XCOM: Enemy unkown

The Game Room
281

Similar - I’m getting my shit steadily pushed in on Classic / Ironman. I refuse to back down. But I think I finally hammered out a starting strategy:

  • start in either South America (the bonus is best in the early game, even though you can get it with just a pair of sats by that time it won’t matter so much) or Europe (of all the economy bonuses, this is the one that has the largest impact on the early game, the other bonuses you can nab later when they matter). The other advantage of South America is that its second country is worthless, so with a base there you can let it go straight to hell and still keep the continent bonus. Africa is also good, for the same reason: the bonus is good, the countries are shit, build your base there so you can get the bonus while letting the countries burn.
  • immediately build one sat
  • research alien biology and arc thrower ASAP
  • build containment.
  • for the first abduction, get engineers
  • build Workshop (sell corpses, even alien nav & power sources if you have to)
  • build second sat even though you can’t deploy it yet. Third and fourth too if you have the cash.

Hopefully this is all done in month 1. Don’t deploy any sat in that first month, there shouldn’t be any country in the red at this point. Avoid building tactical stuff you don’t really need yet (SCOPE, kevlar, carapace etc… ; just one arc thrower and one medkit once you’ve got a support guy with enough XP to triple it)

In month 2:

  • capture a sectoid if you haven’t already, gets you beam weapons faster. You don’t need those for your men yet, but it’s on the way to what you do need: heavy lasers.
  • build a power station, second sat nexus. Don’t deploy sats yet.
  • capture outsider, study the crystal, build the key, don’t raid the base.

From then on, you have both short term and long term objectives.
Your short term is to dig to the nearest steam vent and build a thermo station there ; then the officer school to upgrade to 5-man squads. If you’ve secured Europe, might could want a second Workshop too to make everything else cheaper.

Long term, you want to have deployed your sats in such fashion as to cover at least one full continent. Not so much to get its bonus, but to remove it from the abduction list. Also that way you only need one interceptor to protect them all (equipped w/ Heavy laser, with the help of the one time items unlocked by the sectoid/floater autopsies they can bring down a decent range of alien crafts).

With that in mind, you want to answer abductions in a slightly unintuitive way: pick the continent you intend to cover in sats, and never answer an abduction there, even if it would give you more engineers. Let it go cuckoo. If and when some countries in your target continent panic, and are still panicking at the end of the month (you might get a council mission or terror attack there first, and that lowers panic), launch a sat just before the council report and pop goes the panic. That way you keep the country, you’ve got their income, and you’ve prevented another continent from panicking. Win, win, win.

Long term, you’d really like to have a third sat nexus (or the better kind you get from examining alien nav) up and running, plus its sats, and your troopers equipped with laser weapons and the first tier of armour before you’re forced to hit the base. Speaking of which: only hit the base when you absolutely have to because of global panic. Succeeding that mission lowers panic by 2 worldwide, so only do it if and when there are countries panicking that you can’t afford to lose (US, anything Europe, China, Japan…) and can’t deploy sats to.
Basically, let the base lie and play for time until you’ve got the globe good and covered.

After that, panic becomes much more manageable and you can focus on first upgrading your fighters, then your men to tackle the battleships, the berserkers and what have you. As for long term research goals, I’d go with plasma weapons full tilt before considering better armor, psy ops or firestorms - you should have some in storage already from capturing aliens to equip your dudes with, plus it boosts your interceptors’ performance right along.

282

Does anyone else get frustrated that you can attack and be attacked from behind walls?

I am not talking about destroying the wall in front of the enemy and then getting splash damage. I have routinely fired sniper shots through walls within a space ship where the alien is killed and the wall is not damaged.

Anyone notice this? I am playing on the 360.

283

I’ve noticed it… honestly I just look at it as simulating the fact that people/creature are moving around and not just pressed up flat against walls. It doesn’t bother me that much, but it did take me a bit to be able to intuit the game’s true “lines of sight.”

Also on 360.

284

Are there other squad and turn based games like this on the 360 or is this really a first for the console?

285

This is a good list.

286

Well, one way to look at it (other than the straightforward "it’s a limitation of the abstracted game engine) would be that high-powered weapons can and indeed are sometimes used to fire through walls without necessarily destroying them in real life.

