3301

There is an option for that in the game menu, the only thing that it doesnt disable is the initial zoom in to the aliens when you spot them.

3302

Wow, I didn’t know that. That’s very helpful. Thanks Reldan.

So what happens after you have full satellite coverage – only UFO shootings and terror missions?

3303

At some point I will try classic and will be pleased if the enemies do ‘find’ me in the middle of a battle, or when I spend 2 turns to reload and organize my troops.

As for me, I didn’t spam reloads. I actually was playing in ironman mode, but I do admit that in the last battle I saved at the beginning and backed it up outside the game. I did have to reload that last battle once, but that was it. It was pretty early in that last battle that I needed to reload, so I didn’t see most of the content until my second attempt. I just couldn’t bring myself to play the whole game again to get to this point.

I think I lost a total of < 10 soldiers in the game, including a couple of highly ranked ones. I lived with those losses. So when i said I lost 1 battle I didn’t mean I lost 1 soldier. There was 1 battle that I didn’t meet the objectives for and failed.

3304

As per mechanics thread,. I made a mod that maybe some of you will be interested in. If so I’ll package it for release.

  1. Aim and critical chance for aliens on Classic mode changed from +10 to +5. For reference, Normal mode is 0.

  2. You get 5 Engineers instead of 4 during missions.

  3. Panic self shoot drops from 50% to 40%.

  4. Satellite build time dropped from 20 days to 14.

  5. Soldier cost reduced to 13.

1ex: This number plays perfect as there’s still plenty of fear, but the aliens are not one shot killing you all the time.

2ex: Since all engineering programs run in multiples of 5 this makes more sense.

3ex: Less chance of shooting your own soldiers.

4ex: Currently you need to know way ahead of time you have to build satellites. This forces one to play the game a very specific way. Reducing build time gives players a bit more flexibility.

5ex: Playing with Second Wave “Not Created Equally” you could get a dud. Playing the game in Ironman mode and losing soldiers is not quite as painful.

I’d suggest you play with the Second Wave options of:

Diminishing Returns

  • Edited so satellite cost increases by 5% for each purchase. This helps negate some of the decreasing costs of items from extra engineers and lower soldier cost. Losing satellites is even scarier. Normally this option increases costs 45% per satellite.

Not Created Equally

  • In normal game Recruits will always start with 65 Aim, 40 Willpower, 12 movement. I edited this so random rookie stats would create just a tiny bit of variation without changing game balance at all. So recruits will now start with 62-68 Aim, 37-43 Willpower, Movement 12-13. I went with small amounts so no recruit would be worthless and no recruit would be overpowered. I thought about lowering movement below the default, but it just made the game more frustrating for a major first-time play-through. The normal range for “Not Created Equally” is +/-15 from base which is huge. You get totally worthless players who can’t hit anything or do much damage, and overpowered Gods.
3305

That doesn’t solve the issue though, it just makes it take longer. You’d need to implement limited ammo for the weapons you’d allow to destroy cover, which kinda exists already for all the current ways to destroy cover (grenades and rockets). I assume you mean you want your rifle or pistol to also work.

From a design standpoint, do you want to muddy the combat by adding ammo management? Is that worth the benefit of letting players target cover? They decided it wasn’t, and I for the most part agree.

A few issues with shootable cover:

  1. You’d basically want to preemptively shoot all cars or anything explosive on sight, because you wouldn’t want to risk them exploding later on your own guys if you needed to use them for cover. This would be strategically sound but a huge drag.

  2. Why wouldn’t you just preemptively destroy the cover aliens could use before engaging them? This would be dull as shit to do, but again would be good strategy.

  3. It would most likely get used to create even stupider abuses of LoS than currently exist.

3306

I’m getting crushed by Mutons on my Classic Difficulty attempt. I always end up with 2-3 packs of Mutons all duking it out with me, or 2 packs of Mutons and a Cyerberdisk. I’m not holding up very well, so I think this game is a loss.

I think I’ve made several mistakes. First, I tried to upgrade all my continents to Firestorm interceptors (mostly because my regular Avenger isn’t good enough to take on the larger ships), I should have spent that money on better Armor for my Squaddies. But most importantly, I think I should have pushed more into weapons research. My laser rifles just aren’t doing enough damage fast enough on the Mutons. When I’m in a firefight with six Mutons, I can take out maybe one Muton per turn. And the other Muton with the four bars of health, it takes me 2-3 turns to bring him down, even when he’s standing out in the open. But six Mutons all concentrating their fire can take out one of my squaddies once every turn or two. I need something to bring down the Mutons faster.

