XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Strategy Game - Developed by Firaxis

As an outside observer, it seems this thread is turning into No Mutants Allowed.

TempestBlayze wrote:

As an outside observer, it seems this thread is turning into No Mutants Allowed.

Did you actually read the old NMA Fallout 3 flamewars? This is thread is a glowing pro-Firaxis endorsement of the new XCOM game by comparison. Sure, we're nitpicking over perceived differences between the classic and reimagined version, but people here are still genuinely interested in upcoming release.

“… to remove micromanagement.”

In this case of X-COM and Civilization, a large part of the appeal was to micromanage every aspect of your game. Otherwise you’re left with a damned console game. If I wanted to play console games I’d go buy them and a case of red bull so I can stay up all night pwning newbs and getting headshots.

Yoreel wrote:

I disagree. By making the entry point of a game easier, and upping the difficulty as you go so a new person is having fun the entire time they are playing, you make an overall better game.

The game already does this. It just has a manual, not a tutorial. And the game does gets more difficult over time as it introduces more and stronger enemies to you. You won't face Ethereals and Crysalids in the first month, but boy when they show up things really go to hell.

The point I'm trying to make here is that it wouldn't be XCOM if your troops couldn't be killed at the drop of a hat. This fact remains true from the very first mission to the last. It doesn't matter what equipment or tactics you use. This is war and soldiers will die. The last time I led a party of goodjers in the final mission to Cydonia I used every trick I knew to maximize their chances. We started with a full Avenger of 28 men. By the time it was over less than a handful of us were still alive, and the survivors mere turns away from bleeding out.

Let me repeat what Nevin said earlier:

Nevin73 wrote:

In the original, you loaded your Skyranger with all troops in the first missions because you probably didn't have a tank and you knew you would take losses. There was no armor, no medkits, nothing to really give them any sort of edge over the enemy. If that starting point stays true, then four guys are going to take a beating. If it doesn't stay true, I'm thinking that one of the magical elements of the original game, the act of discovery of new gear, all the more important because it was necessary, will be missing.

This is exactly what I am afraid of. The new game looks amazing and I'm sure Firaxis won't let it out the door without polishing it to a high degree of fun. But what I loved so much about the original game was that it was all about leading the very best humanity has to offer against the aliens. And it was NEVER enough.

LtWarhound wrote:
complexmath wrote:

Really, the only purpose of a full contingent in early missions is to have plenty of cannon fodder rather than because the scope of the mission is terribly large. If Firaxis can keep the feel of X-Com without requiring me to load my ship with human bait, I'm all for it.

If this is the common attitude, it might explain why people say this game is hard. Me, I didn't waste troops as 'cannon fodder', that's just a failure of leadership. I used the troops for supporting fire&movement elements. Two groups, each one with a scout, heavy, rifle and medic. Scout moved forward to spot the aliens, reserving time to pull back to cover, heavy laid down fire on anything the scout spotted and opened holes in terrain. Rifle moves up enough to cover the scout and heavy and reserves TU for reaction fire and the medic played free safety. The two elements worked to support each other, either flanking on both sides to lay down a cross fire, or one element acted as an 'anvil' while the other flanked to flush the aliens. Short of just amazingly bad luck, I didn't suffer wipeouts.

Me either. I was mostly referring to the instances where you lose troops by approaching aliens with enough APs in reserve to take a snap-shot before you have any idea they're there. I've had plenty of times where I walked halfway up a flight of stairs to scout an upper story only to be shot in the back of the head by some alien on overwatch, for example. Which really comes back to the steep initial learning curve of the original X-Com. An experienced player might know that initial missions should be approached with extreme caution--throwing electro-flares all over the darn place during night missions, tossing a grenade into non-visible areas before entering on the off chance that an alien is hiding there, staying out of open areas where an alien sniper on a rooftop can pick you off, etc. If I were remaking X-Com today I'd look for ways to ensure that a new player didn't fail the first few missions horribly and give up, however. Which I imagine is a concern, since this is a time where games almost never have the guts to treat the player so harshly.

As an aside... you brought a medic on early missions? Really? In my experience, even with the first-tier armor, being hit by an alien was almost always an insta-kill. I generally wait until much later to research the medkit, since science resources are so thin in the early game and medkits have such a minimal benefit until later.

Itsatrap wrote:

X-COM: UFO Defense had a pretty thorough manual, complete with 40 pages of tutorials.

I suppose there's social commentary here about kids these days not wanting to read manuals and invest the time in learning new games, but that's probably worthy of its own thread.

Suggestion: They should bring back the printed manual and reinstitute the copy-protection lookup.* That would encourage the user to keep the manual handy and more likely to read it.

*Not actually a suggestion

Raelic wrote:

“… to remove micromanagement.”