My own gripe with the cover system is that only the cover you’re immediately pressed against counts, all the other shit that’s in the way of the shot is ignored. It’s very unintuitive. It gets annoying to me when this:



 _ _ _
|X

position makes shots coming from the left side of the screen more difficult, but not this one:



 _ _ _
|  X

even though the wall on the left is just as there and just as impassable/obstructive.

287

is it though? sometimes i seem to miss high percentage shots because of objects that got in the way. i wonder what they actually factor in their calculations.

288

Well I do know that, say, if you have one of your guys cover behind a car with an open door and an alien flanks that car (with the door between your guy and it) your soldier will still count as “in cover” if he’s right next to the open door, but “flanked” (with all the negatives that implies) if he’s one square further away, as if there were no door at all.

You can also easily test it by having one guy with an assault rifle or pistol aim at an alien from just behind some large bit of cover (again, a half-cover car seems ideal for demonstration purposes), then with his first action move him further back from the cover so that in effect it now stands in the way of the shot and take aim again. Accuracy will remain the same - 65% for a rookie shooting at an alien in the open, 45% if the alien has his own half-cover, 25% for full cover. Those numbers are constant no matter what else is in the way (with the caveat that you get a bonus for close proximity). If the game’s internal RNG actually uses different values, it should frickin’ show those !

289

I paid for the DLC “slingshot” last night, but I didn’t get the chance to play it yet.

290

Didn’t know there was DLC out for it, thanks for the heads up.

291

ok i am playing Iron Man and i have a choice of 3 abduction sites to go to. one of them is red with level 5 panic. i intend to put a satellite up before the month is up. will the country withdraw immediately if i choose to respond to another country instead?

292

Don’t think so, but haven’t tested.

293

No. Countries only pull out at the end of the month as you meet with the council.

294

yup, it didn’t withdraw immediately. in other news, the last member of my SG-1 team got killed by a panicked rookie. not the best way to go.

295

having completed the game again, i must ask - what the hell was the enemy’s endgame?
a) “Oh you died, you’re not worthy!”
b) “Oh good, you’re strong enough to kill me. Please don’t?”
c) ??

296

Unclear. I think it was supposed to be some sort of “Luke, come to the Dark Side! We shall rule the Galaxy as Father and Son!” though it wasn’t well… communicated.

297

So I got the game, thanks to Kinthalis.

It’s pretty good. It retains the feel of the original game and it’s fun. It’s simplified and dumbed down compared to the original, and IMO too much. Some people complain about the micromanagement of the original, but micromanagement is the entire point of a game like this. You’re trying to outsmart and outmaneuver your enemy, and anything that reduces the number of options you have to do that reduces your strategic and tactical flexibility.

Time units give a much greater number of options to you. The importance of movement, cover, and firing become more detailed and more important. The new game basically just means you move up to the next cover and either shoot or go into overwatch, there is very little depth to that decision. Time units would give all sorts of more options. Inventory management also gave you a lot more options for specialization and loadouts. Ammo management gave you real choices about what to shoot and when, how to balance offensive, defensive, and support abilities and equipment, and you’d get fun desperate situations where you have to go back to pick ammo up off the dead to finish a mission. In comparison, this game feels a whole lot more samey where you’re making the same easy decisions over and over again, almost mechanically.

A lot of the negative aspects of the micromanagement from the original came from poor interface design, which could be recorrected in a remake. Not this remake, though, as this features a lot of badly designed stuff. Big, simple buttons all over the screen, way too many submenus - I spend so much time recruiting new guys and looking through their stats and keeping or dismissing some, and it requires me to go through different modules and menus and it’s all sorts of unnecessary hassle. Or having to dig through my characters to figure out who I accidentally left my last plasma rifle with. It’s a compromise to make it work on a TV across the room on a gamepad, and it makes the whole thing clunky.

The strategic layer is also less deep. It feels like there’s very little mid-game. There’s an early game with weak weapons, weak enemies, where the research comes fast and furious, and an end game where you’re following the scripted missions to get to the last one, but the mid-game, where you’re building and training your forces, controlling your airspace, etc. seems shortened. Having multiple bases for more response flexibility, having to manage various teams, having your bases under threat - all that was superior to the current on base system.

