Slackbladder
Member
I assume this is on classic dificulty? I don't think I am ready for classic quite yet! :{
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XCOM: Enemy Unknown |OT| Neo GAF is Under Alien Control
- Thread starter Jintor
- Start date
yeah would be nice to hide everything but the floor sometimes.
Finally finished the base assault, so many chryssalids. Managed to make it out with no casualties (especially hard when two of your assaults automatically fire on close enemies, really hard if you know who the boss is). Almost captured the boss too, but noooooo had to whiff an 80% stun chance. Always said I have the worst luck. Made sure to buy the arc upgrade once I got out though so hopefully this will never happen ever again (it will happen with 100% chance now because the universe likes taking a dump on me).
Yeah, sorry, I totally should have mentioned that, since it's a good heads up for what to expect (or at least what the game's possible of throwing at you if its feeling vindictive enough). Twas on Classic.
It might be worthwhile making a habit of mentioning Normal or Classic on any 'personal testimony' style stories to aid in differentiating the way the games can play out.
Good idea, I'm on my second playthrough (first one went up in flames), normal, Ironman and I have not played previous XComs before so I'm a noob.
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Totally screwing up this mission (in Classic Iron Man), I just exited the game (x out) hoping its last auto save isn't too close to my last fuck up which got one my guys dead (but it will be) I think it's just one last damn alien left and it's turning all the civilians :/
I agree with people saying there are too few UFOs to shoot down, I pretty much only got one before they got upgraded so on my very second sighting the interceptor got owned and I missed the chance for a battle that can yield rewards with little drawback (ie no panic elsewhere etc) which seems quite necessary to progress better than I have been.
I agree with people saying there are too few UFOs to shoot down, I pretty much only got one before they got upgraded so on my very second sighting the interceptor got owned and I missed the chance for a battle that can yield rewards with little drawback (ie no panic elsewhere etc) which seems quite necessary to progress better than I have been.
I finished normal iron man without any defeats, on my first try, you'll be fine
Shooting with a sniper rifle costs two actions. Snap Shot costs one. So when you have one action left, you must be using Snap Shot. At least in game logic. I have Double Tap on a Squadsight sniper and it's at full accuracy for both shots.
Actually, I'm new to XCOM and the Classic difficulty feels just right.
Besides, I just saved the game (June 15th) and wondered what would happen if I ignored every single mission for the rest of the month. So I ran the scanner ignoring a terror mission, an abduction mission and a request, deployed a few satellites that were just delivered and ended up getting an A grade.
I just hope when I actually go through June properly, that no UFO sightings are reported. My interceptors are only armed with laser weaponry and have received no upgrades whatsoever.
Slackbladder
Member
Yeah, really makes Snap Shot worthless as double tap is very, very useful!
KrM DeLorean
Member
almost any indoor map with a roof at the highest elevation level has this issue
AlimNassor
Banned
Terror mission today, I figured what could go wrong...
Loaded my squad, and everything is going well. A few minutes later..."Dragon" is under alien control. He runs off into fire and gets killed, squad panics and they begin to get cut down one by one.
Only 1 man survived, "Private-176". Tis man is now my commander, he is sort of an icon for our new recruits for his supernatural ability to survive anything.
Loaded my squad, and everything is going well. A few minutes later..."Dragon" is under alien control. He runs off into fire and gets killed, squad panics and they begin to get cut down one by one.
Only 1 man survived, "Private-176". Tis man is now my commander, he is sort of an icon for our new recruits for his supernatural ability to survive anything.
I don't know, I think I credit India offering me $1600 for making light plasma rifles was the turning point for me. Before that I had huge and constant cash flow problems but after that I wisely invested it in satellites and other things I needed badly and I've been earning $1000+ every month since that deal took place. It really saved my ass.
One thing that I'm extremely interested in is the question of whether Classic Ironman difficulty can be mastered, so to speak. That is, does that difficulty setting's balance sit in the spot where the primary influence on the future of the Earth boils down to player choices, or is it skewed into the spot where dice rolls (both in-mission and in terms of 'world' events) ultimately own the final say on the outcome. Obviously the outcome is a dance between both, but I wonder what's leading that dance. I'll be happy with accepting the former if, a year from now, it appears that a player can get to enough of a strategic understanding of the game where they can win, say... 70% of a large enough sample of Classic Ironman runs.
EDIT: I should add to that actually, I don't necessarily think that Classic Ironman should be masterable. I'd have to ponder it more whilst wearing my game design hat and smoking my player experience pipe, but my gut feeling is that it shouldn't. At this point I'm just interested in whether it is or not.
