3261

I think their reason for leaving it out is play balance. It’s the same reason you don’t see satellites for $1. I don’t mean that to sound snarky, I just mean that they didn’t do it because it devolved the game into a cover-destruction game, which is not what they were striving to create.

I might agree that some of their design decisions are questionable (the AI bonuses in classic, for example), but not this one.

3262

I choose the money reward if I can get away with it (panicked countries not included). For example, $200 is worth far more than 4 engineers. With $200 I can build a workshop that will get me 5 engineers, and have some money left over, even if I need to build power and excavate.

3263

My argument is that either we have a game that uses real-life military tactics or we don’t. We currently have a game that uses real-life military tactics. In my view that’s a really good thing, and kudos to Jake and his time for making the game more realistic.

3264

Oh, Lordy!

3265

And your point is that I’m trying to emphasize that in real-life small arms are not used to destroy walls? Yes I am.

I realize every fondly remembers their original X-Com experience, but that doesn’t mean it lead to a more interesting game. The new XCom at least in this respect leads to more realistic tactics, and IMO is all the better for it.

If you really want to go around destroying everything, then load up with heavy weapons and grenades. That option is still there for you. And those of us who want a more realistic near-future military experience can skip them and still get it.

3266

  1. Sure, but you have to admit that the comment is pretty funny.

  2. Except you’re wrong. I have personally used a SAW in Iraq to chew through a wall and expose the enemy.

  3. All this is beside the point. “Realism” has to be the worst excuse for a gameplay decision in a game that shows virtual turn-based miniatures battles to abstract a firefight between aliens and soldiers.

3267

Best response ever.

— Alan

3268

Isn’t a SAW considered a support weapon? That isn’t something that a regular M16 equipped rifleman is going to do is it?

3269

Since squads usually have at least one if not two, it’s not exactly uncommon. Breaching walls to create new means of entry is a fairly common practice.

— Alan

3270

Do you really want to press this? REALLY? No not every rifleman had a SAW. “Squad” is part of the acronym. That’s neither here nor there since there’s a Heavy in XCOM armed with what appears to be a LMG.

Sorry, for coming across as kind of a dick here, but you’re starting to remind me of every young pup I talked to when I got out of the Army that was absolutely sure he knew how the military worked and what combat was like thanks to movies and TV. It’s aggravating.

Look, let’s start over. Ignore my snarky response. You can keep going down the rabbit hole of defending non-targetable cover in service of realism, but I’ve already said that nothing in XCOM’s battles are particularly realistic. It’s turn-based miniatures on tiny maps. “Realism” shouldn’t even be part of the discussion other than what feels real enough to evoke a sense of shooting at aliens and getting shot at. I think there are very good arguments for the game makers to not let players target cover and destroy it, but realism isn’t it.

3271

I think the lack of destruction is more a symptom of the disease than the disease in XCom. It’s not so much about realism or lack of it - it’s that it really seems to want to let you know you are playing a Jake Solomon Joint and it will never let you forget you are in the world of the game designer doing the things the game designer has let you do. As far as I can determine -

You don’t get to set the bomb - the aliens get to set the bomb.

Your soldiers hear a noise - good for them, you can’t do shit to it.

A solder sees an enemy - you don’t get to tell people to shoot there. Maybe you can command someone to move to somewhere mysterious the game designer has deigned they can shoot there from, but won’t tell you about for your own good.

You can run a long way and try to stun someone - but the game designer has determined you don’t need an inventory or hand slots so your pistol is physically attached to your arm, you can’t get the stun gun out in advance before you run a long way to shoot someone. The stun gun has been designed as an ‘item’ and the game designer determined that items don’t get to be used when you run a long way.

It seems to totally gimp you in terms of acting on what you as the player know - you can make a soldier act on what the soldier knows, but it’s not inclined to tell you much about what that is either!

