XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Strategy Game - Developed by Firaxis

I get the bug where the frame rate crawls when a Berzerker charges you after you shoot him. But apart from that, my games have been pretty good.

It's dead Jim.
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Tamren:

Except where indicated, I agree with your sentiments, or don't have enough experience to have an opinion. My experience with the game is from 5 games of mostly completed Normal playthroughs. Of those 5 games, I chose to finish 2 and left the other three in a state where I only have to finish the last mission and choose to abandon the game (because the last mission is a bore).

Air combat was pretty dull and feels half-done. It should be more detailed with support for multiple interceptors in the same battle. That would also justify having a hangar capacity of 4. Building a Firestorm should also not require a free hangar space, instead you should be able to transfer it to a specific slot once it's actually build. Your own base would be instant, any other base would take 3 days, just like a normal craft transfer. This would be needed because it would allow you to build them without compromising the defense of your home continent.

Not sure about "should." It could have been more fun. The current interception game is neither very fun nor does it evoke a sense of place or much emotion. It's busywork. Anything that changes it from busywork into something meaningful would be a good change.

I really miss defending my base from alien attackers. That could be a GREAT way of including more ground missions. Aliens discover your off-site hangars, go defend them!

I'd like more maps, period, but I'm not sure that an airbase-themed map would really make that much of a difference. I don't miss defending bases, because in the original I used that mainly as farming operations to fund XCOM long after country support became academic. Its main value was to provide a sense of place to the XCOM bases, which the current anthill mechanic already does extremely well.

I'd like missions with more varied objectives. Yet another mission set with "kill all the aliens" as an objective doesn't strike me as being a necessary addition to the game. If there were a "base defense" mode, I would like it to have unique mission parameters, with unique consequences.

The game should have been more isometric friendly. If the terrain was built out of blocks it would have removed almost all of the camera issues because the game could have displayed only one level at a time, ala the original game. Things cut short would just be shown in cross-section. Currently the game barely knows what's going on and what pieces of terrain to remove in order to let the player see. UFO roofs are particularly bad at this.

Totally disagree. The first game was good for its time, but its blocky maps were really bad for evoking a sense of place. Half the time, I didn't know what I was looking at until I varied the elevation a lot since I was looking at cross-section cutouts. I do that enough at work with CTScans. People are generally very bad at deducing what they're looking at through cross-sections.

The game's display is a compromise between evocative visual presentation and effective mechanical presentation. It could be better, but I want it to be better-better, not scale it back into something primitive and abstract just to make it render well.

Instead of just having ALL MUTONS ALL THE TIME, WITH SECTOPODS ON TOP the later missions would be much more interesting if you mixed in the weaker aliens more often. Sectoids are actually quite challenging but past a certain point they disappear and you never see them again, which also makes it impossible to craft more aim assists. The council missions especially could use less thin men.

The latter missions generally involve these aliens:

Ethereal
Muton
Elite Muton
Heavy Floater
Cyberdisc
Drones
Sectopod
Berserker
Chryssalid

This is a respectable mix of enemy variety. It's hardly "Mutons and more Mutons." More variety would be good, but your soldiers are already super OP once you get Psi. There's no need to make them even more OP by presenting you with lots of helpless enemies.

Having a Sectoid variant for the end game for making assists would be consistent with current game design; but since I don't like the interception game to begin with, I'd really rather that be overhauled than have Sectoids in the endgame. Council missions occasionally use Mutons, but I agree that they could use a lot less Thin Men.

The game already has better variety than the original, FWIW. A Snakeman Battleship in the original would have Snakemen, the Snakeman Commander, maybe Chryssalids. There's a lot of game in the original where you're battling the same green Mutons for UFO after UFO.

Outsiders should be more common. In the game trailer you can actually see a group of 3 outsiders together, but the most I ever ran into was 2. They should have had a special ability and show up throughout the game instead of being a minor plot point. Also Vahlen needs to shut up about capturing them when you already have an outsider shard in storage.

What you seem to want is more enemy variety, which I agree with. There's no special need for a particular enemy to be more than it is. The Outsider is a plot-point enemy and no more. If we want more enemies, there's no need to be constrained to make the Outsider into the variants we want.

More aliens in the last mission. The first time went through it the mission was a cakewalk, I took only 2 damage until I met the double sectopods and then died horribly. The aliens before that should be greater in number or they won't be a challenge at all. Instead of 4 sectoids, put in 12. 3 thin men? pathetic, put in 8.

No. More is not better. Better last mission. Better alien placement, more interesting and clearly rendered maps. More powerful aliens to pose a threat to psi soldiers. Psi should probably overhauled.

Some maps are far too small, or just too narrow. The game is built around flanking, but in many areas flanking is impossible without running right up to the same piece of cover an alien is behind. There is no room for wider maneuvers where you can flank without getting too close. And moving up to flank poses further problems because this triggers more and more groups of aliens.

