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Anyone else pick this up?

Pretty pleased with it so far. It's no proper remake (I'll leave that to Xenonauts) but it stays within the basic XCOM formula (tactical squad fights, base management, world view) while making itself stand out. Good introduction to the genre.

Lots of niggling problems, though. For example, there's no way to just stay on a particular Z-level, which leads to some really irritating camera shit when roaming inside alien ships.

I have just pre-ordered, still not out in the UK yet. 2 more days.

I haven't played an X-Com game since Terror From The Deep. I think I was about 5 or 6, God I feel old. It looks interesting, hopefully free-aim will be patched in.

Xenonauts also looks excellent so far, really like what I've seen of the alpha.

You were 5 or 6 when you played Terror From The Deep, and you feel old!?

Motherf$&*er I'm getting old.

Game's ok but kinda lacks a lot of what made the original special.

Like nostalgia? :P

I noticed you had the same sort of opinion about DE:HR too (a game that received rave reviews, but you feel isn't "special" like the original). And I loved the hell out of that game, so... maybe I'm going to like Enemy Unknown? Hah.

Lets be honest: you want 20-something dudes enjoy game about shooting aliens, more than kids can enjoy it.

im glad

I don't even know what this sentence is supposed to mean.

No game can ever replace X-COM, because it sits in a sort of defiance as to the technological and design limitations of its time. It's like "yeah fuck you guys let's add a million features that all seem contradictory but are actually really great."

I feel like this one keeps the spirit of XCOM without just being a rehash. I'm actually kinda interested in seeing how Apocalypse would look under this engine/ruleset.

This game is pretty fucking good. It's not a remake but a reimagining, from some dudes who you can tell really love some xcom. I've seen some internet echo chambery shit with people whining about things they changed from the original, but it's not like the original didn't have a lot of issues and bugs (http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Known_Bugs) of its own.

If you've preloaded already, skip the staggered release date bullshit: run Steam through a US proxy (I just used plink to tunnel through one of my webservers but you can find a free VPN or whatever) and you'll be able to play right now.

Played about 2 hours of it now, went with a VPN option. I was playing Xenonauts and just couldn't take it anymore. It's a really fun game, I've really enjoyed it so far. I do long for another base and free-aiming in combat, but other than that it's excellent.

the demo of it was pretty awful. 3 boring tutorial/early game levels. it doesn't even give you a good idea of how the game plays, it tells you what to do every step. they could have at least thrown in one real level or something.

yeah that dmeo is baaaad

After the hand-holding start the game really ramps up. I'm really enjoying this, but I'm going to restart in Iron Man mode for more of a challenge. Not that it isn't hard enough already. It's got a few annoying bugs that pop up every now and again, hopefully they'll be patched soon.

Bought it a couple of days ago, and yes, the beginning is very hand-holdy, but it seems to be getting better as I progress. That said, I liked the feeling of piecing the underlying plot of the alien invasion from the research, rather than having it spoon-fed to me via cutscene. The original felt more sandboxy, while this very much feels like the current generation of games where the developers felt the fear that you wouldn't 'get it', and thus opted to cautiously lower you into the shallow end of the pool with a safety harness, a lifesaver and floater wing-things.

As for 'the things that made the original special', I definitely miss things like larger squads, kneeling/standing, different types of fire, placing bases whereever you want, having more than one base, and so forth. It's not about nostalgia. The new one is to the original what Civ V is to the original Civ: better graphics, streamlining a lot of the depth/complexity in favor of ease of access to a generation of dudebro players who are used to more immediacy and twitchy action games than more cerebral, slower experiences.

So far my verdict is "Yeah, it's enjoyable, and I'm glad I gave you money because I hope more games like this get made, but hey, how about a 'retro mode' DLC for $20 that is basically the original game remade in this engine, for us old-fogey types? No? Ok, I guess I'll finish playing it and go wait for Xenonauts again."

kinda thought that would be the case. even still, I'll wait for a price drop.

how's the multiplayer?

I legitimately do not like the cutscenes, except for the interrogation, dissection, and base facility ones. They are super corny and they do kinda spoonfeed the player. That being said, there's still a lot of detail in the UFOpedia.

Larger squads doesn't really make sense given that the encounter sizes are smaller and your soldiers are stronger.

Kneeling/standing was replaced by a very functional and useful cover system (the only real reason you kneeled anyway).

Different types of fire has been rolled into the overall usage of a weapon (snipers, for example, can't fire after moving) and abilities like Headshot or Suppression. Not really necessary to have aimed, snap, free, etc in such a system.

Placing multiple bases I do miss, but they rolled the important aspects of that into the main base. Satellite Coverage takes the place of listening posts, hangars available on each continent take the place of hangar bases, and the main base is dramatically larger than the bases in XCOM. It would be nice if there was an option to enable multiple bases on a new game, but of smaller size (1-2 levels).

The one thing I miss most is being attacked at your base. Really hoping they bring it back in some way.

It really is about nostalgia. It's always about nostalgia. And when the reality of a game doesn't conform to your nostalgic expectations, you paint it off as being "dudebro" and "shallow." As Radix put it:


Also, even with this game out, I'll probably still play Apoc and UFO. Especially Apoc, what a lovely game.

Far from being dumbed down; now that I've played enough to have a bunch of fully-ranked dudes (some are starting to learn psi too) it's apparent that there's a lot more tactical depth than the original despite the overall flow of your turns being simplified. Yeah you have fewer guys and no TUs, but the combination of cover and the various perks/abilities your dudes get makes things really interesting.
I'm really impressed with the design of the risk/reward tactical decisions you have to make constantly. Do you wanna try to soften up an enemy swarm with your guys then have your Sniper finish them all with In The Zone, at the risk of him missing the first shot and ending up with a team of still-alive bad guys in your face? Should your Support pop a smoke grenade to defend your whole squad, or heal the one guy who badly needs it, or risk trying to finish a baddie off, or go into his special on-fire overwatch mode? Should your Assault stun this guy at the risk or ending up defenceless right next to an alien if the stun fails?

Whereas the original was always like this for me:
-HWP scouts, everyone throws grenades. Then later:
-24 dudes with laser rifles walking forward in a line blind-firing until every piece of cover on the map is destroyed. If any die that's fine because it's not like aiming mattered. Then later:
-23 dudes razing the entire map, one guy back in the skybus with a blaster launcher.

I'm not such a big fan of the strategic geoscape stuff in this game though. It all works well enough but with less control over coverage it just feels like the fuck-you timer is killing you in Classic rather than it being a product of your actions. And while not being able to respond to everything happened in the original it was an emergent thing of not being able to be everywhere at once, here it's a choice of three buttons. It's in line with the rest of it but I dunno, the geoscape is just such a huge part of x-com, I think they went slightly too far with the scalpel there.

edit: jesus my grammar

Huhhh, was waiting on this. Gonna get it as soon as I can get to a games store :epileptic:

Just lost all my good soldiers to a few lucky criticals. I love this game.

i first played the original 3 years ago. i hate that whenever you prefer an older game over a newer one your position reduced to "nostalgia."

for me it's not about the "dudebro factor" (whatever that is) or even depth, it's about the game feeling more like a "normal" tactics game than x-com.

Wasn't really talking about you Sinclair. I've just seen a lot of, as Radix put it, "internet echo chamber" shit about how "the new XCOM isn't XCOM it's just Gears of War, they made it for dudebros and frat boys." It strikes me as an ultimately juvenile way to critically evaluate a game.

I definitely feel like Enemy Unknown and UFO Defense are two different games, thematically, but they still carry that theme of consequence. Enemy Unknown is about war and combat and how your mistakes can have drastic lasting consequences. UFO Defense is about tension and the inevitability of loss during wartime and how some things are just completely beyond your control. In that respect, EU is more of the player-friendly choice, as it makes you feel like the mistakes are genuinely your fault. UFO Defense (less so for Apocalypse, but still there) made you feel like sometimes you were just fucked regardless of what you did and you had to accept the anal reaming you were going to get.

yeah i agree and personally that's what i liked about ufo defense. the game really gave you the feeling of fighting an overpowering and mysterious enemy. there were a lot of moments where i seriously panicked. enemy unknown seems to make more concessions to "videogame logic" for lack of a better word.

i know a lot of people probably don't give a fuck about that and EU is definitely a fun and well designed game, no doubt about it. but like i said, it's less "special" and memorable to me than the original.

Can anybody explain to me the logic behind the Xbox demo only being available to Gold members?

ancient aliens

Those fuckers!

I can understand that it's "less special" since the original game sits in its own little microcosm cut off of the material world. I do also think that Enemy Unknown is by no means a bad game, or somehow more shallow.

I dropped down to Normal Ironman since Classic Ironman was ruining my shit and I just beat it with 0 deaths. Normal is for casual dudebros.

I'd like to pick up this game, but because I own UFO Defense, I can't really justify spending the extra money.

From what I've seen on YouTube of people playing it, there isn't much there that would convince me to play it over the original.

Kudos to the devs, the game looks great, but I think it's more for the people who didn't grow up with XCOM UFO Defense.

Got this earlier in the week and I love it.  It's mechanically a very different game to the original but it captures the overall feel quite nicely.  I'm in the middle of a terror mission at the moment that has been a genuinely harrowing experience - over the past twenty years I've gradually got over my fear of Cryssalids but they've managed to make them shit-pants scary again.

On the whole I understand the changes they've made - the original X-com is my favourite game of all time but I have to admit it did have some rough edges that the new one neatly files off.  But there are two big things that I think are miss-steps:

1. No randomly generated levels.  I get that by predesigning them you can make them look all purty, but I would trade in all the sparkly running-water effects for the infinite replayability of the original in a heartbeat.

2. Its approach is a lot more rule-based than the original's more simulationist approach, which I think works against it sometimes.  Stuff like hit chance being based just on range and cover rather than actually tracing the tragectory of the bullet and its slightly weird line-of-sight detection make it a lot harder to tell how things are going to go just from looking, and you get a lot less of the exciting emergent stuff happening.

