greydan

XCOM Enemy Unknown

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I just started playing this. After the first mission, the first guy I lost due to my own actions died of friendly fire.

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Man the tutorial is LOOONG. I fired it up before going to be last night (mistake, I know) and an hour and 20 minutes later I'm still seeing "this thingy is locked during the tutorial"

Also, I apparently screwed up by placing my first additional satellite way out of reach of my interceptors? Do I need to replay the tutorial to fix that? Or does all that stuff get reset once the tutorial ends?

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oh also, what the hell is up with the camera flipping all over the place when you're trying to place a grenade?

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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".

Well as I said, it's whatever you consider genuinely unacceptable. So if your entire squad wipes because of a grenade coming out of the fog of war or something, maybe it'd be cool to reload. I dunno, I haven't wiped yet so I haven't been faced with the decision, but I'd be surprised if there are many instances when you can lose an entire team due to an issue with the game - to lose a full six guys I expect I would have to have screwed up somewhere along the way.

That said, if I did wipe and didn't feel like redoing all my progress and reloaded, I think I would still continue to do fake ironman. Because losing soldiers, even important veterans, is still interesting and still provokes me to play differently afterwards (and the threat that it might happen provokes me to play differently beforehand too) even if I know I can choose not to lose everyone. I don't think charting a middle course between reloading every time someone dies and having your save literally locked by the game is a crazy way for many people to play.

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So I'm hoping my opinion will change, but I'm actually pretty unhappy with it. Such a high proportion of the gameplay is based purely on luck. The aliens and what they do seem almost entirely irrelevant - your real enemy is the almighty RNG, which can and will give or take entire missions on a whim. It doesn't really matter how well placed your soldiers are when there's a very high chance that the enemies will hit them regardless of how much cover they're behind, while your own soldiers are far more dependent on luck . There has also been fairly well substantiated talk of the hit percentages given by the game being innacurate, and given some of the other bugs I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be true.

Well as I said, it's whatever you consider genuinely unacceptable. So if your entire squad wipes because of a grenade coming out of the fog of war or something, maybe it'd be cool to reload. I dunno, I haven't wiped yet so I haven't been faced with the decision, but I'd be surprised if there are many instances when you can lose an entire team due to an issue with the game - to lose a full six guys I expect I would have to have screwed up somewhere along the way.

Oh, there are many ways to lose an entire team through no fault of your own. For example, I had two missions in quick succession which started out with an alien shooting one of my squad members for minor damage, and my entire team panicked for multiple turns in response. I've also had several instances of my entire squad missing 75%+ accuracy shots multiple times in a row, followed by the aliens systematically one-shotting every squad member through full cover.

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if there are random bugs (shots going through cover, percentages being a lie) that should not happen, then the game is purely luck-based

but if the damage is limited to the game being unintuitive and explained poorly, over time you'll be able to understand and manipulate the systems so that you can maximize your chances for favorable outcomes (without necessarily guaranteeing them)

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I'm curious, can you retreat in this X-com game? Is that what the square outside the troop ship is for?

I wonder what the result would be for just bailing on an untenable situation, cutting your losses and running so you can save your veterans. Would that be a viable strategic choice? Taking the hit from whatever negative there would be for failing the mission, but saving your veterans?

The cover system in this game though, i've been trying to sort out what's going on, but it ocassionally still defies my expectations of how it should work. As a general rule though, half-height cover can be freely fired over and is purely an accuracy debuff against enemies, it will not block fire. (Except for when it does.) Full cover will block weapons and can only be fired around from corners, and... sometimes corners don't seem to block fire?

Hit/miss checks and projectile accuracy seem to throw all kinds of weird curveballs at you.

Also, psi-troops are awesome.

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I believe that square is there to highlight the delivery area for rescue targets. There is a menu option mid mission that says abandon mission but I have yet to actually hit that.

I don't think corners block fire at all I just think the accuracy debuff from full cover is much greater and generally discourages the AI from shooting at players in it. I think the only thing that determines what you can hit at is LoS. I wish there was a compendium in game or something that outlined the hard fast laws of cover. Or some kinda training academy in the game. When the game can be so unforgiving I feel like it should really enable me to understand all the fine details of it's mechanics.

