greydan

XCOM Enemy Unknown

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That one I'm not sure on. Presuming that shooting only takes one action, I would think so. I can give you a definitive answer in four hours and twenty minutes. :getmecoat

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Shooting concludes the turn for that soldier. There might be a perk/promotion that lets you move after shooting, but I'm not sure. I actually like the system, because it forces you to be more careful with unit placement.

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So I played my first multiplayer match. My lineup was a Muton Elite, two Sectoids, a Floater, a squaddie sniper with carapace armor and a laser sniper rifle and a squaddie assault with a laser rifle. Square on the 10K points.

The guy brings ~8980 points. I don't see him for the first four turns, though I am admittedly playing it pretty safe. Then I finally catch a glimpse of him with the floater.

It is, of course, a sniper with a plasma sniper rifle. And ghost armor. And what I assume was rookie rank (IE. He couldn't shoot with his rifle after moving.)

Cue six more turns of me encircling and finishing him off, losing only the Floater in the process. I just wish I had brought the Berserker instead of the Elite so I could have punched his dumb corpse off the top of that boxcar.

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I've been playing the original a little over the past few days and I'm pretty excited about the remake. I'm not really an XCOM veteran (it's only since going back to it in the past few years I understand the full game, my younger self could not be arsed with much of the high level strategy. I just wanted to shoot those UFO's down and go in blasting! As such I never witnessed the later game) so my views on the new one might be a bit more lenient than others but I think it's looking really good. I don't mean the slick graphics either, I think the tactical part looks as if they struck a nice balance between what the original offered and updating it to a modern standard of game design.

Can't wait to get stuck in. Unfortunately it unlocks on Friday for me. :(

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Yes.

Adynod, the smiley is right: you should be angry, not sad.

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Go ahead Jake. On a similar note, I almost started an XCOM thread over in Video Gaming because I couldn't see one but then thought I'd check the Strategy section... duh. I feel like things could get confusing if we have threads in both sections for a game, personally I'm more likely to go to VG rather than here. Maybe that's just me though.

Nappi, I find it hard to be angry when it's a bit of a blessing in disguise. I have a lot of work to get through before Friday!

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Shooting concludes the turn for that soldier. There might be a perk/promotion that lets you move after shooting, but I'm not sure. I actually like the system, because it forces you to be more careful with unit placement.

Well, all sorts of things can force a player to be careful with unit placement. Maybe your guys can only move once every other turn! Maybe certain spots are full of evil fire and remove health slowly! Maybe if you don't move in diagonal lines, you take a penalty towards being hit for the next turn! All of these certainly add another layer of strategy to the game, but at the cost of being fairly silly and feeling artificial and limiting. I think "you cannot move after you shoot" falls into that category too. Why not? Why can I walk and then shoot, but not shoot and then walk?

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Well, all sorts of things can force a player to be careful with unit placement. Maybe your guys can only move once every other turn! Maybe certain spots are full of evil fire and remove health slowly! Maybe if you don't move in diagonal lines, you take a penalty towards being hit for the next turn! All of these certainly add another layer of strategy to the game, but at the cost of being fairly silly and feeling artificial and limiting. I think "you cannot move after you shoot" falls into that category too. Why not? Why can I walk and then shoot, but not shoot and then walk?

Turn based movement is already artificial and limiting, so I don't think that is an exceptionally good argument against gun&run limitation in a game like XCOM. Board games have silly artificial rules, because they wouldn't work otherwise. The developers probably played a fair amount with the ruleset before arriving at this limitation. My guess is that had they allowed moving after shooting, then move > overwatch > (next turn) > shoot > fall back tactic would have been way too powerful or something.

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Turn based movement is already artificial and limiting, so I don't think that is an exceptionally good argument against gun&run limitation in a game like XCOM. Board games have silly artificial rules, because they wouldn't work otherwise. The developers probably played a fair amount with the ruleset before arriving at this limitation. My guess is that had they allowed moving after shooting, then move > overwatch > (next turn) > shoot > fall back tactic would have been way too powerful or something.

Those are my thoughts exactly. It's an arbitrary decision, but it forces the player to experience the consequences of standing and fighting for at least one turn, instead of taking an ill-considered shot and then bugging out, no consequences.

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I'm not saying they did it wrong or something, I'm just saying I didn't like how it felt in the demo, at least. Having played X-COM, Jagged Alliance, Silent Storm, Frozen Synapse, and so on, and having had tons of fun with them, trying out the new XCOM felt overly limiting. "Board games have silly artificial rules" is exactly the point - the new XCOM feels much, much more like a board game than the previous X-COM, and more like a board game than other squad based tactical games. It's not just the movement mechanics that make it feel board game-esque; another huge change is that being "behind" a corner isn't actually behind the corner when it comes time for someone to shoot at you. That's an abstraction that works great in board games but that feels a little weird to me in XCOM.