In this case of X-COM and Civilization, a large part of the appeal was to micromanage every aspect of your game. Otherwise you’re left with a damned console game. If I wanted to play console games I’d go buy them and a case of red bull so I can stay up all night pwning newbs and getting headshots.

Oy. Double oy. Epic, nuclear-powered oy.

Just because we used to have manuals.. doesnt mean folks used to actually read them.. consistently. Some manuals were more flavor than substance. Others had to exist because the learning wasnt built into the game like it is nowadays.

I remember the good ol'days when SSI manuals would actually show you some of the calculations being used ingame.

XCOM TBS Discussion Protection Code:
Refer to this thread Page 8, Post 1, Paragraph 1, Word 12 for the answer to worrying too much about XCOM now.

Having a 'learning curve' you have to slog through each and every time you play the game, that doesn't make for a better game.

The information needed to play the game was available, first in the manual, then later in the wikis. Aaaaand people wouldn't take the time to read/track down the info, then complained that the game was like math. Hard.

So, spoon feeding becomes the norm. Ya! You learned how to shoot a single shot! Woo! Now we teach you how to reload! Woo!

...

Pass. Give me a manual, turn me loose, I'm an oooold gamer, I'll take my lumps and overcome and enjoy the game. But then again, I'm the sort to play with things like Aurora, which your average gamer wouldn't.

complexmath wrote:

As an aside... you brought a medic on early missions? Really? In my experience, even with the first-tier armor, being hit by an alien was almost always an insta-kill. I generally wait until much later to research the medkit, since science resources are so thin in the early game and medkits have such a minimal benefit until later.

I have no idea why you WOULDN'T bring a medic. I never have any less than 4 kits and two dedicated medics. Losing soldiers because they bleed out is one of the easiest things to fix. Unless you don't have a medkit in which case you are screwed. Even in the very early game a soldier can get lucky and survive any plasma bolt. They might be heavily wounded and about to bleed out in a couple turns, but it did happen. More so when you got your hands on personal armour. Medkits are also the only way to wake up stunned soldiers.

I ran goodjer xcom games a bunch and I lost count of the times where soldiers would survive hits. One time Prozac got shot in the head and received a slight dent on his head armour. Another time Nightmare straight up tanked multiple shots to the chest without injury. Soldier's frontal armour is always stronger, sometimes it can make all the difference.

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Oh and Firaxis if you are listening. Make sure that if you include a tutorial it will be a separate thing from a normal game, or at the very least skippable. I'm starting to run into a lot of games these days that force the player to sit through a tutorial every single time a new game starts. Not even including it in the story, just durr hurr press A here press B here kinda stuff.

Tamren wrote:
complexmath wrote:

As an aside... you brought a medic on early missions? Really? In my experience, even with the first-tier armor, being hit by an alien was almost always an insta-kill. I generally wait until much later to research the medkit, since science resources are so thin in the early game and medkits have such a minimal benefit until later.

I have no idea why you WOULDN'T bring a medic. I never have any less than 4 kits and two dedicated medics. Losing soldiers because they bleed out is one of the easiest things to fix. Unless you don't have a medkit in which case you are screwed. Even in the very early game a soldier can get lucky and survive any plasma bolt. They might be heavily wounded and about to bleed out in a couple turns, but it did happen. More so when you got your hands on personal armour. Medkits are also the only way to wake up stunned soldiers.

Once I research Medkits I simply give one to every team member. But at the beginning of the game I've found that my precious few research hours are better spent on weapons than on Medkits. I'll usually research Medkits about the same time as first-tier armor, since that's the point where the chance of a teammate who isn't insta-killed when hit is reasonably above zero. If someone is knocked out from a blast in those early missions... I'll just drag them home when I win the encounter. Ultimately it's a matter of strategy though.

This went downhill fast.

I don't know what you do for your starting picks for things like scientists. But I find that I always have enough researching that I finish medkits by the time I have laser pistols researched and manufactured. And then when I finish manufacturing my first set of medkits the laser rifles have finished, and then personal armour and so on.

Do you find that you run into space issues when including that many medkits? I use a squads approach to battles so a kit is never too far from a given soldier. I generally run out of space on the skyranger between stun launcher reloads, flares, grenades etc.

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Not much more to talk about Thin J, just waiting for the next update.

Tamren wrote:

I don't know what you do for your starting picks for things like scientists. But I find that I always have enough researching that I finish medkits by the time I have laser pistols researched and manufactured. And then when I finish manufacturing my first set of medkits the laser rifles have finished, and then personal armour and so on.

Do you find that you run into space issues when including that many medkits? I use a squads approach to battles so a kit is never too far from a given soldier. I generally run out of space on the skyranger between stun launcher reloads, flares, grenades etc.

Honestly, in the early going, I don't care if my soldiers die; they haven't gained any experience, so for $40k I can just plug in a new one. Now, later on, sure, I keep 3-4 medkits on hand and assign them to people with Flying Suits to give them the necessary mobility, but early on, I focus on lasers first for armament and second for income (to pay for the dead $40k soldiers).