I'm also kinda upset that I can't put my considerable business experience of running laser-cannon sweatshops to good use, but I can see why they took that out.

Holy crap, I love this game.

Just lost a normal ironman game. Got my troops ripped apart by Mutons. I expected them to be dumb, much like in the original XCOM, or like with the sectoids. But shit.. Mutons are smarter than I am. They know how to outflank you, how to use grenades properly, suppression fire, how to draw you into an ambush. I remember people used to joke that the aliens in XCOM were overpowered because they were so damn stupid. Not the case with XCOM EU.

I think part of the loss was because I was not used to the new game mechanics. Did a bunch of dumb things like overmanufacturing on equipment early on, or not knowing how to activate the powers.

Just played multiplayer with my brother. I've always loved a round of Fallout Tactics or Wesnoth with my siblings. So far, XCOM multiplayer beats them. There's just so much depth to it. My brother has this tendency to make one uber-guy, a bunch of little supports. I love how you could beat it with sectoids.

This game is way more hardcore than the original. Also love the ironman system - it reassures me that it's the way the game is meant to be played.

There was one thing I hated about UFO Defense/TFTD - it took 15 minutes to setup your squad equipment and 3 hours to win a shipping level. There were short periods of action, but too much damn bureaucracy. With EU, I can setup a mission in less than 5 minutes (mostly shifting equipment). The missions themselves are even more fast paced than Apocalypse - just move your characters into position, tab, move, 1, enter, 3, 3. It's almost a cinematic flow.

I like how Firaxis managed to simplify a lot of it. It's just missing a Grenadier class. And I don't really like how there's much less collateral fire. I don't like hitpoints either. The new base design is nice. Didn't like multiple bases. Disappointing that you can't get attacked, though.

But yeah, kinda disappointed that they chopped a bit much out. XCOM EU is, as a game, a lot better. It grabs that spirit of the game fucking you over, and laughing at you about it. But at times, it does feel too gamey. The UFO After___ series does a better job at getting the alien war simulation part.

It's an entirely different game, but set in the same theme. I really hope Firaxis sticks with it. I wouldn't mind them skipping over TFTD, but Apocalypse had a great theme, and I'd love to see Firaxis' touch on that.

FYI the first game had hitpoints.

So I'm on a crashed-ship-mission, and I'm down to the last group of aliens, which keeps making noises outside. I figure I missed it, but 20 minutes later I've explored like half the map again, and it keeps making noises in new areas. Finally, I see it. It's the alien ship captain... sitting on the roof of the ship. Apparently the grenade I thought killed him merely knocked him onto the top of the ship.  :facepalm:

I'm loving this game. I like a lot of the changes they made from the original, I have very few beefs. Without going into detail, my three biggest beefs - though I don't mind losing the TU system, firing your weapon forces the character to end their action for the round (except for the Heavies that get the perk). You can't go full-auto with a shot - making panic rounds often actually work in your favor! And you can't choose your squad's classes, making for some really wierd force mixes to work with.

I'm hoping Firaxis decides to make an aquanaut expansion. I dunno, I really liked the atmosphere of TFTD, even if it was buggy as hell (damn you lobsterman research bug!).

Yeah, but it worked.

HP fails when it becomes a mechanical calculation. I find myself regularly thinking "Hey I can kill this Muton with two rifle hits, or a rifle hit and a pistol to save ammo.

Like nobody in a war would ever do that. It really breaks immersion. The old XCom didn't encourage that kind of behavior.

Also agree that I don't really like the class system. Would be good to pick a class for them. I normally want half/third the team to be assault, but they're the first to die.

The old XCOM definitely encouraged that behavior.

How so?  In the original, enemy max health and damage inflicted was highly randomised, you couldn't even see their current HP unless you used a mind probe, everything had varying resistances to different weapon types (that I don't think were actually numerically stated in-game) and you couldn't even access the ufopedia in the middle of a battle to check the actual damage your weapon did... it's hard to think of any other ways of discouraging that kind of calculating approach they could possibly have used.

I took it more as evaluating shots and time units. 
Less:
"Hey I can kill this Muton with two rifle hits, or a rifle hit and a pistol to save ammo."
More:
"Hey I can take 2 steps and a half turn and fire a snap shot, or I can stand still and do an aimed shot."

My twin (who runs TBStactics blog) is writing a review of it.  Doesn't seem like he liked it that much.  I'll post it when he's done with it.

Enjoying it so far.  Playing on "XCOM" difficulty and ironman.  Got my ass handed to me on the last two missions.

I really don't like the way enemies can just spawn in in the rescue missions.  The first of my two total party kills involved two thin men jumping right into flanking positions around the guy I was rescuing, then going into oversight.  As soon as he made a run for it, he was shot.

I don't have much of a problem with the lack of time units (although I miss being able to squeeze multiple attacks out of a turn), but I don't like that you can't reassess your movement when you spot an enemy.

Apart from my little problems with it, the game has a great feel to it so far.  There's a lot of fun tactical planning and decision making, plus plenty of that "oh shit, oh shit" feeling from the original.

As an aside, the Sniper and Heavy can both fire more than once in a turn if they have the correct perks, and the Assault can fire as many times as he wants on enemies that come within 4 spaces of him.

Support is pretty much boned on multiple attacks but hey he's there to heal/defend not fuck dudes up.

Yeah, that's probably one of the bigger differences between X-COM and XCOM.  In X-COM, you tended to have more choice within individual actions (move less to get extra shots, snap shot vs aimed shot, shooting at walls and obstacles to clear a path, ect..) whereas XCOM is more focused on ability progression and making best use of those abilities in combat.  (Note I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that it's a core difference which comes out of the removal of Time Units and the addition of ability trees)

Yeah, there's definitely more codified actions and roles for soldiers. I like some things about it (makes individual soldiers more important) and dislike other things (removes some of the wider tactical opportunities).

I hate that roles are random.

I love that they removed TUs. Having to calculate TU usage all the time was a huge turn off. And it makes everything a lot smoother.. you'd expect turns early game to take 45s now.

Would enjoy being able to pick roles or just mix them up, though. The extra grenade thing should be available to Assault. The 4 tile area of control should be available to Support. And so on. Something like being able to tag them roles rather than having preset roles would be awesome.


Just lost my second normal ironman game. I did things right tactically this time, the problem was that I started in the wrong continent and ended up struggling with limited resources till mid game.

Also had too many devastating defeats, where I decided not to retreat even when I had obviously lost (having 3 badly wounded + 3 dead on levels full of chrysalids is kinda suicide).

I think I found an overpowered strategy for lots of money, though. The whole money aspect is about finding which countries to suck up to.

i definitely miss becoming an arms dealer when the entire world hates you

Ah, I see - yes, it certainly did that.  Although I would argue that is slightly less immersion-breaking in that time is a real-world resource (however abstracted) and so you're still making the same kind of decisions that a soldier would make (probably a lot faster) in real life, while HP is not.  That said, I can't say I'm particularly sad to see the back of time units in the new one - it certainly helps the game flow a lot better.

I like it.
If you think of it as being a dodgy substitute for random rookie stats then yeah, it's annoying. Once you get the OTS upgrade that autopromotes recruits to squaddies that's a bit better.
But what I like is that since the roles are all effective in different ways, and therefore any combination of classes (as long as you have a bit of a mix) can work well for the first half of the game, it means that your tactics layer gameplay is going to vary a bit every time you start a new file. That's cool because it makes each new team a little different as opposed to retreading the early game each time you fuck up on Ironman.

Still it'd be cool if their actual actions had a bit of an effect. Like blowing up dudes with grenades would make them more likely to go heavy; killing enemies at very close range or surviving a couple of reaction shots would add a modifier to their chance of turning assault, etc. Just like you're really training up your own rookiemon!

i'm pretty much 100% sure it's not completely random, though. it seems like the first 4 you get are always one of each role, and the rest tend to be mostly supports, then assaults tied with snipers, and then heavies. which i guess makes sense, since a group of all heavies would be a bit overpowered, but it's still annoying when you lose your only heavy early on and then get 4 supports and 2 snipers as your next recruits.

Man, this game has a lot of battles where I end up feeling fucked over.  Soldiers panic way too easily, especially since the squad sizes are so small, one guy dies, and the next thing you know, your team has killed most of itself off.  Soldiers panicking in the first game was effectively tense because it didn't constantly happen, and when it did, you had large enough squads that it didn't completely cripple you.

Also, on the rescue missions, enemies can just jump in wherever they please.  At one point, two thin men decided to jump into flanking positions around the guy I was trying to rescue.  They then went into overwatch, so that as soon as he tries to escape, he's dead.  Not much I could really do about it.

The game does so many things right, but the things it does wrong can get really troublesome.

I actually feel like soldiers panicked a LOT more in UFO Defense, mainly because I feel like sectoids having psychic abilities ramped up the mind shit pretty fast.

Started a new game to discover that it gave me an army of identical blond female soldiers with mild pompadours, some of whom have male first names.

EDIT:  When I exited and went back into the game, they were all different.  There goes my plan to give each of them a different color costume and have an army of blond clones.  (I mean, I could still do that, but it wouldn't be the same...)

I always end up with 0-1 assaults and maybe 4 heavies. Heavies aren't really that great, they run out of ammo really quickly and aren't even that accurate. Out of the different types, I like them the least.

I'd say snipers are some of the more powerful at harder levels, because they can instakill some of the tougher units and you can use rookies to fish them to a good spot for the snipers to pick off. Plus the snipers get that critical reaction shot perk, which is really nasty combined with the fact that they already have some awesome perks and weapons.

But you do need heavies for the terror missions, because the chrysalids and other Big Monsters come at you hard and fast. And the heavies actually have the perks to soften them up.

well the rng is fucked in this game regardless. ironman is pretty much impossible on classic unless you play perfectly.

I think you just gotta know what you're doing on the geoscape part (build satellites erryday) to support inevitable combat fuckups later on. I didn't have too much trouble as far as battlescape on classic ironman, but getting off to a bad start is what really hurt me.

your dudes need to not be worth so much, or they needed to make the critically wounded thing happen every time they ran out of health instead of never. as it is, it's just not worth the frustration of losing your best dudes to some random 20 damage crit from a thin man while your guy was under full cover and smoke.