I'd say that the game is built around cover. Flanking is one way around that, but there are other ways. Destroying cover with Shredder Rockets and Grenadier (twice the grenade count for Heavies) is effective. Inserting Assaults past enemy lines with Run and Gun is also very effective. Close and Personal is practically designed for that. Some maps are for aggressive cover destruction and frontal assaults. It'd be boring if every map allowed flanking.

Aliens should be shackled to the same exact rules that XCOM follows. 2 actions a turn, NO FREE MOVES. That free move is total BS and it's soul crushing to watch ranged aliens waltz into cover on your flank or melee aliens immediately run up into your face.

I do not agree at all. Aliens are generally spawned in the open, clumped together in very vulnerable positions. If they didn't have the free move, you wouldn't need anything other than 100% Heavies loaded to the gills with rockets and grenades. Giving aliens the free initial move simulates stealth and free alien dispositioning. They spawn, then adapt to your positions as you present them to the AI. It's to simulate them "being there all along."

On Normal, alien disposition can be controlled and is predictable. If you get flanked, it's because you took a risk and it backfired. If it's less so on Classic and Impossible, then those difficulties can be tweaked to be more like Normal in alien dispositions.

More specific info on the effects of abilities. For instance if you target a shredder rocket and hit the more info button all it shows is your basic hit-defense percentages, which have nothing to do with the rocket itself. The rocket does say affected targets take extra damage, but by how much? It doesn't say during combat. I think a third tab on the info screen breaking down the damage numbers and all of the related bonuses would help greatly.

Highly agree. I'm particularly annoyed that I can't use Flush reliably except as a +30 Aim modifier. It's not that powerful. A guaranteed move-effect similar to Suppression would make it better. At least display the move chance.

Skills are not terribly important on normal because the action isn't too hard. On Classic some of them become highly useful like Flush and Gunslinger. But on Impossible I've found that some skills wrap all the way around and become useless again. Flush for instance means giving up Rapid Fire. Rapid Fire is mandatory for assaults because a lot of the enemies are so tough you can't take them down in one hit at all, even flanked with an alloy cannon! Suppression on heavies is great, but it means giving up shredder rockets which are much more useful on Impossible because everything has such high health. Gunslinger means giving up a 10% accuracy bonus from Damn Good Ground, and if you don't think that's a big deal you have never missed a shot at 99% and 60% crit. That 10% turns every 90%+ shot into a guaranteed hit, no mess no full.

Flush is not for doing absolutely massive damage in one turn on an enemy right next to you. Alloy Cannon Assaults built for kicking down doors should have Rapid Fire, I agree. Flush is for making sure that you hit by increasing the hit chance to 100%, the same way you value Damn Good Ground. I might very well agree with you once I play on Impossible.

Having played Normal a lot, I'm inclined to think that the game is most tested and designed around Normal and Classic. It makes sense that the balance of abilities would break down at extreme settings. That's generally the way it is in games. FWIW, I'm finding most of the skills about equally useful on Normal, with some exceptions.

EDIT:

Noticed the phrase "moving up to flank." I find it somewhat of a problem when aliens are triggered by an Assault moving up to flank into a forward position, but I generally don't do that unless I'm sure about sighting and such, since I've since learned that triggering aliens when you already are fighting two groups is a good way to wipe.

However, flanking with ranged troops on the side is even worse, since you will generally trigger aliens that will then outflank your entire squad. I only do that when I have Battle Scanner - which is incidentally also good for determining whether it's safe to move up to flank.

Impossible Run Post mortem:

Whelp it's over finally. The last mission was terribly anticlimatic and basically involved my psi troopers tying the boss into a pretzel and taking turns kicking him. But I expected that, very satisfying. Suprisingly the last mission had no bugs in it other than the berserker thing, maybe the smaller number of aliens has something to do with it? All except one thing:

Spoiler:

At the very end when my Volunteer said her last words. The voice that came out was... a man >_>

Some thoughts on the whole thing:

