I’m replaying Xcom 1 and I’m really, REALLY hating the how the maps play with thin men and other aliens just falling out of the sky. I’m early on and have lost my entire teams 3x. Makes me appreciate X-com2 plus expansions even more. Though I super duper miss having UFO interceptions.
That’s probably my main gripe about both modern xcoms, tactically it often seems like I’m just crawling from pod reveal to pod reveal trying to take them out w/o revealing two pods at once (till something about the game design like timers forces me to ignore common sense and run headlong into what what I know is an ambush).
The aliens dropping out of the sky is fairly similar effect only even more difficult to plan for, that train mission where you have to defuse the bomb is particularly annoying with aliens simply dropping in from the sky the entire mission.
Still love both of them though.
I stopped playing it solely because I got tired of the melee crawlers jumping up out of thin air, getting a free turn to get next to my guys, then instakilling all of them on their real turn. Sure, I can make sure never to advance with anyone other than my first soldier of the turn so I have enough actions to kill them in time, but it takes forever; annoying and frustrating.
The pod setup in XCOM 2 isn’t a whole lot better but at least the enemies generally run to cover with their free action instead of auto-flanking you.
I don’t remember the original X-Coms doing that back in yesteryear. It seemed to me the aliens were already
on the ground or exiting a UFO, and they all moved, and you all moved. I don’t know why Firaxis had to go to such dumb tactics. Maybe they just couldn’t be bothered with programming good AI that covered the map.
The AI in the original wasn’t any good- they literally just wandered around as singletons. The pod system is largely so you get actual group vs group engagements.
The original XCom had a huge problem of finding that single last remaining alien to kill and complete the mission.
Was not so noticable in the flatish maps of the original. But was a horror in Terror of the Deep, especially with the multi-level ship maps.
Literally monsters in a closet
I have finally started playing Xcom 2. I have WOTC but wanted to try Vanilla first with a few cosmetic mods and Perfect Information.
I am only playing on Normal difficult and I certainly agree with the general consensus that the game is challenging. First few campaigns ended with a squad wipe. The first Blacksite is too difficult for the time it is introduced. It is suicide to go in without upgraded armor, squadsize and at least upgraded rifles… Oh and Gremlin Mk2.
Once you can get over the tech hump it is a bit less stressful except for the 12 turn missions. Those are tough. As far as I can tell there are always reinforcements at around turn 10 so really you only have 10 turns to get to rescue/capture and then, to within a sprint from the evac. Turn 11 will be dealing with the reinforcements (overwatch ambush) or just running past them to the evac. One of my early squad wipes was a full MIA/Captured loss.
Fun story: Turn 1, and I have squad conceal and have moved everyone except one person, enemy is sighted and consists of a Heavy Turret, Andromedon, and two Vipers. I move the last guy to a side of a building next to the window… but no! I misclicked and send him one extra space (now a sprint) through the window. Bad guys alerted! Here they come and I only have 2 soldiers who did not sprint.
Manage to kill one Viper. I do not have the moves to kill either the turret or Andromedon. I figure I will try to at least kill something
Enemy Turn.
Andromedon: Acid bombs the roof I have my Medic standing on. She is my 2nd highest medic, a captain who has been on more than a dozen missions. She takes acid damage and roof falling damage.
Viper: Targets the Medic who is now no longer in cover. Grab and Pull. I think, not a problem. The squeeze is low damage and I can fix this next turn.
Heavy Turret: Targets the Medic who is now the only one in range.
Crit!.. Sigh
Here’s something interesting I find as I continue to replay X-Com 1. I’d rather have no missions (or just a few) and just do all the strategic decisions. I really dislike it when something has been found or something happens and I have to do a mission.
I’ve been thinking about this and I believe I have some ideas that could have been used for Firaxis’s Xcom and maybe other games like this could consider it for the future.
1 - Program the AI to keep x number of units * random rolls * x-y tiles from each other as they go after the player in the movement phase. The groups could be randomly assigned as the scenario starts. So there would be x number of groups with 2-5 units per group. They then stay x many tiles near/away from each other as they go after the player.
- If it’s hard to corral final unit(s) as they’re constantly shifting, have a soldier that is forced to “plant” himself as he looks at a device (like the Alien motion tracker) which will then show a 5 hex range of where the opposing units are located. So the benefit of knowing mostly where the enemy is, is offset by having one less member of your force available for combat. After the player feels they’ve tracked down or cornered the unit, they can bring up their planted soldier to help finish them off. Xcom’s version is a bit wonky as it’s not specific enough and on UFO missions sometimes you’re chasing the unit(s) in circles around the wall of a UFO since you don’t know which side it is on. Also, their method doesn’t give you any relativity and could be one space or 50 spaces away. This would cut down on annoying stray alien hide and seek issues.