There's an OTS upgrade that makes the chance of the critical thing happening increase with rank.

still stupid

I didn't know you could get 20 damage crits from thin men.

Lol, I just go in with expectations that I'll lose some guys. My strategy is to bundle my squad into pairs or threes, 1-2 pros and one rookie. I keep the rookie in front for scouting and triggering the alien 'on sight' movement. And for taking the heavy fire.

I'd really like to be able to choose classes.

I rename all my characters the same four names but just give them ascending roman numerals. I'm currently in my 4th generation of squad. I'm pretty much screwed and everyone hates me.

Here's my twin's review of the game.

http://www.extremegamer.ca/multi/reviews/xcomEU.php

as a native german speaker, listening to dr. vahlen's fake accent is pretty painful. the tutorial cutscene where she speaks german made want to drive a #2 pencil through my eardrums.

they should've just used lines from old arnold schwarzenegger movies

There's quite a number of factual inaccuracies or omissions in that review but w/e.

Care to elaborate on that?

Only if they take damage more than their armor; not always, sometimes they are knocked out and you can revive them.


Not true at all, especially since most of the time enemies will not actually discover you first. You have to strike out in order to complete missions.


Overwatch is the only defensive tool that hits enemies, it can only trigger once per activation, and it has an Aim penalty. Calling it "powerful" isn't so much factually wrong as it is an incorrect assessment of the game mechanics.


Nope. If it occurs during the enemy phase, they actually get a free move. I've had Chrysalids use this to instantly move up to my guys and force a panic. Only the Sectoids and Thin Men seem to prefer retreat to advance with the free move mechanic.


There is an option to disable it.


Not necessarily factually inaccurate but certainly misleading. Each class has something like 18 skills, only two of which they always get (Squaddie and Major rank skills, IIRC). This forces players to specialize within classes. Roughly speaking, there are "eight" classes in the game: Explosive Heavy, Gun Heavy, Heal Support, Defense Support, Recon Sniper, Range Sniper, Rush Assault, Critical Assault. Weapon types are strictly linear in power, I'll grant that. There's actually more enemy variety than in the original, unless you count the different ranks in UFO Defense as varieties.

Also in general it's a pretty poorly written review.

I liked this game a LOT, I blew through it on ironman classic (13 games!!) over the first week I got it. It's deep and pretty amazing, although it has a couple of REALLY nasty bugs. Most notably, the weird abstracted logic with undiscovered enemies can go totally haywire, and you can have an entire map worth of enemies drop within your soldier's LOS during their turn -- once on the graveyard map I had an ironman squad wiped when 6 heavy floaters and 6 mutons all spawned in the same square IN THE MIDDLE OF MY SQUAD. Not a good bug to have in an ironman game.

Other interesting stuff to remark on:

• A lot of the early game difficulty comes from Thin Men -- The game is never up-front about telling you that light plasma grants an accuracy bonus, so an uninformed player wont realize a thin man or overseer has a significantly higher chance of hitting his soldier if they're trading shots from cover. Like, 40% for your rookie is probably 65% for the thin man looking back at him.
• Overwatch is incredibly viable as an offensive tactic -- even with the aim penalty, I get the impression overwatch @ enemies out of cover is significantly more accurate than fire @ an enemy in cover -- keeping soldiers on overwatch before you end your turn, so they can fire if any enemies are revealed and take their free move, is a vital tactic... ESPECIALLY with snipers, which brings me to...
• SQUAD SIGHT is super overpowered, to the point of being pretty much the only viable tactic in the late game. Two snipers with plasma, squad sight, and opportunist (no aim penalty on overwatch) placed in elevated positions will have you looking at 95-100% chances to hit any enemy revealed anywhere on the map by the rest of your team. I kinda wish there were more good late game squad makeups -- a couple of squad sight snipers is such a profound silver bullet (ESPECIALLY endgame, with double tap) that it doesnt make sense to take anything else.
• Lightning reflexes (first reaction shot by aliens always misses) is a super cool power, that kind of thing is lovely to have in your strategic toolkit -- I wish there were move powers like that, which made me use soldiers in interesting tactical ways, like bating enemies' overwatch so that other soldiers could safely move.

Anyway though: Great game. Bring on some tftd dlc.

On my fifth game of Classic Ironman (the first four tended towards disaster).  This one has been going pretty well so far.  I think I've only lost around 3 guys so far through maybe 7 or more missions, panic levels aren't too out of control, and I've captured a live alien.  The game has a lot of positive feedback loops where minor losses can quickly spiral into major losses, but I've been playing carefully and holding my own so far.  I think I'm getting a hold on the strategies (at least of the early game), both in terms of tactics in the missions, and overall strategies for base development.

They're still nasty mid-late game. I remember doing a bomb mission after mutons/ethereals. Was confident because I didn't lose any guys earlier. Totally underestimated them, lost half my squad.

Of all the units, thin men are surprisingly deadly because they're damn accurate and can very easily outflank you, and they come in numbers. A thin man can jump over the train you're hiding in and shoot you from the back, and a couple others could be in positions to surround you. Heavy floaters are the only ones that come close in deadly mobility.

Thin men are always dangerous as a surprise (I think they climb environments, ala grappling hook, for free, just like stepping from one square to the next?) but, assuming you're playing the economy right and have interrogated a beserker (that's another thing! We Have Ways is ESSENTIAL and none of the other continent bonuses really are, which I don't like) you should probably have 3-6 suits of titan armor by that part of the game... There's maybe a VERY narrow window where thin men are actually a late game concern, but by the endgame not even their crits are really gonna dent the obnoxious amount of health you'll be rolling with. There were a few missions where my only wounds came from thin men, but I dont think Ive lost anyone to them past early game.

Anyway gosh great game, I normally wouldn't be excited enough to talk about little tactical details like this in a tbs!

They do little damage, but it adds up. I think my problem was mainly underestimating them, especially with titan armor… one or two hits from a thin man can't kill an experienced guy, but once they surround him, lay down the suppression fire, give him nowhere to run, he's dead. And the emergency rescue teams were the second to fall. Once outflanked, anyone is practically dead.

Though I find it a little annoying that the game cheats on your behalf on normal or lower difficulty.

Completed it today on Ironman Classic, on a third try.
88 solders dead, 770 aliens killed, 62 battles won, 7 lost. So many deaths. I have been one country away from losing the game. But at the end all panic levels were at minimum.
Very good game, indeed.

I must confess, when I would encountered a game affecting bug few times I would alt-tab and close the game to reload. Like enemies teleporting in the middle of my squad, or direct hot of a rocket not doing any damage to sectopod. I would not recommend playing on Ironman before most of the problems are fixed.

At the end I was trying to find psionics. I lost first two foolishly. And it did took quite some time to find another two. One of them have died, and other one, German lady, I think, got nickname "Bonus" and went to a final mission. I can't remember default names, and I stopped naming them after few dozens of solders I named after book and tv show characters ended up biting the dust. So many deaths *sigh*.

As for damn thin man - once you got ghost armor, which is very powerful if used smartly, you can sneak up on those bastards and blow three of them to pieces with a single alien grenade, while they are "undiscovered". And don't be afraid to spend rockets and grenades generally. It's better to spend it and get guaranteed damage then to curse while watching as your troops keep missing.

I just played it on Ironman mode and got routed halfway through the game and deleted my save in anger. Is there a button you can press to electrocute whoever came up with this?

I don't really like the game, but considering ironman mode is an OPTION that you have to DELIBERATELY SELECT that seems like a pretty petty complaint to have.

You always have the option of suicide for being someone who gets mad at video games.

Because no one ever gets mad at video games, right? Tell me more, master of cool :noir:

I had basically assumed Ironman was like Fire Emblem, where you could repeat a mission if you were routed, but you couldn't save or load during a mission. That's the mode I would LIKE to play on, it made me far more frustrated than I ever got in Dark Souls when my carefully protected team was routed by a swarm of grenade-throwing enemies.

The core gameplay is great, but the cheapness the game throws at you makes Ironman needlessly frustrating. I had soldiers missing on 99% hit chance and enemies shooting snipers from across the map with aimbot-like accuracy. That's not to say anything of the spontaneously combusting automobiles and lack of cover in certain chokepoints.

The game outright tells you what Ironman mode does.

Pay attention????

XCOM is fairly unique in modern long-form games in that you shouldn't expect to win your first game.  Most games have a mentality of making the game where you can't lose the game as a whole, just the individual missions.  This is not one of those games.  You're going to lose a few games before you win.  Most of the things that seem like bullshit that comes out of nowhere can actually be planned against with careful tactics which you learn over the course of a few games.

This is the whole point of Ironman mode.  XCOM on Ironman mode is a game that you can lose, and which you can't trial-and-error your way through.  It's like playing Chess and complaining that you can't take back your move after the other player captures your piece.

A high probability of a hit still means there's a chance of a miss.  If you play recklessly to get a high-percentage hit, there's still a chance you'll miss and pay for, say running out of cover right next to your target

They aren't.  When a car is hit, it will catch fire.  If your guy is in cover behind it, he'll say something like "this thing is going to blow".  This means the car will explode on the next turn.  You can also use this to your advantage (say two enemies are hiding behind a car, you can throw a grenade to deal 3 damage to each enemy and cause the car to explode the next turn, dealing extra damage and [if they're still alive] destroying their cover)

Then avoid those chokepoints.  Dash past them or hold back and draw the enemies closer.

I started the game again without Ironman, and I'm loving it. Though I wouldn't have gotten through on Ironman, since I got wiped about 3 times... two in UFO missions, and once in the Alien Base before I beat it. I'm not saving during the missions, though, only using the autosaves afterwards.

TBH I only died once from an exploding car, after learning how to play better (e.g. making sure you are within line-of-sight) I had less trouble with cover.