- The early game is extremely brutal. To the point that if I lost a single soldier I would just quit and reload the mission from the beginning. Even without the panic spiral the simple loss of firepower is too much to deal with. Later on the bugs became more punishing and I started saving the game after the defeat of each alien group.
- All of the early missions are 12 vs 4 sectoids, they all have 4 health and when they mind link they have 5 health! And mind link heals them for 1 point whenever they do it! Your basic assault rifle and other guns can only down them in one hit if you get lucky enough to crit AND do max damage. I found that the only tactic that worked was to find the weak link, grenade to expose him and then hopefully take him out before he can get to cover. That deals with the other sectoid.
- Aliens have a ton of statistical bonuses. For instance drones have 6 hitpoints and are hardened so you can't crit them! Taking them out in one shot even with plasma weapons is not guaranteed. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, a lot of the non-mechanical enemies are also hardened and have flat out defensive bonuses around the 10-30% range. I would have preferred if Firaxis could have made it harder without just giving the player a handicap.
- If you don't want to lose any countries you need to dump 999% of your resources into uplinks. This means giving up everything else, OTS, BODY ARMOUR, weapons. I even had to demolish my alien containment at one point to balance my power usage. According to the score screen I sold hundreds of Elerium and over a thousand units of alloys just to make ends meet.
- Laser weapons are killer, they up your damage just enough that you can start to reliably take out the weaker aliens in one shot when you flank them. Bullet weapons might as well be paintball guns. There is no possible way you can skip lasers, even once you get light plasma your snipers and heavies will be sticking with lasers for a very long time.
- Air combat is a lot harder. It takes 5 avalanche hits to down a Large scout. So having multiple interceptors with the latest weapon upgrade is essential even if it means giving up something else due to limited funds. Never ever ever sell floater corpses, you need them to make dodge modules and they remain useful for the entire game. To a lesser degree target modules from sectoid bodies help too, especially with missiles because of their poor hit rate. Having more than 2 craft per base seems to be pointless however because you will never see more than 1 UFO in the same place in the same month and UFOs will tend to run off faster than your second fighter can catch them. If you miss a ufo, even a landed one, another will come back to attack your satellite, but this tends to be a battleship and far outclasses your starting craft.
- Skills are not terribly important on normal because the action isn't too hard. On Classic some of them become highly useful like Flush and Gunslinger. But on Impossible I've found that some skills wrap all the way around and become useless again. Flush for instance means giving up Rapid Fire. Rapid Fire is mandatory for assaults because a lot of the enemies are so tough you can't take them down in one hit at all, even flanked with an alloy cannon! Supression on heavies is great, but it means giving up shredder rockets which are much more useful on Impossible because everything has such high health. Gunslinger means giving up a 10% accuracy bonus from Damn Good Ground, and if you don't think that's a big deal you have never missed a shot at 99% and 60% crit. That 10% turns every 90%+ shot into a guaranteed hit, no mess no fuss.
- Bugs, bugs everywhere. If I had to guess I would say most of the bugginess stems from the sheer number of aliens the game tries to pack into every level. It seems like the more aliens there are the dumber the AI gets in a lot of ways. And on impossible the consequences of random glitches are magnified to the point that they become glaringly frustrating. I'm sure if I was playing on Normal a lot of this stuff would just slip my notice.
- The last mission was terribly anticlimactic. No sweat at all. I was expecting them to at least up the number of aliens but it still stuck with a single group of each type, if that. No match at all for my forces. The aliens just being tougher wasn't nearly enough to make up for the piecemeal attacks.
- I did this run using Not Created Equal which randomized soldier stats. I hired soldiers in batches of 10-30 and just flat out fired anyone with less than 75 accuracy or 45 will. This made combat a little more even compared to the aliens, but it also made every loss that much more painful because each soldier was effectively worth 5x as much in credits alone.

Some things I would have changed if I was making the game:
- Air combat was pretty dull and feels half-done. It should be more detailed with support for multiple interceptors in the same battle. That would also justify having a hangar capacity of 4. Building a Firestorm should also not require a free hangar space, instead you should be able to transfer it to a specific slot once it's actually build. Your own base would be instant, any other base would take 3 days, just like a normal craft transfer. This would be needed because it would allow you to build them without compromising the defense of your home continent.
- I really miss defending my base from alien attackers. That could be a GREAT way of including more ground missions. Aliens discover your off-site hangars, go defend them! The hangar would then be moved somewhere else on the continent and fighter cover would have to come in from nearby bases. Not having a home-base mission makes sense because if the aliens found that the game would be over anyhow.
- The game should have been more isometric friendly. If the terrain was built out of blocks it would have removed almost all of the camera issues because the game could have displayed only one level at a time, ala the original game. Things cut short would just be shown in cross-section. Currently the game barely knows what's going on and what pieces of terrain to remove in order to let the player see. UFO roofs are particularly bad at this.
- Make the opening cutscene skippable. I can't stress this enough. If I have only an hour to play games every minute wasted is a significant fraction of my time.
- Some of those council specific missions are godawful. Not ubearable to play, but the unskippable shrill dialog from the NPCs grinds on my nerves. The same goes for Vahlen and the other heads of staff when they chime in during a mission about something or other.
- Instead of just having ALL MUTONS ALL THE TIME, WITH SECTOPODS ON TOP the later missions would be much more interesting if you mixed in the weaker aliens more often. Sectoids are actually quite challenging but past a certain point they disappear and you never see them again, which also makes it impossible to craft more aim assists. The council missions especially could use less thin men.
- Outsiders should be more common. In the game trailer you can actually see a group of 3 outsiders together, but the most I ever ran into was 2. They should have had a special ability and show up throughout the game instead of being a minor plot point. Also Vahlen needs to shut up about capturing them when you already have an outsider shard in storage.
- More aliens in the last mission. The first time went through it the mission was a cakewalk, I took only 2 damage until I met the double sectopods and then died horribly. The aliens before that should be greater in number or they won't be a challenge at all. Instead of 4 sectoids, put in 12. 3 thin men? pathetic, put in 8.
- The ending cutscene is poorly done. The music is dramatic enough, but the sound is balanced in such a way that you can barely hear the music or the "environmental" sounds. The voices come in flat and dull as if being recorded in a cave without echoes. Completely unlike all the other cutscenes with dialog.
- Some maps are far too small, or just too narrow. The game is built around flanking, but in many areas flanking is impossible without running right up to the same piece of cover an alien is behind. There is no room for wider maneuvers where you can flank without getting too close. And moving up to flank poses further problems because this triggers more and more groups of aliens.
- Aliens should be shackled to the same exact rules that XCOM follows. 2 actions a turn, NO FREE MOVES. That free move is total BS and it's soul crushing to watch ranged aliens waltz into cover on your flank or melee aliens immediately run up into your face.
- The anthill is very detailed, and I didn't discover you could zoom in on it until after I beat my first game. It would have been nice to show more non-static animation or little mini-cutscenes linked to specific events like interceptors returning and landing on their pads. But I can see how the cost to benefit ratio is pretty low. If you ever do more DLC it could be neat to show off more of the base areas like the barracks.
- MORE MAPS, argh. This game could have twice the number of maps and 4 different player starting locations for each and it wouldn't be enough.
- More specific info on the effects of abilities. For instance if you target a shredder rocket and hit the more info button all it shows is your basic hit-defense percentages, which have nothing to do with the rocket itself. The rocket does say affected targets take extra damage, but by how much? It doesn't say during combat. I think a third tab on the info screen breaking down the damage numbers and all of the related bonuses would help greatly.
- Rescuing civilians in city missions should be easier. All it would take is to increase the size of the rescue radius a little bit. The perimeter of the radius also doesn't match the tiles where you can save them from. Unlike the arc thrower where if the blue ring passes through the center of a tile you KNOW you can stun them from that location. More alien variety here would be nice too. In one mission I got TWELVE cryssalids, talk about a zombie apocalypse.