EDIT: I should add to that actually, I don't necessarily think that Classic Ironman should be masterable. I'd have to ponder it more whilst wearing my game design hat and smoking my player experience pipe, but my gut feeling is that it shouldn't. At this point I'm just interested in whether it is or not.
Neuromancer
Member
Just got a bug (360 version) where it became stuck on one dude, couldn't switch guys, couldn't move, couldn't end the turn, couldn't do anything except rotate the camera. Couldn't even pause.
For a while I thought my game was bugged because the arc thrower missed 5 times in a row when all the hit chance were mostly 90%.
Someone spoil me how many months it usually takes to finish a game. I wanna gauge my progress.
The key thing is to use everything that would minimize you getting a bad streak of dice rolls (grenades, rockets, snipers, shotguns). Even then, I doubt anyone could have 100% completion rate on classic ironman. I'd say 80-90% is achievable though.
Someone spoil me how many months it usually takes to finish a game. I wanna gauge my progress.
The key thing is to use everything that would minimize you getting a bad streak of dice rolls (grenades, rockets, snipers, shotguns). Even then, I doubt anyone could have 100% completion rate on classic ironman. I'd say 80-90% is achievable though.
Slackbladder
Member
I don't think so. In my Normal game it's January. I am near the end but I think you can go on for as long as you like.
I feel that there's a soft timer where alien encounters slowly get stronger as time goes on. I just encountered my first cyberdisk after my base assault missions whereas my last playthrough I was much slower and I had already encountered many cyberdisks and muton berserkers before I even made my Skeleton Key.
100% would be terrible design. At that point the game's just a flowchart and you're in danger of a situation where a page on GameFaqs allows someone to beat Classic Ironman the day they purchase the game simply by following a build-order and scanning down a list of 'if-then' conditions.
For Classic, I feel 80-90% might be too high. It serves the player who
I think of it like this: For any given outcome of a game (ie. did you WIN or LOSE), there's three primary emotional responses in the player -- disappointment, acceptance and elation. The key one there is acceptance and it does include the quality of 'happy' (just not fucking ecstatic). The key defining characteristic of acceptance in this sense is expectation, the expected outcome. I don't believe that games can necessarily achieve all three responses in a wider, general sense; typically, any given game's outcome emotion (determined by the personality of the player) resolves itself as one of the pairs, either disappointment/acceptance or acceptance/elation, obviously corresponding to lose/win.
Nearly all games run with disappointment/acceptance.
But, if a game has the stones to come right out and label itself as a difficult game, it should be managing the latter pair, acceptance/elation. And this falls as much on the player going into the experience as it does on the design of the game's challenge. *A player should expect losses (accept losses!), regardless of their playtime/experience level, in any game that's pushed as a difficult one. Especially in the case of strategy games and certainly in the case of ones that use dice mechanics.
Going back to what I said earlier, 'For Classic, I feel 80-90% might be too high. It serves the player who plays expects to win, which I kind of feel isn't at the heart of XCOM', what I mean there about a player playing to win is that their expectation is a win condition; that's the acceptable outcome[. Classic should, I feel, always feel challenging. Which is to say, a loss should always be acceptable. And you should feel fucking great about yourself every time you win. Basically, after getting a solid grasp of the game's strategy, Classic should cater to acceptance/elation players, where Normal difficulty should cater to disappointment/acceptance ones. I feel 80-90% win rate would be ideal for Normal.
All this pontificating is assuming Ironman mode, by the way. Videogames' grand unifying time-rewind mechanic of save/reload nullifies these thoughts.
I'm ignoring Impossible difficulty here because I feel that that represents a more 'novelty' sort of experience, where you're playing simply to see if you happen to be the outlier sample who rolled nothing but double-sixes.
EDIT: * Added this part to the end of this paragraph, since it's a point I don't think I stressed.
Woo-Fu
Banned
They do upgrade, even mentioned by one of the NPCs.
I'm going really slow on normal after finishing classic, just so I can try a bunch of things while ignoring the story. Well, I finally did the base mission and it was full of heavy floaters and had a sectopod with elite mutons as the final gatekeepers.
Even on normal with fully upgraded soldiers I didn't come out of that mission unscathed.
I hate heavy floaters, they're very aggressive and are very good at negating any terrain advantage you're trying to maintain. Hate elite mutons because of their stupid grenade showers.