I started in Ironman because I heard everywhere that it was the "real" way to play, but for your first playthrough I don't think it's a good idea.

ironman is still more fun for me because i end up getting reloading ocd when im playing without it. im not disciplined enough to use saves sparingly.

Yeah, I would say Ironman is the best way to play the game, but not necessarily the best way to learn the game, unless you're okay with a few long games going very poorly.

see this is what i thought, but it really doesn't work with how they mixed the perks thing with the rng of the old xcom games.

Yeah, this for me. I just felt guilty about playing it without reloading. I also like the tension of having some real risk involved. I actually like losing a few ironman games in a row..

I beat the game, and for the most part it was a great experience. I did reload a few other times, but mostly after I was killed by Sectopods and their dual-move gimmicks.

I think the key to playing on Ironman is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Putting all your highly-trained troops on a mission is a ticket to disaster - if the mission wipes, you will have only lost one or two important characters if the rest are back at base. That, and SHIVs come in really handy.

i've played 5 half campaigns in iron mode before giving up on xcom. It is a great game but sometimes the luck effect is too much important, and that really turns me off. So i decided to stay away from that game for a time.

What in normal mode? The computer actually cheats away some of that luck to help you in Normal. (like if you're missing several times in a row, the next roll will have a higher chance of hitting.. or if you've got a guy getting hit a lot, the computer will make the less attack less likely to hit)

I don't think that would be enough. I've actually played a bit on normal and it felt without challenge, then i went to classic and it felt too randomly brutal. I think the combat would improve much more if it was like Frozen Synapse. I dunno, maybe the problem here is more of personal taste, rather of the actual game.

are we excited?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCSoqdOZ0-M&feature=youtu.be

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/08/21/xcom-enemy-within-is-an-expansion-out-15th-november/

oh, great, now when some alien hiding in the shadows pops out and one shots your full health marine from half way across the map, it'll be that much more frustrating

Oh, yes.

>:D

Is that what being bad at strategy games is like?  :(

Seriously though did they ever patch the famously broken "spawn every single enemy from the mission on the same square as your soldier" bug?

I got through an ironman game with that shit only happening once (and us somehow surviving -- it was after my troops got leveled, but before the game got hard again) but it scared me away from trying again.

lol strategy

Nope. And that bug is actually the result of them trying to fix the original teleporting aliens bug.


Huh?

do you just not level your units because the hardest i've ever been hit was like. half health

also i think the 'lol strategy' comment is just referring to the fact that if you stick with one team long enough you're basically unkillable

and also: every other game with progression.

basically, what im saying, is that, this game is bad?

No, you see, it's actually really, really good.

That is of course an entirely objective assessment based on an employment of a multitude of methods to measure the de facto goodness of the game.

us technicians call it The GOodness Factor (g factor for short)

I played so much of this when it came out, but I got tired of it way faster than the originals. This might be enough to bring me back for a little bit or at least tide me over until Xenonauts is complete. I like Xenonauts more, it's more like UFO Defence.

My last ironman run ended with some impossible thin man magic. You learn to always keep a rookie about for scouting ahead/cannon fodder on ironman, but the squad size limitation is bad and the base number limitation is bad. The whole alien free move thing really annoyed me too, it kind of lacked the whole fear of the unknown the originals had.

Oh man!

Loved Enemy Unknown.  This expansion is basically going to be my excuse to do a new playthrough with Second Wave.

i like how they announc expansion to this after the bureau :xcom fedora unknown gets stinky reviews

Never had this problem

Yeah, I can't help but feel somewhat sorry for 2K Marin. All the shit they had to go through to get their X-COM to market, and then an expansion for the other X-COM completely steals their thunder.

i dont feel bad at all that the thing they releasd is an exact copy paste of firaxis's game +the shooting -the women and bombed hard. the bureau only exists because suits wanted to rerelease enemy unknown but to their imaginary version of the cod audience.

I don't feel sorry for the suits. I feel sorry for the many devs that busted their asses off for 8 years trying to bring this game together. And having Enemy Unknown's expansion take away the limelight is just rubbing salt in the wound.

I personally don't feel very bad for the devs either.  The Bureau pretty much represents everything I think is wrong with the current mindset of the AAA industry, and a lot of that lies on the shoulders of the developers (In fact, I wrote a bit of a rant about this on my site (http://renegadesector.com/2013/08/rant-xcom-and-the-state-of-aaa/)).  If you look at interviews with the Enemy Unknown guys, you can tell that they really get what made the original X-COM great, and also what makes their own game work as its own entity.  When I watch an interview with the developers of The Bureau, I see people who not only entirely missed the point of X-COM, but don't really understand the design process any further than "Take the skeleton of Mass Effect/Halo/Call of Duty and paint elements of alien conspiracy and some tacked on tactical elements (which we didn't even intend to have when we started)"

I don't disagree with much of anything you wrote in that rant, but bear in mind that the Firaxis X-COM is the result of one team working on their own project from pretty much a singular vision, while the 2K Marin game was inherited from team to team over and over again because nobody was really able to crack the code (which in hindsight should be obvious, since they were trying to make an X-COM game while stripping away some of the fundamentals of what makes an X-COM game).

It's just that after reading Polygon's article (http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/19/4614410/xcom-the-bureau-development-2006-2013) on the belabored process 2K Marin went through, I'm not getting the sense that the final dev team didn't "get" it. They just had a much higher mountain to climb off the bat than Firaxis did. They tried to make the best game they could with the hand they'd been dealt. And, judging from the thread on Something Awful and other forums, the game isn't really as bad as the reviews are making it out to be. It's just a worse X-COM reimagining than the Firaxis game, but still quite an enjoyable game.

Aaaand with that I'll stop defending people I don't know and a game I haven't played... :whome:

idk im glad enemy unknown ended up being the revival of x-com and not the bureau, b/c it would have probably turned the series into an fps forever. the way it is we got a pretty fun "x-com lite" from firaxis and a shooter no one likes lol

This makes me happy.

I just quitted my first game to restart. I went quite far in the game, totally aced the battle maps, few rookie deaths here and there but overall smooth progress... but my whole finance/base layout was a disaster, and after losing my 6th country i felt I should have put some money in satellites and uplinks after all :)

Considering going back on xcom and trying my hand on this warspace mod (http://xcom.nexusmods.com/mods/18/?).
Had anyone tried it? I've heard it's more strategical or something like that.

I've been playing it on Classic. Happens all the fucking time to me. Line up guys for an ambush... then boom, a thin man criticals my guy while under heavy cover with a light plasma rifle. Normal actually severely nerfs alien criticals, so your guys don't get 1-shotted.

The critical bonus is really minor (like 10%) or something, but it shows up very often. If you've got a guy in full cover up against a bunch of aliens with light plasmas, not using Hunker Down can get your guy killed.



Looks interesting, will check it out. I've played almost 50 times over on Classic Ironman. Classic is just not meant to be played on Ironman, I think. It punishes small mistakes too much. Lose a few rookies and your satellites/laser tech will delay too long. Go too fast on a bomb defusal mission and you'll lose half your experienced team... go too slow and you've practically lost the game what with the critical 'side mission' bonuses and the resulting panic. Lose a Captain+ early on and you're doomed, especially if it's a sniper.

I suppose I never had that problem because I game the "alien cluster" spawn system.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/01/xcom-2-announced/

sequel just got announced. set in a future where the aliens won and youre fighting back against them to free humanity.

xcom EU is probably one of the games that has grown on me the most so im hyped.

...what if they turn x-com into aterritory control and capture and defend ala JA2

...WHAT IF THEY MAKE IT BASICALLY SCI-FI JA2

UHHHHHHHHHHH

YES!

:addicted:

(http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/15/jun/xcom2.jpg)

im already liking the new UI. im glad this trend of burying information in submenus out of a misunderstood sense of "accessibility" seems to be coming to an end.

honestly my biggest wish for this game would be procedurally generated maps. i put many many hours into EU and playing the same maps over and over again got kinda tiresome. i dont even care if theyre just stuck together from predesigned chunks, i want more map variety dammit.

procedural maps are already confirmed. they are built from level chunks ala xcom 1

ooooooh

i might actually buy this day 1 (extremely rare for me these days)

PC only. Guess I need to get a gaming PC. I'm not made of money, Firaxis! :-X

I really loved XCOM and will probably drop so many hours on the sequel.

That said, I am not sure the premise makes sense from a story standpoint. ****spoilerss**** The invasion was supposed to be a test to find a suitable species to work as a heir/transplant to the ethereals. As far as the other subjugated species show, they brutally reegineered them to the point of near unrecognizability to make them their battle thralls. I dont think humanity would live colonized as it is seem to be shown here.

The Advent website is all about people mysteriously disappearing, so I guess the Unification and Advent are a front and the aliens are experimenting on the populace in secret?

Really excited for the sequel.  Really glad to see the team is confident enough (and deservedly so) to make a sequel that significantly changes the overarching structure rather than just making more of the same.  

Multi-platform usually means bad interfaces so I'm actually pretty happy that it will only be on the PC tbh.

Really like the idea of having a more offensive role and trying to take the planet back from the aliens. But yeah from a story standpoint it seems odd. Is everything that happened in Enemy Unknown/Within retconned now?

Looks like they're just going with the bad ending? Or some more shit went down in the intervening 20 years? The Ethereals did talk about them wanting to prepare mankind for the real threat, so beating the Ethereals may have doomed us?

Oh man, my hype levels are off the charts right now.

i thought the EU interface was pretty good actually, tho admittedly the xcom2 UI looks better. EU had a few problems with unnecessarily hidden info (like i said) and aiming grenades was wonky. but other than that it was good.

I hope the snake lady means there's a bunch of experimenting with the human genome we might be able to take part in to defeat our alien overlords.

otoh firaxis had kindof a bad run lately with civ beyond earth and sid meiers starships. lets hope they break it with this game.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Beyond Earth was okay, it just paled in comparison to Civ V because it wasn't all that different. I think most people would have considered it a decent 4X strategy game if it hadn't been trying to live up to Civ V and both its expansions.

