2641

Maybe you should stop reading this thread if something small like that is going to cause you to get all bent out of shape.

2642

Does normal get appreciably harder?

It’s important to me, because I do not want to win the first game without challenge. I tried normal, and only lost 1 guy in my first 7 missions (while capturing everything alive that I could capture, etc.). I got an “A” for my first month’s report.

Basically, I don’t want to waste time playing something that is way too hard, but also don’t want to win the game without challenge (because you can only discover this stuff for the first time once, and I’d like there to be some effort to it). I’m trying to find the right difficulty level.

2643

I’m playing on normal. I just tried an abduction mission and had to fight nine mutons at once and a cyberdisc.

It did not go well. I’m two and a half months in and I just did the base attack prior to this, most of my guys have laser weapons. Doesn’t matter. I’m not enjoying the difficulty curve in this game, which seems to be set to “easy, easy, a little tougher, NOW YOU WILL DIE”.

2644

I’ll have to check it out. I wanted to carry on my first game to see what happens, but I ended up restarting because losing is so unfun to me.

What follows is a philosophical sidebar on spoilers about what I’ve learned after years of reading vBulletin threads. Feel free to ignore.

Have you ever heard that joke that a bad driver is anyone on the road driving faster or slower than you? I fully admit I’m being unreasonable here. It’s not a spoiler in the traditional sense.

But the thing is, there’s no “reason” to drop that into the post. Here’s why. We all pretty much go through the same thing in most computer games. Describing what happens in the game isn’t useful because there’s no discussion value. Readers either know what you’re talking about or they don’t. It’s either a +1 or a ‘huh?’

I get that people still want to have a shared experience. That’s why the spoiler thread is a good place to dump descriptions of what happened. (If you’re afraid of seeing spoilers, then don’t post.) If you think most people are at that point and want to put it in the main thread, at least roll it into a general discussion topic – maybe you think that mechanic sucks or you would’ve played things differently had you known.

/end panty twist nerd rage, carry on

2645

Agree with the comment about Classic kicking the player’s ass. It’s certainly doing that to me. I’m not sure if I’m already loosing and I just don’t know it yet but I just had my first total loss in a terror mission. Luckily it was at the end of the month so I could cash up quickly to replace all the soldiers who bit it. But…starting from scratch now with only a single veteran in my barracks. I’ve lost 4 countries, but haven’t had interceptors or sats blown up yet.

I will say that continually missing shots in the 70% area is pissing me off. I’m trying to flank and such but on some maps (that terror mission in particular) it was neigh impossible. When you get swarmed by 2 groups of floaters and a group of Chrisalyds it’s ah…it’s hard. :)

2646

Every time the Research doctor and Engineering dude talks to me, their facial expression reminds me of those leaders in Civ IV!

Loving the game so far. I started with Classic and after 4 hours, I can vouch that Classic is the choice if you were a XCom veteran.

2647

How did you do in your first 7-8 missions? Lose any guys?

2648

My first Terror Site last night on Normal (for now) went well enough but the entire mission was spent fighting on the corner of a single building a mere 25 feet from the Skyranger. There were 10 aliens and they seemed to be bunched up right there or maybe they came to me?

Frankly, it was rather anticlimactic (and disappointing), considering the size of the towns in 1994 XCOM were much larger and required far more tactical movement. Is this the norm or just my roll of the dice?

2649

Someone else forgetting the hour and a half of “tactical movement” it took to track down that last sectoid in a closet somewhere. Double that for TFTD.

2650

Nope. I move slowly, with lots of overwatch…I lost my first guys on the base assault (standing too close to a door when Chryssalids came through). It’s worked up until now. But with only six guys and weapons that can’t one-shot kill mutons or cyberdiscs, I’m boned when there’s more than one group of aliens. I didn’t even have time to get out of the parking lot of the restaurant I landed next to.

2651

Any digital downloads for this that aren’t charging the €50 steam are looking for?

2652

@GuildBoss.
You have less soldiers, so it’s not surprising the maps are smaller. It makes sense.

That said, yeah, it’s somewhat disappointing.

@Scharmers, there are several ways, some of them implemented by other UFO clones, to avoid the “where the hell is the last enemy” syndrome, without needing to touch the scenario sizes. For example make the last two enemies attack you, instead of being eternally in guard mode.
And even forgetting that, because in Xcom EU the movement is faster, more streamlined and you have less soldiers to whom give orders, you would need much less time to comb a scenario than in the original.