AndyMoogle
Member
It happened to me too on PC. I don't know if it was because I was pressing the buttons on the controller over and over again, or if it will just get unstuck on its own eventually, but it did go back to normal after a short time.
English please.
But you make no sense. So 70% is okay and then the sudden jump to 80-90% is like oh no, people gaming the video game is playing it wrong! You're setting arbitrary limits that only makes sense to yourself. Playing to win and exploiting the in-game systems to do so has always part of video gaming, if you choose yourself to do otherwise, that's your own choice.
Heavy floaters sound painful to fight, but my assaults with auto overwatch and my OCD overwatching in general should curb them.
I thought I used english. :[
And there's a pretty marked difference between 70% and 85%. The game itself makes that painfully clear!
I think I made my points in the post - apologies if they don't read particularly clearly - so I won't expound on them. I'm talking in terms of overall balance though, the challenge and, importantly, what that level of challenge (ideally) should mean in terms of expectation. I'm interested in matters of game design and my current thoughts on XCOM leave me thinking that, if Classic Ironman can be beaten 85% of the time, then the design is a little off.
EDIT: Actually, my wording above could certainly have been better. I said 'It serves the player who plays to win.' I didn't mean that specifically, sorry. I'm going to strike though it and replace it with what I actually meant, which was 'It serves the player who expects to win.'
EDIT2: Ha, I just realised that I already explained exactly that point further into the post. Still, my initial wording of 'who plays to win' was poor in choice.
Yeah enemies and general encounters do become tougher as the months go by, which is why you can't afford to lollygag much, at least in the early-to-mid game.
In the later stages you can be powerful and well-off enough that you can afford to just hang around and stall the final events, but prior to that it's going to bite you if you spend too much time in normal missions without progressing through the story, since you're just giving the aliens more of an opportunity to get those panic levels up.
In the later stages you can be powerful and well-off enough that you can afford to just hang around and stall the final events, but prior to that it's going to bite you if you spend too much time in normal missions without progressing through the story, since you're just giving the aliens more of an opportunity to get those panic levels up.
Basileus777
Member
Even classic gets too easy late game. I can just charge right ahead because enemies don't do enough damage to kill units in less than 2 or 3 attacks.
Funky Papa
FUNK-Y-PPA-4
I think normal ironman may be a better option than regular classic. I can't stop myself from loading the previous save as soon as one of my good soldiers gets splattered, which is FAR TOO OFTEN :-/
Mutons are devilish beasts.
Mutons are devilish beasts.
MrCompletely
Member
Third failed classic ironman play through, thinking I should scale down to normal 
. I feel like I can handle the tactical side on classic but the strategy side is just unrelentling
. I feel like I can handle the tactical side on classic but the strategy side is just unrelentlingYeah, I'm pretty much eating up chryssalids for breakfast and downing cyberdisks in one turn on my normal ironman run.
That's why I played on ironman, I had the foresight to know I'd savescum. However if you make an accidental mistake (did something you didn't mean to) you're fucked.
O, for a pop-up on turn end that says, "Hey, commander, are you sure you want to end your turn? I mean, you're the boss and all but.. you do realise that your Sniper is still equipped with her pistol, right? Of course you do. Just, uh, thought I'd mention it. [END TURN] [CANCEL]"
Impeccable
Member
Second Terror mission, in Germany.
There is literally about 10 of those fucking crawling-zombie turners running around here... after trying to save cilivians I figured it was the best course of action for my higher ranked soliders to stand-by near the drop point in Overwatch and let them come to us to die.
Bring it, zombies and Xrays, BRING IT.
There is literally about 10 of those fucking crawling-zombie turners running around here... after trying to save cilivians I figured it was the best course of action for my higher ranked soliders to stand-by near the drop point in Overwatch and let them come to us to die.
Bring it, zombies and Xrays, BRING IT.
Metalmurphy
Member
Dude...
Hoover SHIV + Sniper with Double Tap and Squad sight = OP. No one can touch you.
100% Headshot + 100% normal all the way across the map.
Hoover SHIV + Sniper with Double Tap and Squad sight = OP. No one can touch you.
100% Headshot + 100% normal all the way across the map.
Is anyone getting bugs in their game: When the squad select screen doesn't show all the characters? Or when you customize a character, the character to customize will only look like one character from your squad? Or sometimes menus will overlap with other menus when you try and go back? Or due to the overlapping issue, the game doesn't let you save and quit? Or sometimes one character in your squad will be duplicated and you'll get two of the same character in sqaud select as well as in the game? Or sometimes when a member is KIA they'll be active and available for another mission? Or when your character is wounded they have no ETA on release making them stuck in medical bay permanently?
