Erkki

On the normal level it seems you can control panic well enough that you can delay the story missions sometimes. Although, I did have high panic before the alien base assault and lost China. Afterwards I got lucky I guess and panic has been mostly under control.

Classic Ironman is way too brutal for me. After 5 or 6 missions (2 of which failed) I had lost 10 men, and was left with 6 rookies or so. The one-shot kills by the aliens are just way too annoying, I think I will just try Normal Ironman.

Finished it. Normal was definitely on the easy side and I might play another game in Classic Ironman mode (maybe with the mod that was mentioned here).

Hmm... at the monthly council report, I go "mismanaged resources"... so maybe it's not a bug but something else I'm not aware of. There was a pending request I couldn't fulfill (they asked for 6 (SIX) cyberdisc corpses, maybe it was that)

That's not the case. it happened in the middle of the month. And as I said earlier, suddenly I had a lot of money coming in the previous monthly report (~1200). I actually did see this bug happen in real time some time earlier -- I bought something from engineering and the UI got stuck somehow and things started going negative. I reloaded after that, but failed to notice when it happened again.

Not to worry! A bug in game caused me to go into negative credits (or is there a legitimate situation when that might occur?); of course I saved over the previous save before I noticed. At least I got to build most of the weapons/armor I wanted and full satellite coverage before that happened.

Wow, after discovering I had more satellites available than I thought (forgot to build some after I built the nexus I think) and now after getting 3 continents covered I'm swimming in cash!

So I never played the original X-COM and actually have pretty much ignored the entire genre (only played Fallout Tactics if that even is in the same genre). And to my surprise, I am finding Normal to be a little too easy. Panic levels are at minimum in almost all countries. My sniper "Lockdown" (Major) just took out a sectopod by herself, while down to 1 health point. The Major skills for snipers are great (Double Tap or In the Zone) and after I lost my best heavies towards the beginning, the snipers became my favourites. I'm not sure if Squad Sight is entirely essential for snipers, as someone opined before in this thread, because the alternative (shoot after move) is great as well. Especially as I have snipers equipped with Skeleton suits and snapping accross rooftops if such are available. The beginning of the game was really easy and I didn't have to save/load for a while. Later I started using save/load when things got really screwed up and more lately I've even been loading whenever one of my favourite units dies. I don't mind this much, although I'm sure playing this way is not the 100% authentic XCOM experience, I'm just playing to have fun not to have a specific experience with the game. But I might try Classic and/or Ironman at some point in the future. I also found it somewhat weird that the aliens seem to just wait for you until you step into their radius -- stepping 1 more square to the left than you should can sometimes make the battle several times more difficult as you reveal a new group. However, I think they actually do move around on the field, at least in the UFO missions. I've actually made some UFO missions much easier for myself by being VERY patient (and boring). I literally waited 10 or so turns on overwatch until some enemies came out of the ship and exposed themselves. So I think the AI is not as patient as I am The most confusing thing is the strategic layer... what to build, what to sell etc. Much of the beginning of the game I spent without selling anything because I didn't notice I could! And that turned out to be great because now I had lots of money suddenly and put much of it into engineering, sataellites and so on. I had a real trouble shooting down UFOs at some point (about the same time I had to shoot down the overseer). I failed to shoot down about 10 altogether, even earning grade D in one month. I did several upgrades: Phoenix Cannon, Laser Cannon, the temporary boosts etc., but those didn't help at all. After two months, I finally was able to build Plasma Cannon, which DID help, and now I just shot down the overseer and cleaned it out without taking much damage. I think this game is great, but it surely has some flaws and I do hate the interface occasionally, especially the camera controls.

Knowing Steve Gaynor's tendency to spoil things, I will not listen to this before I've played Dishonored (in November).

I always read that as "Rat, so fat, so rat" so I was disappointed to hear it was more like "Ratso Fatso Rat"

Wow, I've played through it 3 times and I have also never seen that car (almost certain). Could it be from a DLC?

Would give it a try but figuring out how to get the NaCl plug-in for Chromium seems too difficult to bother.