I believe any cover is potentially destroyed (full of half) on misses. I can't really figure out how it decides what to destroy either. It may actually just be casting out into the environment and breaking whatever it hits in a really stimulative way after it does all the emulative random number rolls to determine the miss.

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The cover system in this game though, i've been trying to sort out what's going on, but it ocassionally still defies my expectations of how it should work. As a general rule though, half-height cover can be freely fired over and is purely an accuracy debuff against enemies, it will not block fire. (Except for when it does.) Full cover will block weapons and can only be fired around from corners, and... sometimes corners don't seem to block fire?

All cover does is give a bonus to your squaddies' defense skill. If a character has line-of-sight on enemy, they can fire and be fired upon.

What's slightly more confusing is how line-of-sight actually works. This would be a great situation for a tutorial to explore, if only by positioning your team in various places and demonstrating when they can fire and when they cannot. Like Orv said earlier, full cover blocks a character's line of sight to an enemy if there is an adjacent square of full cover in the direction of the enemy. This gets a bit dodgy on diagonals and goes completely to pot when one of them is on elevation.

On a different but slightly similar note to what people were discussing a page or so back, it really seems like Classic and Impossible difficulties up enemies' to-hit and critical chances while depressing those of squaddies, but without fully reporting these altered weights to the player. I've played a couple early missions on Normal and Classic back-to-back in order to compare, and it really does seem like squaddies miss more and get hit harder in Classic under near-identical circumstances. I wish there was more transparency here, it would alleviate some people's feelings of excessive randomness.

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How much defensive bonus is conferred? Thusfar I have only gotten one item that confers me any defensive bonus at all. I'm having a difficult time weighing defense bonuses versus additional HP bonuses. (I have yet to build power armor that confers any manner of defense bonus).

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I have no idea how the Offensive and Defensive stats are calculated. All I know is that "Hunker Down" doubles the defensive bonus from cover, and once I got my snipers the skill that doubles all cover bonuses they almost never got hit. I'm pretty sure if you checked the awkward "character info" screen you can pull up using F1, there'd be some way to track what modifiers are being applied.

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I don't think corners block fire at all I just think the accuracy debuff from full cover is much greater and generally discourages the AI from shooting at players in it. I think the only thing that determines what you can hit at is LoS. I wish there was a compendium in game or something that outlined the hard fast laws of cover. Or some kinda training academy in the game. When the game can be so unforgiving I feel like it should really enable me to understand all the fine details of it's mechanics.

I believe any cover is potentially destroyed (full of half) on misses. I can't really figure out how it decides what to destroy either. It may actually just be casting out into the environment and breaking whatever it hits in a really stimulative way after it does all the emulative random number rolls to determine the miss.

Agh! Ok, this makes way more sense.

Also, the character sheet that you can bring up that lists off all the ailments and buffs your character is experiencing lists low cover as a 20% defense buff, and high cover as 40%. Who can say what that actually amounts to, though.

There's something else going on too, i think being in cover negatively impacts your own aim as well?

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I just had a promising campaign ruined because the mouse cursor snapped from "send skyranger to landed UFO" to "Scan for activity" as I clicked on it. I think I might be done with this game.

if there are random bugs (shots going through cover, percentages being a lie) that should not happen, then the game is purely luck-based

but if the damage is limited to the game being unintuitive and explained poorly, over time you'll be able to understand and manipulate the systems so that you can maximize your chances for favorable outcomes (without necessarily guaranteeing them)

You can maximize your chances for favorable outcomes when playing a slot machine, but it's still gambling. That the game also happens to be full of unintuitive mechanics and bugs like walls phasing in and out of existence and medkits randomly not working is icing on the cake.

I wonder what the result would be for just bailing on an untenable situation' date=' cutting your losses and running so you can save your veterans. Would that be a viable strategic choice? Taking the hit from whatever negative there would be for failing the mission, but saving your veterans?[/quote']It's a viable strategic choice, except when the game randomly decides not to recognize that your soldiers are in the extraction zone. In that case it's actually better to let them die, because you lose their equipment if you "leave them behind".

