem just over halfway into the game but it is well worth playing at least until that point.
On the other hand, Silent Storm: Sentinels fixes all the problems with SS and is imo easily the pinnacle of the genre.
holla_cabezas_de_mierda
Arcane
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- Jul 8, 2006
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- 3,023
sweet, sounds good. So mod the panzerkleins out? Does sentinels have panzerkleins?
SSS doesn't fix the Panzerklein problem!
I don't have anything against them theme wise, but they are awful to use with the UI and the maps.
Pretty nuanced criticism. Discussion starts at 08:04
ArchAngel
Arcane
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- 21,309
He is the quitter I was talking about that was using the swap around items trick and then called the game stupid because Ambush would happen that would prevent him from swaping around equipment. Another nuXcom retard.
Also his tactic was to build a lot of Research labs early, it didn't pay of and then complained about manufacturing taking too long lol
Also his tactic was to build a lot of Research labs early, it didn't pay of and then complained about manufacturing taking too long lol
Xeon
Augur
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- Apr 9, 2013
- Messages
- 1,858
A lot of the big streamers respect Filthy, also most of what he said is valid criticism and he didn't overreact like Beagle did.
I enjoyed watching TorNis but he is kinda the very opposite of Beagle, where Beagle kept shitting on the game no matter what, TorNis kept defending the game despite of everything, both views are shitty tbh. At least this guy just talked about what he experienced without talking about things he didn't experience yet.
I enjoyed watching TorNis but he is kinda the very opposite of Beagle, where Beagle kept shitting on the game no matter what, TorNis kept defending the game despite of everything, both views are shitty tbh. At least this guy just talked about what he experienced without talking about things he didn't experience yet.
flyingjohn
Arcane
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- May 14, 2012
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- 3,198
Anybody who abandons nu civ for battle brothers deserves a brofist.
ArchAngel
Arcane
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- 21,309
In this video he turned out fair and balanced but I watched him stream the game and he went full retard more than once. Not like Beagle, that was beyond words, Beagle went full autist.
orcinator
Liturgist
Managed to beat it.
The final boss didn't do anything but spawn a crabman every few turns. It had over 9000 HP but no sound effects. The two part gauntlet preceding it had like 20 crabmen with guns, two queens, a half dozen sirens plus some artilelry in an arena consisting of a corner and an open area. I killed all the crabs with mind crush in a single turn after they piled in after me (regular killing spree powers wouldn't have worked due to the return fire) then killed the rest once they all panicked. Then you fight a bunch of artillery aliens that shoot actual bombs instead of critters, (that was the first time I saw them shoot their load since before that I always focused them down before they could fire, turns out that was the right decision)
I can see what the game trying to accomplish but it's constantly being brought down from being good by various issues, mostly the fact that it's unfinished and it's desire to copy NuCom without regard for how it melds with its mechanics;
Actual Line of Sight is a good thing, but it's stapled on top of NuCom cinematic movement and animations without consideration for whether it will work or not. So you have to deal with not being able to choose where your guys can crouch and whether they can peek out from behind a wall or not. Waist high cover seems to only be used for protecting your legs (so make everyone wear the barely armored sniper pants I guess). Overwatch is a fucking joke, besides being able to pick a cone of fire you have the same "open fire as the alien moves in slowmo" deal, so now you can miss since the cinematic moment let the dude get behind cover. Oh it's resolved in sequence instead of all at once so the second soldier in line might not even get to shoot of the alien is out of sight.
Compare this with the much less cinematic Silent Storm; you still get some fucky moments but it's much easier to deal with it since everyone stays still and you can crouch or go prone wherever you want.
Instead of researching everything yourself, you have to ally with the factions to get all the cool stuff. Problem is the faction system kinda sucks;
Rep management is very simple, it goes up when you defend a faction's bases and attack their enemies but goes down when you attack them or save the bases of the other factions (once their rivalry starts heating up). There's also a gimmick where the rep won't go up past a certain point until you do a mission for the faction to level up their relationship but if it goes down you won't lose the benefits of the relationship. As I said in an older post, the mission can spawn on the other side of the globe so you might be forced to wait a long time before you can be friends with a certain faction.
Faction bases seem to be clustered in one region of the world so depending on where you spawn you'll see constant alien raids against one faction while the rest go unnoticed, in my game even once I explored everything the aliens kept attacking one faction while rarely touching the other ones.
The "meta" thus boils down to focusing on an alliance with the factions whose havens keep getting attacked, then once you're allied, keep raiding them to please their rival, ally then betray them in turn to befriend the last faction. I don't know what happens if you let an allied faction's rep drop too low since I managed to keep them topped up thanks to alien bases.
Oh and there's neutral havens, they don't do much besides offering you a side quest you can complete for extra resources.
There's very low map variety, there's randomization in some of them but it's barely noticeable, most maps are also very small so it's easier to notice when the pieces start repeating. Guess they had to copy that from nuCom too.
There's stealth. It gets broken when you combine the assault's killing spree power with the stealth guy's double damage from being in stealth with the weird detection mechanics that let you stay undetected even as you're blasting fools with a shotgun.
I'm too tired to go into combat and the but the gist of it seems to be a trying to focus on crowd control where you can choose to permanently remove an enemy by killing it, cripple it by shooting it's arms off or make it panic by killing other enemies or use "nonlethal" tools like psi or stun weapons. When it works it's fun and challenging but then you get enough dudes to level 7 and unlock the death god powers and it becomes more about killing everything in the first few turns instead of trying to survive against overwhelming odds. The game seems to be build around this since it throws more and more enemies against you as it goes on, culminating in the final mission I described above.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I played on hardest
Just watched a clip and noticed that on the lower difficulties you have like 4 enemies per mission instead of around a dozen, that might change how you play the game.