Starships sounds like it was a mess. Haven't played it myself, but I get the sense it was originally supposed to be a lighter mobile/tablet game. Then they brought it to PC and made it sound like a full strategy game and people were understandably disappointed.

The fact that XCOM 2 is coming as a PC exclusive and that they're focusing on modding is a good sign to me though. It sounds like they know their audience and they know exactly what they (as developers) want from the game, which is more than I can say for Starships. The fact that the screenshots they've released are showing some different types of gameplay to EU also suggests to me that it won't be suffering from the problem of stagnation as Beyond Earth. My only concern is that they deviate too much from what made EU great and end up with a totally different game.

But for the time being, I'm still pretty hyped for this.

Details on how XCOM 2 will use procgen.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/04/xcom-2s-procedurally-generated-maps-ign-first

I really wished they'd go back to this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeVTqf0RHHc) after they satisfied the die hard fans with the last game. Still some of the best VFX I've seen in any game. Everyone called it a Fallout ripoff when they demoed it in 2011, now Fallout 4 looks to be following a similar art style.

Mechanically it seems like a fps version of the bureau, which in turn felt like a poor mans mass effect 3

who are "they", its not even the same developer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok65u-2DoVw

Hmm...

whats wrong with it? looks good to me.

It's mostly the presentation I'm not a big fan of...

I don't really like the look of the city. Looks so clean and minimalistic and overly stylized to the point of lacking detail that it to me almost looks placeholder or unfinished. I also remember Jake Solomon talking about how he didn't want to remake Terror from the Deep, because to him one of the key components of XCOM was fighting aliens in everyday environments (as opposed to deep in the sea). So placing it in this futuristic city seems odd. Hopefully only some of the missions take place in this city.

And I really didn't like the music. XCOM 1 had music with a distinct style and personality. This felt like generic placeholder heroic music.

It probably didn't help with my opinion of the video either that the first enemies were generic-looking soldiers/robots in generic armor.

Gameplay-wise I liked some of the new stuff shown. Being able to pick up fallen comrades and bring them back to base. Choosing the evac spot. Seemed neat. I sure hope that wasn't a hacking minigame, though.

I think I probably just have to get used to the new look of the game...

i do actually like the new sleek look. i mean it's set in The Future(tm) and x-com was always pulp and b-movie inspired so it only makes sense that the new game would be set in a shiny *technopolis*. you do fight aliens in everyday environments, just that it's now the everyday environments Of The Corny B-Movie Future.

They've also said there are a lot of different environments this time around, so the sterile cities won't be the only place you visit.

I have really mixed feelings about the fact that the armor/city designs are all xcom: apocalypse homage.

On the one hand, apoc is blatantly the most interesting setting for an XCOM game,

on the other hand, apoc is visually completely grotesque (http://lparchive.org/X-COM-Apocalypse/Update%2029/xcoma054.png).

I dont think the tone of XCOM2 music is that different from some of the combat tracks from XCOM1, but I admit that so far the originals are more memorable.

I sor of okay with the city feeling. I wonder how much the more cinematic approach will detract from the experience tho. I liked the original slomo scenes and occasional third person view switches that happened, as it was just icing on the cake. Here everything looks a bit too orchestrated and I fear it might not make a more diverse experience. I would have to see a couple other missions to see if I my suspicions are unfounded tho


Also, I hope they dont drop controller support. Even on PC, I prefered that to mouse/kb controls

i switched that shit off after like my second battle & i hope u can do the same in the new gam

eh, there is a difference between cinematic shots and cinematic events. i dont mind the former, but rather the later.

The developer they interviewed after the gameplay footage was shown said that the whole thing was scripted. For example, the enemies don't get to appear on the map and immediately shoot at you like they did in the video. Also, everyone knows that rookies never hit anything, and yet they did.

So it probably seemed orchestrated because it is.

Welcome to the Avenger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ-rTdoiJZU)

looks like the base NPCs are more like real characters now.

Dropping Friday. This is one of the rare AAA games I'll buy on launch. I might even get the DLC season pass because I'm trash.

I am preloading it now :handshakeL: :crazy: :handshakeR:

Did they release a character creator tool yet or is that only on launch?

Don't think so.

I dont have the money alas. But oh how i wish to join the fray

Why is this PC only?! I loved the last one!  :'(

they wanted a more robust ui and more extensive modding support. should come to other desktop platforms eventually though (mac/linux), firaxis has a pretty good record of supporting multiple OS releases

it's so they can focus on developing and optimizing the game for their core platform rather than porting it to multiple.

http://www.pcgamer.com/xcom-2-creative-director-explains-why-its-pc-exclusive/

tbh, i can understand their rationale, seeing as these games are pretty "niche" for AAA releases and firaxis is pretty much the last dev keeping the TBS genre alive in the AAA sphere*. so they probably have to cut corners elsewhere to make sure the game is both polished and profitable.

*(fuck ubisoft and what they did to heroes of might & magic)

that said, xcom EW had a surprisingly very good and full featured mobile port. i'm gonna miss being able to play this on the bus, but oh well.

This is the first time I feel a console peasant.  :waaagh:

Seems so weird to me when the shtick of the last XCOM was literally "a TBS than can be played with a gamepad". And it's Unreal anyway. Still hoping they'll port it one day. XCOM retail sales seemed pretty good for a niche genre, so I think there's a slight chance.

will depend on pc version sales i guess.

my fave feature of this game: your characters can have different accents now. everyone talking with the same BADASS MURICAN SPAYSS MUHREEN voice in EU/EW (aside from the few non-english language soundfiles that exist, that is) was a little ridiculous.

12 hours to release. I might actually die from this hype

might actually unlock earlier in euro territories. or at least i've had this with some games that were supposed to unlock at 2AM and then unlocked at 11PM instead. fallout 4 for instance. but otoh i haven't preordered a lot of stuff on steam so who knows.

also i did end up getting the season pass because i already know i'm going to buy the dlcs anyway.  :shrug2:

btw i changed the title of this thread to better reflect the content. hope u don't mind, dragonmaw

 :handshakeL: :-* :handshakeR:

FINE w/ME

Wine F/me

this gam doesn't have the greatest performance. i can only run it at min settings and there are still some framerate hiccups. i guess im gonna need a better pee cee at some point. also the tutorial is really really overlong, but i'm probably just saying that because im already familiar with xcom EU and should have just skipped it. there are some new mechanics, but nothing revolutionary from what i'm seeing. my favorite part is probably the more varied mission objectives.

uhhhh how do you enable ironman in this thing? don't tell me i have to unlock it first or some dumb shit.

edit: oh lol, you have to disable the tutorial in the new game menu and then click start to get a popup that lets u enable ironman. UI Design™

anyway, so far this seems like it's mechanically even better than EW. don't take that as a final word tho, i haven't explored the systems enough yet.

I'm not sure that I like it as much. And the real problem for me is the graphics / UI. Maybe some of it is because I have an older computer and I can't turn all the options on and put it in high-res, but for instance, look at this. This is my first procedural (I think?) mission after the two tutorial/story ones:

(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/320122457687539780/636A62EECFD8EDC7B125C38F28AE5F706DA8CD80/)

Just about every damn thing on the screen is a different shade of blue. Why aren't my soldiers distinct and easy to make out from the grid? Why do the UI elements fade into the terrain - of which they are the same color! - to make them harder to see?

Of that quartet of soldiers on the bottom, the top left guy is a sexy-lookin' black bald dude. The guy on the bottom right is wearing a green ballcap. Yet because of lighting and stuff, their heads are very nearly the same color.

Also, they've scaled the view to show more of the map this time around, making your people look smaller, and even more indistinct. My first impressions are not great. :(

/ those jaggies aren't visible in the actual game screen, I think they are compression artifacts



EDIT:
Here's a couple turns in:
(http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/320122457687593717/C297FFB678F95006E140C154FE6503248FD46774/)

Dude on the left is supposed to be a enemy sergeant or something and have red piping on his headgear to make him distinctive. At least, that's how he looks in the action shots, yet it's all disappeared into a sorta-blurry smear here. He's hardly distinctive from his lesser alien soldier on the right, I certainly can't easily tell the difference, except for the red HP bars.

Not likin' this at all. Maybe it's just this tileset. :(

i'm playing on minimal settings (on my monitor's native res tho) and i can see everything just fine.  :shrug2:

i really hope they fix the loading times btw. those are clearly bugged/poorly optimized (and yes i'm using a SSD).

Confirmed, the resolution was the fault, here. Turned it up, and I'm good to go.
/ RIP squaddie sexymans, my fifth mission was a terror attack ("retaliation"). Good ol' X-COM RNG is still here
// And Canadians still best snipers

What's the deal with the resolution options? It seems like I can't pick anything higher than 1336x768 and it makes the game look like ass.

Edit: Never mind, when I restarted the game all the options were available. I have no idea what the issue was before though...

Release bugzzz

yeah those screenshots looked like a resolution issue (wow the jaggies haha)

To my fellow Shitty Computer Owners: I tweaked some stuff in


and the game runs perfectly smooth on my laptop now and even looks somewhat cleaner. here are some of my tweaks

LensFlares=False
FogVolumes=False
bAllowLightShafts=False
Distortion=False
AllowRadialBlur=False

You can also use this guide: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/11cvda/performance_tweaks_for_xcom_ive_tested_on_the_ini/

Most of these tweaks still work since it's the same engine

is it just me or is this game a lot harder than xcom EU? the "normal" (veteran) difficulty is already as hard as, if not harder than classic in EU.

improvement: the chief scientist doesn't have an annoying fake accent this time around. tho stilted speech mannerisms persist.

The tactical portion isn't harder, really. I've only lost one dude, in addition to the two mandatory ones in the tutorial, so far. But the "stealth" gimmick can lead you into some silly situations if you're not careful, because it's such a retarded gimmick. There's nothing to be gained by trying to sneak past patrols, you'll just wind up fighting on multiple fronts as you're englobed, and that's hard as fuck.

