greydan

XCOM Enemy Unknown

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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.

It took me like six hours of gameplay before I realized that protection from cover was not strictly directional and that it'll let you know when flanking has compromised it by turning yellow or red.

It took me about the same amount of time to realize that cover doesn't block line-of-sight, or rather only blocks it sometimes in weird ways. There's no advantage to posting your guy at the end of that car rather than the middle, since only walls block line-of-sight.

I do hate that sometimes the miss animations involve my dude unloading three shots in the back of his teammate up ahead. If they're not going to model accidental hits beyond a little geometry destruction, I wish they'd at least tweak the animations to avoid such situations.

It's a game system, which just means needing to get comfortable inside those little quirks. I'm sure I'll be set by my next campaign, but I'm having too much fun owning the battlefield with plasma rifles and stealth armor. I probably use the grappling hook way too much, in situations where it's actually detrimental.

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Only three-wide (or more) pieces of all tall cover will block LoS if you're in the middle under certain circumstances. It's usually not worth the trouble in SP, since it means that person has limited firing opportunities, and on the higher difficulties you always want as many shots on a target as you can get.

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is there a guide somewhere that explains the LoS / accuracy / shooting angles (i.e. how to actually play the game)

i'm getting by on 'intuition' because I know real-world geometry, but the game seems really bad from that lens

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Not as of yet. Shooting chances are based on your soliders rank, their weapon, distance, the enemy type, their altitude versus yours, whether they're flying and cover. The worse any of them are, or the better the cover is, the lower your shot chance is.

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It took me like six hours of gameplay before I realized that protection from cover was not strictly directional and that it'll let you know when flanking has compromised it by turning yellow or red.

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure it's entirely directional.

Spots turn yellow when an enemy in line of sight has a flanking shot against that piece of cover, and red when it's totally the wrong side and completely exposed. (I think the two states affect the strength of that cover differently?)

Also - I want this game to be better about managing equipment.

If a plasma rifle is equipped to a guy who is not going out on a mission, that plasma rifle should be available in the pool of items on the equipment screen. I shouldn't have to go unequip the other guy to get it.

About the accuracy thing - On top of the things already said, also check your soldier's aim stat. Each soldier has different growth and will end up with different stats as they rank-up.

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Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure it's entirely directional.

Spots turn yellow when an enemy in line of sight has a flanking shot against that piece of cover, and red when it's totally the wrong side and completely exposed. (I think the two states affect the strength of that cover differently?)

I mean that if you're getting fired at from an angle of eight-nine degrees from the cover's facing, the cover is still effective, with no degradation of performance. Only once the cover could be said to block not a single part of the target does the target count as "flanked".

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On a side note, I love neo-Latin slogans like the motto for the fictional XCOM organization. I know they'd rather I translate VIGILO - CONFIDO as "I watch, I believe," but I'd much prefer to translate it as "I'm awake, I'm confident." Latin's fun like that.

If you asked me, I'd phrase it TUEMUR QUIA CREDAMUS but that's why no one's hiring classicists these days.

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My frustration levels of seeing my American friends play X-Com while I'm having to wait and just look at "Pre-load complete; unreleased" is very high. It's kind of a "Yea, we know" thing, but goddammit, I will repeat my grievances with this utter stupidity until it changes. RAAGHRG!

Will it someday change if we all complain loudly enough?

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If you're not afraid of violating Steam's TOS you can log on through a VPN originating from North America to unlock it. I have some UK friends who have done this.

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Or download a pirate copy. Yarr! (I'd feel morally justified since I already gave them my money)

I'll just pout and make an angry face at publishers and retail until it comes out. :(

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Todays monster (1.8G) patch greatly improves the PC version.

http://forums.2kgame...es-for-10-11-12

There's a bunch of undocumented fixes in there too. Hardware cursor support is essential, for the first few days it felt like my mouse was stuck in the mud.

I've been sitting around scanning for activity forever now.

I finally feel like I'm geared up enough to assault the alien base!

EDIT: So while that missions was easy the difficulty spikes HUGELY after that. The next UFO landing I got resulted in a complete wipe!