LarryC wrote:

The game's display is a compromise between evocative visual presentation and effective mechanical presentation. It could be better, but I want it to be better-better, not scale it back into something primitive and abstract just to make it render well.

Oh I didn't mean you would actually make the map out of blocks. What I mean was cut the terrain into more discrete sections so that if I'm trying to look at something behind it you can make one section disappear instead of whole blocks of terrain. Sometimes the game actually does this properly, if something is obscured it will make an object transparent, or show a coloured outline of the entity when the player's view is blocked. But for the most part the camera is a horrid mess and the whole roof of buildings can flicker in and out whenever you move the camera. It's especially annoying when you to go throw a grenade.

Even if the tileset isn't fully isometric, the camera and cursor are. But they don't behave fully isometric. If my tile selector is on "level 1" KEEP IT on level 1. Don't suddenly jump it up to level 5 just because I pan the camera over a building. If I want to change levels I'll hit a button or scroll my mouse wheel to move the selector up and down vertically. Same goes with terrain, if I am working on level 1, DO NOT show me any terrain above that height. If I'm fighting inside of a UFO the roof should not exist, I have no reason to look at it, don't shove it in my face. That sort of thing.

LarryC wrote:

The latter missions generally involve these aliens:

Ethereal
Muton
Elite Muton
Heavy Floater
Cyberdisc
Drones
Sectopod
Berserker
Chryssalid

This is a respectable mix of enemy variety.

Well no not exactly, the list is a lot shorter than it looks. At least on Impossible, I certainly remember more variety when I was playing on Classic. 95% of my late game missions were composed of:

Ethereal +1-2 Elite (only on UFO missions)
3 Elites (Always at least 1)
Sectopod + 2 Drones (almost guaranteed)
Cyberdisk + 2 Drones
3 Heavy Floater
2 Mutons + Berserker (rare)
3 Mutons (very rare)

Terror missions always had at least one group of 3 chryssalids, but I never saw mutons of any kind or sectopods in them. On the two smallest weakest UFO types (the scouts) I had about a 10% chance of encountering normal floaters or a 20% chance of encountering normal mutons. Once I did the alien base I never saw a single sectoid again or thin men outside of council missions. Once I did the Overseer I never saw Sectoid commanders again until the very end.

LarryC wrote:

Having a Sectoid variant for the end game for making assists would be consistent with current game design; but since I don't like the interception game to begin with, I'd really rather that be overhauled than have Sectoids in the endgame. Council missions occasionally use Mutons, but I agree that they could use a lot less Thin Men.

What they could have done for endgame was put in single Sectoid commanders into regular missions with each one leading a small pack of 2-5 sectoids. The commanders actually have a "mass mind link" ability, but you never EVER see it used because most of the time they spawn in 2s or 3s on UFO bridges and they only time they appear alongside normal sectoids is the final mission. 5 mind linked sectoids with boosted health and crit backed up with a commander lurking in the back tossing mindfrays, grenades, and surpressing and mind controlling your guys is a pretty credible endgame threat. Especially combined with other alien groups.

LarryC wrote:

What you seem to want is more enemy variety, which I agree with. There's no special need for a particular enemy to be more than it is. The Outsider is a plot-point enemy and no more. If we want more enemies, there's no need to be constrained to make the Outsider into the variants we want.

Why not? You have an alien that doesn't get much use and is boring as dirt. So make something neat out of it.

