Reloads are up the player, so I think you should play any way you like. The steam forum has a never ending discussion about this topic. The purist arguing you should never do it, and the other side saying it’s just a game man, do what you will.
My 2 cents on it are this: don’t simultaneously claim the AI is crap while reloading your way to a win. This is abused w/o acknowledgement in pretty much every tactics or strategy game ever made that someone is discussing. ;)
Lantz
2852
I agree that people should feel free to reload and experiment with different approaches but I also think that if you are too reliant on reloads you will stunt your tactical growth because the best tactics can weather things going wrong and anticipate that they will.
So definitely reload but don’t be afraid when things go off the rails a bit because threading the needle out of it is super rewarding.
Maybe this has changed, but I thought the way the modern XCOM games work doesn’t really reward that in any way. If you take the same shot on the same enemy in the same turn with the same soldier, there’s a “seed” or something (I’m not a dev, so don’t ask me what that means, but I gather it informs the RNG) that makes it so you’re still going to miss. Now, you can certainly decide to do something different with that same soldier, or have a different soldier take an action instead, and that might make for a better outcome. That’s the way I’ve played.
I recall that on my first campaign there was a particular “save the captured operative” mission with a ridiculous time limit on a large map that I savescummed my way through on normal (XCOM 2) and did save the guy and evac all my people, but I really had to work at it, and it was a nail-biter.
RichVR
2854
Yeah. If you want a different outcome you won’t get it. You would have to go back one save. And that’s ridiculous.
Did they ever fix that weird bug with the grenade launcher in the last mission of the game, where if you were in half cover the bug made it useless? Or maybe it even applied to thrown grenades.
If you go back and do something different than last time I believe you get a new roll. Not positive.
The random seed is what gets saved, so the same sequence of rolls will still happen. Sometimes you can ‘skip’ a bad roll by doing something where the outcome doesn’t matter, like throwing a frag at an enemy with 2 health. But really, if a player feels like they regularly need to do that, they’re probably better off either lowering the difficulty or playing something else. The adversity of bad things happening sometimes is kind of the point.
RichVR
2858
I am 100% in agreement. I was talking about the very beginning of the game and new players. Also my dislike of the term ‘savescum’. That just pisses me off. My game. My fucking rules.
I’ve heard that said many a time in steam forums usually summarized in the immortal words git gud. The one reservation I have around that sentiment is the game design in terms of difficulty scales such that if you don’t keep ranked up units alive over time you fall behind the power curve and lose.
If Firaxis had really seen there way thru to what you suggest they would have provided missions that were milk runs, something those who didn’t need them could ignore and those who needed to regroup could make use of.
Just idle musings that the game could have given you some options to actually make suffering losses not quite so game ending. This is usually the point where in steam forums pages of responses show up explaining how to get gud.
And while I’m no doubt only marginally competent even though I’ve played 400+ hours, I feel like I’ve played it enough to throw out the suggestion they might have at least given this some thought.
This is the exactly the problem with XCOM’s strategic problems.
The game is designed around you almost “perfectly” completing your missions. Thus, on one hand, they demand perfection in the tactical portion due to the way the strategic portion plays out.
On the other hand, they discourage the usage of units that can perfectly complete missions. For instance, the massive Will reduction per mission.
So I think any complaints against save scumming misses the schizophrenic nature of the design that demands perfection and penalizes you for playing to that design in the first place.
Which is why I think Chimera has a much better approach in that respect. At least that game does not actively penalize you for perfectly completing the tactical portions which the game demands from you.
Yeah, I guess in general I’d just say that for something to actually be tactics or strategy for me there has to be failure as a part of the planned game outcomes. Otherwise it’s just a puzzle.
RichVR
2862
OTOH, when you get that OP A team, you could bulldoze through the game with them. So the trade off is, you have to use your marginally less skilled B or C teams. But. You get to give them all of the cool stuff like armor and weapons and such. In the case of armor, it doesn’t make sense. A huge suit of power armor has to be tailored to the individual. On a noob in it it it just don’t work right.
I agree. Although XCOM has RPG elements, it is not a RPG game.
In a typical RPG progression, as you progress, challenges are thrown at your team. You get a satisfying game loop where you successfully meet challenges and your team progress in power levels, you can afford to get damage because you get healed up before the next challenged.
In XCOM, when you get damaged, you’re forced to have down time. Unless you perfectly complete the mission, you get penalized. So the design encourages zero mistake.
And because the game is designed around many units, to force players to play as designed, they force downtimes, if not the units become OP. It’s an extremely clunky way to force users to play to their design, via penalization.
IMO the interplay of RPG elements and the strategic layer in which tension is introduced is not well thought out. A lot of the mechanics introduced flow out of the bad design interaction in the first place. So we see a lot of curbs on the RPG progression because it don’t play well with the overall strategic design.
Edit: As demonstration, I’ll point to the popularity of the Musashi RPG mods which removes the RPG curbs and the addition of harder enemies and AI.
JPR
2864
Don’t think of them as A and B teams. You need to have 3 or 4 of each class at roughly the same level, and you always mix one or two lower leveled people into your squad. The only time you should be taking “the A team” is the 2 big story missions, killing Chosen, the last mission, and maybe taking out enemy bases.
This is correct. When I got the achieve for never expanding beyond four team members, I had to save scum like crazy, as it’s very difficult.
I think there are some things they could do to both give a bump after a failure and make the doomsday meter better reflect the player actually losing the game, but WotC especially gives plenty of opportunity to level soldiers without missions as well as acquiring new level-scaled soldiers to replace losses. Anything short of a total loss is rarely game ending and even that is more because of the equipment - rocket launchers are expensive and boosted bullets/grenades are hard to replace.
Soma
2867
There is a flag you can toggle in the start of the game to make the “RNG” really RNG. Even if the RNG is fake, if you, say, take a shot slightly later (e.g. taking a shot after you moved others, as opposed to taking the shot before you move other), the fake RNG changes the outcome slightly and you still have a chance to make that 33% shot even if the first time you missed.
PS: what @Balasarius and @easytarget said.
Lantz
2868
I adore the game, but while we are complaining, the way the game is structured for you to throw a couple randos into the psi chamber to emerge late game as world destroyers is pretty weak.
When WotC came out I started a new campaign, and it was going along fine for a while, but I made the mistake of not investing in the Guerrilla Tactics School soon enough, and suddenly the Chosen were showing up and basically there was no effing way I was not getting my party wiped without more than four people on the field. Lower level troops were not going to be able to take up the slack if that happened.
Maybe if they did have less intense missions available for troops-in-training one could build up some reserves by giving them some experience, I don’t know (they could have those happen in the background like in some of the AC games). So far I’ve only ever played the vanilla XCOM 2 campaign through, one time.
WoTC has those types of side missions. You send one or 2 units, plus maybe a scientist or engineer, and the do some covert mission while you keep doing your thing. After a set number of days, depending on difficulty, etc, they come back with some experience. The neat thing is if things go sideways, you get dumped into a run-for-your life mission, where you go through a tactical retreat to an extraction point.