Like, I guess I just don’t get what much of the streamlining really achieved. It seems like there is still a bunch of shit in there that - hidden from you - still does actually work on the same exact concept of ‘action points’, only now it is much less intuitive what the real costs of this stuff might be. Not to bring it up again, but in Silent Storm, you have a green action preview bar, an orangey bar and a red bar, which seems to me to be pretty much exactly the same thing as a blue and a yellow line, only it actually tells you shit about what you can do. Who thought a taser was not a weapon? Who thought reloading a gun would take an entire turn? Is that really the simple way to do it?

3272

For the love of little gray men, i’ve heard this bullshit enough. it is time to put up or shut up (ie stop repeating this talking point from the developers over and over without explaining it).

Why would allowing intelligent shooting of non enemies devolve it into a cover destruction game?

As was so kindly pointed out, real life soldiers have the ability to shoot cover but you don’t often see them shooting cinderblocks when there is someone hiding half covered behind them.

Why didn’t silent storm turn in to a cover shooting game even though it had probably the best terrain destruction i’ve ever seen?

Why can’t they balance the game around me being able to shoot a car? Why can’t they simply make it so firing modern small arms against a concrete wall has minimal effect? This answer seems so simple that i can’t believe people keep repeating the bullshit excuse line you mentioned. Firing mindlessly against the walls of armored UFO’s should not be rewarded. Shooting cars or light cover to expose/explode enemies should.

I feel like i’m playing starcraft 1 again after playing total annihilation and listening to starcraft fans tell me why having actual turrets on units is impossible and would destroy game balance.

3273

What if all the answers for why CAN’T they make everything the way you want is: “They didn’t want to?” Is it really that inconceivable that some might have slightly different preferences for game rules or the game play that those rules encourage?

You’ll never be able to PROVE your own personal taste in alien invasion video game realities is best, you might as well calm down about it.

3274

The repeat responses might not bother you so much if you didn’t post the same complaint every two pages in this thread. Just a thought.

As for explaining their thought process (the developers), maybe it’s because cover (or the lack there of) is given a greater importance in this game than in SS. All the mechanics in this game are around cover. Or maybe because forcing only explosives (grenades, rockets) to cause damage, along with missed shots, provides enough cover destruction and if you want more, you must make a choice to bring more explosives (or poor-aiming rookies). That’s a valid decision in my book.

Anyway, see you in a couple of pages! Here’s me, getting a jump start on that conversation

3275

Cover was very important in Silent storm as well.

You still haven’t explained why allowing intelligent destruction of terrain would d0me the game and make it a cover destroyer. I don’t see “it has a console style cover, so you can’t destroy the unicorn protected cover” as a valid reason personally, but if you do, i will take it as a difference of opinion i guess.

I also don’t understand why they couldn’t have just made cover able to take more damage if they really thought people would just blast cover without thought.

3276

True. But I think SS had more to it, from a tactics standpoint, than XCOM does. XCOM is cover, cover, and more cover, with some abilities. SS had cover, but it wasn’t the be all, end all of the game. Leaving a soldier out of cover in XCOM is one-turn-and-dead every time (assuming the Aliens have been triggered on the map).

You still haven’t explained why allowing intelligent destruction of terrain would d0me the game and make it a cover destroyer.

I was trying to think of a practical example. I’m not sure how well I can articulate this, but I’ll give it a shot. If I could destroy cover at will, with my unlimited ammo, I would setup a kill zone of no cover. For instance, outside one of the larger UFOs, I would destroy all the cover that my soldiers weren’t standing behind. I’d do this in the first few turns, before any aliens were triggered (with the assumption that they wouldn’t just walk into the line of sight. It’s a safe assumption, as it rarely happens that they do this, even on Classic). Once all the cover in front of my dudes was destroyed, I would run one dude in - ideally with ghost armor and the nano vest, for a lot of protection and range - lure out the mutons, the sectoids, the thin men, and any other aliens who use cover, and then pick them off in the open area. They’d have no place to go, and the lack of cover is such a detriment in this game that they’d be killed in one turn. I think it’s why they gave aliens that don’t leverage cover - beserkers, chrysalids, cyberdiscs, etc. - big advantages in other areas (lots of health, lots of range, lethal melee attacks, for example).

