3001

Hmm, I guess I’m blessed re: these bugs, at least on PC–all I’ve seen is the occasional wonky glam-cam.

3002

Gah. Ragequit and uninstalled today I was so pissed at this game. F-ing Thin Men pushed me over the edge on an escort mission. I even put the difficulty down to Normal to try and get past it. Seems they can not only snipe me for insta-kills from half a map away, they can also poison all my guys with 100% accuracy.

XCOM is like some kind of twisted dominatrix. I think I love it, but man she beats the hell outta me.

3003

I do agree that the poison thing is stupid because it doesn’t appear to be a projectile based attack. They just seem to be able to poison areas at will with 100% accuracy.

My greater annoyance with escort missions was unlimited spawning in the middle of the map from thin air as long as the escort is not escorted out. As a rule of thumb, i generally dislike unlimited respawning unless you have a DAMN good story reason to support it (xcom doesn’t). I also tend to dislike spawning in thin air unless you have a damn good story reason to support it (xcom doesn’t). They didn’t even bother to make it look like the thin men teleport in using “Technology.”

3004

There are two different types of this bug i’ve experienced.

  1. The game is stuck on trying to reload/attack/something like that. In this case you can’t perform any battle actions through keybinding or mouse click, except switching weapon or reloading. Doing either of those will break you out of the… stuckness.

You know you’re in stuck type #1 if you press escape and you get the menu to popup. Lucky you, you don’t lose any game time.

  1. The game just won’t accept any input. Similar to #1, you can’t perform any action through keybindings or mouse clicks, but unlike #1, you also can’t reload or switch weapons and most obviously, you cannot use non battle shortcuts like escape (to bring up the menu).

If you get a #2 you’re screwed as far as i know. I hope you turned on auto saving because you will need to ctrl alt delete and then reload.

I just got one of these again just now.

3005

Wow, I thought the comments about the camera on large ships were probably overblown – then I played a map on a large ship. One thing I’ve noticed is that movement pathing is much better when you select the view level that corresponds to the level you want to move to. However, on a large ship, if you select the right view level for movement, the upper levels of the ship paint over the view! So you have a choice between not being able to see your guys, but have them go where you click, or being able to see your guys, but have them sometimes move to random locations.

3006

Heh. Large alien scout landing. We kill off the defenders with no casualties and get to the bridge. We completely surround the sectoid commander with the entire squad. He has one hit point left. What’s he going to do, <spoiler> one of us?

Pew pew. 2 points of damage from his little plasma pistol. Assault trooper disdainfully wipes the char marks off of her armor and brings out her arc thrower…

3007

I just barely scraped out a real nail-biter of a firefight. A choice of 3 Very Difficult abduction missions, and I took the one in Toronto because Canada was on the verge of pulling out, plus I needed the scientists.

Anyway, the best I could come up with was 3 low-ranking officers (Sergeants and Corporals, iirc), 2 rookies, and a SHIV enhanced with alloy armor. Even though I had them advance carefully, they eventually ran into 4 Mutons, 3 Floaters, and 3 Sectoids. I had one rocket, and probably would have been more successful if I had brought grenades along, but I felt mesh underwear and med kits would be necessary. The Mutons, on the other hand, had no such compunctions, and came in loaded for bear.

Long story short, at the end I was down to 1 rookie with 2 health points against a Muton with 4. They were both on opposite sides of the same car staring at each other. The Muton fires first…and misses! I think my screams of YES! woke tlr from her nap. My rookie takes a shot …and scores a critical hit for the win.

That’s XCOM. baby.

Now I have two Squaddies in the hospital and a roster full of rookies. The odds of this game going well from here are slim, other than it’s July, I’ve only had two countries leave so far, and every one else is no higher than 3, so if I can get some more satellites up, I may have time to regroup.

3008

How does this compare to Silent Storm in terms of combat mechanics and engine capabilities (destruction etc)? This looks promising from the youtubes but I remember looking at Jagged Alliance Back In Action the same way. I don’t know if I can take another one of these where 5 minutes in it becomes obvious that they thought the benchmark game to beat was from 1999 rather than 2003. Or 1994 in this case.

3009

Started playing this on Classic. Is it normal to come out of a fight with my tail between my legs and 1/4 team members alive? ;) At this burn rate I am going to have no troops left.

3010

That’s about how it went for me until playthrough 6 or 7, Sean. Just take what you’ve learned and apply it to your next game. Eventually you’ll do decently enough through the first handful of missions that you can get into screwing yourself via poor base management and research.

