Dunno; I feel like I lose -plenty- of folks in the new version, especially playing on Classic, but I’m still able to pull through and win. Either I suck (but can somehow win anyway) or you are putting in way too much effort or something.
But it’s NOT “incredibly expensive” - they don’t even seem to lose the saucer they use to attack the base. Or at least, you don’t get the resources that would come from capturing it. And even then it’s no worse for them than you shooting down one (ONE! Out of a BLOODY LOT) of their saucers. And they DO forget. They will NEVER ATTACK THAT BASE AGAIN unless they manage to “find” it again the same way they did it the first time. This is basically a flimsy justification for a mechanic that makes no sense.
Let me know when you come up with a way to make it make sense.
I was thinking of the expense being in terms of dead aliens, not so much the equipment they lose. While I don’t think the aliens put to high a value on life, they appear to have a somewhat limited supply of footsoldiers, much as the player does. Lots of times in the original game, I’d fail a base assault and leave the base untouched for several months, while I rebuilt and re-equipped my team before making another assault. I figure the same logic applies to the aliens. In terms of game mechanics, you may very well be right that the aliens “forget” about base locations after a failed assault, but I don’t recall that being particularly apparent through the experience of playing the game. Rationalizing it as, “They got their ass kicked last time, and they’re thinking twice about coming at me again,” works perfectly well as a justification for the aliens not immediately re-attacking.
All that being said, I don’t particularly care if the situation makes sense. Base defenses were fun. I’d like to see them in the new game. In terms of justifying in-game behavior, it’s not nearly as incomprehensible as the fact that, in the new game, X-Com won’t simply buy two more Skyrangers, despite the fact that two to three times a month, they have multiple alien attacks at the same time, and can only respond to one of them.
Well, I think it makes sense just fine as it was, but if I were improving it for the new one:
Aside from defensive installations, I’d make it so that discovery of the X-Com base sets off a series of regular base defense missions, on the order of about one a month. To prevent it from becoming too routine, the attack can be blunted or averted by intercepting the attacking craft with fighters, or using surface-to-air defenses as in the original. The effectiveness of the defenses versus the size of the attacking craft should scale unequally, such that there will be times when your defenses are sufficient to destroy the attack craft before it reaches the base, and times when they send ships big enough to break through and actually invade the installation with minimal damage.
As for the mission itself, I’ve got a few ideas. Generate a mission critical target in one of the base’s biggest power plants. This is what the aliens are trying to get to to destroy the base. Put similar targets in the biggest lab, workshop, and maybe a couple other areas. These are secondary targets - losing them doesn’t destroy the base, but it can set back your research or manufacturing. This, along with the ability to build automatic defenses, makes base design important. You want to make sure your power plant isn’t right next to your elevator shaft, for example.
Also, put the alien ship in the tactical map: if the players advance quickly enough, they have a chance to capture the alien craft before it takes off. If they do this, they get the resources from the ship in addition to the stuff they take off the dead aliens. If they’re too slow, the ship takes off, leaving behind whatever aliens are currently in the base. There might even be the possibility of the ship taking off after you’ve put troops on it, but before you can disable it, but I’m not sure what you should do with the troops stuck on the ship. There’s a lot of ways you could go with that, depending on how many new mechanics you want to invent.
But they “get their ass kicked” on all their OTHER missions too; By that logic, they should just give up and go home. The aliens are supposed to be a formidable force set against your scrappy little team. If they supposed to be “short of manpower” that was never an impression that was conveyed to me by either game.
True, that is clearly a ‘gamey’ decision.
Some interesting ideas here, but I think there are a some very significant problems.