The strategy portion is lots harder. The gating of tech and options behind research and buildings is more strict than it was in EU, and scrambling for scientists and engineers is so much harder. I've still only got one engineer, for instance, and it's really choking my pipeline. I've been finding a ton of scientists, which means the game is appraising my science advances and throwing stuff at me I have the research to defeat, but not the items or facilities (so I don't actually have them). I'm not in dire straits yet - like I said, I've only lost the one soldier so far.

i use the concealment mechanic mainly for scoping enemy locations and then setting up an ambush which gives me an advantage at the start of a mission. i don't think you're really meant to sneak past patrols seeing as you have to kill all enemies in most missions anyway.

This "concealment" thing is really annoying me, super-duper much. It's like a chain of events that you see as a programmer and you stare at the guy and ask him why he just didn't use a different implementation.
(In X-Com: EU)
1. "Hey, guys, how about we make cover super important? It was kind of understated in the original X-Com, and maybe it's a personal bugbear of mine, so let's give crazy bonuses and penalties oriented around it!"
2. "Huh. Well, stumbling into an enemy means that you can just shoot the hell out of it because it's out in the open now, thanks to the cover system, letting you steamroll the map. Hey, let's give a little movement and have the aliens scurrying for cover when they're seen, that'd fix that!"
(2a. Simplification of AP system and removal(mostly) of multiple shots per turn may also have entered this conversation at some point.)

Time to make X-Com 2:
3. "Hey guys, the action is slow to start because everyone hates that the aliens get an intrinsic discovery advantage. So, how do we patch that? Wait, I know, we can have a concealment mode! We'll still have all the annoying shit from the first time, but instead, we'll give the player one opportunity per map to have the advantage! Doesn't matter if the aliens and the x-com guys lose track of each other later, we just want it to happen once."

They really needed to go back and examine their AP/cover systems and rework them, rather than just push in this sloppy gameplay patch of "concealment".
I really wanted to like this game, I've been so hyped for it. But it's letting me down in a bunch of different ways. I'll probably talk whine about more later on. And maybe I'm set on a negative course after my disastrous first impression. :(

given that you apparently disliked xcom EU, why did you expect to like this?


why? these systems work fine for what the game tries to do. specifically i don't understand what the problem with the lack of "AP" is, other than it being different from the original x-com. the 1 move + 1 other action system is a common mechanic in tactical skirmish games that usually works well in them. and it works well in xcom. nothing wrong with the cover system (which the entire gameplay dynamic is based around) or the free move aliens get either. the real problem is that EU doesn't pressure you to do anything at all (outside of timed missions), which is where the slowness comes from.

No, I really liked X-Com:EU. I played the shit out of it. Steam records me at 120 hrs, and I know it was longer than that, because there was a bug during much of that time where it wouldn't record your hours correctly if you played in offline mode. Probably more like 200 hrs.
And I was so pleased to have a modern X-Com that I could look past its flaws, although I could still note they were there. I don't think I dislike X-Com 2, I just think maybe it could've been a better game than what we got. Disappointed.


These systems do work fine. They're not elegant, and they're simple, but they work pretty satisfactorily.

No, this was actually a major problem, because it forced the player to advance through the maps at all times as if they were under surveillance and play extremely cautiously, moving 1/2 speed per round (to sit in Overwatch). Later on you could get around this with a set of snipers with Squadsight and blunder into enemies with your assault units, to then get your snipers to hit them from afar, but the 'free move' is a silly gimmick that was introduced in order to make up for the extreme cover bonuses/penalties.

This problem of crawling through maps was also present in the original X-Com, but it added to the suspense. The aliens didn't get free moves, but you'd stumble into view of one, and then suddenly try to get as many of your guys to shoot at it as possible. Frequently, there was three or four of his buddies backing him out just outside of the fog of war, and if you didn't handle the situation correctly, you'd take losses. Statistically, you had to play the numbers of how many troops to advance and how far, since you had roughly twice (or up to four times) as many units as you do in the reboot - you could play better odds about taking shots and such, even if the troops were less accurate than they are in the reboot. And it was a lot more pleasing to the player, because it felt like if you fucked up, it was your fault. Not you potentially getting screwed over by a quasi-random scurry-move that maybe forces you to overextend or be insufficiently aggressive in response.
Now the scurry-move does work in the reboot EU and 2, but speaking from a design standpoint, it's ultimately frustrating because it removes player agency. The player has to play around it - which is the snail-crawl through the map.



Kind of? But that's a results-oriented way of looking at the problem, instead of method-oriented. Yes, timed missions force the player to maintain speed, but that doesn't solve the initial problem of why a player would want to move cautiously - it's a gameplay hotfix, not a solution. Evidently, Firaxis agreed, because they introduced the concealment mode to try to help solve the problem and at least make players want to run in and feel safe.
But again, that's not an actual solution, it's a post-problem fix. Going back to their original implementation and reworking it so that this problem didn't appear at all would have been a smarter thing to do - because you can still run into this problem half-way through a mission, when both you and the aliens have lost sight of each other, yet there's more squads of them to take out, so you move slow like a snail on your way through cover until you spot something. It's also bad, I've noticed, on the urban maps with lots of corners, because you can frequently stumble into enemy vision without realizing it until too late.

I was thinking about this a little earlier as I was doing my job tasks, and I realized this is almost exactly what Terror From The Deeps was to the original X-Com: If you wanted more X-Com, that's what it is. Not any real gameplay improvements, but the game's a little harder(especially in the strategy phase), has a new setting, some new enemies and stuff, but it's pretty much the same game as the first time around. X-Com 2 has the same BS arbitrary choice "which penalty/reward do you want to take?" missions, and so on.
I find I really miss all the troop voice accents that were in EU. :(


I do like the reworking of the Geoscape so that you're not just spending time, but actually doing things. Even if it's nonsensical things like spend 7 days to pick up a monthly supply drop.

what? there are more accents in this that than there were in EU. i never noticed troops in EU having different accents tbh.


how does it "make up" for anything when cover is literally the central game mechanic? it's not like they just arbitrarily decided to give you "extreme" cover bonuses, the entire game is based around using cover and it's a decent system too. i don't know what's supposed "inelegant" about it. the scurry is a necessity to ensure that enemies are in cover when you face them, so as to not give you an ridiculous advantage. how else would you handle it? imo, if firaxis had just made this a "hidden" mechanic (i.e. you trigger an enemy group and they automatically spawn in cover within a certain radius), no one would have complained. singleplayer strategy games need some sort of rule asymmetry to work.


i find the same to be true for new xcom and i don't think you have that much less agency. the decisionmaking is just tighter.

Is it the central mechanic? I certainly agree it's become the dominant one, but doesn't it ring some warning bells when you're more anxious about getting your troops caught out of cover than a scary alien invasion and what might be coming next? I thought the central mechanics were permadeath, strategic depth translating to tactical combat, and of course the tactical combat itself, with character growth/investment mechanics. Other tactical games use cover systems as a matter of course, but it's rarely so dramatically extreme as it is in the X-Com reboots.
 
Once you accept that as a foundation, then yes, everything else will flow 'logically' from it, but I question the premise. Like I said before, it's similar to a chain of events or fixes you see as a programmer and then stare at the guy who did it and ask him why he didn't use a better original implementation. Problem is, probably as it was at Firaxis, is that now they feel they have invested this time into getting their implementation to work, they don't want to go back to the beginning and rework it to be smarter.


Well, like I said, go back and rework the tactical system. That'd be playtesting and stuff. I can imagine they tried something as simple as returning to concealment mode and found it OP, but there are other solutions, although some of those dreamier solutions may be restricted by using the Unreal engine in a 3rd person mode. I don't think you have to return to an expectation of 8-24 man squads and huge maps and AP meters.
Could involve some strategy reworking too. Maybe your units could be more singular and heroic, rather than easily replaceable.

The game has many central mechanics, and you just listed a bunch of them. There are a several different systems layered over top of each other, including the resources metagame, the character growth mechanics, and the combat itself. The combat system is designed from the ground up around their cover system, so in that context, it definitely is the central mechanic. So it's a bit ridiculous to claim that Firaxis just kind of threw in a half-baked cover mechanic and never went back to "fix" it — the whole combat system is pretty clearly designed with the idea of cover in mind.

You have a constant tension between your cover level, how good your shot is on an enemy, and now how much time is remaining. There are weapons and abilities designed around destroying cover and there are objects you can target to destroy cover. There are reliable types of cover, and there are types of cover that are risky (like cars that can set on fire, or second-floor rooms that can collapse). The entire Ranger class is built with the idea of a risk/reward tradeoff for leaving cover to use your sword. Clearly there's a lot based on cover as a mechanic.

It just seems to me like you're saying that Firaxis should have thrown out their entire system from EU because it's based on cover. Which is fair, I guess, if you accept that cover is innately bad, but I don't see why that's the case.

Thrown out? Nope. Tactical RPG's are pretty much my favourite game genre, and you definitely need a cover system, I think, to make for a good gameplay.
Scaled back a bit? Probably, though perhaps there are other solutions. The cover system in the reboots is very dramatic and severe, and maybe there doesn't need to be miscellanous crates/trees/other half-cover objects littering the maps in an almost nonsensical, Gears of War way. Again, you can see all these gameplay fixes and patches that are introduced, just to make the cover system work to the degree it does. Going back to the original X-com again, for instance, they had the kneel pose which reduced your profile while in the open. That's a simple solution for a simpler system - the reboots use flanking bonuses as well, which the originals didn't. Should flanking bonuses be in? Definitely! (The originals dealt with flanking generally by panicking your troops if they got shot at a lot during a round, which was a different method of introducing the idea).
Maybe having a longer vision range range than effective shooting range would be an elegant solution, but that brushes up against engine limitations, perhaps.

but... that's already the case?

and if it wasn't, why would engine limitations affect it in any way?

I still don't understand why you think that using cover as the central battle mechanic is a bad thing though. It's just a different approach to the tactics genre, where sightlines and cover are given more focus than defense and damage per turn. Plenty of people (myself and presumably Silbereisen included) really enjoy the cover-based combat system because it's different from other games. Had they scaled it back because tactics games aren't "supposed" to be as cover-based, I would have been just as disappointed as you are.

