3401

No, it’s a restriction on the maximum number of aliens that will engage your forces in combat at any one time. On easy and normal, no matter how many patrols or camps you stumble across at once, only five individual aliens will attack you at any given time. The rest will drop back a screen or two and hide out of LoS until you kill one, at which point another will take its place.

On impossible (and classic, so I don’t understand what that mod is doing) there is no such restriction on the number of simultaneous alien combatants.

3402

I’m always curious if the folks who are discussing the relative value of skills are playing on Normal, Classic, or Impossible. I really think there are some significant differences in what you’re dealing with on the tactical layer that impacts whether some skills are as useful as others.

3403

Ah OK. Thanks again. That makes sense, and yeah, classic already does that, so … .

3404

Agreed. I thought there were quite a few useless skills until I started playing on classic. To excel there you really need to put the skills you pick to good use.

3405

Looking at more mods, and I find this: http://xcom.nexusmods.com/mods/10/

But I’m mostly interested in this part:

You are also now able to intercept ufos that prepare for abduction and terror missions. Its pretty funny, cos the feature was completely in there, it was just disabled.

What does it do?

Before a terror or abduction mission happens, a ufo is spawned. The ufo now needs to fly to its destination…if you have satelite coverage, you can intercept it. If you shot it down, the mission wont happen after all.

On abduction missions, there are 3 ufos because of the 3 abduction sites which you usualy select after the abduction mission takes place. If you shot all 3 ufos down (very very hard to do), there will be NO abduction mission at all. If you shot down 2 of the 3 ufos, you still get the abduction mission but with only one of the 3 locations to select. This means that even shooting 1-2 ufos of the 3 down, will lower the panic spread by alot.

This sounds a lot like the X-Coms of old, and I have to wonder why Firaxis decided to nix a completely functional aspect of Enemy Unknown that would go a long way toward making the Geoscape really feel like a simulated world. Right now, it definitely feels like the game is feeding you one mission at a time in regard to UFOs.

3406

I can think of a couple reasons:

  1. the ufo combat isn’t that interesting, and it may not be any fun to do 3 in quick succession.
  2. the way the abduction missions are set up, you’re always choosing between the 3 rewards (while also balancing the difficulty and location of the mission). If you really wanted more engineers, but shot down that ufo without knowing which one it was, you no longer have the ability to get that reward, through no fault of your own. So, they might have wanted to guarantee that as a control point for the strategic map.
3407

Sure, the combat itself isn’t that interesting, but it doesn’t take more than 15 seconds per encounter. I’d say the draw isn’t the dogfighting, it’s just the idea of having to deal with multiple threats at once that makes it interesting. You also have new choices (i.e., which of the three should you intercept, if at all?)

Though, I see your second point. That could be frustrating … or it could add another layer (i.e., do you let the UFO through for the reward or shoot it down?). Or, the nation over which you shoot down the UFO could offer the same reward you would have gotten for the abduction mission for going to the crash site and cleaning up.

3408

The first is super-gamey, which while not necessarily bad, it seems kind of silly.

In the latter case, you’re no longer forced to make a discrete interesting choice: you can get all the rewards if you just push air defense more. The choice then becomes a distributed one around your entire money management strategy, which is much less satisfying than a choice of a single mission selection. Also, I think it would be hard to balance. By the mid-game, you either have total air superiority and take everything down, or you get crushed because you hadn’t been getting enough multiple rewards.

That being said, the air-support stuff does seem under-explored in the current game.

3409

That’s a good point, CLWheeljack. But let me offer this counterargument. I think this is where time-based missions would work really well.

In other words, crash sites are only on the map for a certain period of time, so you wouldn’t be able to visit them all anyway, especially because you have a single Skyranger that must launch from a single location and then return to that location after a mission before going on another.

Letting you shoot down UFOs en route would benefit the game’s atmosphere, making it really feel like a global invasion, not a trickle of UFOs. And I think it could offer more choice to the player while still forcing you to go with one of multiple options.

Edit: Thinking about the abduction mechanic a little more, I’m starting to see this as a riff off of Apocalypse, where UFO sightings would involve three drop off points at separate parts of the city. I think that worked reasonably well. You had an opportunity to shoot them down (and then visit their crash sites), or if you couldn’t, you had wait for an alien sighting (unless you’d carefully taken note of the drop off points). On anything other than easy, I don’t think it was possible to do everything.

3410

So is there any difference besides an aesthetic one between “regular” geoscape view and hologlobe view?

Also, are there basically just two time-passage speeds in Mission Control, namely one minute gametime ticking by every real-life second vs. the “scan for activity” speed? And what’s the trick for sending more than one interceptor after a particular UFO?

3411

The hologlobe pastes the current panic levels onto the Council member countries with their corresponding color codes.

I don’t think it’s possible to launch two Interceptors at once at the same UFO.

3412

Finally got to final mission. 90% of the way through, this has to be either the final encounter of the mission, or possibly the second to last. Several ethereals and friends. One <redacted> my psionic and the game instantly crashes. Sigh. First CTD. I wonder what happened to my saved game, but I’m almost afraid to look.

3413

I assume that the shooting down of Abduction UFOs was removed late in the process. All of the suggestions regarding how it could have been designed better with regards to still enabling a selection of rewards and still making global panic a somewhat scary proposition sound great to me… but I get the sense there just wasn’t the time to rework that degree of changes into the game.

It seemed quite odd to me how little air combat there is in the remake even though there are a lot of weapon upgrades and boosts they designed in. I suspect it originally was a larger part of the game but got stripped down because it wasn’t meshing well with keeping the strategic later a challenging set of interesting choices.

Shoot down UFO, Shoot down UFO, complete Abduction, salvage UFO, salvage UFO. Seems like you’re able to curtail the alien threat pretty damn easy without needing to make any hard strategic choices.

