Dying to know what super special advanced tactics everyone had for the first game, because that was a title in which there was absolutely a RIGHT way to do EVERYTHING and it was generally super obvious.
I think he’s laughing at the fact that you’re comparing this negatively to the original, which had no options per rank for specialization.
it’s been a long time, but here are a few options i missed from the originals:
- to have dedicated grenadiers instead of putz carrying a max of two grenades.
- likewise to have enough smoke grenades for it to be a viable strategy.
- to be able to fire on walls and other destructibles directly.
- to have to defend your base, complete with familiar layout and equipment lying around(?).
- to have anything from a swarm of flying motorcycles to the latest alien tech to take down UFOs.
- to run out of ammo and appropriate a dead enemy’s weapon.
- to have suicide bombers.
most of all, i missed the atmosphere of the original. it’s probably nostalgia, but imho it remains one of the scarier computer games ever, despite the fact that it is turn-based.
That, and the fact that there are no bad choices. Some combinations aren’t so hot, but there are absolutely no “required” builds.
Example:
This is so hilariously off I really did laugh out loud. Gunslinger Snipers are excellent - particularly in base-assault missions where you may have limited height advantage opportunities. They’re about break-even in city missions, depending on whether the enemy placement lets you make good use of height, but have a comparitive weakness in downed UFO missions, as you can usually get long sight-lines and height advantages. And that’s just looking at one ability which often comboes well with one oher, but which doesn’t need it.
Likewise, there are argunments over whether you shiould build your assaulters for pure damage, making them something of glass cannons who rely on having high armor and the ability to damn near one-shot anything to survive. Heavies have immense flexibility in build, and Support probably have the biggest arguments, as you can do so many things with one. Really, the only Super-Special-Awesome-Must-Have in the game is due to a bug.
Gunslinger doesn’t compete with Squad Sight - Snapshot does…which is, of course, no contest, particularly since Gunslinger makes Snapshot about worthless anyway.
I’m with Beef; most of the class abilities are really poorly balanced. Sniper has exactly one choice to make: Disabling Shot vs Battle Scanner, and even that’s fairly skewed since Disabling Shot can’t be done with pistols. Heavy has only one: HEAT vs Rapid Reaction. If you’re playing on Impossible, Assault has no choices at all to make, since the defensive options become nearly worthless, and Support has much of the same problem.
I’ve actually come to rather like the new XCom on Impossible, once it hit me what the game really was. It’s obviously nowhere in the same category as the original XCom, or Jagged Alliance, or hell, even Fallout, but I’m not sure it was even trying to be. It’s not a tactical game…it’s a puzzle game. You’re not controlling probabilities, you’re selecting between a handful of distinct, rigidly controlled options to force a very predictable event flow to go how you want. You’re not planning a battle, you’re constructing a sequence of dominoes. It stands on its own moderately well, but it would have been better off not naming itself after a game that it bears very little gameplay resemblance to.
Aha, well that’s stupid then. I’ve noticed the need to exaggerate how many HAHAHAs you stick in a post with being wrong. I’m not saying the new game is inferior in that regard. In fact I basically said “the new game has [this better feature], but the implementation of this new feature is flawed in such a way as that its impact and advantage over the old game is limited”, which is a pretty common logical construction that he seemed to be confused by.
The new game also isn’t ambiguously better in this regard - the old game had more stats to work with, which naturally differentiated your guys. Not as much as classes, but the new one only having willpower and aim as variables is kind of bland.
It’s not “super special advanced tactics”, exactly. It’s having meaningful choices to make. The whole point of a game like this is the choices. For people to write that off as micromanagement to me is odd - the entire point of the game is the game is those little choices you make. It’s like if you played some dumbed down version of Civilization and said “well I’m glad they took out the ability to choose what your cities were building and having to choose where your units moved - I hated all that micromanagement”
It’s been so long since I’ve played the original so it’s hard to remember the specific sort of decisions I’m talking about. For instance, I can’t remember what factors governed how many time units each soldier had - if wearing lighter armor gave them more, or if it was all stats based, or what. But much of the game is movement and firing, and that’s very simplified. The vast majority of turns you will make a move - and everyone moves the same, they’ll all have the same sized radius (except supports with that one ability), you can cover any terrain for the same cost. Then you either fire or overwatch. It makes everyone feel very samey, your only real choice is between dashing and two moves.
In the previous game you’d have to make actual choices like when you should take a low-TU terrain route with lower cover to move faster, or a slower area but with higher cover. Whether you should retain enough action points for an aimed shot or just a snap shot, or if you want to retain the ability to reach into your inventory for a grenade or a medkit if you make contact on the way over. Whether your soldiers would carry extra ammo or medkits or other utility items, which of those were prioritized for quick access. You could make a wrong choice - skimp on the ammo for more grenades - lose a guy or two early, run out of ammo with the remaining guys, and actually have to go back to raid ammo off fallen soldiers.
I’d have to go back and play the original to really come up with more examples. I just remember facing real decisions in that game often - choosing one path or another with upsides and downsides - whereas the new game is almost mechanical. The choices are so simple and obvious that you’re just going through the motions. Rarely do you make a meaningful choice with tactical implications, the optimal strategy is simple and clear.
