3041

Yeah, that particular mission was pretty annoying. I’m not sure I ever had an alien hide in one of those 1x1 apartments, but you could never be sure, so you had to check.
Still, the solutions I suggested above would have resolved the issue.

Sure, that’s the root of my issue, I guess. It seems to be pretty easy to get into a position “flanking” any piece of cover.

rezaf

3042

I don’t think it’s that clear when you are past the cover line or when you aren’t, when there is some distance between you and the alien.

edit: to be more clear

Let’s say you are in d1, with cover facing the opposite side, the enemy is in the 8th row.
In what squares from the 8 row would be the alien firing to cover and in which he wouldn’t?

3043

From no position on the 8th row could the alien avoid your cover. He would have to get down to your row or past it.

3044

True, bad example for my part. But if I was in… say A3, he wouldn’t have cover for g8 or h8. And f8, diagonals are still inside cover or not?

3045

Nope, he’d still be in cover from all spaces you mentioned. Sightlines don’t matter at all, only the position of the units and the facing of the cover.

3046

Ah, ok, so the cover is “180º”.

I could swear someone discussed how the cover worked in a previous page, and I got the idea from what they said it’s was a 90º cover, to the front, as in some position it could seem you were in cover, but truly you weren’t.

3047

rezaf, I appreciate your passion, but I think the discussion about simplification is clouding the issue at this point. XCOM is the game we’ve received. We can’t change that now. But there are more than enough errors of commission to complain about here. The problem is not simplification, it’s the additional flaws introduced as they went their own way.

I can get it eventually. I don’t like how much time it takes to do all that fiddling. Along with the lack of economy of motion in the interface, there is a lot of dead time. Sometimes it feels like one of those Eastern European tactical games that are finicky and full of tedium. Fortunately it’s well worth the effort.

3048

Sometimes you get flanking from one line back (so with a target at d1 I might be able to flank from h2). I’m not sure of the exact logic.

Annoyingly if you are flanked and also in smoke it seems you still count as flanked.

This contributes significantly to the artificial feeling of the game, since you always want to be advancing along a cardinal direction - if you are advancing diagonally it’s much much easier to get flanked.

3049

Can you explain what you mean by lack of economy in the interface? I find it every easy but then again I use hotkeys (Numberkeys or Y)

3050

I must be weird but with this game I have more fun watching other people play than playing myself. But I dont like any random video, must be of somebody that is fast playing turns and is chatty about what is doing. I laught when shit happens and the hero byte the dust and random things happend. The game is too good at stealing victory from the hands of the player in a hilarious way.
If anybody have any good video, please share.

3051

But maybe we can! Unfortunately, the Firaxis of Civ4 (SDK release!) seems to be a thing of the past.
Still, since XCOM uses UDK, maybe there’s some hope for a heavily modded XCOM still.

Otherwise, yeah, I have to agree I guess.
Still, it pains me a bit to read such undifferentiated positive feedback as many folks present here.
In 15 years or something, when someone makes the next XCOM game, he will look back and see how it worked last time to just remove a ton of stuff from the previous game and everyone was raving. And so he’ll just do the same thing again.

rezaf

3052

I think we can do both!

To discuss the issues/bugs/littles omissions of the present game, and to discuss the why/how/I like/I hate of the core design of the game (even if we can’t change that).

Hell, we also can’t change the little “issues at this point” at this, but even then you also are discussing them!

3053

Not easy or hard, Razgon. SLOW. Something similar happened with Dungeons of Dredmor. I don’t want to throw them under the bus because it’s a good game. Anyway, their marketing was to make fun of all the obscure key combinations you needed to play most roguelikes. The only problem? Dredmor at release was easy to control but brutally slow to do pretty much anything. The mouse based interface made simple things take longer than they should. They got rid of the obscure UNIX style shortcuts, but they didn’t come up with a better solution at first.

XCOM has a slow floating camera (number one issue), confirmation buttons, repositioned ability buttons depending on what is there, inability to lock zoom level so you don’t have to keep edge scrolling, various camera issues with grenades and rockets, locked camera positions that never provide exactly the right angle, fiddling with height levels, fiddling with the cursor to identify cover on busy maps, [EDIT] HOW COULD I FORGET THE ANIMATION WIND-UP, etc. It adds up. I can’t believe I’ve already put 22 hours into this game.

3054

What on Earth would bug you so much to know that people are enjoying playing a game far more than you seem to? Honestly rezaf I think you have made your point here (and in the other three threads) but please don’t damn different opinions by calling them undifferentiated. Apart from the fact most positive opinions here are clearly anything but, I also feel you’re missing the point somewhat. But I can accept that our tastes clearly differ on this one, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

3055

I finished my first playthrough on Normal. I only lost Japan because I could not shoot down the thing attacking it’s satellite. I had no idea that you had to go to the interceptors to equip the new weapons. All the other stuff you build at that point show up as icons to use on the hud during the fight.

I missed some research at some point, but I do not know what. Maybe the ethereal alien? They have like a 4% chance to be stunned and I never got one.

I was quite disappointed by the ending, but Ill not discuss that here because it will contain spoilers. I definitely will wait for some bug fixes before I do another play-through. They have to fix the camera issues, such as when throwing a grenade or trying to tell someone using skeleton armor to climb up somewhere in a UFO. At the extreme ranges the camera would bounce like crazy. Also the problem of trying to tell troops to move in certain multi-leveled areas was quite problematic, again mostly occurring on UFOs.