3307

One thing I have learned to appreciate is the power of a shotgun assault dude the various crit and close combat perks. Run and gun right behind an enemy in cover and you can almost guarantee two very high damage crits that turn, which easily smoked a muton by itself.

3308

How do you think my Assault squaddie earned the nickname “Septic”?

3309

Have you tried softening them up with rockets first?

3310

Because suppression sucks, you should have one to two shredder rockets available. They work wonders.

3311

Mine too. The only bug I ran into in Normal was the SHIV bug (where SHIVs are unusable after the first SHIV). On Classic I have seen a lot of bugs.

3312

Anyone know if the final score report is available somewhere? I searched in my documents and steamapps folder but couldn’t find anything. I can’t believe they would give you a 4 page report just to lose it once you exit the game?

3313

Now that Tom jokingly mentioned on the podcast about giving Purple Hearts to wounded characters in XCOM, I really wish they had a big screen full of awards and flavor stuff like that for each character.

3314

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but is the World column supposed to have anything in it? Is it me or the game?

3315

reading about the difficulty, and people finding it too easy, I really feel like I’m playing a different game. I play on normal Ironman, and I’ve been losing people almost every mission. I finished the first terror mission with 2 KIA, 3 gravely wounded, which was largely due to 2 chryssalids I had to kill with normal guns because I didn’t have laserweapons yet. Only now, when I finally get some soldiers up the ranks, is it getting easier, but up until now I simply couldn’t keep them alive long enough to get experienced…! Still not sure if Ironman has anything to do with this, my first playthrough on plain normal being so much easier (without reloads), but I don’t mind either way.

All this probably means I suck strategically, but I’m not complaining… I find it quite a challenge, and therefor quite a lot of fun. ;-)

3316

I had the same problem until I got hold of Carapace armour and Laser rifles. After that the strategic combat becomes very easy until you reach the next difficulty spike (which takes a while).

3317

I had a similar experience, I also lost about 1 squad member per mission until I got Carapace armour and Laser Rifles. After that I had a long streak of no-soldiers lost that ran probablyi for a good 10 or so missions.

3318

I’m really out of step with the popular opinion here. Its a genius remake IMO. I love the cover system, the 2 step movement, the faster moving combat. And its done that while keeping so much of what I loved about the original: the danger, the attachment to soldiers, the back and forth of missions and base management.

I’m not belittling the criticisms though. I agree with some of them, especially regarding the interface and line-of-sight. But mostly I just see really great design decisions where some see flaws. IMO this update is almost (but not quite) in the Civ 4 category of great remakes.

Great article by Rob Zacny here.

Agreed. According to Steam its been released in 9 languages so theres no excuse for not having some variation in combat barks. I know it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for a squad to be speaking in 6 different languages, but it would be more atmospheric. Even one language per continent would be a huge improvement (English, Spanish, German, Japanese and … ok so they’d need some additional recordings to cover Africa).

Oh man. Now I want to see soldiers in dress uniform with mission specific medals.

Tony

3319

What are you talking about? Popular opinion seems to agree more with you than with me (and the few other, less vocal “naysayers”) - and even I rated the game 7/10, that’s not exactly devastating.

Essentially, it really boils down a bit to - like Tom put it - being a 1994 vs a 2012 gamer.
Some people these days seem to have the very positive attitude of “hey, this is great, stuff is being taken care of automatically for me!” when being declared “under disability” and faced with all decisions being made for them by a guardian.
Only a few “1994 gamers” mourn for the days when they could just make decisions themselves.

That said, it’s great you enjoy the game as it is now - I don’t think you’re in a minority.

Edit: I’ve now read the linked article. Rob Zacny is the TMA guy, right? He’s a truly odd fella. He seems to play hardcore games, but often asks questions or makes remarks about them that imply he either just has no clue about these games and would be better off playing console games exclusively, or he spends no time at all preparing for these podcasts. Well, or both of these things, I guess.
In any event, I’m not surprised at all that he likes the simplification. He’s clearly the type of “you decide for me, and then let’s get on with the action” player you could probably call the “modern gamer”.

rezaf

3320

It’s a great game. What few things I think need improving are (outside of bugs) just my wishes for nice-to-have features like better LoS info.