I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill there. Sure, you have to go through a few sub-menus to get to the inventory. But it’s not labor-some, or frequent IMO. At least, I don’t generally feel the need to tweak the inventory of my players to the mission. You get 4 slots: 1 gun, 1 secondary gun, 1 armor, 1 auxiliary. Maybe I’m not upgrading fast enough, but for the most part, those items are static. When I have a new gun, I run through and upgrade it in a few seconds for all of the squad that needs it. Assault gets X, support gets Y and so on. Are you swapping out the aux gear constantly? Or wiping entire squads? Beyond that, i just don’t see how it’s a major inconvenience, particularly as it is mitigated by the smaller squad size
I actually found the easier inventory system somewhat preferable because I don’t have to spend some much time wedging ammo packs and medkits into backpacks and belts every single mission. Sure, the menus could be streamlined, but I don’t think it’s worth calling out as a major flaw in the game or anything.
I don’t think it’s a major flaw. But it’s a flaw. And Airk, are you seriously trying to compare UI design from today to design from 1994?
There’s lots of information that could have fit in the UI on a PC. We don’t sit 10 feet away from the screen most of the time. Having a few GUI options would have been nice (Borderlands, for example allows you to resize the GUI). And there’s no reason why ALL the options couldn’t be present in the squad setup menu, except TV’s and gamepads.
Despite the GUI issues (I’m playing with a gamepad most of the time now), I’m having a LOT of fun with this game. It’s put my wanderings on Pandora on hold. I mean who else is going to keep sending Sergeant Beef on dangerous fools errands if not me?
The only patrol tactic I ever saw payoffs from in the original was scouting suspected alien bases with an empty Skyranger…with no tactical loadout, those old-school Skyrangers had outrageous loiter time, and if my guess was approximately right about where the alien base was, I’d have it spotted within a few hours almost every time. (About twice per game, usually, if I recall correctly, and usually before I had more than 3 bases, or hyperwave decoders all around.)
I don’t think anyone ever claimed a wolfpack attack did non-intuitive things with damage done to interceptors. If you gang-attack with 4 interceptors, usually the first intercepter sent into engagement range takes the brunt of the attack. If you were willing to micromanage, you could swarm a big target (canonical example is a battleship) and pull each interceptor out of the fight as their damage increased. With a big enough starting attack, you could down a battleship with Avalanche missiles or X-Com laser cannons. The interceptors involved would probably out of commission for weeks, but it may be worth it, and it’d be flatly impossible otherwise without an max-armed Avenger.
Now that I don’t remember at all. In my experience attacking a ufo with multiple ships meant the ufo got shots off at each of them at its normal rate-of-fire.
And an amusing note: last night I had a heavy get promoted to colonel…for missing his target.
As near as I can figure, his reaction fire passed by the target, but hit a car in the far distance, around which a number of aliens were clustered. At any rate, they brought back quite a few more corpses of thin men than I ever spotted.
I don’t think this is true. My first game, I rushed all the priority research as soon as I could, but I didn’t switch to laser weapons soon enough. When mutons and chryssalids showed up, I got gutted.
Last night, I started a new game, and rushed to get lasers first, and deliberately neglected the priority research. The first terror mission, and the appearance of the heavy alien infantry units, happened about at the same point.
From looking around there is some debate. The basic impression I’ve gotten is that there is a slow progression over time, but that priority missions will speed up that progression to make sure you’ve reached the required plateau for your place in the story.
Dunno. I’m playing it as if there is a timer to some extent. If nothing else, the panic level of your member states forces that mentality. I’m still working through my first pass through but next time around, I’m going to focus on getting more satellites faster. I think that lead to my somewhat slow start.
So far, I have only two real complaints with the game.
The first is a disagreement with a relatively legitimate design decision: only having one Skyranger available to launch missions. I get why they did it: by only being able to attend to one abduction mission at a time, it forces you to choose between rewards and try to balance the panic rating among your various backers. My problem is that it’s a very game-y solution. I’ve got a barracks full of soldiers sitting on their hands, and at least once a month, I find myself in a situation where I have more alien emergencies than can be handled with only one squad. Why the hell wouldn’t I invest in a couple extra Skyrangers, other than arbitrary game limitations?
The second is just straight-up cheating bullshit: aliens get a free move the first time they see my squad. This has directly killed my guys more than once. I can be advancing carefully, only doing half moves and sticking to cover, until I come across, say, a pack of chyrssalids. The chryssalids immediately get a free move and charge me. They don’t attack, but suddenly what was clearly a safe vantage point is swarmed by venemous space bugs, and there’s no way my character can move back to a safe position before they get their turn and rip me apart. Worse, occasionally, I can “sneak up” on an enemy squad, and see them on the map before they get their reaction animation. Except there’s no combat vantage point from where I’m at, and there’s no way to predict what will be a safe vantage point once they trigger and get their free move. This is particularly annoying with floaters, who will use their free move to jump behind me and cut off my squad member.
Other than those two issues, I’m really loving the game. It’s not quite the remake I’d always wanted, but it’s closer than I’d ever expected to get.
1: Motherfucking disk of doom.
2: Major Hayashi, you died too young and it was all my fault for leaving you in the open just before the three brutes showed up.
This mirrors my experiences. My second game, I delayed researching the arc thrower for a much longer time, and while the mutons and cyberdisks did show up again anyway, it happened significantly later.
…but you don’t want to postpone too much because you just can’t keep up with the panic escalation. I had to write off all of North America. You need the global threat reduction that the priority-unlocked base assault causes.