Ya, that's how the game is for me right now.
Ya, that's how the game is for me right now.
Metalmurphy
Member
I'm having a stupid bug when trying to add soldiers to the
Psy ops training
There's 3 slots but once I put 2, the third replaces the second over and over again. The first time I did this however I was able to put 3.
Oppo
Member
Man I feel like I can't hit shit in Overwatch. Too many times I've set up a very carefully constructed defense, only to have every single one of my soldiers miss the aliens that come rushing towards them.
Also the fact that I cannot deploy any SHIVs now is really burning my ass. I hope they fix that bug soon.
Also the fact that I cannot deploy any SHIVs now is really burning my ass. I hope they fix that bug soon.
So you can't stun chrysalids.
Third month into my classic ironman game 12, still holding in there but my rate of almost 1 dead soldier every mission has left me with 4 snipers, 2 heavies, and random squaddies. Too many snipers kinda suck for large ufo missions and I've been getting those more often lately. Last mission opened a ufo room that has 4 mutons and 1 muton berserker... that was not fun and my last assault guy died horribly.
Large ufo maps (non-scout ufos) seem to be quite buggy with the spawns so watch out. First one I had a group of 3 floaters and a cyberdisc pack spawn right on top of my forward troops after I killed the outsider. That is just lame. Second one I had a group of three mutons spawn, killed one, then floaters spawned on them of the same spot, then I couldn't find the remaining two mutons anymore. That wasted about 20 minutes of my time just trying to scout the map carefully for them.
I'm starting to feel that battle scanner is the most overpowered early game ability you can get. Battle scanner + rocket = risk free damage, just too good to be true.
Third month into my classic ironman game 12, still holding in there but my rate of almost 1 dead soldier every mission has left me with 4 snipers, 2 heavies, and random squaddies. Too many snipers kinda suck for large ufo missions and I've been getting those more often lately. Last mission opened a ufo room that has 4 mutons and 1 muton berserker... that was not fun and my last assault guy died horribly.
Large ufo maps (non-scout ufos) seem to be quite buggy with the spawns so watch out. First one I had a group of 3 floaters and a cyberdisc pack spawn right on top of my forward troops after I killed the outsider. That is just lame. Second one I had a group of three mutons spawn, killed one, then floaters spawned on them of the same spot, then I couldn't find the remaining two mutons anymore. That wasted about 20 minutes of my time just trying to scout the map carefully for them.
I'm starting to feel that battle scanner is the most overpowered early game ability you can get. Battle scanner + rocket = risk free damage, just too good to be true.
Metalmurphy
Member
Overwatch is only really useful on snipers, or in close quarters. Hunker down is preferable otherwise.
Check http://www.twitch.tv/steamgaf/b/335553853 @ 2:06:30 for a perfect example of when to use overwatch.
That would be the best addition to the game. Maybe also pop that up when you move to a square with no cover and generally doing stuff when not in cover. Toggle-able in the option of course.
Overwatch has penalties to aim yeah, but it would be nice to see how big the penalty is.
Overwatch is great to punish initial enemy movement turns when you first spot them, and also fantastic against enemies who don't use cover. Against ones who turtle behind cover, hunker down becomes very useful.
Metalmurphy
Member
Close Combat Specialist
Yup, there's nothing else like overwatch.
Yeah, another thing is that if you know that the enemy has to reposition himself away from his cover, overwatch is still a good choice. If you know it's an option for it to just sit there and shoot, just go hunker down on his possible targets.
Speaking of which, how exactly does the flush ability on assault soldiers work? I had one but he died before I could try it.
For some reason I have the overwatch penalty as -20% in my head. I'm buggered if I can remember where I picked that up from though. I don't think I pulled it out of my arse, but who knows. I now tend to just take the shot or hunker down against enemies in partial cover because of this.
Slackbladder
Member
I'm going to have to use hunker down more often. With overwatch I tend to have all but one in overwatch then move my support with the extra distance skill forward one turn. If it triggers aliens I get him back to his overwatching buddies. Question. If an enemy is moving out of cover when the soldiers use overwatch does the enemy have 0 defence as they are not in cover?
speculawyer
Member
I'm sorry, but could anybody link me to the mod that gets rid of the intro movies? Google has failed. Or at least, my Google skills have failed me.