You keep throwing out all these mechanics and design decisions which are "fixes and patches" for the cover system, but most of them seem either unrelated or a matter of preference. Like, going through a few of your points:

• The timer system doesn't really have anything to do with cover. It encourages you not to turtle, but even if there weren't cover, you could still just advance really slowly through the level.
• Concealment isn't just there give cover bonuses. It lets you scope out the level and find where pods of enemies are so that you can plan ahead and place your units in preparation rather than going in blind. It's also thematically fitting given that you're now the attacking force rather than a defending one.
• Scurry moves give you a bunch of free shots as long as you're on overwatch or have any abilities that let you attack moving enemies. As Silbereisen said earlier, if the enemies just started in cover, nobody would complain (but ironically that would actually give you less of an advantage against them).
• Having stuff scattered around the level to hide behind is really not that ugly a "fix." We're willing to accept that human and alien forces move all at once on opposite turns for the sake of game mechanics, and that everyone stands totally still in between. Is having a few extra traffic cones and bags of trash sitting around in an urban landscape seriously a problem?

If you're interested, Polygon has a great article on the making of XCOM: EU (http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/1/31/3928710/making-of-xcoms-jake-solomon-firaxis-sid-meier). There's also some early gameplay footage where it still used time units and didn't have the current cover system.

here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKS2hz4u7HY)

It's pretty clear that a lot of testing and iteration went into the current combat system. They didn't just throw it together and work around it for the rest of the development cycle, and I'm not sure why you feel the need to prove that to justify your opinion. It's okay if you don't like the cover system, but that doesn't make Firaxis bad designers. It just means they took a different route than you would have preferred.

So anyway, in my opinion this game is Really Good and I think most of the mechanics changes are for the better. There are a number of things that discourage turtling (mission timers, concealment mode, soldiers get more HP (i think), certain unit special abilities) which was the #1 problem in EU. Some people hate the mission timers, I like em and actually found them to be generous enough contrary to what the haters claim. I also like how the geoscape is more interactive and much more strategic. I'm also glad they removed the flying invisible squid aliens whose only purpose seemed to be to make you waste time.

The new base building is good too. I thought it was one of the most unrewarding mechanics of EU. The "puzzle" aspect was too simple and shitty positioning of steam could screw you over early game. I like that it's now more about what you build rather than where you build it.

Things that are worse: Music is less memorable, enemies don't feel as distinct. Performance issues that will hopefully get fixed soon. I'm also a bit split on the "avatar project" thing. I like that it's more flexible than the EU doom tracker and doesn't railroad you as much. But I also sometimes feel like it's unnecessarily convoluted, with the establishing contact with the resistance and etc stuff. The fact that the game doesn't make clear what your actual goal is until after a few missions doesn't help either.

Oh also another problem: The ranger's melee attack is kind of OP. Getting caught outside of cover for 1 turn isn't even that bad (besides it doesn't even necessarily happen everytime you use it), considering it's an attack with 80-100% accuracy that does a shit ton of dmg and can potentially 1shot every enemy early game.

I never used gunslinger snipers in EU/EW but now they are incredible. You get extra shots that cost no actions and there's an active skill that lets you shoot once on every visible enemy with your pistol. It's amazing for cleaning up what remains after throwing a grenade at an alien pod.

Also: Be very careful with Rangers because there are some enemies (Mutons) who will just shank you if you try a melee attack against them. This class does great damage but it's probably the one that is most likely to fuck you up if you don't know what you're doing.

Nah, it's not the case. I mean, you may have to do a partial move, but sight range is effective engagement range. I mean, I dunno, I've not used the Unreal engine and I have by no means insight into Firaxis's code, but if the viewing frustrum is specificed to just what you see on-screen, why is it such a resource hog? More vision probably means more light calculations and stuff. Like I said, may.



Look, the over-exaggerated cover isn't the problem, necessarily. But it has caused, indirectly, a lot of other problems which have been given kludgey "fixes" and sometimes player-originated work-arounds. I think that's been gone over several times in this thread alone, not to mention other places where you may see critique of X-Com, so if you don't understand it - with all due respect - I don't have much time for your opinion. I really don't mean to be elitist or a dick because I honestly hate that shit, but if at the same time, you're not bothering to pay attention, why should I give much attention to you, right?
Would it be easier to "solve" the problem (again, that even if you can't see, Firaxis saw) by scaling back the cover bonuses? Sure! Probably. But as I said before, repeatedly, there are other possible solutions.
But you do raise an important point and suggest it's enjoyable and wanted. Well, that may be! There IS nothing wrong with liking it. But again, as I said before, Firaxis appears to disagree, since they introduced all these kludgey fixes to 'solve' the side-effects...

I have no disagreement that a lot of work went into the original X-Com:EU implementation. It was actually lauded at the time of an example of playtested work - especially since they had to justify themselves to grognards and old aficionados of the series, like me, who lapped that up first on a 486.
But that doesn't mean it was flawless or there weren't problems with the reboot. I noted them, other people noted them, and Firaxis noted those problems. Instead of going back and reworking the system to smooth the problems, they threw patches at it. All I'm saying is that the patches don't feel good enough. Just like with TFTD - this feels like a big expansion to X-Com: EU, not an actual iterative title. Quite effectively, nothing's changed, though there are improvements to the things that were already there. That doesn't mean I dislike or hate it - just that I wanted to see more, and very I"m disappointed I didn't get more, especially when I see all the work that went into everything else besides gameplay.
I'm happy as shit to play a new X-Com. Hell, the actually RNG-generated maps alone is enough to keep me going. I've been playing it every day.


Trufax. I wound up restarting my game after being crippled from RNG with regards to Engineers, and man, Rangers pwn the first few months.

Idk what "effective engagement range" is. Because you know, it's possible to see enemies pretty far away but have low chances of hitting them (because theyre too far away). Shots with <50% accuracy are usually not worth taking. Or do you mean something else?

lets not forget squadsight

Generally speaking, if a squaddie is in vision range of an enemy, they're in shooting range or move and shoot range - more relevantly perhaps, a Ranger is just about always in Slash range of any alien in their (personal) vision range. There are edge cases, it's not 1:1, maybe like 100:85.
Doesn't mean they're in engagement range of your entire squad for sure! But personal engagement, definitely.

:-\

I directly responded to several of your statements about the system being a kludge. I don't see how much more attention I could be paying. I've seen plenty of criticisms (many of them valid, and perhaps yours is too) leveled against the reboot, but you're the first person I've seen claiming that the very existence of the cover system is the biggest issue. I'm just trying to get inside your head.

Your argument seems to be that the cover system causes problems, and that making cover less important would solve those problems. While that may be true, it would introduce problems of its own, like how to encourage people to consider unit placement, how to make the level layouts more meaningful than just being a backdrop for combat, etc. And for that matter, it would require totally rethinking much of the game's combat since it was designed around the central idea of cover.

Every change in game mechanics is going to come with certain tradeoffs and issues that have to be addressed. So what I still don't understand is why you're interpreting every mechanic that Firaxis has added to XCOM's combat as a "kludge" worthy of sending the whole thing back to the drawing board. You're making it sound like Firaxis' additions in XCOM 2 are an admission of defeat on behalf of the cover system, but it looks to me like them doing what any game developer would do: iterating on a system that they (and most players, judging by the game's ratings) are happy with, but want to tweak here and there.


I'm with you on all of these, especially the world map stuff. It's definitely more interesting than the one in EU/EW, but the game throws a lot of concepts at you without really explaining them. It felt like I was making a lot of uninformed decisions, because I have a bunch of different resources and markers all over the map (and ways to affect them through hacking in battle), but I don't even know what any of them do.

More than anything, they could have just straightforward about the fact that "contacting the local resistance" in a region is the same mechanic as satellites. Once you figure that out, things suddenly make sense lol. Also a bit odd that you have to collect your monthly income yourself, but I guess thematically it ties nicely into the guerilla warfare theme.

Also I like that there are more ways to make money outside of the regular income now (giving you cash for clearing out debris in particular was a great idea). In EU I often had this problem where I saved up for a big expensive building combo, then built that as quickly as I could so as to not waste time. Then, when I needed money at any time during the month for whatever reason (such as eg hiring new troops), I was too broke. 

Yeah, I'm feeling a little less like I need to keep a constant buffer of 200 moneybux sitting around just in case I suddenly need to buy something really expensive.

I feel like the overwatch animations are way less janky this time around. There were a lot of times in EU/EW where you'd go into slow motion, but then one or two people were still kind of moving their limbs at full speed or sliding around awkwardly. It feels more like actual slow motion now, and the animations are really nice. Still lots of awkward pauses before/after kills and clipping issues though.

Anyone else finding the story a little... derivative? Trains bringing people to imprisonment camps, an evil organization in search of genetic superiority, etc. I wonder if that's just a result on the Firaxis staff researching the obvious in order to present a reasonable view of an occupation and a resistance. Shame they didn't take more examples from Central and South America,. The notion of a second alien faction that's working against the Ethereals and their pawns (paralleling CIA-backed revolutions) could've been interesting, and paved a way for the next sequel to go interstellar instead of earthbound, or something. Ah well.
Meanwhile, I think I might have all my squaddies speak French...



There are very few tactics game that don't use cover. Final Fantasy Tactics comes to mind, it was about elevation and line of sight, not cover (inasmuch as cover could block sightlines). But the cover system in the X-Com reboots is grossly exaggerated (I had for instance a 40-something % shot the other day against a Muton that was one square diagonally away from the rifle-armed squaddie). Reducing the cover penalties/bonuses wouldn't change player's desires to want cover. And I'd argue that the level layouts could use some cleaning up, having a crate or bench or something every few squares just so you have plenty of cover options is a little absurd in all tilesets.
But the cover exaggeration is not necessarily the problem, but the side-effects it causes, are. "Concealment" is definitely a kludge, otherwise it would be more consistent. And the mission timers (first brought to great effect in the X-Com:EU expansion) are definitely kludges, they're Firaxis saying, "We recognize that you've learned to do this very safely and sanely, so we're gonna make you rush and overextend because we don't like the results of how our system taught you to play".