LarryC wrote:

No. More is not better. Better last mission. Better alien placement, more interesting and clearly rendered maps. More powerful aliens to pose a threat to psi soldiers. Psi should probably overhauled.

The only way to threaten a Psi squad is through attrition. On that last playthrough I only took damage 3 times. One was reaction fire from a blind corner, the other two were from psi-panicking aliens who then returned fire. If that had been 6 hits instead of 3, or even 9 hits it would have drained all of my healing resources and every further hit would hurt that much more. This is why I say add MORE aliens. Make each group bigger. Make the aliens constantly spawn in a stream that gets larger with every new alien type you encounter. Don't allow the player to just steamroll each piddly encounter and then end turn repeatedly to recharge psi powers.

LarryC wrote:

On Normal, alien disposition can be controlled and is predictable. If you get flanked, it's because you took a risk and it backfired. If it's less so on Classic and Impossible, then those difficulties can be tweaked to be more like Normal in alien dispositions.

This is really the main issue. On classic and up the aliens are tougher and stronger, so even a single group of them can be a match for your entire squad. But as you are moving around trying to deal with this single group you trigger more aliens, and more. Because there are more aliens to begin with the game has a much harder time fitting them into the same space and you end up with lots of glitches and monster closets.

LarryC wrote:

Highly agree. I'm particularly annoyed that I can't use Flush reliably except as a +30 Aim modifier. It's not that powerful. A guaranteed move-effect similar to Suppression would make it better. At least display the move chance.

Something that irritates me greatly is that some abilities just don't work on certain aliens. Like how Disabling shot works on cyberdisks but not sectopods. The game doesn't give you any indication about this until the sectopod opens fire anyway. There needs to be more granular detail given to the player, the interface is already set up towards this so just make it fully functional.

LarryC wrote:

Having played Normal a lot, I'm inclined to think that the game is most tested and designed around Normal and Classic. It makes sense that the balance of abilities would break down at extreme settings. That's generally the way it is in games. FWIW, I'm finding most of the skills about equally useful on Normal, with some exceptions.

Yeah, Normal/Classic are really the balance point. Easy is well... easy. And Impossible rigs its odds, but it's not like it doesn't warn you first. All of the abilities are useful (or at least viable) on Classic, but Impossible just ups the HP amounts to the point where only damage boosting skills can really compete.

Tamren wrote:

When you guys say that you never run into these bugs, which difficulties have you played? And do you own Slingshot?

I've got the free "new purchase" DLC for customising your soldiers but no Slingshot. I've played on normal, classic and second wave normal. Never tried impossible but it'd be really surprising if those old bugs were showing up only in impossible since the same game logic must be used for all three with slight modifiers on the rules. I mean, that's how I'd make the game, logically, to do it differently would just make more work!

Duoae wrote:
Tamren wrote:

When you guys say that you never run into these bugs, which difficulties have you played? And do you own Slingshot?

I've got the free "new purchase" DLC for customising your soldiers but no Slingshot. I've played on normal, classic and second wave normal. Never tried impossible but it'd be really surprising if those old bugs were showing up only in impossible since the same game logic must be used for all three with slight modifiers on the rules. I mean, that's how I'd make the game, logically, to do it differently would just make more work!

I own slingshot and the only bug is the framerate when the Berzerker runs. Played on normal and classic ironman.

I've encountered some of the unpolished sorts of things the game was known for even before launch. It's Firaxis. None of their Civ games were all that polished either. There were typically a long laundry list of bugs communities like CivFanatics fixed on their own. That said, the fundamental game design ideas were generally sound. XCOM seems kind of bug-lite for a Firaxis game, all things considered.

Tamren:

Even if the tileset isn't fully isometric, the camera and cursor are. But they don't behave fully isometric. If my tile selector is on "level 1" KEEP IT on level 1. Don't suddenly jump it up to level 5 just because I pan the camera over a building. If I want to change levels I'll hit a button or scroll my mouse wheel to move the selector up and down vertically. Same goes with terrain, if I am working on level 1, DO NOT show me any terrain above that height. If I'm fighting inside of a UFO the roof should not exist, I have no reason to look at it, don't shove it in my face. That sort of thing.

In my games, this generally only happens when I'm free-selecting soldiers or aiming grenades. The grenade/rocket aiming thing really needs a lot of work. Tabbing through soldiers works better, too. In that sense, you can really see where the console genes are splicing in. I'd mind more except that I want more people to like XCOM. Getting it exposed on console is a small price to pay, IMO.

Well no not exactly, the list is a lot shorter than it looks. At least on Impossible, I certainly remember more variety when I was playing on Classic. 95% of my late game missions were composed of:

I suspect that it's the Impossible enemy spawn rates that are screwing that up. Normal enemies are more varied. About the only thing I don't see at all are Sectoid Commanders with Sectoids. It is kind of a shame that that combination isn't used more.

Why not? You have an alien that doesn't get much use and is boring as dirt. So make something neat out of it.