Man, so I've won the game twice and am continuing to play on easy, but in some games I get almost destroyed in the first few encounters. Like almost happened just now. Second encounter, lost a crew member and am down to 5 points of hull.

Or alternatively, they could still have linear progression between the episodes, but make the episodes themselves less linear. Or alternating linear and non-linear episodes.

I disagree with this argument. I wouldn't say that the games are designed especially to be linear, but rather well-directed and with clearly defined variety* of "episodes" within each game (*ok, less variety in their other games than in Half-Lives). As I suggested above, maybe their games have been as linear as they are just because of tech limitations they had. And Portal's were just because the concept was basically designed to be linear. I think that while they haven't had enough of a desire to make a less linear game, that may be just because it wasn't that viable for them before using their tech and the designers they had. But more and more games of various genres have popped up since Half-Life 2 was released that do have more open worlds, and I don't see why Valve wouldn't go there just because they haven't so far. Maybe they'll find a way to have Half-Life 3 feel similarly well-directed, but put the well-directed "episodes" into an open world without having a strictly linear progression between them, and add some RPG-lite elements or even Zelda-ish progression element to the mix.

About GTA being a genre -- I guess so, but I've never personally been interested in that genre. I think it's because I fear that the other games are all just "GTA with a twist" and if I were a fan of the genre I would probably go for that. But GTA itself is more than another game in that genre (trivially, being the one that started it), it has some of that "quality without a name" or whatever and I've always liked it for that, not only because of the elements it has that form that specific genre. The only other games of the genre I've played are Mafia and Red Dead Redemption. Mafia was quite different from GTA actually and had it's own charm. RDR because I'm a sucker for westerns (as long as they're not dumb-seeming games like the previous Red Dead R...) and probably also a little bit because it was from Rockstar. Anyway, I can see other people would like different games from the genre (Saints Row, Sleeping Dogs, and whatever the others are) but even though the genre is not very populated any game other than GTA has to really make me notice something else about it that I find interesting besides simply being a "GTA genre game". Word. [edit]PS. Oh, I just remembered that Just Cause 2 also seemed interesting, just for the totally crazy tricks you could pull. But I didn't play it due to lack of time (messed around with the demo, though). I don't know if it's even in the same genre with these other games? Maybe not.

Ok, I'm sold. Half-Life 3 will have a more openish world than HL2. I think the end of Episode 2 actually tried to go there a little bit, with the wider area for the battles and some levels in Half-Life 2 are also not that linear. The more I think about it the more it makes sense for them to make a more open world (which probably still has some very directed episodes where you follow other people while they open doors for you). It might be that the Source engine / tech was a limitation why they hadn't done it before and maybe they've spent this much time because they needed new tech. (or are there Source engine games with much wider levels/areas?)

I'm not someone who remembers a lot of details in games, so just to check. When you compared this to the original, as you put it, did you mean the original Half-Life or Half-Life 2? Maybe some of the things are so just to emulate Half-Life. But I'm not sure, I've only started and just reached Unforseen Consequences.

Probably this.

Yeah, the game isn't really easy even on easy. I've lost 6 or so games, not even getting very far, since the last time I won. Mostly it's because I try to focus on some single aspect and then I run into an encounter I'm not prepared for (or just take too many risks) and get destroyed. I think you need to be a bit of a generalist to be prepared for any event that may come, but with a boarding focus you really need to specialize as well.

I guess that's not much of a stretch indeed.

I only watched 3 first episodes I think, but I kind of like knowing very little about the project and being surprised when it comes out. But on the other hand, I'm sure the videos are intresting and I am tempted to watch more of them. The backer forums is something I have no interest in, though.

Yeah, IMHO it would be awesome if games focused less on graphics (and even voice actors) and more on simulation. Even if GTA just started simulating things outside of the bubble surrounding the player, that would be pretty cool.

Somehow it doesn't seem logical that Episode 2's cliff hanger would be followed by an open world game. But who knows. It's certainly been a while (wow, has it really been 5 years? I feel old now) so they must be doing something different from Episode 1 and 2.

Interesting. You mean Rocks, right? I guess boarders don't really need speed that much, though it can play an advantage.