I never went back to this game and I didn’t have high hopes, but this gave me a good chuckle anyway.
Yeah, it would stretch out the game thereby making it harder, but it wouldn’t make a big difference in the decision making process.
The only thing it would make prioritizing which country gets a satellite harder. In the mid-late game, there’s no pressure, since you can just hoard a couple satellites and launch them on whoever gets a terror bump just before the month ends. If they’re more expensive, I imagine it would be harder to do that.
How about this change maybe - instead of making them more expensive, you must launch them when they are built; you cannot sit on them and use them as needed.
I would hate that option, but maybe some folks would enjoy it?
Alan_Au
4084
So yeah, I suspect that the intention is to let people play on normal with added Second Wave restrictions. This makes the early game more forgiving while still increasing the difficulty of the late game.
Well, I guess it’s time to try an Impossible playthrough (but probably not Ironman).
I’m on the final mission of my first playthrough as I write this, and even I can see that Mark’s right. There’s no strategic replayability in this game, just tactical. “Build as many satellites as possible as fast as possible” is the only viable approach. The battles can be approached in different ways–heavy on run and gun assaulters or a more ranged approach with multiple snipers, and so on–but the world map and base building cannot.
Quaro
4086
If you combine increasing satellites costs with the diminishing income option, that will put a real clock on the game and you’ll have to decide just how many satellites it’s worth going for of if you could race to defeat the aliens first.
I can see that, but it still doesn’t make a different strategic approach viable, it just puts a time limit on the one viable approach.
Quaro
4088
Well I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. You could say in Starcraft that building workers is the only viable option and Satellite are essentially the same thing. It’s all about when you cut production.
In the current balance it is almost best to build as many Satellites as you can, in front every other option for spending money, since they both stop panic and pay for themselves so quickly anyway. If the costs increase enough it could mean you actually have to prioritize other things, or decide to abandon ever getting full coverage.
Do screenshots with the Steam overlay (F12) not work any longer? I played for a couple of hours tonight with the new options and none of my screenshots were captured.
Did they ever end up fixing the semi frequent getting stuck on a soldier and not being able to do anything? If you were lucky, you could reload or change weapons to break out of it, but half the time you needed to alt f4. Also the bug where you lose the ability to order your save games so they become randomly ordered?
I thought the whole thing in the beginning was that people wanted to play Classic for the full unlocked AI, but it was too hard in other ways. So you really need Classic with a few player bonuses rather than Normal with a few penalties.
Perhaps a bit of symantics, but rather than more player bonuses on Classic, they need to tone down the current AI bonuses. Map design, primarily alien quantity and distribution, was clearly balanced more around normal. The alien to squaddie ratio is significantly higher in XCOM than in X-COM, for most of the game. Giving the aliens major to-hit bonuses, as per Classic, is really unforgiving when they have the weight of numbers. Basically ending the turn with aliens in view, even when in high cover, is too often a death sentence.
Conceptually, you could give the squaddies more of a inherent cover bonus, but that’s mathematically clunky.
Jag
4093
I just got the game and had this bug last night for the first time (with the new patch).
That is… extremely disappointing.
Jag
4095
No kidding. I was doing pretty well in a tough mission and my autosave takes me back to mission start. I just shut down and went to bed after that.
I wasn’t aware that the bug existed. The mission was to rescue someone and it bugged when I located him and my objective changed. From that point I could scroll through my guys, reload, overwatch, etc but not scroll the screen or move the guys.
flyinj
4096
Were you always able to modify the difficulty at any time?
How does the affect the game? Seeing how the strategic layer plays differently when playing on classic as opposed to normal, wouldn’t switching the difficulty mid-game have drastic effects on the meta-game? Do panic levels rise faster and slower if you switch between classic and normal several times during a playthrough?
Yeah, you’ve always been able to.
For an in-between difficulty, somebody recommended starting a game on normal, but then bumping it up to classic before the first mission: this gives you the strategic level boost (start with an Officer school, and maybe a lab or something and some extra cash), but gives you the full classic difficulty in combat. I assume that things like panic levels, mission frequency / enemy distribution just depend on the difficulty at the time they occur.
Of course, you don’t get the achievement credit for Classic playing that way.
What Jake needs to do now that the game has been out for a while is to put in “Third Wave” options, namely a completely-new “custom game” option that includes checkboxes for full A.I., alien hit bonus, etc. etc. I want to play with classic AI but not all the rest of the wankery that classic brings.
Me too. alt-F4 doesn’t quit, either…maybe Steam big-screen mode had something to do with that.
It just boggles the mind that they haven’t fixed what is basically a recurring game crash (since you need to alt f4 about half the time) after all of this time.
Anyway, my feeling on classic are similar to a few previous posters in that i like the increased ai but don’t like the accuracy modifications. I started out playing on classic, but after a while i realized that a poor starting strategy (for the love of god, don’t not focus on satellites early on) had knee capped me. I didn’t feel like going through all of the crap in classic again so just went normal when i restarted.
Missing someone right in front of me and then having a far away alien one shot me when i’m under heavy cover from them just pissed me off too much. It would have been one thing if it was rare, but it always felt like even a thinman with a pistol was more accurate at long range sniping than a max level sniper, which annoyed me to no end.