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Yeah, the mouse is much more responsive now. The stupid interface oversights, like a row of selectable unit portraits with statuses along the top of the screen or the ability to pull up a context-sensitive menu of actions by holding left click on a target, still remain, though.

Also, I have a new winner for "best random name generation". William "Duke" King, come on down!

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Steam won't actually ban you for unlocking with a VPN. What they will ban you for is buying a game that is not available in your region via VPN.

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So just out of curiosity, what difficulty is everybody playing on and have you been finding it challenging?

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So just out of curiosity, what difficulty is everybody playing on and have you been finding it challenging?

I played it on Normal my first time and felt really conflicted about it. On the one hand, the gameplay experience felt very fair and consistent on that level. I never lost a soldier unless I did something irreparably stupid. On the other, there was a definite difficulty curve I sailed over right around the time I launched my tenth satellite and got my whole squad using plasma, where the game just rolled over and stopped trying. I blew threw the final level like it was a joke. Maybe I've just gotten that much better, but I don't think so.

I've now played two missions on Classic Ironman and still feel really conflicted about it. The consequences are felt so much more deeply when guys are getting smoked left and right, but that means the game is now occasionally unforgiving in all the wrong ways. I don't just mean a rookie panicking and offing two guys on my first mission, although that was a lark. I mean that sometimes I'll get shot by someone I can't see even though aliens can always see and shoot my guys, or I'll surprise a group of aliens by flanking them but have them use their free move to flank me instead.

The harder the difficulty, the more it becomes clear that there are little ways in which the AI is playing a different game from the one you've been taught, which makes learning from your mistakes more of a challenge. It's not enough to make me go back to easier difficulties, but I'll probably keep it in mind as a caveat, like the strangely wooden interface.

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I don't really mind the free movement thing so much, i've found that i've been able to control it just by making sure my guys are always covered by eachother's overwatch states. The AI is definitely aware of when you are in overwatch, and the degree to which you can have overlapping overwatch seems to cause most of the smarter enemies to retreat into cover rather than attack. (Though the more aggressive enemies, like the chrysalids, will still just barrel towards you.)

The issue i actually have with that stuff is that it becomes evident that the enemies aren't doing anything at all until you stumble into them and trigger their free movement. It completely changes the tenor of the scouting phase in a battle, there's absolutely no risk of an enemy coming and finding you first. You can basically take as long as you want to carefully explore, since there's no time pressure, so to speak. (Well, terror missions seem to function differently, and those are by far the most challenging missions in the game.)

Anyways, I'm just playing through on normal.

Things were going poorly for me early on, but around the time i took out the first major alien base i put into motion a plan to get things on track and have generally been pretty much on top of things. (Terror missions seem to be the only thing i still lose guys to, the only real setbacks i've had.)

I've been trying to avoid save scumming things, but i find that temptation is too great when i feel like it's a mistake -I- made. I want to give the ironman mode a shot just to have that rule enforced.

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I don't really mind the free movement thing so much, i've found that i've been able to control it just by making sure my guys are always covered by eachother's overwatch states. The AI is definitely aware of when you are in overwatch, and the degree to which you can have overlapping overwatch seems to cause most of the smarter enemies to retreat into cover rather than attack. (Though the more aggressive enemies, like the chrysalids, will still just barrel towards you.)

The issue i actually have with that stuff is that it becomes evident that the enemies aren't doing anything at all until you stumble into them and trigger their free movement. It completely changes the tenor of the scouting phase in a battle, there's absolutely no risk of an enemy coming and finding you first. You can basically take as long as you want to carefully explore, since there's no time pressure, so to speak. (Well, terror missions seem to function differently, and those are by far the most challenging missions in the game.)

These two things are probably related. Most battles, I'll set up a perfect overwatch net, but I still have to send a brave soul out to poke the AI into coming out and tripping it. Even then, most of the time it'll retreat and force me to come find it instead, which makes for a more exciting experience, but doesn't sit quite well after a while. It feels like a kludge, maybe? They couldn't program an AI that could outmaneuver guys in overwatch (and who can blame them, I certainly can't manage it most battles) and needed an incentive for players not to turtle anyway, so seeding the map with clusters of aliens that are only activated once spotted must have been a pretty good solution. I don't know.

