5364

Finally done a CI run (well, ready to do Temple, fully loaded for bear, but gotten a bit bored with the game atm)! I feel like a proper gamer now :)

In the end, I think the absolute one single key (if there is one) to XCOM gameplay on Classic (and I should imagine even more strictly so on Impossible) is to only ever clear fog of war with your first move, even when the first move does unveil X-Rays. Which means, as a side-bonus, that you can scoot around a map fairly quickly (and get to that juicy Meld quicker) by going in column and not worrying about cover, so long as no move subsequent to the first unveils anything.

It also means you’ve got to keep an eye on the “Path” arrows when moving soldiers subsequent to the first - having your man move round the side of the truck that might unveil mobs, instead of round the side of the truck your guys have already been, can make all the difference. Even just one square wrong can lead to disaster.

Full cover, elevation and flanking are great when you can utilize them, but they’re chance-based (or rather map-based, but of course once you know a map it’s all much easier anyway); not unveiling fog of war after the first move in a turn is one thing that’s always under your control.

Other than that, it’s the usual thing of managing panic with satellites and judicious use of the Alien Base at the right time, while balancing the need to have the Alien Base up your sleeve with the need to get ready for the first Terror mission and have lasers/decent mec/genetics for that.

What I particularly love about Ironman mode is the way it makes your wee soldiers matter even more, and that side of the game be even more immersive. Finally, even, there’s actually a use for the memorial, and you can shed a tear for your favourite-up-till-then soldier who bought the farm, and the incident is engraved on your memory :)

Next up (when I get a hankering for the game again, as I have no doubt I will) CI with Second Wave options, after that Impossible with saves, then I/I, then I/I with Second Wave, all while trying different tactics and combos of upgrades, etc. Then, I should think, the game will be done and dusted. Great value!

5365

It’s not out yet, but when the XCOM mod “The Long War” is ported to EW you could try that instead of so many replays.

http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/88/?

They say an early alpha release (probably only mentioned in the forum) will be out real soon and a more public one in a couple months. I played the version for vanilla XCOM and in a lot of ways, it felt more new than the entirety of EW.

Yup. This reduced the fun a bit for me – feels like playing against the system and not against the AI.

Both of the two main XCOM mods mess with that. They have more roaming enemies that stumble into you at any time, and they let sleeping mobs have a random chance to wake up and move around. It means you never know what’s up. The other mod, Warspace, put a timer on every mob so if you just waited around you could get absolutely crushed by every mob being awake and have no aggro control.

5366

I still don’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that, at least sometimes, the AI does use ‘patrols’. Wouldn’t a patrol (infrequent though they seem to be) cause serious damage if it finds your squad standing out in the open?

I have a few other questions too:
Are you guys moving half steps in a column then putting everyone on overwatch?
If your first move does reveal a hostile, do you fan out to take cover? If so, doesn’t that force you to reveal more FoW and risk waking more hostiles?
Do you completely ignore flanking tactics? (Flanking obviously requires dividing your forces, spreading out, and revealing even more FoW).

It seems like most people use some variation of this tactic, but in my case I still tried to use cover and spread out for flanking. (I just made sure that my biggest FoW reveals came early each turn).

5367

No, because you’re encountering a patrol on the Alien turn, not the Human turn, and the aliens won’t shoot on the turn you make contact. So what happens is your guys all take overwatch shots, and then on your turn you scramble for cover.

The main exception here is enemies which go into overwatch on initial contact, which is only with the Enemy Within expansion. Sectopods, Mechtoids, and sometimes Floaters. Those guys get a free shot at your men as they scramble for cover. Which is not quite as bad as it sounds, since overwatch shots don’t give critical hits, and they’re at an aim penalty.

5368

Hmm. Is this definitely confirmed? I seem to remember having aliens (mutons) suddenly appear out of the FoW (or from around a corner) and fire at me or toss a grenade. I hadn’t seen them before. Does this mean that the Mutons had actually seen me and I just hadn’t seen them?

5369

Orthodoxly, it’s supposed to be like Gus says, unless you’re already making some sort of racket, in which case unseen aliens can be attracted to the sound and come out of the fog of war, or just on the edge of it, spot you, and take up positions, even in the middle of your turn. You can see this happening sometimes if you have a Battle Scanner up (which clears an area that would normally be in fog of war according to LOS, but without aggroing). It’s also why you should be careful about breaking doors down/smashing, etc. - they do “hear” it sometimes if they’re already quite close.

But if aliens suddenly appear where you’ve already cleared fog of war (especially right next to your guys) and immediately start shooting, that’s the teleport bug. It happens maybe 2 or 3 times in a game for me, so I’m always ready to CTRL+DEL+ALT out and quickly kill the game when it happens (the bug spoiled my first good-going CI run, which pissed me off no end, so I’m not about to let it mess up a game ever again).

