meeper
4321
Mostly agreed. I played through on classic at launch and recently again on normal (both were iron man games). The biggest difference I found was that it was marginally tougher to survive the first few missions on classic. Once over that initial hump, the plays were quite similar. If there were significant differences between them, I didn’t notice.
I enjoyed the tactical battles but there wasn’t a lot in the game that makes me want to replay it. The strategic shell and limited number of maps is disappointing. Has Firaxis ever released an editor? I was hoping the mod community would pick up the slack.
I don’t understand playing a strategy game any other way, whether it’s enforced by the game engine or not. The opposite of “ironman” is save and reload, which is essentially cheating in a strategy game. Didn’t like that die roll? Just cheat and roll it again.
In a game like XCom, I also think it hurts your ability to learn how to play correctly, because you can always cheat your way out of a bad decision. If you’re in a situation where a shot must hit or you’re screwed, you’re not playing correctly. Classic difficulty punishes you if you don’t make effective use of cover, unless of course you’re willing to just reload every time things fall apart. In which case all the hard decisions go out the window.
“Miss” with a shotgun at point blank range generally doesn’t happen unless there are unusual circumstances. Like, there’s something wrong with your guy, or you’re trying to shoot at a guy who is behind cover, or the target has heavy armor. Missing a Sectopod isn’t really a “miss” in the sense that your guy is blind, it’s that the armor deflected the attack.
Is the game as replayable as the first? Not really, I only went through about 4 times, which isn’t a lot for a strategy game. But it’s more than zero.
You can’t do that anyway as far as i know.
I’ll admit that in my classic game i did try a few times. However, i am very sure that they generate random numbers using a seed that doesn’t change when you load a game. so if you miss a shot, reload and try to shoot again, you’re going to miss no matter how many times you do it. I’m pretty sure i remember them confirming this as a well.
It is probably possible to play ironman now, but on release when i started my game, there were a couple, semi frequent, (ui) freeze bugs that you could only times escape out of without saving, quitting and reloading. Sometimes you couldn’t even do the save part, but in ironman i dont htink you would be able to save at all.
rezaf
4326
You’re right - that’s not possible as they indeed store the seed in the savegame.
Contrary to Gus, I found/find this to be something that should at the very most be an option when you start out your game, not something the developer enforces with no opt-out.
My reasons are very much the same ones you cited for not playing Iron Man, in that, sometimes, I might not be willing to replay that long base mission (or whatever) just because that last alien on the last turn manages to best impossible odds and one-shot my best soldier. It’s fine if you consider this cheating and a practice beyond you - don’t do it, then. You can always still play your way.
But if the developer enforces no-reloading by storing the seed in the savegame, any other than your way becomes impossible. Why dictate others their game experience?
Oddly enough, if I ACTUALLY want to cheat, I can still do that by hacking me endless resources and fielding a squad of “Sid Meier”'s, and I bet there are people doing just that.
Note that I tried to do this (reloading due to a bad roll) only twice or thrice through my entire run through XCOM, the time I remember was the increadibly cheap move with the Chrysallids out of thin air during (iirc) the base assault. I ended up having to restart that mission.
Have I not cheated all the same by doing so, except this time I had to pay a premium in the currency of my own lifetime?
They have not. So far, their support for modding is piss-poor, and they have openly declared it being “not a priority”.
Some folks have managed to make some - within the grand scheme of things - fairly marginal changes by hacking the game’s executable (as Firaxis even REMOVED some minimal support for modding by allowing external files to overwrite game rules post-launch, this became neccessary). For example, from folks liking the game better than I do, I’ve been hearing good things about this mod.
I still had zero desire to get back into XCOM so far, though.
It wasn’t a bad game, had some nice ideas and was pretty fun one time through. But that’s it, for me. No long-term draw whatsoever.
Playing OpenXcom was SO much more rewarding - even though they botchered the dynamic difficulty somewhat, so the game tends to drag on a bit.
rezaf
Not in my games. Lasers all the way, backed up with high-explosives. This is exactly why the original is better in EVERY way (and more so with the OpenXcom project). The player decided the route they wanted to take, not the game. I hated using Alien tech, i felt it was unpatriotic as this was a Human vs Alien war and i needed to support my corner in every way i could.
garin
4328
What? There’s nothing forcing you to progress beyond lasers in the new game, if you want to continue to play sub-optimally for strange roleplaying reasons.
That pretty much sums up my experience. I found this canned, on-rails version of X-com playable and entertaining in general, but overall unimpressive when not downright dumb (That neutered geoscape? Spring-action enemies that teleport around a bunch of non-random maps when not triggered?). It was also bugged to a level that made my Ironman run unplayable - but I guess the joke’s on me for preordering.