2653

Wow…even Greenman Gaming nuked their 10% discount. So: I don’t think so. Also: XCom is probably worth the 50 quatloos or glass beads or whatever currency you use ;)

2654

The point is: the decisions are the same, without the endless faffing about of moving twelve squaddies through an endless cornfield to get that one sectoid. That trudging about wasn’t interesting gameplay. It was just a gamer tax. X-Com was and is godlike, but it is filled with gamer tax.

Are the maps small in the new game? Yep. But they’re packed with cover and approach points. There’s just enough room to manuever and make meaningful tactical decisions without having to ctrl-c ctrl-v things up.

As you can tell, I’m pretty happy with the small maps and the general signposting of which way your operatives need to go. This design decision, and many others, shows that XCom respects my time, which not something I have as much of when I was in my slacker 20s rolling UFO:EU :)

2655

I think I’m ready to throw this out there: I bet if Firaxis hadn’t introduced their own gamer tax to XCOM: EU, they could’ve given us more units and bigger maps without increasing the overall time to play a mission.

I’m talking about the slow animations and the slow interface. I bet they could tighten all that up to give us a 7th soldier “for free.” That doesn’t even include larger issues like the mostly static enemies and compartmentalized encounters that lead to gamey behavior (reloading all your weapons manually before moving on) and slow pace to remain behind cover with an action point available, which feels a lot like that cornfield to me.

I’m reacting to the sentiment that X-COM is so old and unbearable. Not because it didn’t need to change. It did. But because sometimes modern “streamlining” has different problems that are nearly as annoying. You can almost pick out the reasons why it’ll be hard to go back to this game in 15 years.

I can’t say the same about the strategy layer yet. I bet it’ll be much faster. A lot of strategy-tactical games get unbearable in the endgame when you have a huge empire to manage. Let’s see if the boardgame style helps.

2656

After losing 4 games on Classic+Ironman (when you lose veterans it’s easy to get into a death spiral where every mission ends in your rookies being slaughtered), I bumped it down to Normal+Ironman. It felt a bit easy at the beginning, but it’s starting ramp up. Feels like that’s the sweet spot for me.

Also, I’m surprised at how much I like the “glam cam” and how much it fosters an attachment to your characters. Every time it zooms in on my beloved French sniper, Lt. Petit, with her butch haircut and icy demeanour, I know something in her crosshairs is going to die. I think this game is Game of the Forever material for me, right up there with the original X-Com.

2657

I agree the meaningful tactical decisions are mostly the same (Flanking, suppression, explosives, snipers, use of smoke, cover, etc.), except served in smaller dishes, to use a food analogy.

But there is something more than just tactical combat. Even if with a good focused design you can have fun in very small scenarios with 2 corridors and a handful of simple rooms (look at Frozen Synapse, good game!), I still prefer something bigger.

It’s more a question of… how to say? Part immersion, part scope, part having terror missions feeling more epic than the normal ufo crashed missions, part exploration of the maps. The feelings of advancing through streets, parks and abandoned buildings, having to explore several floors in a house while I’m in tension. yeah “having to”, it may be a bad thing for people who want to cut to the meaty part, but for others it’s a good thing, “having to” explore empty areas without knowing if that street is really empty, or the aliens are in that part of the map.

edit
In a way, the X-com games are classics not because their cold but solid mechanics, but because they lend themselves to be very emotionally charged experiences. Shooting aliens in the dark, a soldier panicking when he see a friend die, confusing shots through the smoke, losing 1/3 of the squad while climbing down the transport, the feel when you clean half the map with the blaster launcher, searching aliens through a corn field or in a city through shops and warehouses, the feeling when one single chrysalids avoid your shots and transform everyone in chrysalids. It was all very moody, very emotional, and less like “just a turn based tactical game”. That’s chess.

So stuff that can affect the mood and tension is important.

2658

One of the advantages and disadvantages of modern AAA “safe” design is the methodical pacing. Games do a good job keeping things moving and sticking to bite size chunks of content for busy older gamers. But sometimes you see behind the curtain (Half-Life 2’s puzzle, walking, shooting, repeat) or you start wishing for more scope sometimes to let the game breathe.

2659

Well… all I can say is: XCom hits the “what I want from a strategy game” spot for 2012 scharmers, whose game preferences differ mightily from the mid-90s scharmers. And if that young punk decides to take things over for a day, well then he is still holding out on Xenonauts, which unsurprisingly missed its beta deadline.

2660

This XCOM is exactly what you’re describing. It’s amazing that in this day and age a major publisher poured significant resources into a hardcore turn-based strategy game.