The soldier specialization is an advantage over the original, but it’s still kind of shallow. Only having two options per tier, and often with one option being so much better than the other leads to creating a whole lot of samey guys. I wish there were deeper specialization trees so you could really customize your troops.

That said, it’s still really fun. I’ve played it a ton since I got it. But I don’t think it has the depth to be something you keep going back to like the original. It feels sort of like the dumbed down console version of a great game - say, compare civilization to civilization: revolution or something - and I want to play the great game, not the crippled version of it.

I wonder if anyone has addressed that with mods. Anyone have any experience?

298

Ha ha ha-ha-ha.

Oh wait, you’re serious.

Bwah-HA-HA-HA-ha haaaaaa!

…

No, it’s not the same game. I find it unequivocably better in virtually every respect. You may argue they didn’t make it to your taste. Fine. But frankly, nobody except people nostalgic for the original really wants another one like it. That’s not a large market. Aside from which, the new version came out after a couple decades trying new ideas, technology and platforms, and fitting in twenty years of paradigm shifts in games: that it was made at all, and kept with the basic concepts of the original is remarkable.

299

I have no idea what you’re objecting to. Having only two options per rank is less detailed a specialization than having multiple trees you could more deeply specialize in. And some options in those tiers are clearly better than the other. For instance squadsight for the sniper is practically mandatory, so all your shoulders should have it. There are probably 5 or 6 non-choices like this. Wtf do you find so hilarious?

“paradigm shifts in games” is apparently codeword for dumbing down games, removing tactical flexibility and real choice and thinking from playing it. Removing the depth of tactical decision is a “basic concept of the original” and it’s a far simpler game because of it. There’s not a lot to master - you could be as good as the best xcom player in the world after your first run through, because there’s very little real tactical or strategic choices. It’s paint by numbers, which of your choice of a limited number of tactics to use is obvious, and you just go through every mission basically doing the same exact thing.

300

This is true to some extent, but there’s also “this option is too annoying for most people to use” in which case, it should be removed. Also, I approve their logic in the reduction of squad sizes. Throwing a bunch of disposable newbies at a problem doesn’t really foster the sort of mindset they wanted.

I kinda disagree; "Move up to the next safe spot and either shoot or do nothing (aka the old version of “go into overwatch” only it was yet another percent based chance) is pretty much what I did in the first game too. The only advantage TUs gave was that it was possible to make multiple cover moves, and it came at the downside of never knowing how far you could actually move (which is mostly a UI problem, but also a “terrain costs are super arbitary” problem.) which could cause you to instead accidentally end a move outside of cover.

I’m sortof torn on this one - there was a whole lot of crappy useless fluff in the original game’s inventory system, but the new version feels TOO stripped down - the inability to take a medkit off a fallen soldier to stabilize them is one of my big gripes, but I’m never going to be persuaded that it was a good idea to let you decide where you strapped the ammo to your soldier.

Or, as I like to call it, “staying true to the original” in which recruiting and dismissing was even more annoying. :wink:

I agree and disagree; Multiple bases, IMHO, are a loss that’s no biggie. They added a lot of micro to a game that already had too much, IMHO. OTOH, I agree that the ‘mid game’ feels too short, though there’s a New Game+ option that apparently changes that - at least in terms of time. It obviously won’t expand the tech tree, but you’ll at least have more chance to play with what’s there.

I just wish the choices were better balanced. With the squad size the way it is, there’s not really that much point in being able to built 1024 different versions of each soldier (Note: There are already like 32 different soldier options for each class, it’s just that a lot of them aren’t entirely worth taking) and it just makes it harder to make them all worth selecting. That said, this is still WAY more specialization than the original game had. AND I think you’re dismissing some choices unfairly (Squadsight is critical for your FIRST sniper, but the power of a snap shot + in the zone should NOT be underestimated.)

I haven’t seen any mods that meaningfully change the experience - all the early ones were fiddly stuff like “remove the bonuses the aliens get in classic difficulty” that didn’t really change things very much. I haven’t checked in on it lately.

Anyway, I’ve probably spent about as much time on this version of the game as I have with the original - which I finished once and then mostly found too annoying to play more of.