It just smacks to me of last-minute tweaking - they needed a way to put constant Panic pressure on the player and determined that always having abductions add more panic to the world than they reduce (even if successful) was key.

3414

I wonder if Firaxis also found that letting you shoot down so many UFOs a month (I think you get at least two abduction events a month, which translates into at least two more UFO opportunities if we’re considering time-based missions) was giving the player too many resources from UFO raids (like Alloys and Elerium). Abduction- and Terror-class UFOs usually net a lot of those.

I could see how if you do really well early on that you’d have a huge stockpile of these necessary manufacturing materials for when you discover more advanced weapon and armor tech.

3415

I am cruising pretty well in my Normal game. Have 4-5 Colonels, some Psi guys, lots of goodies, nice base etc. Game got a ton easier once I got plasma tech in my hands and Skeleton Armor and beyond. The only tough mission I have had was the first alien base mission, and that was all because of a couple of 3 pull Chrysallid groups. Cyberdisc gave me a problem initially but a Heavy with Bulletswarm and Heat took care of that for me going forward.

Some thoughts on the game so far:

Manual: This game needs a proper manual. The command card Fireaxis turned out is an embarrassment and does not do the game justice. UFO Database in-game is similarly half assed.

Classes. They need to just let you choose the class on the transition from Rookie to Squaddie. I don’t like the way it is now at all and I don’t see a compelling gameplay reason to keep it that way.

Abilities. I think that many of them are clearly better than their counterpart, in almost all situations. For me, very few of them were tough decisions until Colonel. I am not saying that in most cases one choice is great and the other shit, just that there is too big of a utility gap between the two choices. I think the game could stand to have a few of them buffed or moved around. My thoughts on the 4 trees:

Sniper: Squadsight over Snap Shot. Gunslinger over DGG. Opportunist over Executioner.

Support: Sprinter over Covering Fire. Field Medic over Smoke and Mirrors. Rifle Suppression over Revive.

Heavy: This tree is fairly well balanced, though I lean towards Bullet Storm, Suppression, HEAT, Danger Zone and Mayhem.

Assault: Best balance out of the 4 classes IMO. I favor the defensive/survivability choices but I can see that going all cannon would be pretty powerful late game.

Psi: Haven’t played with these much.

Inventory: There absolutely needs to be a way to pull gear off of other troops in the Mission Loadout screen that does not involve going to the Barracks or adding a soldier to the team, stripping his gear, clearing him, replacing him and then re-adding gear. Its even worse trying to pull stuff off guys in Psi testing. With resource contention being a real concern all game long (from what I can tell anyway), I don’t have enough for guys in the barracks to be sporting A-team gear. Or maybe a setting that just throws everything that is not unlimited back to the pool after each mission?

Combat: I’d like the ability to set overwatch by default if I hit end turn and overwatch is an option for a soldier. It would also be swell if I could hit overwatch on a sniper that’s already moved but wielding a sniper rifle without having to equip the pistol first. Another nice to have would be adding ‘ghost’ shields to sighted enemies when you are considering where to move a soldier. So you would know if a spot you are considering flanks an opponent or not. Most of the time its easy to see, once you get a feel for the cover system. But there are still times when I dont quite get why an alien is not showing as flanked.

Terror Missions: I get what they are going for here but I think its just way to random as to how easy or hard they are. There are some maps where Terror missions are a joke (seriously in one of them all of the aliens were in and around the building closest to our starting point) and others where, in order to save most civilians, you have to move very aggressively, which ups the risk to your squad considerably.

That’s all I got right now. Looking forward to winning and replaying on Classic. Not sure I will ever be down for Ironman…

3416

Classic is kick-in-the-balls difficult compared to normal.

3417

Odd, it sounds like the maker of that mod is mistaken, TurinTur already posted what the different difficulty settings do, and Classic does NOT have the 5 man limitation, only Easy and Normal. And the same goes for Chrysalids, the chance is 0 on easy and normal, 0.5 for Classic, and 1 on impossible. So maybe this mod maker upped it? Ick, he also mucks a bunch with accuracy that I don’t think is needed, like increased sniper rifle accuracy, and removing their close range penalty. I also dislike the pistol changes, unless he was going to up their starting crit or damage. Also, lowering Rookie accuracy? Eww.

3418

Yeah, I don’t like most of the changes, but I thought letting you equip the Arc Thrower into the pistol slot was a neat idea. I also like the idea of two item slots for certain armors (though I wouldn’t put it on Archangel), but you’d have to somehow square that with the Support class’ perk that does just that. And I like the idea of more UFO interceptions, but as we were discussing up thread, the game would need more tweaks to really make them work well.

That second “anti cheat mod” I linked is better with it’s minimalist changes. The only change to the tactical game is to remove the bonuses to hit and critical percentages that the aliens get on classic. So you get the “unshackled” A.I. without the aliens becoming deadly snipers, which is something I think a few people around here were interested in.

3419

Whatever USER INTERFACE GENIUS decided that right-click should always mean “cancel operation” EXCEPT when it means “move here” can bite me.

3420

It provides more variety. I’ve had games where I end up with all Sniper and I’ve had games where I end up with a whole bunch of Heavies. They play very differently. Also they force you to work with a wider range of Skills selected. Squad Sight may seem like a great choice (and it is), but if four of your squad members are snipers because that’s your soldier selection ended up very sniper heavy, then suddenly Snap Shot becomes much more useful, and you’ll want a mix of Snap Shot and Squad Sight snipers.

Later you’ll inevitably end up with a broader mix of Assault, Sniper, Heavy, and Support troops, but since you’re most senior members will have been impacted by your original choices, you’ll have a much richer more interesting set of soldiers.