The Outsider is an alien specifically casted so it'll be a plot-point capture. It has to be relatively straightforward (no weird crap that early in the game) so as not to confuse newbies. That leads to it not being that interesting as an enemy in the long run. It might make sense to make an upgraded version of it, but at that point it seems to be a better thing to just make new and interesting aliens from the drawing board.

The only way to threaten a Psi squad is through attrition. On that last playthrough I only took damage 3 times. One was reaction fire from a blind corner, the other two were from psi-panicking aliens who then returned fire. If that had been 6 hits instead of 3, or even 9 hits it would have drained all of my healing resources and every further hit would hurt that much more. This is why I say add MORE aliens. Make each group bigger. Make the aliens constantly spawn in a stream that gets larger with every new alien type you encounter. Don't allow the player to just steamroll each piddly encounter and then end turn repeatedly to recharge psi powers.

I think you're solving the problem ass-backwards. The Psi powers are broken, so you think piling on enemies is the way to go. I don't think this is good design. It requires the player to have Psi powers, even multiple Psi Soldiers to tackle the last game pieces and the last level. At that point, you've constrained the player into a very funneled experience.

Mind Control is broken. Straight up. It was broken before, it's still broken. You could do a lot to mitigate its power by stipulating that it can only be used once per map. As you say, recharging between encounters is too easy. The time-out is not really a realistic control for the power. Shredder Rocket is only 1/map. Mind Control can be, too.

Psi Panic is almost as bad, but I'm not sure it's strong enough to make it 1/map. Timing it out is not enough of a control. It's single-target, but it's a hard control power.

This is really the main issue. On classic and up the aliens are tougher and stronger, so even a single group of them can be a match for your entire squad. But as you are moving around trying to deal with this single group you trigger more aliens, and more. Because there are more aliens to begin with the game has a much harder time fitting them into the same space and you end up with lots of glitches and monster closets.

I'll have to try Classic soon. I think that a single group of aliens shouldn't be a match for a powerful squad late in the game, and early on the monsters are smaller in number. I can see this becoming an issue on Impossible.

Something that irritates me greatly is that some abilities just don't work on certain aliens. Like how Disabling shot works on cyberdisks but not sectopods. The game doesn't give you any indication about this until the sectopod opens fire anyway. There needs to be more granular detail given to the player, the interface is already set up towards this so just make it fully functional.

That might be a bug in your game. I hit a Sectopod with Disabling Shot twice and each time it did not fire its main weapon. It barely hits anything even when it's Suppressed on Normal. It can still fire its secondary weapons.

Yeah, Normal/Classic are really the balance point. Easy is well... easy. And Impossible rigs its odds, but it's not like it doesn't warn you first. All of the abilities are useful (or at least viable) on Classic, but Impossible just ups the HP amounts to the point where only damage boosting skills can really compete.

That's one of the problems with just inflating numbers to layer on difficulty. MOO2 suffers the same way. So does Civ. In Deity and up, the way to play is to use the AI Civs to power your own through a variety of means making certain advantages worth a lot more than other advantages.

That said, Flush IS a damage-boosting skill but the main problem, as I see it, is that Flush requires Aggression and Bring Em On to deal a lot of damage through a high percentage critical hit. Doubling the HP and making everything Hardened hits Flush really hard.

Hey Tkyl is there a way to force trigger the Slingshot council missions? I really don't want to start a new game to do them.

Duoae wrote:
Tamren wrote:

When you guys say that you never run into these bugs, which difficulties have you played? And do you own Slingshot?

I've got the free "new purchase" DLC for customising your soldiers but no Slingshot. I've played on normal, classic and second wave normal. Never tried impossible but it'd be really surprising if those old bugs were showing up only in impossible since the same game logic must be used for all three with slight modifiers on the rules. I mean, that's how I'd make the game, logically, to do it differently would just make more work!

I just started a new Second Wave game on Normal. I turned on every single Second Wave option except for Marathon because that just makes the game longer, and Hidden Potential because I don't like that kind of uncontrolled randomness in regards to soldier stats. Not Created Equal sounds like it could be exploited a bit to get superior soldier stats but not as much as you think. The original game allowed you to do this, at no small cost. Since it's possible now to get soldiers with poor stats getting one with average scores is not guaranteed anymore, so you fire as many soldiers as you keep and this doubles the effective price. And that cost does add up very quickly if you set your aim a bit higher, with all of the other options turned on credits are going to be a scarce resource. For instance I have the one that randomizes funding amounts per nation and I started in South Africa, my home country is giving me an amazing monthly income of... 7.

So far no bugs, the most aliens I have faced on a map so far was 8. The game seems to run a lot nicer in general. I've only come across one graphical glitch where a soldier leaning beside a door turns the wrong way before throwing a grenade. The grenade still flies out of the door it's just that the soldier turned left instead of right and is making the pitching animation into a solid wall.

Having Damage Roulette and Absolutely Critical turned on doubles the effective damage range of each weapon and makes flanking a guaranteed 100% crit. This means an assault rifle can do 1-6 damage or 1-8 on a crit. I really like this new combat dynamic because it puts paramount importance on exposing enemies in cover and flanking them from the side. It also makes it much harder for the aliens to just straight up gun you down as you move from cover to cover.