WOW. Just saw this thread. I am really excited. This must be the remake we have been waiting for.

I'm only a few steps away from the bathroom, but for the sake of solidarity, I just did my business right here in the seat.

Tamren wrote:

I don't know what you do for your starting picks for things like scientists. But I find that I always have enough researching that I finish medkits by the time I have laser pistols researched and manufactured. And then when I finish manufacturing my first set of medkits the laser rifles have finished, and then personal armour and so on.

Do you find that you run into space issues when including that many medkits? I use a squads approach to battles so a kit is never too far from a given soldier. I generally run out of space on the skyranger between stun launcher reloads, flares, grenades etc.

At the start I'll hire as many scientists as I can afford, but what I'll usually do initially is dedicate them all to one thing at a time to get the quickest results. I've tried both initially researching Medkits and waiting on weapons until I recover a plasma weapon vs. getting my squad equipped with Laser Rifles ASAP. I generally favor the second approach, since the standard rifles are garbage and heavy weapons are just unwieldy in terms of ammo, their effect on AP, etc.

Managing 8 Medkits plus heavy weapons in the beginning of the game can be a problem, but once my squad has moved to laser or plasma weapon I only carry 2 spare ammo clips, a Medkit, and a few Electro-Flares and Grenades. I don't usually bother with the Shock Lance, since I tend to recover live aliens knocked out from Grenades or simply from ship fires at crash sites. I never cared much for tanks since they're very expensive and take up tons of space in the ship, and once I get Blasters I'll often just leave one guy in the ship sitting on a pile of Blaster Bombs who is in charge of wiping out a target my strike team has scouted.

I used to name my troopers after Russian WW2 recipients of the Order of Lenin. I figured most of them died before war's end anyway, so it made it easier to to maintain some level of detachment.

So I've gone through the complete range of emotions on this. Everything from crapping pants to sad panda kicking a can. I've finally come to the conclusion that I'm excited. Not (in this case) excited that someone is remaking X-com, but that one of my favorite developers who made a great civilation game for consoles is doing the same thing to X-Com. I think Mr. Danimal mentioned Civ Rev earlier, but I didn't really think about what that meant until now.

Was Civilization Revolution the great sucessor to Civ 4? Nope. Did I play the crap out of it and have a great time? Yep. Will this be the X-com game everyone has been waiting 17 years for? Probably not. Will it be a great game and fun to play? Most likely.

I will buy this game and I will play this game on my xbox. I will enjoy it. Firaxis, you kick ass.

Well, looks like this will be the relaunch title for X-COM, as the FPS has been delayed into 2013.

Given that the new XCOM strategy game is supposed to be the chronological follow up to the FPS. Now they are switching it up and making the FPS a prequel.

I'm was certainly more interested in the FPS now that the remake has been announced. But now that's tempered with the annoyance that I need to wait even longer.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Well, looks like this will be the relaunch title for X-COM, as the FPS has been delayed into 2013.

That makes sense since it would be silly to have a bunch of XCOM games coming out and confusing consumers. On a related note, Silent Hill: HD Collection, Silent Hill: Downpour and Silent Hill: Book of Memories are all releasing in March

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Well, looks like this will be the relaunch title for X-COM, as the FPS has been delayed into 2013.

Hot damn, I am a GENIUS.

[size=8]I'll probably never nail a prediction ever again, so please let me bask in the glory of this one.[/size]

Couple more screens of the game.

GI: Why You Should Care About XCOM: Enemy Unknown

More awesome screens, Tkyl, thanks!

The fact I can't immediately play this game is very frustrating. I've had to put down Skyrim and start up a play-through of the original XCOM to get it out of my head.

I'm not sure how Valkyria Chronicles fits into this, but that's a plus.

Wait, wait.

Forgive the skimming.

Can you name your troops?

If so, I'm in. If not, no dice.

Tamren wrote:

I'm not sure how Valkyria Chronicles fits into this, but that's a plus.

I could see a movement based system like Valkyria Chronicles had fitting into the screen shots that I have seen. The aspect of I can be short at while I'm moving from point A to point B that was in the original X-Com was also somewhat in VC. Also, you can do the same thing to enemies, so I could see setting up a choke point by destroying some buildings, and then forcing the enemy to move into an area where you are set up to get many shots off during their movement.

Am I the only one who's disturbed by "press Y to scan for UFOs" visible in this image?

MoonDragon wrote:

Am I the only one who's disturbed by "press Y to scan for UFOs" visible in this image?

I am not only disturbed, I am horrified. Nay, my very soul is stricken to the core!

Eh, in the original the mini-game to shoot down the UFOs was just that...a silly little mini-game that worked as a simple mechanic to perform a function the game was not really designed to address. Perhaps the scanning thing is similar.