5370

Moving in a column, it’s always half-step and Overwatch, yes (although laggards can dash up to where the column is, again if they aren’t going to reveal anything by doing so and most of your guys are able to Overwatch). If your first move reveals aliens, then you can stay more or less in the area you are if you can find some full cover slightly behind the “line” your lead guy is at, for your lead guys at least (but WITHOUT revealing any fog of war), because if you do that usually the aliens will be distant enough on their first shots that they’ll miss if you’re in full cover. Rest of your guys can move back a bit to half cover and hunker down or be on Overwatch if they’re at the back.

But if you can’t find full cover just slightly behind the line your lead guy is up to, dash your lead guy RIGHT BACK to full cover somewhere behind, get everyone else back, even out of LOS, and set up your flanking opportunity by FANNING OUT BACKWARDS into areas you’ve already “cleared”, and set Overwatch. That way you get a free crossfire shot if they move into LOS, and if you’ve fanned out intelligently relative to the clutter, you have a chance of having a guy in a good position relative to where they take cover (the AI is pretty smart, so think what you’d do if you were them - e.g. they will try for high ground if they can find it).

5371

Cover in general isn’t as important on Classic and Impossible, except hunkering in full cover. It might take a 90% down to a 50% hit, but both scenarios really suck on ironman. You still try to stay in cover all things equal but overall you’d rather be out of the of line of sight, or maximizing offensive power and ignoring cover. So in the situation MrPinguin is asking about usually I either aggressively try and kill every enemy ignoring cover (moving forward to maximize shots and keeping explosives as a worst case scenario fixer) or retreat back like Gus describes. Often retreat completely out of the line of sight giving you a turn to setup or overwatch shots.

If you play enough you get a feel for where the AI will go, what cover they will move towards, etc. One of the things I saw a twitch stream do when he won on I/I with every difficulty second-wave enabled was preemptively destroy before waking up the aliens to control where they moved on discovery and setup rocket kills and avoid risky situations.

5372

You and I have been over this already, three pages ago. We went into the two states of aliens (activated and un-activated) in great detail. If an alien shot at you, either 1) they saw you on an earlier turn or 2) it’s a bug. It’s not a matter of contention, it’s basic mechanics, like how cover works, and it should be obvious since the game goes out of the way to show you the transition. If you have any doubts at all - and I don’t understand how you could at this point - ask on the official XCom forum. Everyone will tell you the same thing.

George is incorrect. While it’s true that aliens will move toward noises, noise does not activate them. In particular, aliens cannot move during your turn. The single move-to-cover action during the transition from “unaware” to “activated” is the only exception. If you make noise, aliens may move toward your position, but only during their turn. If they advance because of noise, they still will transition from “unaware” to “active” with the standard animation during your turn, and they will not shoot at you until the next turn.

This is in fact the ideal way to make contact, because it wastes an alien turn. You get a full turn to react, instead of the partial turn you get when you make contact during your turn.

5373

Sorry, I didn’t mean to kick a dead horse. I guess you’re referring to this post?
I must’ve missed that post the first time, but I appreciate your reply.

Anyway, I was confused by the idea that aliens can move towards you during their turn, but they won’t attack if they move close enough to see you. In your previous post (linked above) you clarified that, if aliens do happen to move into your LoS during their turn, they’ll (theoretically) go through the ‘activation’ move and won’t actually attack.

I also remembered you posting this:

But I’d forgotten the other part of your post where you declared it a bug.

So in my dead-horse-beating defense, I think you can understand why I might have some confusion/doubts given your own recent discoveries with these bugs within the last month. For one thing, it’s not clear to me (from simply playing the game) how we’d know whether these things are bugs or intended behaviors. You assert that spotting an enemy without activation is a bug, and in the quoted post you infer that the Sectoid charging you and firing is a related bug, but I can imagine both those scenarios as a design working as intended.

If you’re saying that the devs have confirmed that these things are not supposed to happen, that’s good to know and I appreciate your insight, but since they do actually happen, they seem like something that should maybe influence player tactics. Or for me, maybe I’ll just use them as a rule that justifies a reload in a ‘wooden man’ game.

@Gurugeorge and Quaro: Thanks. I guess if I play again with EW I’ll focus on the column move-up and fall back approach (staying in the open to try and gun them down seems too risky to me).

5374

As Quaro says, that actually will happen surprisingly often. If you check each of your soldiers’ possible moves several times, often a scenario comes to mind where they can all basically get into position to take a decent flanking shot without cover, or (in the early stages) throw a grenade. Particularly in the kind of situation where you have one Sectoid controlling another, or two pairs, it often pays to be bold.

It usually works very well - so long as you don’t uncover new areas in the process! If you do, you’re screwed because your guys are exposed. You just have to pray then :)

Of course this is the classic Assault thing anyway (possibly why Assaults are my favourite :D ), but it can work with any soldier who has the possible move.

5375

That’s because it is a bug. If you read a little further, Routlaw mentions that it’s a known problem with a group on the right side of that particular map (Street Hurricane).

I called it out because it’s very unusual behavior. I’m not sure how you can play XCom for any length of time and not notice how activation works. The game hits you over the head with it, you get an elaborate animation every time you activate a group. The Second Wave option “Itchy Trigger Tentacle” even makes explicit mention of the unaware / activated transition, and how aliens normally don’t shoot during that activation.

