I don’t understand why this is so confusing. There’s no cover, half cover, full cover, and flanked, plus above or below. it’s obvious when an enemy is above or below you, it’s obvious when you’re flanked, and it’s obvious when you’re in full or half cover or on the wrong “side” of a cover object (red shields). The only ambiguity is that if you’re dealing with a roughly “diagonal” enemy you can’t know for certain if they’ll break to the good or bad side of the available cover, but that would be true in any cover system.
Honestly I feel like most of the people who complain about “impossible” or “improbable” hits or misses are just bad at statistics or full of confirmation bias. As someone who plays a lot of die-rolling dependent wargames, getting upset that I missed a 99 percent shot or whatever would never occur to me, shit like that happens constantly. In a game where you have 6 people firing multiple times each battle, and the percentages to hit are no finer grained than 1 percent increments out of 100, there’s going to be a tremendous amount of wacky outcomes, because the reliability of any “roll” is relatively low.
@Hugin: What made S2 so tedious to play (for some people) was mostly the resolition of enemy (and neutrals!) turns, though, wasn’t it?
The actual physics engine (pre PhysX etc.) made the game stutter when spectacular damage was being done, but generally worked fairly well.
I’m talking about the interaction between the possibilities built into the game engine and the play mechanics they designed to leverage them. I found the game fiddly and tedious to play. I find Laser Squad Nemesis, a game with a much simpler engine, fiddly and irritating to play as well.
Strategy gamers have a terrible tendency to think “complexity” is inherently good. I’m strongly of the belief it isn’t, necessarily. I think XCom:EU strikes a decent balance between tension associated with mutually exclusive decision making, tension associated with success/failure gates, and making the optimal choice at any given moment an interesting smallish-to-mediumish outcomes cloud with some entertainingly big outlier spikes (with the exception of cascading panic coupled with friendly fire, which I think spikes too hard on Classic, IMO)
Going back to an almost twenty year old game and actually SIMPLIFYING it is fairly embarrassing in my book.
Simplifying is awesome. If this game were the original X-Com with modern graphics I wouldn’t have bought it. People think Simplifying is taking the easy way out, or dumbing things down. They think simplifying is making things less. I think when a design is good that’s entirely untrue.
My problems with X-Com have almost nothing to do with the design level decisions, the combat systems, the cover, the trooper customization stuff, the single base, none of that, they’re mostly technical.
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The game is buggy, too buggy to make playing Ironman safe/fair. The interface will crap out under various circumstances, the save system is apparently bugged, those sorts of things.
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I think the way the camera handles object display/occlusion with architectural objects is poor, I don’t know if that’s a technical implementation that’s simply poor or bugginess. In short, anything with a roof is a pain to deal with, intersecting walls can be a pain, the camera doesn’t like dealing with map objects directly below it, etc.
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I feel like the game needs another polish pass in terms of the way the tutorial missions work, the way base management is explained to the player, conveying to the player how to manage global panic levels in particular, what objects are safe “trash” to sell, how projects (don’t) “spend” engineers and how various trooper abilities actually work.