I think this path I describe would be the main approach in this game, and I’m not sure I’d like that. Now, you could disagree that it would be, or you could counter what I’m saying by saying that there already is only one real strategy in the game: lure out the aliens one group at a time and hope there aren’t any weird respawns. And you might be right. Don’t mistake my reasoning for why the developers don’t have purposeful, gun-based, destructive cover, with a claim the the tactics in XCOM are without flaw. There is some questionable stuff, though I think it takes a while (a good deal of the game) to see it. For instance, I’m not impressed by the AI in Classic. It’s more cheap (and rigged) than intelligent.

The other thing I’ve found with XCOM is that even with “accidental terrain destruction”, there are some levels where so much of the cover has been destroyed that I can’t effectively move my troops (again, in large part due to the over-reliance on cover as the main tactic). Adding even more cover destruction would compound this problem (more levels where soldier movement is crippled).

I also don’t understand why they couldn’t have just made cover able to take more damage if they really thought people would just blast cover without thought.
Yeah, maybe that’s the logical way to do it and keep both camps happy.

3277

Anyone fooled around with multiplayer yet? I played a couple of matches tonight and squad setup is suprisingly deep. You can customize a squad of up to 6, picking a mix of human and alien. With humans, you get to customize everything down to their sidearm, main weapon, traits, etc. All point based.

Was fun the few matches I played. Very much a “who will get an advantage and flank cover” type of gameplay.

3278

Yeah, I’ve kinda reached the same conclusion.

Tom’s review is a fun read, I guess I have to live with the fact that a few 1994 genes remain in my gaming body.
One question it springs, though, does this new XCOM have legs to stand on which will make anyone do a similar comparison with it in 2030? I doubt it.

Comparisons with the original or Silent Storm aside, a big problem I have with XCOM was summed up best by Jake Solomon himself: They made a game design that supposedly removes the fun-valleys from gameplay, but at the expense of also sacrificing the fun-peaks.
Like most individual maps, the entire XCOM “campaign” is a narrow corridor in which you get to navigate just a small amount.
There’s an actual and a game-mechanic narrative you cannot escape or circumvent.
To ensure steady progress, you’re kept on a tight leash. Things happen in a certain order, and they will in every replay.
I haven’t double checked yet, but maybe you can slow the train down for a bit by not researching a certain tech just yet, but that’s about it.
And I’m not sure how much good that can even bring you.
Things happen as defined in the script, and most of the time, you can literally “feel” the director’s chair with Jake Solomon calling the shots for you. You’re an actor in HIS game.

We’ll see how even the subscribers to his school of design will look at these things when this thread is bumped a couple of years from now.

rezaf

3279

Some observations/questions:

  • what does the hovering shiv do? I bought one, assuming it was an upgrade from the alloy shiv I already owned, and it could indeed hover, but nothing else, apparantly. No guns, nothing. What’s it’s use?
  • does Ironman also add a bit to the difficulty, or is that just my imagination? I started my first game (ever!) on Normal and didn’t loose anyone until about 7 missions in. So I upped it to normal-ironman (also because I couldn’t resist reloading when I did finally loose my favorite soldier…) and I lost a rookie in the first 4 missions. Just coincidence?
  • I really love the idea of having soldiers from different countries, all doing their part. It really adds to the immersion, and even plays a role in who I send on missions. But why oh why do they all speak American? Full, accent-rich American? Where are the oriental/posh English/Aussie/South African/eastern Europe/spanish accents??? Missed oppertunity IMO, but still enjoying it immensely!
3280

mjgreeny, I’m guessing the function of the hovering SHIV is to be a scout, perhaps?

I completely agree with you about the voice acting. What’s her name’s German accent is passable, but her murder of the pronunciation of “Können Sie mich hören” showed that she doesn’t have much of an ear. And I too was disappointed with the lack of accents of the soldiers. Apparently less than 3 years from now everyone will speak English with flawless American accents. :rolleyes: I think I’ll be turning off the barks, myself. Hope someone can mod some decent voicework in.