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This is officially the slowest install from disc that I've ever sat through. Baldur's Gate II was loaded into the ancient recesses of my first PC faster than this.

Going on an hour and change now...

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I'm playing the SP on Classic Ironman, and I'm burning through a rotating rookie slot like free wontons. Someone on SA put it really well, I think: This is the nicest looking roguelike ever made.

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So this game has a terrible interface. If you haven't played it yet you'll probably think I'm exaggerating, but it is actually harder to use than the original interface from 1994. I've gotten used to stuff like the confusing, endlessly nesting menus and complete waste of screen real estate, but simply looking around is a constant struggle due to the way it maps your mouse movements to a virtual analog stick instead of scrolling naturally. To add insult to injury, the game won't even let you switch to the gamepad it was obviously designed for unless you shut down the whole game down and turn on the pad before you start the game up again.

From what I've heard there's probably a great game hidden in there, but it does not leave a good first impression.

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Ahhhhhh I want to play... but I promised myself I'd finish my minor thesis first which is due in mid-November. Hopefully by then any important bugs will be ironed out, and maybe someone will have smoothed over the mouse & keyboard interface. But in any case, I'm weirdly looking forward to sitting on the couch and playing this one with the gamepad.

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Is anyone else having trouble moving their mans up or down floors using mouse & keyboard? I scroll up, or press the up level keys but the cursor still stays on the bottom floor. I didn't feel like replaying the tutorial from the demo so maybe I missed something, but I'm having some real issues getting people on roofs.

Outside of that I'm generally enjoying the game outside of how the aliens trigger. The free movement they get seems really broken, especially in a

chryssalid

terror mission I got.

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Is anyone else having trouble moving their mans up or down floors using mouse & keyboard? I scroll up, or press the up level keys but the cursor still stays on the bottom floor. I didn't feel like replaying the tutorial from the demo so maybe I missed something, but I'm having some real issues getting people on roofs.

I've had trouble like Lork talked about, where the camera snaps back to a ground-floor view sometimes when I try to scroll up, and on occasion the cursor will flip out when I try to select a space on certain elevated surfaces, but I don't think I'm having any issues like you speak of. Most of my problems have been with the free-look aiming, namely that if I try to select anything but an enemy the camera freaks out and flings me all over the map. I'm trying not to hate this game for the obvious compromises it's made, particularly because almost every other part of it is incredibly fun, but I really really wonder if the seven people who'll play this on consoles were worth it.

Speaking of things I do like, this may have the best random (code)name generation of any game ever. One of my starting dudes was Leif Eriksen, who got the moniker "Rampage" when he became my all-star Assault point man. He was recently promoted to colonel after Operation Blinding Tears. Yes. Now if only he didn't sound like he hailed from Middle America...

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You can change their voices, and you totally should for Leif.

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I don't have much time now, I just wanted to make amends for being such a grump after the demo

I only stopped playing last night because a final snakeman got lucky with critical hits, killing my entire squad in four turns

without that painful prompt I wouldn't have been able to tear myself away

EDIT

Oh Hey my first game this afternoon I finally saw a cyberdisk :D

five of them :/

against three rookies and two squaddies

I think I've reached a fail state :/

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The PC interface feels VERY awkward. After about 6-8 hours I have completely normalized to it and don't really find it odd anymore but I can 100% empathize with anyone picking the game up for the first time. They really should have diverged the mouse and keyboard controls even further from the console variants. I'm sure there's a good reason they didn't. Maybe snapping into the pre firing stage (where aim% is finally shown) is maybe where that calculation is actually occurring.

I'm sure the once modding kicks off unrestricted free aim of all weapons and mouse and keyboard interface tweaks will be among the first and most requested mods.

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I'm playing on the 360, the interface feels pretty natural, pretty snappy.

So yeah, I think Firaxis has made a pretty incredible game here, and i don't think any of the small technical issues or subjective complaints are enough to take away from how much they got it right.

I don't mind the aliens getting free movement when they're spotted, i'm usually able to keep that stuff in control if i've been overwatching my dudes at the end of each exploration move. (You'll note that the AI generally seems pretty aware of when your guys are in overwatch, pulling their units back into the shadows instead of immediately coming down on you like a bag of bricks.)

The cover system has some weird oddities. The way projectiles will impact hard on obstacles in the environments unless it's the thing somebody is taking cover behind, which it'll phase right through for a hit or miss.

I've also had several instances where my guys would take reaction shots and successfully hit enemies through multiple walls and a roof, there seems to be a lot of strangeness that creeps up in multiple-level environments.

Satellites seem like the most important thing going on with the base management part of the game, get those satellites out there asap

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