Let me tell you, though. When you're playing a harder difficulty on Ironman, there are many moments when you wish you were capable of surprising the AI with its pants down like it's able to do to you. Rk. Cho and like ten other guys so far, RIP.

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Well, there is at least one trick you can use to sneak up on enemies. The snipers can get a device that can be used twice per mission to reveal an area in the fog of war beyond line of sight, which you can then combine with longer-range weapons to get a jump on enemies. Attacking them will trigger their free movement if they aren't instantly killed, but having three enemies grouped tightly together is a nice target for a heavy's rocket launcher.

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I've come to think of it as "landmines" of enemies. I am maneuvering through this minefield of aliens and I'm trying to tactically manage when I set off individual packs. I've noticed that sometimes enemies will surface in fogged areas of the map. I don't see them moving around or anything they're all just standing there in a group. I'm not sure why I am seeing them like that or if it's a bug.

There are some missions where the spontaneous arrival of a bunch of aliens has totally decimated my squad. I feel like the packs of enemies might be moving around the map in the fog of war but I think they're doing it basically as a singular object occupying a map tile (or maybe a 2x2 cluster || 4x4 cluster). It seems like they only separate into individual units once they hit your FoV and play that little cinematic and then make their initial movements. That might actually be why that's happening, it could be "unpacking" the enemy units from that single object.

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There are some missions where the spontaneous arrival of a bunch of aliens has totally decimated my squad

I feel ya :violin: I just logged on to vent on this topic

as has been mentioned, chance plays a big role in classic ironman's shootouts; though painful losses are common, when a couple spawns of enemies are in play, mitigating some bad dice isn't impossible

but I've triggered some insane spawns which I just can't handle:

- throw everything I have at a lone Cyberdisk and barely kill it, next turn four more float through the wall

- I got LoS on a downed UFO just as four Mutons, a Berserker, a Cyber and three Floaters walk out the front door

- on one terror mission I met nine Crysalids on turn three and a Cyber arrived on turn four

- an escort mission halfway into the first month had 12 Thinmen jump me during turns three and four

while brutal, this is the tough love I expect an x-com [xcom] to display.

is anyone else not seeing crazy spawns on abduction missions? they're fairly safe afaik

oh and I'd like to ask: with the smaller squad sizes, what's having the biggest impact on battles, luck or tactics?

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My soldier had a 99% chance of hitting the enemy. He missed. Goddammit.

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I'm pretty sure this game is like the original in the sense that you can have close to a 100% aim rating, but you still have the big wildcard of the projectile possibly impacting on something between you and the target.

The cover system muddies things significantly, it's not always clear if a piece of cover will be treated as a solid entity for a projectile to impact against, or if the projectile will phase through it for the hit/miss check.

As for the smaller squads, i don't know how i feel about it.

I think it both makes it a more tactical game, and makes you more subject to the whims of the RNG god.

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I've been trying to avoid save scumming things, but i find that temptation is too great when i feel like it's a mistake -I- made. I want to give the ironman mode a shot just to have that rule enforced.

I actually do it the opposite way. I'm not playing ironman, but I am living with consequences as much as possible. The reason I don't actually play it in ironman mode is basically this:

I've now played two missions on Classic Ironman and still feel really conflicted about it. The consequences are felt so much more deeply when guys are getting smoked left and right, but that means the game is now occasionally unforgiving in all the wrong ways.

So rather than keeping the save card for when I fuck up, I keep the save card for when I feel like the game fucked up. I believe this was mentioned in the TMA podcast about the game, but it seems like the most "fair" way to play is to fake ironman in this way - don't be systemically bound to your save, but have the personal discipline to not use it unless the game screws you in a way you consider genuinely unacceptable. So far I've kept to this standard pretty well.

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"Genuinely unacceptable" means what exactly? Because that sounds like a way of saying "Oh, I wiped so I'm going to reload", so you might as well not be doing "fake Ironman".

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