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Agh! Ok, this makes way more sense.

Also, the character sheet that you can bring up that lists off all the ailments and buffs your character is experiencing lists low cover as a 20% defense buff, and high cover as 40%. Who can say what that actually amounts to, though.

There's something else going on too, i think being in cover negatively impacts your own aim as well?

According to a few places elsewhere on the internet, it's just a straight subtraction from an enemy's percent chance to hit you, which is calculated by their offensive skill modified by distance (closer is better for all guns except the sniper rifle). Of course, who knows what an alien's base offensive skill is.

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Ugh the cover system is really confusing. The F1 menu does not appear to take into consideration defensive bonuses granted by armor? I gave some ghost armor to one of my squad members (med armor +6 HP +10 Def). Put him into cover and checked his def values. 20 in half cover 40 in full.....

The longer I play the more I wish they had built more visual cue's into interface. There should really be something to give some manner of indication of LoS. Lots of times I am kinda guessing where my character can and can't see. It gets especially dicey since characters can sometimes seem to see round corners and be able to shoot right through walls that look like they have no LoS to.

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Just got my two best dudes smoked in easily avoidable firefights. I think I need to keep a pad of paper by my computer that I can write "Overwatch!" on every time an enemy goes into overwatch, because I always forget.

I really keep coming back to it, though. This game has such a satisfying, impactful combat system. I can only imagine how much more satisfying and impactful it would be if my guys weren't sometimes randomly unable to see enemies on the other side of doorways and weren't sometimes shot from offscreen while in full cover by enemies I never even knew were there.

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I feel like as more eyes hit the game and they get more feedback and data (and mod tools inevitably drop) we'll see some UI improvements. I really feel like the fault is the game not providing you with adequate information about what's actually going on in the battlefield. I actually feel like the combat system and game itself are excellent it could just be a lot more informative about what it's actually doing.

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Agreed. It's a huge mistake to hide the actual mathematical nuts and bolts of the combat in an out-of-the-way and poorly-formatted stats screen, as well as making line of sight a hidden factor and not an overlay that can be toggled like the movement grid. Let's hope Firaxis is willing to put some muscle behind its new darling.

I mean, I'm sure there's some argument to be made of the magic and mystery inherent in not knowing if you can hit this guy from that position, but I feel the same way about it as I did about hiding diplomacy calculations in the early versions of Civilization V, which was not great.

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I doubt firaxis will surface that info on the combat screen or change the UI. There was a lot of talk before release about releasing mod tools, I'm not really sure where that all stands right now. I tried to poke around a little and I don't think anyone without seriously deep knowledge of unreal will be able to do anything with this. I believe they are using an altered version of the UDK because I am unable to open any of the UPK files in the install. I really am hoping for PC mod tools. I think the modding community could pretty quickly correct the issues with the PC UI (as well as adding free aim for all weapons back in. The one thing that seems to be universally requested).

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I've had some definite issues with line of sight (not sure why this sniper can't shoot that thin man, she even has shared sight and the yellow support has vision) , and also times where the assault close quarters reaction shot doesn't go off, costing me a unit. I've also experienced that cover issue, with a sniper in low cover only getting 20, even though they have the low cover is full perk.

The thing I miss the most is not being able to free aim, though. Only explosives give you the tools to remove cover or obstacles reliably, but those have dangers depending on positioning and other aspects. Suppression sometimes hits the cover to take it down, but sometimes it misses entirely. I wish I could just choose to shoot through a wall to enter a building or shoot an explosive object that my opponent is using as cover with any soldier. I'm not sure if the game would support it though. It seems to just calculate a percentage chance to hit and just roll against that, rather than modelling a cone of probability for each shot, choosing one, and then accurately modeling anything it comes into contact with. I've definitely shot enemies through objects that weren't the cover they were behind.

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I actually think it casts rays out of some probability cone once a roll concludes in a miss. I think that's why it just destroys totally random cover on misses.

That mod looks really awesome. I haven't been able to get into the core game upk files. I wonder if he was able to find that in some XML somewhere... I'm sure I'll end up using that one when I start my next play through on classic.

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