Gah, I got the Support rifle fire crash again! It seems like it specifically happens when the support shoots his rifle, normal shot/supression/overwatch doesn't seem to make any difference. It was a regular assault rifle and not a laser rifle this time. Though I can't remember this ever happening with light plasma or plasma rifles.

Unfortunately I don't have any save for this mission because I wasn't expecting this at all. I'll start saving at the end of every turn just in case this happens again. No idea if any of this is helpful but I saved the details. I'm thinking of just re-downloading the game entirely to see if that helps at all. (and in preparation for the Warspace mod which I would like to try)

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: XComGame.exe
Application Version: 1.0.0.28586
Application Timestamp: 51250957
Fault Module Name: XComGame.exe
Fault Module Version: 1.0.0.28586
Fault Module Timestamp: 51250957
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 009a8bde
OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3
Locale ID: 4105
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

I'm enjoying my game so far, but it's starting to look like this game is going to be flat out impossible. Even though I'm only playing on normal the combination of super expensive satellites (300 each! and they go UP in price every time I build some!) and War Weariness looks like it's not going to leave me enough money to do anything. I'm nearing the end of my second month and I can just barely afford my first satellite uplink. But I only have 2 satellites, it's going to cost 750 credits to make 3 sats to use the uplink and ALL of the funding nations have already cut their support by 10% in the second month. By month 11 I'm not going to have any income at all!

The diminishing returns in either direction is just a bit much. One of them on it's own isn't an insurmountable challenge but I don't think it's possible to play a game with both of them enabled. On my Impossible campaign I used up every credit I could get my grubby paws on, had satellites on all of the nations and had every continent bonus. And I still ended the game with a surplus of just 1000-2000 credits, or one month's income.

I've come across some more minor glitches, but the game seems to be much more stable overall on Normal mode.
- When a sniper works the bolt of his rifle after each shot, the animation of the bolt and the animation of his hand don't match up. His hand floats to the side while the bolt moves itself. It's particularly glaring because you see it in third-person slow motion every time he shoots.
- If an alien dies and it's body falls off the edge of the map for whatever reason, there is no ground to catch them. Instead it just clips through the ground and falls into the centre of the earth, dragging my camera with it. This happened 3 separate times with 3 different floaters on my last mission which was the roadside diner. You need to put some proper level geometry in for them to land on or this will keep happening. Floaters are especially problematic because their jetpacks tend to toss them around a lot, especially if you take them out with overwatch while they are already moving.

Tamren, have you ever considered a career in QA?

Reinstalled the game, started a new campaign. So far no issues, though I'm only through the first month.

I did see two glitches though. Sometimes when you launch an interceptor for the first time the game doesn't remove the static "terrain" launch platform when it's showing the animated cutscene version. So the old platform just sits there while the moving platform clips through it horribly. Sometimes the hangar doors are down, which looks even worse! This can also happen with the firestorm. That particular bug has been in there since release. The other issue is that some maps with water on the ground have these bizzare crisscrossing artifact lines that mess up the texture and reflections.

I was thinking of trying Warspace but you have to be a member at nexusmods to download it. I do have an account I used for fallout 3 stuff but it's so old I had to reset the password and the XCOM nexus page doesn't let me log in. Irritating.

Duoae wrote:

Tamren, have you ever considered a career in QA? ;)

Is this what QA work is? I tend to critique the games I play and think of ways I would have improved or done them differently. It's pretty much a habit at this point and I sometimes find my way to a game's suggestions forum (if one exists) and share my thoughts on it. I'm pretty active with Planetside 2 in this way. Though whether or not anyone actually reads them I have no idea, but I enjoy doing it nonetheless.

You're absolutely doing QA work, Tamren. (My wife manages QA engineers.) The role of QA is to scour the software for bugs, glitches, exploits, etc. so that users don't suffer problems like you have been reporting or be able to perform actions the designers would consider violating the rules/purpose of the software. Like how some iOS apps occasionally are shown to enable free tethering, and everyone therefore starts downloading them, and then Apple removes them from the marketplace...those are cases where Apple's QA didn't manipulate the app enough to really see for what it could be used. Often times, QAs will be responsible for running front-end software that will test the software in question using brute force methods much more efficiently than performing the tests themselves.

Tamren wrote:

I was thinking of trying Warspace but you have to be a member at nexusmods to download it. I do have an account I used for fallout 3 stuff but it's so old I had to reset the password and the XCOM nexus page doesn't let me log in. Irritating.

I could send you a copy of the files. I've got the latest version currently sitting on my hard drive. Let me know.

Sooo this was just released on the App Store for Mac... Is the Steam version going to be updated to be Mac+PC ? I don't think I'll buy it a 3rd time on the Mac, but it would be nice to not have to reboot to Windows to play.

Laarrs wrote:

I could send you a copy of the files. I've got the latest version currently sitting on my hard drive. Let me know.