5376

So that mod I was talking about released a beta version adapted for Enemy Within:

This mod changes a great many vanilla X-Com features and settings to create a far longer and more intense conflict with the aliens, and provide as much of a “sandbox” experience as possible. It creates a more interesting and rewarding strategic game, and battles will be challenging while still rewarding smart tactical play. You will see many more UFOs in the sky, and your squaddies will fight in a dozen or more combat missions per month. You will need to develop more than six troopers to succeed, and you will also have to carefully balance investments in research, construction, and interception capability.

Major Features:

  • Eight soldier classes, including the scout, infantry, rocketeer and engineer
  • Up to eight X-Com soldiers on missions
  • Up to a dozen missions per month. Abductions will take place one at a time.
  • Multiple base missions that allow you to retake countries from the aliens
  • Revamped and new perks structured to force difficult choices at each level while creating powerful complementary abilities
  • Aliens conduct research and their soldiers and UFOs will grow tougher over time, although X-Com can slow their advance
  • Interceptors gain experience and grow more accurate
  • SHIVs now have the potential to be a major component of your tactical game
  • Strategy game rebalanced; everything takes time to build and research and satellite spam is no longer the dominant path to victory
  • Expanded Gray Market and council requests for alien captives
  • Many new items, alien pods of up to eight x-rays, alien leaders and navigators, and much more!

Comments in the thread are pretty positive so far, looks playable even at this early state.

5377

Wow, that sounds great. I suppose the 8-soldier squads and (up to) 12 missions per month might bog the game down a bit, but the overall effect sounds really positive.

I also really like the decision to have abductions occurring one at a time. That will encourage the type of gameplay I always expected: I won’t skip missions because they’re a 3-way split, I’ll skip missions because my teams are exhausted and the aliens are simply overwhelming Earth’s defenses. Coolness.

I was lukewarm on the idea of replaying with EW, but if this mod gets good reviews and can deliver a stable experience, it might be the thing that actually convinces me to buy EW.

5378

I did some reading of the details of the Long War mod. Lots of changes in there. I’m not sure the result is necessarily better, but it’s clearly going to be different. Which is good if you’ve pretty much played out the game and the second wave options that interest you.

I didn’t look at it too seriously the first time around because I didn’t care for the way they monkied with the soldier classes. After playing Training Roulette, I’m a bit more open to the idea of playing with alternate skill sets.

The strategic game balance sounds a lot more like UFO Defense. Since you only get one abduction mission at a time, and you have to lose an abduction to raise panic, you can keep panic under control as long as you keep winning missions. By the same token, since panic isn’t steadily climbing as does normally, you don’t have to win every mission or suffer crippling panic increases. A fallout of this is that you don’t have to focus almost exclusively on launching satellites, either, since they don’t reduce panic, and you don’t need them to reduce panic.

5379

Feeling like I know the game fairly well now and having done some Second Wave, I think the basic framework could be extended in many interesting directions.

I do wish, though, that as a special treat the devs would release as a mod their early build that had more or less the original X-COM gameplay. I’m sure people would love it. Open Xcom and those things are great labours of love, but surely everyone would like to be able to play just a graphically tarted-up version of the original game?

5380

I just wish they’d put the slightest effort towards making the game moddable. The fact that Long Way a tribute to human stubborness – the act of creating mods for XCOM is an absolute nightmare. It’s astounding they got as much done as they did.

5381

You truly believe, after seeing the game in action, that this has at any point worked the way they described it?
At the VERY best they had a barebones version running that was an approximation of the original game, in the same way a Swiss Army Knife is an approximation of a fully equipped toolbox, put probably they didn’t even have that.

Amen to that.
After going the extra mile and more with the Civ4 SDK and eventually (though FAR too late) the Civ5 SDK, XCOM moddability is pitiful. I didn’t expect otherwise post-release, as they said early on moddability is “not a priority” and even took active and unneccessary steps to PREVENT modding, but it’s still pitiful.

rezaf

5382

I don’t understand - the original game came on a floppy disk. How hard could it be to reverse-engineer it? The hard thing was surely (in terms of resources) to do the graphical tarting-up, and then (in terms of a brain-teaser) to make a game that was suitable for consoles (that “flowed” for console play) and shorter attention-spans, had its own flavour, yet still retained some of the older game’s immersion, tension, etc.?

5383

Well, let’s not roll up a discussion about specifics there again - my point is that I find it hard to believe they ever had a “game” that was essentially the original X-Com in this new shiny engine up and running. For example, a big part of the original is random maps - if they’d ever had this up and running, who in their right mind would throw it out again?
IF they had ANYTHING that could actually be played, it was in a so early version of this engine that you can’t just polish it up a bit and release it as an addon to this XCOM - a tremendous amount of work would be neccessary to make it happen.

Given the choice, I’d always prefer a Civ-like modding SDK - fans out there would make it happen somehow.
I have VERY little hope of either happening, though.

rezaf