To try to state it another way - you could play the original xcom for months and still become better at the game by learning and making better quality decisions. For the new xcom, however, you could probably play through the game once and then be pretty much close to the best you can possibly be at the game.
Is there a low end cut off for the Will score? Too low and the solider is easily mind controlled, but how low? I am trying to cut out anyone with <40, but should it be less than 50?
I’ve tried the 50+ willpower soldier route, and I’ve only managed to resist IIRC one mind control out of about 20, so I’m not even sure it really matters.
Anyone below 80 Will is an equally squishy target. In my experience, the threshold for seeing useful results against Psi attacks is around 100. Both the Sectoid Commanders and the Ethereals have super high Will of their own and will just slap around anyone who’s not both high rank and running one of the Will buffs (stims, mind shield, psi armor, etc). Using those buffs is a much bigger deal than worrying about the roster; after all, everyone starts with the same stats, so the only difference is from critical wounds sustained (which is ideally zero, anyway) and how many levels they got before you purchased Iron Will, and those still pale next to the big chunks of +20 you get from buffs.
Once you’re around 120, you’re pretty much immune to enemy psi (a 1 damage Ethereal Mindfray is just funny) and 140 gets you good success rate on mind controlling -them-. A juiced-up psi soldier can walk up alone and outright crush them in a duel. Until then, there’s always SHIVs if you really want to trump them.
I’ve never found enemy psi much of a threat, since the guys using it are always the last ones on the map, content to wait for you to storm their tiny room with way more firepower than they can handle. I’ve never had an enemy even attempt to use Mind Control on any of my guys - which is just wrong for a game named XCom 
The first game had fuckall choices to make. There was one way to do things.
one of the tactics i tried when someone got mind-controlled was to run the hell away from him. after a few turns hiding in the fog-of-war, he would be released and could take proximity shots at his captors. it would have been nice if the option was available, as it was in previous X-COMs, to load him up with a backpack full of grenades and trigger them all in the middle of the enemy base.
it certainly was a more interesting way to fire weak willed soldiers.
This was sortof myexperience. I mean, you could make some fiddly little tech tree research order adjustments, and sometimes you would have to play with “sub-optimal” lads depending on how crappy your recruiting dice rolls were, but the actual strategy of the game was paint-by-numbers. Fine, maybe it took longer to figure out what the numbers were, but that was less because the choices were “more meaningful” and more because the game didn’t tell you jack about how it actually worked.
Actually, I was a bit surprised when I heard some of the comments in this other thread:
Xcom Enemy Unknown–nineties style!
For instance, I never bothered using grenades, and I almost always ignored Terror missions, but some people seemed to think those were both pretty important.
Well, Terror missions WOULD have been important if, in fact, the original game had used any sort of logic at all when determining your funding, but since it doesn’t (Read: An essential game function is basically broken) there’s not a lot of point.
Oh yeah. And funding becomes irrelevant quickly anyway because you can sell alien loot/manufacture medkits or whatever, so why bother?
In the original X-COM would ignore the first Terror mission, which always seemed to be in Russia, and when you soldiers were still wearing muscle shirts and carrying assault rifles. Invariably my troops would be slaughtered. Russia would get pissy but got over it in time.
I miss the huge Ranger craft holding 14 men and a tank to boot.
I miss the base raids. I kept a few junk soldiers overloaded with explosives and some old model tanks in each base that I didn’t set up as a "listening post’ (radar, nothing else) and having a good old brawl with the invaders. Damage to my own base did not seem to show up on the accountant’s sheet.
I don’t. This just encouraged you to use tons of disposable rookies.
Base raids are one of those things that sound like a great concept until you actually think about them, at which time they become incredibly stupid. Okay, so the aliens found your base! And attacked it! That’s cool! But then they…mysteriously forget about that base until such time as they ‘find’ it again? That’s stupid. Of course, the alternative is that they keep attacking that base over and over until you lose, which is ALSO stupid, but at least more realistic.
So, in a nutshell, there is no permutation of base attacks where “makes sense” overlaps with “is fun”. Hence why they dropped it from the new version.
have you seen the movie The Rock with Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage? long before that, X-Com had taught me that it is a really bad idea to squeeze your entire squad into a small room. that’s just begging to have your entire mission blown to bits.
What X-Com taught me: if you have weapons capable of blowing through walls, there’s no such thing as a “small room”.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. I liked having canon fodder in my missions. The fact that, in any given raid, two or three guys were pretty much guaranteed not to come back made the whole war seem a little more high stakes. Whereas, in the new version, if I lose more than two or three guys in the entire campaign, I’ve been doing something wrong. And war against someone who’s never able to inflict more than three casualties against you isn’t very threatening.
I never thought of it as the aliens “forgetting” where my base was, rather, that a failed raid was incredibly expensive in terms of dead soldiers and lost gear, and it took the aliens some time to put together another raid after one got wiped out. This is something I’d have liked to see in the new version, along with the ability to include things like automated defenses and security choke points in your base design.
Maybe in DLC. Base defenses are just about the only thing the new version is missing. It’s a damn near perfect update of the original, IMO.