Nothing whatsoever like Evil Genius. It’s not fundamentally different in gameplay scope from a simple list of checkboxes., since nothing ever actually happens inside the base to make the layout matter.
So, the game is a consolified Jagged Alliance?
the aliens don’t invade the base anymore?
The X-Com experience in a nutshell 
It’s an even numbered Microsoft OS release… 'nuff said.
That’s half of it. The other half is the sick inevitability of death you see coming but can’t do a damn thing about… like a grenade landing under your sniper’s feet, or your assault trooper bleeding out on the ground and the medic supressed by the last Floater on the map and the poor guy covered by the last two Mutons on the map in overwatch…
I lost my entire senior team.
DO NOT go after UFO’s that haven’t been shot down, but landed of their own volition instead, without some good equipment.
I had to call 5 parents and tell them of their children’s death. Could I tell them about their bravery and sacrifice in the face of the alien menace?! NO. Because it’s a secret.
I hate my job some times.
On the positive side, I got 5 new promising rookies in today.
Actually, with the adjacency rules (and the bonuses therefrom, which are quite substantial for me at this point), the layout of the base really does matter if you’re trying to get the most out of your stuff.
Aliens don’t invade the base anymore, because that mechanic was moronic and there’s no actual way to make it make sense and be fun at the same time. (Either, you go the original Xcom route and the aliens mysteriously forget where your base is after you’ve driven them off, which is stupid, or the aliens attack you over and over again until you die, which sucks.).
Also, now that I have some meaningful playtime under my belt, I find myself utterly baffled by the complaints about the UI. What exactly do people have issue with? (Also, right mouse button IS “back out”, for those that care.)
I’ve spent a while playing now. Still having trouble getting enough engineers to get enough satellites to cover enough countries to prevent panic which reduces the number of engineers. Or something.
But I have some advice. Most of which experienced xcom players will already know.
First, cycle through your rookies. I have a 6 man squad, and I try to take 1 or 2 rookies out each time. Better to level them up a little than to have a senior squad wipe leave you bereft like Kinthalis did. Also, even if they don’t wipe, I find that I get half the team injured and out for days/weeks no matter what you do (seriously? The thin men have a cloud of poison?). No matter what, your seniors will be unavailable. It’s good to make sure you have something better than a rookie backing them up.
Second, I’m not sure, but I THINK that doing the priority objectives/research moves you into the next ‘Chapter’ of the game. Each time I’ve completed one, it’s seemed that the game ups the ante to the next level. New aliens appear and bigger UFOs. That could just be perception, but I’m making a conscious effort to avoid some of the objectives until I’ve got my next milestone in my base done. Like I said, I’m not sure.
Third, Small moves and snipers. I don’t generally dash my players unless I’m trying to save civilians. I make small moves from cover to cover and then set them to overwatch. Behind it all, I have a sniper that takes down more or less anything that any of my people see.
Fourth, stun them when they’re down. As said somewhere above in this thread, don’t bother to stun anything with more than 3 hit points left. I have never managed it, and lost a few people in the effort before I accepted that as a fairly solid truth.
Fifth, beware the exploding things. It seems that some of the levels were designed around the idea that you will take cover behind the stuff directly in front of your start point. That’s fine, but more often than not, that cover is cars that can and will explode when shot. Or worse, gas pumps. I know it goes without saying, but such things are bad choices for cover. I feel better off dashing in a different direction than accepting the sometimes obvious cover offered by such things. Too often, the aliens get you in a pincer move that traps you in an area where all of your cover is bad and/or explosive. Avoid the trap.
Sixth, Sell it all. This is boiler plate from the original games, but make sure you sell off your spare inventory. There are a lot of things you don’t need (Like a giant pile of sectoid corpses that you’ve already researched). it’s better to sell off excess on the gray market in the situation room than to struggle waiting for a new influx of money.
That’s all I got off the top of my head.
This is definitely true. “Priority” research really means “research that advances the plot”.
Yup. While this is no longer the hilariously game breaking “Woo, two heavy plasma rifles is practically equal to my entire monthly budget, and I get six per mission” nonsense that happened in the original game, the boost you can get for disposing of a bunch of corpses can make a big difference.
A word of warning - bodies are actually ingredients in some of the tech now. Frex, IIRC, sectoids are used to make the “aim” booster for the ship combat. Stuff that doesn’t get used, like “damaged flight controls” is explicitly labeled as such.
Crap. Time for a restart.
I figured that would be true for some things, especially since damaged objects specifically called out that they were useless. But when I first noticed it, I had 65 sectoids and a butt load of others. I kept about half and maintain that number now by selling off new ‘acquisitions’. I figure that even if I don’t need them for something like the aim booster, you never know when some country will ask for some.
Where? Was it patched, 'cause it didn’t react in that way while I was playing it? How does it behave when dealing with elevation?