Ill also gripe about the RNG as being very streaky. Many times on overwatch with most of my squad, they would all miss. Also why is it when soldiers panic they tend to shoot your team, but when aliens panic they also tend to shoot your team?

3056

I see good prospects of XCOM modding, very good even. A lot of ini files control the balance of the game, these ini files need to be imported inside the exe file, but that can be made automatically. The other reason is that the game need modding, the current balance is questionable and have bugs. Its possible to activate all the AI of imposible without the unfairness of abusive tohit stats, creating a new interesting dificulty level. Is posible to make the strategic layer harder, and even have something like a second wave, where the game is still challenging when you have unlock all the techs.

Mods more complex than that would need model exporters and stuff, but since this is built with unreal, probably a lot of most tools already exist.Only multiplayer looks like modding unfriendly, sadly, because this multiplayer beg for a aliens vs predator mode, or a war40k mode.

3057

I know you were responding to rezaf, but I wanted to clarify that I’m posting my frustration because I’m jealous of all you jerks that aren’t sensitive to this interface (hehe) and more importantly I don’t agree with the narrative that’s developed about these two games. I don’t see it as simplification versus complexity. You can’t just drop a sentence about moving rookies through wheat fields in X-COM and be done with it. I think XCOM has new, different lows that have a similar effect to the ones they streamlined away.

I was on board when Jake said they chopped off both the highs and lows. Fair enough, I thought. But that hasn’t gone as well as I had hoped.

This thread gets me a little too riled up though. Like I said, all it takes is a string of straightforward missions or a long break in the strategy layer and I get over it. Let’s see if that still holds now that I’m in the endgame.

3058

Man, of course the part’s that bugging me is NOT others enjoying the game more than I do. Why would I begrudge other’s their entertainment?
And by undifferntiated I wasn’t referring to feedback from any individual poster, but from posters as a whole.
Recently, feedback was more of a mixed bag, but early on (and now still, occasionally) there’s quite a bit of “best game ever” drool.

It’s a solid game, and I like some of the things it does, but I don’t see it having NEARLY the same long-term legs. Unless … modding.

But you’re right, I’ll try to limit myself a bit - sometimes I can get a bit overzealous.

rezaf

3059

I’m really enjoying the game enough to raise a few nitpicks without feeling like a hater.
The first is that it feels like there are no aliens patrolling the ground. You pop a monster closet and kill it, spend a few turns reloading and repositioning and then you inch forward until the next spawn pops. It would be nice if aliens investigated or wandered in a larger radius.
Secondly, for a game that is about an international effort, why are all the voices so blatantly American? They couldn’t get any foreign voice talent to say a few things? I’m particularly annoyed with the female voices… it’s like all of them are slightly different versions of Vasquez from Aliens. You could pretty well double that observation for the terrain graphics- the world of the future will look like a strip of American suburbia no matter what country you are in.

3060

I’ve been playing this pretty steadily, and, for what its worth, I never played any of the original X-Com games to compare it to directly.

I’m finding the tactical combat a little repetitive. It really feels straightforward: march together from cover to cover, try not to trigger more than a single enemy cluster at a time. Rinse and repeat. The Terror and to a lesser extent Bomb Disposal missions are therefore more fun since you are encouraged to be riskier with aggressive moves.

This is on Normal difficulty, though, so I’m sure things get tougher on Classic. What I worry about is that I don’t see any room for the Classic experience to be “qualitatively” more difficult, if you understand what I mean? I envision just tougher groups of enemies in greater numbers, and there really doesn’t appear to me to be much in the way of response apart from sticking to the best cover and trusting the percentages and crossing my fingers. We’ll see.

The campaign seems lengthy though, so I may lose interest before trying Classic.

As for the strategic layer, I am very underwhelmed. The ant-farm base is cute and all, except largely pointless. It’s not even very busy looking so you don’t get that Anno XXXX feel of just sitting back and watching the bustle for fun or anything. It took about 20 minutes before I was just clicking through the menus and ignoring everything and being annoyed that I can’t go straight to the Mission Control from another menu.

Also, the Mission Control feels like a whole lot of artifice around a simplistic “next mission” button. I 100% get the “why only 1 Skyranger?” complaints. In theory I see a sort-of-interesting resource management game with your interceptors where you are trying to maintain coverage and keep them repaired, etc. (Though on Normal there aren’t nearly enough interception missions to make this a problem.) I would have been way more interested in something similar for the Skyranger(s), where I had to keep my roster and Skyrangers distributed in order to be able to get to events in time and I might have to send second tier units into a bomb disposal mission because they are the only ones close enough to get there in time.

Ultimately, when I click “Send Skyranger” why do I have to sit here and watch it fly to the location and watch the clock tick by? It’s meaningless, nothing is ever going to happen to interrupt it, it’s just tacking another 10 seconds of “loading” time onto things effectively. (This isn’t a big deal.) It just feels like a lot of effort was put into making the illusion of a game here.

The user interface in both halves of the game is well below the standard I’ve come to expect from Firaxis. The game is desperately in need of tooltips for things I have to open submenus for. Is there a way to tell what the continental satellite coverage bonus is for a continent at any point AFTER you initially get it?

At the end of the day though this game definitely has the Firaxis charm of there always being one more thing to do. The tactical battles are starting to wear as they get longer with bigger bullet sponges on both sides, but still brief enough I feel like I can squeeze just one more mission out before bedtime. There’s a lot to be said for that.