Among the things I liked were that it got made at all, the graphics (for a strategy game), and the class system, which at first I thought would be a deal-breaker. But in all the game felt like a half-cooked effort that could be fleshed out properly in an eventual sequel where they could add all the brains and meat that were left on the cutting room floor.
Another bad point, at least in the pc version, was the lack of moddability. Disappointing given the mods of Civ 4, here even small tweaks had to be done with hex editors and it’s not like it can be done more than said small tweaks. With xcom being a big name in computers, it could have generated a big modding community.
DeepT
4331
When this came out, I played it on normal and had fun. Then I tried it on classic and suddenly every alien was a sniper. I just couldn’t keep my squaddies alive to level up hardly at all. It just seemed that my guys could not hit the broad side of a barn, yet the insectiods almost never missed.
Not quite. In the original X-Com, keeping around older-tech weapons was a great idea. In UFO Defense, all weapons have damage types and all enemies have damage modifiers. For example, Sectopods are weak to laser weapons (I think it’s a 150% modifier?) and strong against plasma (70% modifier?), so it’s a good idea to keep a pair of laser-equipped soldiers to deal with those later in the game when everyone has plasma weapons. Laser weapons in UFO Defense also retain usefulness because they don’t need ammo clips – so no need to take TUs to reload – and they’re much lighter than plasma weapons. Rookies fresh out of boot camp likely won’t be able to hold heavy plasmas without taking a TU penalty, so using lasers while rookies build up their stats is a good idea, too.
UFO Defense also has a few special-case weapons that are worth keeping around for specific roles, like the auto-cannon, which has auto-fire and ammunition types. Keeping one around for terror missions is always a good idea: The HE rounds can lay waste to weaker enemies who still show up in terror missions (like Floaters and Snakemen), while IN rounds can let you quickly light up a night mission.
The new XCOM is missing damage types and modifiers (and lighting) – everything just has a single damage stat, so, yes, in Enemy Unknown, there’s no reason to keep lasers around; they are always outclassed by the alien-tech weapons (alloy cannons, plasma weapons, and the blaster launcher).
garin
4333
Believe me, I know all that. I absolutely agree that X-Com had greater variety and differentiation in its weapons.
But neither game “forces” you to use plasma weapons-- if you’re trying to play effectively you use them because on the whole they are better. Despite the minor tradeoffs (which other than cost/materials don’t exist in XCOM) choosing to not use them at all cannot be construed as a reasonable strategy in either game. It’s not a matter of play style, it’s a matter of efficacy,
Just because the name is xcom, doesn’t mean i can’t compare it to xcom apocalypse as well and apocalypse certainly had weapon choice at all levels of the game.
I know a lot of people here prefer the original, but apocalypse was, and still is, my favorite xcom game.
Eh, I don’t know about that. Enemy Unknown certainly becomes impossible without alien weapons tech. I mean, sure, you’re not “forced” by some transcendental entity, but your squad just isn’t viable at all against the late-game aliens without alien weapons tech. I attribute that to a number of factors, including the small squads, the simplified damage and health systems, and how armor and cover tie into to-hit percentages. I don’t really know of any high-level play that can see you through the game with just laser weapons, let alone sticking with the starting human tech.
But it’s entirely possible to finish UFO Defense without researching plasma weapons at all. I think that’s the difference.
garin
4336
I think the number one factor there is just that XCOM has a much wider difficulty band in terms of enemy progression. The difference in power between a Muton and a Sectoid is much, much greater in XCOM than in the original game. This means that there’s an arms race on the alien side as well as on yours, and choosing to stop your progression at an arbitrary point is going to hurt you more.
As with most design decisions in the new game, there are pros and cons. It would feel more like the original if every enemy type had 3-5 health, but I don’t think the game would be better.
I noticed the difference between Classic and Normal difficulty, btw. I played half the campaign in classic, and then switched to Normal :P.
sclpls
4338
I don’t think there is any real question that XCOM: EU could have used more variety of weapons, the designer Jake Solomon admitted as much. It probably would have been difficult to work within the tight design of the game. Simply adding it to the current design would turn what is already a sufficiently long campaign into something even longer. Or they could shorten the research time, which would probably impact some other area of the design. I’m glad Firaxis is going to iterate on the game though because as much as I still enjoy the game (I started a new game a few days ago after watching Brad Muir play the game as part of a promotion for his turn based tactical game kickstarter) features like greater weapon variety, and a better end game should be in there.
I love how lean XCOM is. There are few designers who are willing to cut, cut, cut until there is nothing but the essential left. It’s not perfect (there are some areas slightly too lean, some slightly too fat) but it’s impressive work.
robc04
4340
He seem to cut the replayability out of it.
I know that isn’t entirely fair as there are a lot of people who enjoyed multiple play throughs. I could resist though because I wasn’t one of them.