The game is really hurt by the removal of time units. Everything has to take place in such large steps that it winds up doing the opposite of what was intended: it slows the game down. You can no longer advance and respond to contacts as you meet them, so you have to laboriously inch the team forward over several turns instead. The poor chrysalids took the worst of it - they can’t even attack you anymore without someone else spotting for them 
The base UI is terrible, most particularly the pre-mission team select/configure screen, where you have to go through sub-menu after sub-menu to actually do anything. The tactical UI is functional, but not great; they clearly designed it around TV resolution and it has only the barest of bones given to PC potential. Case in point, you can mouse-over the enemy contacts to see the selected soldier’s hit percentage for each one…so why is that not displayed all the time?
The base is boring now, since there’s no concern at all for tactical layout. The adjacency stuff is rudimentary and only like-to-like, so it makes Connect Four look deep and complex. Also, -the- base. Singular.
The strategy layer has been hugely simplified. It’s essentially turn-based rather than real time, since you have no actual independent control over anything. No more patrols, or scouting, or tailing contacts, or ganging up on them. No more multiple teams. There’s a neat new addition of consumable interceptor buff items, but it feels pretty out of place when nothing else in the game is consumable (you even get your gear back from a total squad wipe)
The major new addition of character skills is hit & miss. Some of them have really neat mechanics that expand the game (Suppression is rather clever) but others are just really boring. The balance between skills in the same tier is also so bad that there’s often only one obvious choice, which means all your guys wind up being identical anyway, which somewhat defeats the purpose.
The tech tree is better designed. Everything has something to offer, even what used to be pure fluff, so there’s more of a decision about which way to go. Unfortunately, it’s also smaller than it used to be, and so is the general array of items.
The atmosphere is great, though. The music, graphics, voice work, all the fluff is done very well and really nails the feel of XCom in a way that tickles the nostalgia without being just a cut & paste job. The new cyberdisks in particular are super cool, and a serious threat, for once.
I can see the point around the missing time units, but I don’t think it’s seriously detrimental to the game. For me, the end result is more or less the same.
[ul]
[li]Move forward to next cover[/li][li]If you see someone shoot them, else go to overwatch while your team moves up (thus using your remaining TU)[/li][li]If needed dash to new cover aware that you can’t shoot once you get there (out of TU)[/li][/ul]
That’s basically how I remember playing the original and TFTD. The only real losses were veteran units being able to shoot twice when they had high enough time, which is now limited to the skill tree.
As for the base… eh. It’s different. Still trying to figure out the right way to expand to get what I want. That said, I don’t think tactical base design was something I did much of before. Effectively, all of my bases ended up filling most of the available space, so any fighting was a cluster anyway. Maybe those of you that were more diligent miss that.
I agree that the strategy elements are reduced. You’re just reacting to whatever it gives you. You can’t set up patrols or anything to try to be more proactive. You just keep throwing satellites up to get more vision.
Uh, news to the fellows on my team that have been killed by Chrysalids on turn 1.
Why? How is it different from the old style, where you click on each subcategory and get submenus for it? Have you played the original lately?
How would you fix that? There’s too much stuff to put it all on one hunormous screen. And I hardly consider clicking “Edit unit” and then “Loadout” to be “submenu after submenu”?
Clutter? Too small to read? It wouldn’t actually help because it’s not like you can fidget one square to the left and say “well what’s my hit percentage now?”
I’ve never heard of “ganging up on them” in the first game either? The Interceptor combat UI clearly only supported one-on-one combat? If you want to attack the enemy serially, I did that just last night. Patrols and scouting were 97% busywork for 3% payoff. It was more stuff that made you feel like you were doing something than actual content.
I really, REALLY don’t get the love for running “patrols” in the original game. It was a complete micromanagement waste of time. Even if you saw a UFO fly off in a given direction, the odds of finding it via sending an interceptor down that way were slim, and the idea of “I’ll just fly some patrols over north america” is basically secret code for “I’m bored because jack has happened lately and I’m waiting for something to happen” because to be honest, I don’t think I’ve EVER found anything by doing that. When you think about it, the odds are terrible, because your interceptors can only stay aloft for a couple of hours, and most of the time you don’t see a UFO except every few DAYS.
On the bright side, they also got rid of energy units.
Twas quite annoying to not be able to open a door, or take another step despite having half your time units left, because you had to walk through a wheat field earlier.
edit: the only point to patrolling in the first two games was to try and spot the alien bases. Or you could just have a plane trail along after an ID’d supply ship.
I don’t think ganging up ever worked - I’m pretty sure damage was tracked separately for each engagement, even if it was 3 separate interceptors attacking a single ufo.
Considering that’s two steps more than is necessary, and potentially repeating for each soldier and each mission, yeah, it’s bad design.
There’s hardly any inventory slots, or squad members. Even with the console-themed giant Fisher-Price UI buttons, you could easily just have a simple grid showing everything on one page, just by not spending 3/4ths of the screen space on a glamour shot of the team. Like the useless ant farm base display, and all the many cutscenes, it’s going for flash instead of usability, which is cute the first time, but really grates in the long run.
Yeah, but you could have up to 4 of those UIs up at once. TFTD was even designed with it in mind, since the tech tree and alien victory conditions strongly rewarded attacking powerful UFOs long before you had good enough interceptors to take them out one on one, and the alien fuel was so precious that you were probably using old interceptors well into the late-game anyway.