#1: The map would be GIGANTIC. and we’ve already demonstrated (coughTerrorFromtheDeepcough) that this game breaks down and becomes really tedious when the map gets too big. #2: “Regularly scheduled” (Yes yes, fine, I know what you’re saying. “Roughly one mission per calendar month” not “a mission every month on the 14th”) missions also sounds pretty tedious, even if “this week, they want to blow up the reactor” is the goal, if the Aliens have an extreme small number of ingress points (which they do) then the mission is going to play out pretty much the same way every time aside from variations in enemy force composition. Imagine if every terror mission happened on the same map. Basically, the only reason these were “fun” in the first game is BECAUSE the aliens gave up and never came back.
And that’s still setting aside believability issues, which I still feel are important, even if the game as it stands makes some concessions in that space, it doesn’t mean “open season, stuff no longer needs to make sense.”
Well, right. The fact that you keep shooting down their ships and killing their soldiers is supposed to be significantly slowing down their plan to assimilate the Earth. Presumably, the aliens would be doing even more terror missions and abductions if you didn’t keep shooting down their ships and killing their soldiers.
That always seemed rather apparent to me, given that every single alien offensive can be turned back by about ten dudes, give or take. Their entire military is clearly operating at a level only slightly larger than X-Com, else at some point you’d assume they’d just start openly invading. Instead, they fight the entire war, even up to the point where the humans are knocking on their front door, with squad level tactics.
I think the problem with TftD wasn’t that the maps were too big, so much as they were too detailed. Going down the hallway of a cruise ship, having to check every single passenger cabin, was a pain in the ass. Having a big map that’s made up mostly of large spaces would alleviate a lot of the problems.
I disagree. For one thing, the ability to upgrade your base would give a certain amount of variety to the base defense missions, especially if you make it a bit easier to replace (or upgrade) existing structures. Bringing back the ability to have multiple bases would also help mix things up for these missions. But even that aside, I don’t see a big problem with having one kind of mission repeat the same map, so long as it’s not done too frequently. Once a month might be too often, but that’s easy to tweak until it feels right.
Honestly, I don’t think you’ve made a very good case on the believability front. Yeah, it’s not realistic for the aliens to “forget” where your base is, but that’s an implementation issue, and was largely invisible to the player in the original game. Hell, just add a few new text pop-ups to it, and you’ve solved the “problem” without having to actually change the code. The basic concept behind the idea of having to defend your base from aliens, the same way they have to defend their base from you, is sound, and the fact that the aliens never try it is itself a bit of a plot hole.
I think we’re mostly going to have to agree to disagree here, but this one bugs me:
If the entire world’s military is tied up fighting these guys in some way, it seems to me that it should be EASIER for them to spare enough lads to completely wipe out a troublesome team whose entire armed forces is less than 30 guys, not harder.
If you have enough force to fight the combined militaries of the entire planet, the percentage of your total force that would be required to bump off a tiny organization is bound to be very small.
Look at it this way:
If you have a force that is fighting a guerrilla war, working by stealth and occasionally raiding a few locations to strike fear/steal resources/whatever, it’s likely to be a much smaller force than one that is able to create more disturbances that the entirely military might of Earth is able to address.
Yes. The alien victory scenario goes through two basic options:
(A) A complex six-hundred-step conquest plan which requires immense resources and remains vulnerable, slowly taking control of one area after another until Earth is controlled, while being attacked by a guerrilla force to slowly pick you off while wrecking your command and killing the leadership one-by-one.
(B) Destroy X Com; accept sobbing surrender pleas.
If the aliens can find you, they should win. At a bare minimum, they can just drop rocks on you from space until there’s a smoking lava-strewn crater. Even having a protective mountain on top won’t save you from that. There’s basically no need to actually attack, at least not until they wrecked the place. They could easily deploy massive forces afterward (well, massive for them) and make sure there’s nothing left.
The aliens have no reason to do this otherwise because they don’t want to kill us, rather they’re after conquest and enslavement. My guess was that they didn’t have ample numbers or resources themselves. But you don’t need much to drop a giant asteroid on people.
Well, I’ve heard it pointed out before (I hope not in this thread, and that I’m not repeating anyone), that the aliens’ plan doesn’t make a damn lick of sense. Basically:
Their plan is to find an individual with psi skillz sufficient to assault their base. And then what?