I'll keep that in mind thanks. But there are a couple other mods on Nexus that look interesting so I would like to get that working if possible. I put in a ticket with nexus support so we'll see.

Keithustus wrote:

You're absolutely doing QA work, Tamren. (My wife manages QA engineers.) The role of QA is to scour the software for bugs, glitches, exploits, etc. so that users don't suffer problems like you have been reporting or be able to perform actions the designers would consider violating the rules/purpose of the software.

Ah I see what you mean. Though I'm pretty sure that job description usually doesn't extend to providing suggestions for improvement or new content. I tend to be better at that then just breaking things, and I come across enough broken things as it is. Ever tried Planetside 2 after an update? One day I logged into the game and Every. Single. Person. in the entire game had their necks turned 90 degrees to the left at all times.

I started up a new campaign again. After impossible I was finding normal difficulty a little sedate. So I loaded up a Classic game with every single Second Wave option except for Marathon, Diminishing Returns and War Weariness. This one is turning out to be a lot of fun!

Unfortunately I did get the laser rifle crash one more time. This time it was an assault who fired it so it clearly has nothing to do with soldier class. I did a quick google search and it popped up 2 results. One of them was a Steam forum thread which didn't have any solutions. The other one was on the 2k forums and one poster said he found a way to fix the crash, at least for him. It involved disabling ALL sound devices on his computer except for the speakers he was using to play the game. No sound = no crash. Only one device enabled = no crash. I looked at my control panel and I have about 8 devices listed between my onboard sound, my graphics card HDMI ports and my headset microphone. I only have 2 speakers and my headset is just for the microphone, so I went ahead and turned off everything else. Will see if this makes a difference.

Figured I'd clarify some issues I mentioned earlier. This here is the dropoff of doom. Flight-capable aliens will sometimes try to take a shortcut over the corner. But the moment they step off into open air they just die and fall off the map.
IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/867218017636442520/412DEB5E1821DB380440F04D6B3BCE874CEB05F5/)

And I got that glitchy water again. This seems to happen only on forest UFO maps. Something is highlighting the edges of the ground polygons when it shouldn't be.
IMAGE(http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/867218017636439487/0C320D0263F326AD379059BF7B4CA0AF657D8D71/)

I stayed an 8th game with Marathon and Not Created Equally on Normal. What can I say? I like easy wins. I like the balance of timings on Marathon. There's a long while where you can survive on just Laser Rifles and Pistols. I like having a lot of encounters using this stage of tech.

Some of the changes done by marathon are pretty cool. It makes some facilities a lot more expensive and slows down the "milestones" where new enemies show up and stuff like that. I would probably use it if it didn't make the game so long. I just don't have time.

Still getting that crash sadly. I did some digging on other forums and it seems to be fairly common since the Second Wave patch. Thinking of putting this campaign on hold for a bit.

Okay, what the hell? For my first time ever, I didn't instantly skip an ad in YouTube to get to the video I wanted because the ad was labelled as something about XCOM Declassified "The Burn Room". The ad was actually pretty decent but mentioned it's by the creators of Bioshock 2. So, is this or is this not an XCOM product? Is this the fps knockoff we've all been horrified by the prospects of for a few years now?

Youtube link

Keithustus wrote:

Okay, what the hell? For my first time ever, I didn't instantly skip an ad in YouTube to get to the video I wanted because the ad was labelled as something about XCOM Declassified "The Burn Room". The ad was actually pretty decent but mentioned it's by the creators of Bioshock 2. So, is this or is this not an XCOM product? Is this the fps knockoff we've all been horrified by the prospects of for a few years now?

Youtube link

There's a thread for that.

And if by "Horrified", you mean "Super excited". Then yes.

I read a very brief article that the XCOM shooter was being retooled. Maybe this is that.

There's been a bit of chat about it in the other thread. I don't know that it's been changed a whole heap (went from first person to third person, but that was a while ago). I think it's just being remarketed as a spin-off to take into account the success of the strategy game and isolate itself from criticism that a true XCOM game can't be a shooter.

Yeah I hadn't favorited that thread so I didn't know it had gotten updates. I'm following it now.

My only gripes with the previous info on the Bureau were that it was announced before we even knew a TBS XCOM game was coming out, and it seemed to be all about fighting black goo. Black goo?

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Yeah I hadn't favorited that thread so I didn't know it had gotten updates. I'm following it now.

My only gripes with the previous info on the Bureau were that it was announced before we even knew a TBS XCOM game was coming out, and it seemed to be all about fighting black goo. Black goo?

What? Didn't they have it in the sci fi series Dark Skies?. Also the black goo in the X-files.

There was never black goo in XCOM that I know of.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

There was never black goo in XCOM that I know of.

There was green sparkly goo in X-Com 3 which sorta counts.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

There was never black goo in XCOM that I know of.

But wasn't the point being that it was a reboot? You don't have to have the same things in those!, Mr. OCD!

IMAGE(http://rps.net/QS/Images/Smilies/rolleyes.gif) You're just arguing to argue now.

There's lots of green goo in this XCOM and in UFO Defense. Would it be better if the goo were green?