It really isn’t that hard if they want to fix it. There’s basically two problems:
-
Enemies getting the free turn: This is basically a hack around them walking around exposed until the player sees them. After XCOM breaks concealment, all the aliens on the map should start moving with respect to cover, whether they’re in combat or not. Now they don’t need a free turn. It’s not a trivial AI problem, but it’s not rocket science, either.
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Player accidentally clips the sight of a second pod and gets blown up: To some extent #1 would give the player a little more time, since they wouldn’t get auto-flanked from the start. But a better solution is to give each pod specific orders (patrol area, guard the base, stand around until combat starts and then run to combat area, etc). In the pre-mission, tell the player what the groups will be doing (but not their composition, location, or path). While there would still be the occasional “how could I have known there was an enemy there, now everyone is dead” with a little more AI information and structure the player will feel less frequently like they just got randomly screwed.
That said, I do think that the game plays best when every once in a while you do just roll your natural 1 and get blown up. I think in some respects they could get more value not in reducing that frequency, but being more clear to the player that it isn’t the end of the world, with less severe voiceover and music on failures (especially partial failures) and more guidance on how to recover. Right now you can complete the primary objective, have to evac out before cleaning up the remaining baddies (which counts as failure), and the music alone makes it feel like the apocalypse has already happened. Ease up on the “WHY DID YOU FAIL YOU SUCK OMG” if you want people to stop raging and save scumming every time a 90% shot misses.
Yes yes yes.
Agreed. They should take a leaf or two out of Invisible Inc and how it handles objectives, partial success and mission timers.
So I am working my way through Xcom 2, WOTC at the commander level. I think the next level will be an exercise in frustration. So was wonder if the other expansions are worth it. I remember the initial review weren’t great, but I only heard that they are a better with WOTC.
I started playing this as it was free on PS4 in June with PS Plus.
Mission timers suck, and I feel like I have to save scum because of how buggy encounters can be. Doing a mission carefully and triggering a pod of vipers who pull my sniper off a 3 story roof down to the middle of the map 2 movement turns from the rest of my party who is in the same building? C’mon…
It is kind of B.S. how the AI gets free actions and can just wreck your shit entirely in seemingly random fashion. Like, in that same mission, I had a grenadier die, because I foolishly moved her too far up, and she got whaled on. That felt fair. My sniper getting stuck up on while on the roof, and getting killed in the same round she is discovered? B.S.
But, that is why I don’t play on Ironman.
Otherwise, the game is great. The customization options, the new squaddie abilities, map verticality, overworld structure. All great.
The combat part feels a bit cheap though, with the mission timers forcing you to move quickly, and the wandering pods often catching you off-guard. In Xcom EU when I got killed it was because I fucked up, in Xcom 2 I get killed because a pod rolled up on my flank and got a round of actions. I feel like it would be less of an issue if you had more vision, or they were more liberal with the “sound coming from over here animation”.
If you think having some more bosses of questionable fairness is worthwhile, the Alien Rulers DLC might be good.
The Shen DLC’s best part was actually the (static, but long) mission, which they have disabled in WOTC. The new unit type you get from it is poorly balanced and bad with or without WOTC.
WOTC allows you to customize the game when you start it. There are several options, including doubling of mission timers and doubling of the Avatar timer. Highly recommended.
The mech that Shen’s Last Gift adds is great. I recommend all the DLC.
Is that true on PS4 as well? That alone might get me to pay for it.
I recently re-installed this and am playing with the long war 2 mod. I seem to have gotten myself into a bind.
I keep being reminded to do an autopsy on an advent commander’s corpse. I do not have such a corpse. After googling this, it appears that I may have rendered it. I probably did this not knowing what was meant by rendering.
Ideally, I would kill another commander in another mission and get one, yet I never get corpses from missions. I have even tried to pick them up, like you would a fallen comrade. This does not work. Am I screwed? I am on my 4th or 5th month of the campaign I think. I have almost nothing to research because of that missing corpse. There is also no avatar stuff going on either.
Does anyone know how I can get a corpse or why I can’t collect them?
You don’t get corpses on missions where you extract so try taking that into account when picking missions. If I remember right the supply depot ones and resistance base ones are good for corpses.
Worst case you can console cheat one in.