If his/her powers are strong enough they defeat the supreme alien whatever and the invasion is over. If not, they die like the others.
Either way…profit?
But of course, alien invasion/conquest plans rarely make sense. In RL destroy all humans would be a trivial, but on the face of it, pointless, task for an interstellar species.
Push humankind hard and give them the necessary ‘help’ to develop psi capabilities, and the gives those “supersoldiers” a ‘come to the dark side!’ moment, which, inexplicably, they were absolutely certain would succeed.
It’s a little stupid, but not NEARLY as stupid as people who seem to have missed the second part of the plan make it sound.
Do they have that much force? They never actually fight the combined militaries of the world. Why it’s up to X-Com to shoot down all the alien space ships in American airspace, and not the USAF, is never made clear, but the aliens never confront the conventional military at all. My assumption is that, for all their advanced technology, the aliens aren’t strong enough to face the Earth in a stand up war, so they use terror tactics and infiltration to weaken national governments and take them over from the inside.
Given the alien’s heavy reliance on cloning, its possible that they don’t maintain a standing army between conquests, preferring instead to secretly establish themselves on the planet and grow them domestically - what we’re seeing in X-Com might be the small window we have to defeat the aliens before they clone enough soldiers to conquer outright.
smiling bandit, you make a good point about asteroid strikes, but so much science fiction overlooks the possibilities of orbital bombardment, I kind of put it in a class with “explosions in space” and “spaceship battles where the ships are less than 100,000 km from each other.”
I don’t think the alien plan is supposed to be rational. According to the guy in the final mission, the aliens are the remnant of a race that had long since evolved out of this reality. The aliens you’re fighting are the ones that, for whatever reason, could not make the jump with the rest of their species, and I think that fact has driven them insane. Unable to evolve themselves, they became obsessed with finding another species and uplift them so that they can make the evolutionary jump that they could not, as a way of proving themselves to their long vanished cousins. They don’t care what happens to them after that. They’ve essentially become a cult - asking them “What happens after you evolve the perfect species,” is like asking someone, “Where do you go after you get to heaven?”
After buying the game during the Steam sale, I’ve just finished my first game on Easy. I liked the game well enough for the price I paid, but the ending sucks.
I successfully avoided lethal casualties for the entire game, and you killed one of my troops in a fucking cutscene? And it was the final cutscene, so it didn’t even have any potentially interesting affects on the gameplay!
I really hope they add mod support at some point. The final mission isn’t good enough that I feel like I’d be missing out only seeing it once, so it’s a good opportunity to add more mid-game content to make it a bigger sandbox to play in.
I just bought it during the Steam sale, and I’ve restarted twice already, trying to get the timing of getting new satellites up and running (looks like I’ll have five in the sky by the end of April–not great, but better than I’d done previously). Anyway, I’m having an absolute blast. I’m no graphics junkie, but the graphics of the original X-Com made it nearly unplayable to me last year when I gave it the old college try; the new graphics and interface are far superior. And I definitely think that the cover rules add a layer of complexity to the game that was either missing or not apparent in the original. Sure, some things like varied movement speeds are gone, but cover, elevation, and special abilities (not just which to choose, but when to use them–do I run-and-gun this turn or save it for next?) more than make up for the losses, IMO.
Has anyone played the new expansion? What did you think? I’m trying an Ironman impossible run, inspired by beaglerush’s ironman impossible series on YouTube (if you haven’t seen it, check it out. The best edited and most entertaining videos of gameplay that I’ve come across. I would link, but I’m posting through a proxy) Has anyone else here played I/I ? Its surprisingly addictive
I’m playing Enemy: Within and enjoying it. I’m only playing at Normal difficulty though. Just got my first MEC Trooper; he’s fun so far. Setting Chrysalids on fire and watching them run in panic is entertaining.