The final boss didn't do anything but spawn a crabman every few turns. It had over 9000 HP but no sound effects. The two part gauntlet preceding it had like 20 crabmen with guns, two queens, a half dozen sirens plus some artilelry in an arena consisting of a corner and an open area. I killed all the crabs with mind crush in a single turn after they piled in after me (regular killing spree powers wouldn't have worked due to the return fire) then killed the rest once they all panicked. Then you fight a bunch of artillery aliens that shoot actual bombs instead of critters, (that was the first time I saw them shoot their load since before that I always focused them down before they could fire, turns out that was the right decision)
I can see what the game trying to accomplish but it's constantly being brought down from being good by various issues, mostly the fact that it's unfinished and it's desire to copy NuCom without regard for how it melds with its mechanics;
Actual Line of Sight is a good thing, but it's stapled on top of NuCom cinematic movement and animations without consideration for whether it will work or not. So you have to deal with not being able to choose where your guys can crouch and whether they can peek out from behind a wall or not. Waist high cover seems to only be used for protecting your legs (so make everyone wear the barely armored sniper pants I guess). Overwatch is a fucking joke, besides being able to pick a cone of fire you have the same "open fire as the alien moves in slowmo" deal, so now you can miss since the cinematic moment let the dude get behind cover. Oh it's resolved in sequence instead of all at once so the second soldier in line might not even get to shoot of the alien is out of sight.
Compare this with the much less cinematic Silent Storm; you still get some fucky moments but it's much easier to deal with it since everyone stays still and you can crouch or go prone wherever you want.
Instead of researching everything yourself, you have to ally with the factions to get all the cool stuff. Problem is the faction system kinda sucks;
Rep management is very simple, it goes up when you defend a faction's bases and attack their enemies but goes down when you attack them or save the bases of the other factions (once their rivalry starts heating up). There's also a gimmick where the rep won't go up past a certain point until you do a mission for the faction to level up their relationship but if it goes down you won't lose the benefits of the relationship. As I said in an older post, the mission can spawn on the other side of the globe so you might be forced to wait a long time before you can be friends with a certain faction.
Faction bases seem to be clustered in one region of the world so depending on where you spawn you'll see constant alien raids against one faction while the rest go unnoticed, in my game even once I explored everything the aliens kept attacking one faction while rarely touching the other ones.
The "meta" thus boils down to focusing on an alliance with the factions whose havens keep getting attacked, then once you're allied, keep raiding them to please their rival, ally then betray them in turn to befriend the last faction. I don't know what happens if you let an allied faction's rep drop too low since I managed to keep them topped up thanks to alien bases.
Oh and there's neutral havens, they don't do much besides offering you a side quest you can complete for extra resources.
There's very low map variety, there's randomization in some of them but it's barely noticeable, most maps are also very small so it's easier to notice when the pieces start repeating. Guess they had to copy that from nuCom too.
There's stealth. It gets broken when you combine the assault's killing spree power with the stealth guy's double damage from being in stealth with the weird detection mechanics that let you stay undetected even as you're blasting fools with a shotgun.
I'm too tired to go into combat and the but the gist of it seems to be a trying to focus on crowd control where you can choose to permanently remove an enemy by killing it, cripple it by shooting it's arms off or make it panic by killing other enemies or use "nonlethal" tools like psi or stun weapons. When it works it's fun and challenging but then you get enough dudes to level 7 and unlock the death god powers and it becomes more about killing everything in the first few turns instead of trying to survive against overwhelming odds. The game seems to be build around this since it throws more and more enemies against you as it goes on, culminating in the final mission I described above.
Edit: Oh yeah, and I played on hardest
Just watched a clip and noticed that on the lower difficulties you have like 4 enemies per mission instead of around a dozen, that might change how you play the game.
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I don't know shit about this but besides an annoying tendency to whine somewhat, the man knows his turn-based tactics. His Battle Brothers videos are exemplary.
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The flares in OG X-COM always triggered me: We have laser weapons and such, but are unable to get any night vision/infrared/thermal goggles?
NV goggles are really awesome irl, so I understand JG went for a much weaker option, but they could have been balanced with things like battery life.
Endemic
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2012
- Messages
- 4,449
Yeah, that always irked me. OTOH, thermal sights would have removed a lot of the challenge of locating enemies, what with being able to see through soft cover. Pretty sure there are mods for nightvision though.
And thermal sights would not work on whatever aliens are cold blooded
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2012
- Messages
- 29,864
Them panzerkleins are a lot less annoying in sss
I'd rather deal with an organization that can't afford NV than have goggles with batteries that run out after 15 seconds. I'm done with failing video game flashlights, it's over.
Zanzoken
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2014
- Messages
- 4,064
Nerfing something that should obviously be there based on the setting -- such as NV goggles -- for balance reasons is bad design. Much better to leave it in but give the aliens some kind of ability to counter it -- like flashbangs that can blind your guys for a few turns -- so that using NV is now a risk.
In those turnbased with procedural maps, such as Xcom (old and new), Phoenix point etc. they should really tie some gameplay to day, night and weather. It opens up so many possibilites
Van-d-all
Erudite
It's honestly baffling how neglected the weather is in games. Battle Isle did this in cool way, with weather forecasts and terrain changes.
Endemic
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 16, 2012
- Messages
- 4,449
Games like Panzer General, Total War and Combat Mission factored in weather. It's odd that X-COM didn't considering the scope.
Agree. Expecially because the engine already support it with Sitreps and differents times of day\weather.
It's odd that nobody modded it too.
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