Yes, I would imagine (and hope!) that as well. My comment was made mainly for the amusement of a Marine buddy of mine who sometimes lurks on these forums. :)
I’ve been playing on Normal since Veteran is way too brutal. I’ve learned a few important lessons. First, a riot shield is key for breaching UFOs, they can absorb shots and throw a grenade of your choosing into the room and then you are safe to rush an assault guy or two in to clean up the room. For the missions you know will be stacked against you(terror missions), the tank thing is wonderful especially once you can give it a Pulse Laser. Sure, you won’t recover equipment from those aliens, but the heavy firepower will help keep your guys alive. Third, I’ve started largely screening recruits based on accuracy which seems to be helping as well. If I get guys with low accuracy but great other stats I’ll try to fit them into an appropriate class, but my snipers and riflemen are all high accuracy.
Has anyone found the Heavy Weapons class very useful? Seems like the machine gun is so low accuracy and requires so many TUs to fire that they just don’t end up that useful. Maybe they are more likely to suppress, but it doesn’t take too many people shooting at an alien to suppress it as it is. Does the laser version of the machine gun help out? My alien alloys have been so limited that I’ve never ended up constructing one.
The lack of description for the base components is really bad. Garages hold vehicles. I always build a medical bay, but I don’t know if it speeds up healing or is required for my guys to heal. Everything else seems pretty self explanatory at least. Not too many crazy buildings.
I also like that certain technologies just automatically apply upgrades to the appropriate weapons rather than needing to always swap out or build new. The missile launchers in your base upgrade to use lasers, your interceptor weapons will upgrade, etc.
Also don’t understimate the use of flashbangs, they supress and supressing disables reaction shots from enemies.
I use my heavy guys with rocket launchers and just shoot any enemy that seems hard to reach or that will probably kill one my guys, you will realize sooner or later that recovering equipment isn’t really that much important, since most of the time it gets sold at the end of the mission.
Maybe you are talking about something like that:
?
Well that’s the army nurse corps but maybe xenonauts was going for that… ;)
In any case is the game not set in the 60s or 70s and some of the art does seem a bit out of place/weak.
The game starts in 1979.
Ya and I don’t want to nitpick but thats really the end of the 70’s and noone had uniforms even close to that at this time. Let’s just not pretend it’s in any way or shape inspired by a real thing and simply an artist’s choice. :)
They want to get the cold war era vibe, and tbh if you change the colour of the uniforms in the first you linked, there isn’t much difference heh.
I finished it. I ended up save-scumming furiously, I sadly just wasn’t having any fun trying to iron man it (and the crash bugs didn’t help).
This game is an incredible achievement for an indie team- I’m very impressed with the scope and the production quality throughout. But for my taste they dropped the ball a little on the design. I can’t really imagine playing through it again. People said the Firaxis remake had no replayability, but I have hundreds of hours and all the achievements in that one.
Really, this has less replayability than that Firaxis railroad that I have no desire to revisit!? That really sucks :(
YMMV. It shares the original X-Com’s more simulationist approach, so it’s “freer” in that respect. I think this game has convinced me that it’s kind of pointless, though. It adds to the fantasy of running an organization, but it doesn’t actually generate more meaningful gameplay.
Their ‘airstrike’ mechanic is a brilliant contribution to the genre, though. The ability to get rid of a crashed UFO I don’t want to assault (nearly all of them) and still get some reward for it is great.
Well, why have so little replayability? lacking in AI? difficulty railroads you into the same type of decisions?
It has similar strategic depth to the original X-Com. So there aren’t really wildly different ways to approach it, but I find these games are more about “the story of how things turned out”. That’s really where the replayability comes from-- it’s not that you’re going to see any new content, but because so many elements of the game are randomised and interlocking things will turn out slightly differently and you’ll get a different story.
When I say that I can’t imagine playing it again, it’s just because I didn’t enjoy playing it as much as I thought I would. I don’t want a slight variation on that story.
I’m sort of surprised at how quickly it can be finished! It’s been out for a week (at most?) and garin has finished it. The original X-com takes me nearly twice that to finish (i don’t play it all day off course). I get the feeling Goldhawk are kind of just happy to get it out the door and be done with it (understandable from a small team), but i really, really hope they re-visit it for patches and possible expansions etc.
It’s not short, it’s as long as you’d expect. This is what I’ve been doing this week.
Hmm…i think i just wanted ‘more’. I’m really trying to think on how long it takes to beat the original game now :) I have a save game that i’ve been playing for over a year, but i haven’t re-visited it for a good long while. My memory of that first play through and victory (spoilers - another planet) on X-com was that it seemed to take about two weeks of solid playing to beat? It was a good summer holiday from school that.
In the original X-Com it really depends on how efficient you play.
I could’ve sworn you can delay the appearance of certain aliens by not doing or researching some stuff, but the X-Com wiki proves me wrong by saying it’s all time-based.
But if you do a lot of missions in that time, it’ll pass a lot less quickly, and if you research the right stuff in the right order, you much sooner have troops wielding heavy plasmas in flying armor, which CONSIDERABLY cuts back the time it takes to finish said mission as well as your losses. When I played OpenXCOM, I was quite shocked to see how fast I was at that point - but then the problem had a bug with the difficulty not ramping up properly, so I got Sectoid UFOs and stuff all the way through to the end.
I sort of intentionally bided my time though because I wanted to research everything I could, so it dragged more than a bit anyway, but if I’d REALLY pushed for it, I think it’d have been quite easy to finish MUCH sooner.
rezaf
I personally I’m really enjoying the game. Its longer than I wanted, or the new X-Com game, but it’s been a blast. I love the new combat options in the air to air combat, and I had a local cop saved my team’s ass in my latest mission. He killed a the zombie maker as they ran at my team! two turns later he took out another alien that was in a house. I wanted to hire him to my team! Its all the depth of the original X-Com with most of the features you would expect with a modern update.
Good to hear, the new Xcom really was not the kind of reboot of X-com i was looking for, too ‘modern AAA’ for my tastes. Xenonauts is definitely on my small list of games to get, it is just that over 20 years of gaming i have developed an automatic non-early adopter policy to buying games, so i will do as normal (99% of the time) and wait for a few updates/patches etc before buying.
Yeah… In some ways it’s a fairly minor thing to complain about, but I’ve been disappointed in the soldier-character art for this game since it first popped up on Qt3. I kept hoping it would be refined over the past year(s). It seems like these games are partially built around the idea of bonding with your soldiers as you build them up and risk their lives for the mission, but it’s harder for me to feel attached to or inspired by my glorious frumpy man who looks rather bored with his ho-hum life as a Defender of Humanity.