When Firaxis introduces gameplay "patches" like these to deliberately change the learned response to their implementation, it becomes appallingly obvious that it is inelegant and insufficient to the task set before it. That's not iteration so much as reversal.
And that's fine to disagree with me, I'm no authority or bouncer. I just don't like it. It's ugly and it's begging for a rework.

I find the notion that the singular extremity of the cover system is the main attraction in X-Com - plausible, but unlikely. Maybe! I would've thought a lot more folks play for the IP and the mixed modes and so on, but I could be terribly wrong.

I'm just repeating myself on this at this point, so I'll talk about other parts of X-Com instead.

couldn't this dumb game have at least told me that using the skulljack spawns an extremely powerful enemy that can teleport and clone itself?? i just lost my 2 highest ranked characters thanks to this.

I only lost one myself. ;)

But I'm OK with this because I haven't had much trouble with the game at all so far, and I'm doing the final mission now.

yeah i pretty much lost my veteran ironman campaign after 2 squad wipes in a row. im gonna start a new one.

also i wish bradford would just shut the hell up sometimes. "commander you don't have much time left etc etc". yeah, no shit i can see the freaking bigass mission timer in the top right corner of the screen THANK YOU VERY MUCH. i hope the "reduce beginner VO" option mitigates this.

honestly, i wish you could turn off more of the excessive feedback, like the game taking a few seconds at the start of the turn to tell you your soldiers are poisoned, panicked, etc. also the little cutscene zooming in on your mission objective when it first enters your LOS. as if there wasn't a huge icon pointing to it on your screen the entire time. this was something that already bothered me about EU. they're small things, but they add up over the course of a campaign and end up wasting time.

still really really enjoying this game tho.

oh also i still really disagree with starsrift about concealment. it speeds up the first few turns of missions so much that i can't imagine going back to EU's slow ass opening crawl. tho you probably lose the the time gained through concealment staring at a loading screen lol.

Hey, I don't disagree with that! I disagree with the current state of game balance that makes concealment so necessary.

Also, Avenger defense missions are dicks. They literally spawned aliens faster than I could kill them, I was on T2 weapons and I hadn't built any defense matrix - but a dude on another forum told me it doesn't actually matter, he had two defense matrix, an engineer to get them to fire 2x a turn, and t3 weapons, and it just gets worse.

Also, I keep wondering if the long loading times are because it's doing map generation and baking lighting and stuff. Stupid Unreal engine.

Nah, i think the loading times are just bugged and/or poorly optimized, seeing as the loading time to get back to base is longer than the one to start a mission (and can sometimes be "sped up" by pressing buttons).

Firaxis just dropped the ball on optimization in general. The most bizarre thing is how the character customization screen runs slower than everything else. I hope there's gonna be a patch sometime soon so I can maybe play at more than sub-minimal settings. On the positive side, I haven't come across any gameplay relevant bugs at all.

So, some things about the Codex to help out:

1) If you hit the Codex with a reaction shot during their initial reveal (the scamper move), they won't clone from taking damage. You can combine this via Ambush to kill the Codex before they have a chance to clone.
2) Cloning causes the Codex to split their health equally between both Cortex clones, which makes them significantly easier to kill; a Mag Pistol can usually one-shot a Codex clone.

it wasnt so much that the codex itself was difficult, it's that i was already surrounded by a bunch of troopers and 2 vipers and a muton that i ended up accidentally triggering. a new unexpected spawn completely fucked up my strategy which was already hanging by a thin thread.

Flashbang grenades prevent a lot of stuff from what i read, including splicing and shit. I wish i could play xdumb2

ah yeah, i triggered the codex way before i saw vipers or mutons

tbh i totally misjudged the quest objectives and started far too late on them. i wanted to get a solid basis first. i also underestimated the importance of the proving grounds and built it too late.

yeah i did the skulljack the moment i made it haha

To be specific, pressing Caps Lock causes the game to suspend all rendering and issue all load requests at the same time. It's a dev command. That's why it speeds up the base load significantly; they probably ran into long loads while testing and decided to build a command to speed it up.

then why didnt they just, u know, speed up the load times and eliminate the need for this "command"? wat a heck.

also regardless of that, the game also has framerate issues it shouldn't have considering graphical fidelity.

because it freezes the game, they wanted an animated loading screen, loading single requests at a time is more stable, the list is endless

still dum

this gam has 2many unnecessary animations that slow it down in general. but that was already a problem with EU

Finished the game last night. The short version is that it's a significant improvement over Enemy Unknown. Although EU/EW has had some time to mature (the expansion pack offers a ton of content) so right now I'd say they're about equal, but XCOM 2 is going to be better once it receives more content because its basic systems are superior.

The serious performance issues have already been mentioned, hopefully it will be patched at some point.

The strategic layer... This has also been said, but being able to go and actually do things (instead of waiting for things to happen to you) makes a big difference and you feel more in control of the situation. Although at first you will be annoyed that you have to go and pick up your supply drops each month, unlike in EU where you just get instant money.

However, the doom clock is not threatening enough IMO. I never felt like I was running out of time to beat the Avatar Project. If all the dots on the track are filled, it just starts a countdown and as long as you can raid a facility or a blacksite during the countdown you are never going to be in danger of losing to the Avatar Project. Personally I would like to see some real consequences if you let the track get filled up too often. Maybe they could start destroying your radio relays or something if you allow them to make that much progress, I don't know.

The tactical layer: a lot more interesting with the varied objectives. In EU all missions were basically "kill the aliens + get some Meld if you can". Now there are missions to destroy objects, hack computers, protect objects from the aliens, etc. My favorite is the one where you knock out a hostile VIP and bring them to the Avenger, makes you feel like a badass.

Unlike the Avatar thing, the time limits on missions are extremely tight and I feel they might be too harsh on some maps. I was able to finish all missions within the time limit, but still felt like I was being rushed into making bad decisions and that wasn't cool. Also sometimes the civilians will block pathing to your objective which can really ruin your day.

Balance-wise, I like that the difficulty curve is smoother in this game compared to EU/EW. Those satellites took so many resources to build that you didn't have any money left for equipment. Now you have enough supplies to buy some upgrades for your troops early on, making the beginning of the game more friendly to newbies. It also helps that much of the cost of making new resistance contacts comes in Intel, which is a separate resource from what you use to buy items.

Sword rangers are amazing in the early game, but quickly fall off in usefulness, probably because the swords can't keep up with the damage of other weapons. Each sword upgrade seems to give +1 damage instead of +2 damage. I would recommend retraining your sword rangers into a stealth-focused build when the swords don't cut it anymore (heh).

Other classes are mostly balanced. I like the buffs to gunslinger snipers a lot and I use them much more often now. Grenadiers do the thing that heavies did in Enemy Unknown and it's just as effective now as it was then. Maybe even more effective because of the armor shredding. Tbh I find it a little boring that the same tactic that worked so well in Enemy Unknown (spamming explosives with the heavy) remains the most generally useful tactic in terms of classes.

Mimic beacons are by far the best utility item and probably needs to be nerfed. Basically when you put a Mimic Beacon out the aliens will focus ONLY on destroying the mimic for as long as it lives. They will even put themselves in bad cover just to get a better shot at the Mimic. Sometimes they will waste their entire turn trying to defeat the Mimic and then you can just flank them and take them out. I'm not sure how to balance it, but a good place to start would be increasing the cost of the item like they did with Mimetic Skin.

Finally, I will say I was pleasantly surprised by the characters on the Avenger. The plot might not be that good overall, but I enjoyed interacting with Tygan, Shen Junior and Bradford a lot and seeing what they think of each other. Also the final transmission from the Spokesman was amazing. Thanks for the help, bald shadowy dude.

i agree on the avatar project thing definitely. i thought the doom track in EU was too strict and railroaded your decisions too much. so at first i was happy about the more freeform way it's handled in xcom2, but now i feel like they went too far in the opposite direction.

patch just came out btw

game doesnt run any better after the patch lol

Thing that happened the other day:

I was on a kidnap VIP mission and only had 2 turns left. The evac zone was on the roof of a building. The only enemy still alive was a mech that had seemingly skipped a turn and fucked off to some corner due to an AI glitch. Or so I thought. I managed to evac 3 of my soldiers and the VIP and would have easily gotten the other 2 out next turn.

Except the mech that I erroneously thought could no longer hit me decided to destroy the roof I was standing on, knocking down my 2 remaining guys to the building's ground floor and blocking off access to the evac zone. I only had 1 turn left at that point. I thought "maybe if I destroy the evac zone using a grenade it'll be moved to my level". So I did that. The game DID spawn a new evac zone in response, except it was in the opposite corner of the map. FUCK THIS GAME SOMETIMES, SERIOUSLY

By all accounts, what you did should have worked. I don't get how the programmers didn't catch that bug...

No, it worked. CA just ran out of tiem. :(

no it's all bradford's fault. not only is he an obnoxious handholding nanny who keeps interrupting gameplay to tell u obvious things, he is also fucking stupid and/or a sadist.

"hmmm ok this roof our soldiers were supposed to evac from collapsed and alien interceptors are closing in on them. should just pick them up from now exposed the ground floor? nah, that would be too simple. oh i know, tell the skyranger to land 2 blocks away in an area our guys can't possibly reach in time. that is clearly the best plan".

tl;dr fuck bradford

The mod that shows if a move is going to flank an enemy is a godsend. Same for the "stop wasting my time" mod.

New patch just came out. For me at least, the performance difference is pretty much day and night.

And they nurfed the meme beacon

How will I faceroll the missions now...

same here. fun story, when i first ran after the patch, i was getting 1 fps on everything! it was much worse than before. but then i realized that for some reason it had ignored that i had set specs to a minimum. once i killed the process and reloaded, everything ran 40fps on avergae (minimum settings on 720p mind you), which si fine for me.

Long War 2 for XCOM 2 has been released
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=844674609