Far down the research line, there’s a set of “Ghost” armor that’s supposed to make you harder to detect. I don’t know what the detection stat is now, but it currently seems to be 100% at all times, since the enemies never seem to need to be more than 1 grid out of the fog of war before they start shooting. I wonder if that’s going to help - ambushes would be more fun.
I swear, this game has the most insane DLC/expansion pack potential I’ve ever seen. So many things I’d like to add.
Played through my first game just now. Some thoughts:
Push your Sniper to Colonel as soon as possible. Double Tap is lethal. I one shotted the final boss from outside the chamber, first round, with one critical Headshot and one normal shot, with a plasma rifle.
When moving your Sniper around, change him over to pistol. This’ll allow him to go into Overwatch - with the Gunslinger ability it’ll do as much damage as an assault rifle. Instead of just wasting a TU.
As said above, skip lasers entirely and just truck ahead to Plasma.
Get as many satellites in the sky as you possibly can, as quickly as you can. Money quickly becomes the biggest bottleneck to development.
The Skeleton armor gets a cool Grapple ability that can get your Sniper on top of a roof without needing a ladder. Very useful.
I’ll second the lethality of doubletap and squad sight. Once I had a pair of snipers with it, I stopped bringing my heavies to the show.
My squad is 2 assault, 2 support and 2 snipers. Front 4 move up from cover to cover with overwatch while the snipers sit further back and pick off the enemy. When they need to move up, I rush 1 forward, while the other covers and then bring the other sniper up the next round. The snipers are leading the kill count by far. The squad is basically a pack of hunting dogs flushing the game out into the open. It got even worse when I got armor to expand thier mobility options. No where is safe.
I’ll also second Miller’s comment about the game-y nature of a single active squad. My barracks can theoretically have 99 soldiers in it. In practice, it has 15-20 and about 10-15 of them have mid to high rank because of the way I rotate fresh meat… I mean rookies… into the squad. So there is no reason for me to send troops to France while giving the finger to India. I could have responded to both with sufficient force to win both. And with a little more resources, I could have cobbled together a force to take on Brazil too. But the single dropship makes that impossible and there isn’t a good reason for it beyond a game mechanic to force global panic. .
I went for lasers on ym current playthrough because I was getting beaten up something awful, and I wasn’t sure how long it would take me to research the plasma weapons.
Still, incredibly satisfying to drop a dude that would have taken 2 hits to take down before with a single glorious beam of light.
What was your very first live alien capture? I bagged my first critter yesterday and it was a Muton! It cost 2 rookies their life.
First live alien was a thin man, I think. They’re so low health that you can stun them without having to hurt them first.
And yes, to a degree I was comparing modern UI design to 1994 because frankly, if a game can be your favorite game of all time with crappy arsed 1994 UI design, trying to hold “bad UI design for 2012” up as a huge black mark against a modern title loses a lot of its credibility.
My favorite moment thus far was when I was preparing to storm a building, and had everyone in carefully chosen positions around the front, all in overwatch since they’d just gotten into position. Inexplicably, a pair of mutons showed up on the roof and six overwatch shots went off simulataneously, leaving a couple of smoking corpses on the ground. It was a thing of beauty.
Edit: I’m glad to see them patching this though - I’ve definitely run into some issues where the view kept resetting to maximum altitude everytime I moved to a new soldier, and moreso, some ‘hangs’ where a solider would sortof ‘start’ to do an action, but the UI for it wouldn’t appear and they’d just kinda freeze there. I discovered I could fix that by switching weapons though.
My first was a sectoid, then a muton. Then I started over and got a thin man then a sectoid. It’s so hard to get them without dying in the early game that it’s mostly just grab what you can Does anyone know if you can have multiple aliens in containment? I don’t think I’ve ever managed to bring home multiples to find out. More by chance than planning.
I love that feeling Airk. I actually use over-watch a lot to bring them into firetraps. Best of all is when a floater or thin man decides to drop behind your lines and 3 people have flanked shots on him in the open. It’s like a race to get the kill in the middle of a laser light show.
I don’t know if there’s a limit to number, or how long you can keep them, but it’s definitely not limited to one at a time.
There’s also no need to capture additional subtypes (no more sectoid engineers.) So while I’m not sure whether or not you can capture multiple types on one mission, capturing two sectoids right off would just give you one to question. Both their guns though.
Capturing multiple aliens works fine, but as far as I can tell the only point of capturing a specimen you’ve captured before is to get their weapon intact. (Which, I guess, is slightly more point to duplicate captures than the original game). On the other hand, killing them gets you a corpse you can sell for a few pennies, and some weapon fragments which are crucial for research, and capturing a “dupe” gets you a live alien that, as far as I can tell, disappears into the ether, and a gun that if you don’t use, you can’t sell. (Unless maybe there are events where countries ask for plasma weapons.)
An interesting thing about this game, too, is that overall the mood is MUCH more effectively tense than the original ever was for me. Somehow, in the original, I felt entirely too in control of events, particularly since the behavior of the various countries that were funding me was best described as “about as predictable as a herd of rabid baboons” so the ‘stakes’ on any given mission was basically just my soldiers, who felt extremely replaceable, overall, because half the time your veterans were no more effective than your newbies, since the game was so random. (My latest playthrough, my most veteran squadmember, who has made it to like, captain and survived countless missions, still has only strictly average accuracy and no particularly redeeming stats. Any rookie who spent some time at the firing range before getting scooped up by X-com can perform just as well as he does.)
Oh, and I basically had nigh-infinite money anyway.
Whereas the new game actually feels much more like we’re only barely holding things together, even though there’s a far smaller chance of a soldier getting randomly mauled by an alien walking around a corner and blasting him with plasma.
Does anyone know if you can have multiple aliens in containment? I don’t think I’ve ever managed to bring home multiples to find out. More by chance than planning.