3011

Perhaps a bigger problem than the camera ones are that the game has problems telling when things shouldn’t go through different height levels because of ceilings or similar.

MANY times i’ve had enemies fly/walk through ceilings to drop down on my soldiers. I also had a ufo mission where floaters were firing through the ceiling at me and i couldn’t return fire because “nothing was there” (i ended up having to run out of the ufo and snipe them from outside while they were on top of it). I also just had someone pull off an impossible shot when he was on the ground floor outside of a ufo while my troop was far back a level above them.

Basically this:


___X________
            |
            |   A

X being my soldier and A being the alien. It was completely bullshit and hugely pissed me off.

djotefsoup: It doesn’t. the silent storm combat engine is significantly better in every way. Terrain destruction is extremely simple in XCOM, much how it was in the previous games, but it is more limited as well. LOS is simple at best.

3012

In terms of combat mechanics XCOM is not as detailed as Silent Storm. In SS, you could choose to headshot or legs or arms. It’s pretty straight forward here. Shoot or grenade or stun or whatever else you have equipped.

It may sound over simplified but it didn’t really matter to me as the streamlining made a good gaming experience but I can imagine a hard core tactical game lover screaming blasphemy!

3013

My experience was that starting in Classic was extremely difficult. I had three wipes in a row on the starting mission. But then once I got past the hump, it got a lot better. After my third wipe, I restarted on in my fourth attempt I’ve had at least 10 missions (AFAICT there’s no actual mission count, but my most experience soldiers are at 10) and I’ve only had one death – that’s actually better than my Normal Ironman game.

One thing that I think helps, is AFAICT you get more experience in Classic mode (I suspect it’s from having more bad guys). So after 10 missions, I’ve got 1 Major, 3 Captains, 1 Lieutenant, and 3 Squaddies, which is way, way better than I think I had at this point in Normal difficulty.

So if you can get through the first couple missions, you should accelerate and get better troop abilities, which helps a lot. It’s just those first missions are very hard. Your troopers seem to panic a lot more in Classic. So most of my starting missions consisted of someone getting killed, and then someone panicking and shooting his mates. In fact if IIRC the one death I’ve had so far in my current playthrough is actually someone who got shot by his mate in a panic.

Also go very slowly. It’s not unusual for me to have everyone sit on overwatch, while I wait for one guy to do an ammo reload.

3014

Man, I am doing awesome on my latest play through. I’ve teched up to Titan armor and plasma weapons. I’ve only lost 2 countries. I have a shit load of vets, including 2 colonels. I have my shit handled.

But now I’ve hit a gamebreaking bug and I don’t know if I’ll be able to continue. Every time a mission comes up, the geoscape shows my Skyranger flying to the Arctic instead of wherever the mission is. No big deal right? Not really, no. Except also whenever an abduciton mission comes up, the three location choices on the side do not. So I’m stuck with whichever one is first no matter how inappropriate the choice is. That’s gonna lead me to losing countries if I can’t choose based on panic levels.

I really do not want to start over again.

3015

Just had something unexpected happen. During my classic run I had Australia hit 5 points of panic and got the alert that they would drop out of the council. Completed a terror mission and went I got back and had the council meeting, they stayed in even though they had max panic. Australia was of course not the Continent that the terror mission was on.

This is the first time that happened, is there a chance that countries won’t drop out of the council at that point, or was that a fortunate bug?

3016

I’ve managed to keep countries that I shouldn’t have in that same way.

3017

I should’ve listened to the people who said Firaxis games are buggy at release, in order to prepare myself. This is my first day one Firaxis game experience. Yeesh.

I really don’t understand why more people aren’t complaining about the camera. Maybe they haven’t reached that part of the game? Missions that ought to be epic are painful instead. 22 hours in and I haven’t “gotten used to it.” I die a little inside every time someone brings up game of the year when I can barely move my mans to the square I want.

All comments about tedious micromanagement in the original X-COM are now null and void. I’ve spent more time swimming around the screen with the TAB key than I ever did moving rookies through wheat fields or pressing the kneel button.

Still cranking though. All it takes is a string of straightforward missions to forget about it for a while.

3018

IIRC successful terror defenses drop levels across their region. Was your terror mission in Asia/Pacific?

3019

It’s extremely annoying, but easy to work around by twitching between different level views, though of course it makes errors much more likely. Rage-quitting over a mis-click would certainly be justified if it was on one of those levels.

3020

No, I’m sure that it was in Europe. As on the council screen it still showed Australia at having 5 bars of panic.