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[MetalSlimeHunt]

Naw man, real OGs only play Lazer Squad.

[puke]

I thought LaserSquad came out later, after TFTD?

[Henny]

In newcom, I always felt like losing a single mission resulted in a death spiral in the strategic game.

Which is why I play Bronzeman.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Did anyone else feel that new XCOM was actually, in a way, more difficult than the original? Before you freak out, here's my reasoning.
Deaths: in the original you received about a death a mission unless it was an easy mission and often more if it was a harder one such as a terror mission or battleship. It was also very easy to replace dead soldiers.
Countries: In the new game the panic system is highly volatile and when you have to respond to only one of the three countries panicking from abductions, you are very likely to lose at least one. Also, in the original you could fight to the last council country but in this you could only fight to about half were lost.
Squads: You go from the original's 26 maximum to the new game's 6 maximum. Yeah, big difference.
Aliens: Not quite as deadly as normal, but you always encounter packs of them which can be harder to deal with when they surprise you. Some are still deadly, mainly sectopods with their ludicrous health, but if you know how to exploit the AI you can safely handle them.
Soldiers: In the old game a rookie could be extremely useful for things like grenade relays, being a pack mule, acting as a psi-puppet, being a psi-soldier, or even operating a blaster launcher without accuracy playing into effect, but in he new one rookies are useless and squaddies are still pretty bad.
Money: Okay, if you didn't have an extra $10,000,000 by the end of the original you were spending ludicrous amounts of money. It was significantly more scarce in the original. This was balanced out by other resources not being as important.

Oh, it was difficult alright. But the wrong kind of difficult. The old X-Com was a sandbox - you succeeded in it if you used your resources correctly. In the new XCOM, everything is too deterministic. You succeed by following a specific plan, since the game operates by clear-cut rules. "Against a UFO at this stage of the game, you have this much time to defeat it, so you must have at least this weapon on your interceptor". No bouncing a Battleship with a coordinated wave of simple Avalanche-armed interceptors because everything else is still in repairs, no choosing to risk being shot down and sending your craft up close to hammer down that terror ship with craft cannons instead of disengaging and letting the ground team sort it out. No options, no strategy, just a minigame with a ticking clock and some consumable powerups.

It's been said numerous times, but... the new XCOM is a good game, a hard game in its own right, but the old X-Com game is just... different. It's not right to compare their difficulty by directly comparing matching elements without taking in their respective pictures as a whole. They are difficult by different means, and while XCOM is a difficult game in its own ways - X-Com just has more ways to be difficult in.

*Correct me if wrong. Been a while since I played UFO Defense.

You're not wrong, but not completely right either. X-Com never got much in the way of patches. If you're playing an original version of UFO Defense, you're unnecessarily restricting yourself, as even XComUtils fixed a lot of the game's bugs. OpenXCOM is the standard way to play nowadays.
Specifically, there was a bug with your bases' radar systems. No matter how many radars you built of any one type, the detection rate did not improve, being stuck at 1. So the game was supposed to allow you to upgrade your detection rates, but, well...

Also, you can scout with interceptors and even the Skyranger. UFOs won't actively seek out your craft, and every craft has a short-range radar that is very effective at detecting things. A common tactic (for me) is to use the Graphs screen to see what countries are being bothered by aliens, and sending my interceptors over there to patrol in shifts. It's a great way of projecting your influence.

I thought LaserSquad came out later, after TFTD?

Laser Squad was the protoform of X-Com. Rebelstar was the successor to it. I played Rebelstar II on the Spectrum. So, yeah.

[scrdest]

“It’ll be cool to show Central, as he’s 20 years older,” said Solomon.

The running joke of Central being Bradford's actual first name is now canon.

You got it backwards. Bradford is his first name.

Mr. and Ms. Central had peculiar tastes.

[NullForceOmega]

The thing oldCom had going for it, was that it was brand new.

I had played a FUCKTON of Breach (including Breach 2 and 3) before Xcom was ever a gleam in Julian Gollop's eye (okay, maybe Breach 3 was after xcom1), so the sci-fi squad tactical game was not new on me -- but somehow xcom was still brand new. 

I didn't know the interface, ended up having a rookie throw his pistol instead of a grenade, hilarity and death but eventually overcoming it and getting good at it and winning.

If I had understood the interface and how the AI acted from the beginning?  Maybe it would have been easier than nuCom, on low levels.

But oldCom on high levels?  you cant even get out of the skyranger without getting blown up.  You need to do everything under cover and smoke.  swarms of early UFOs that shoot your interceptors out of the sky... It was *way* harder at the high levels.

Maybe it's just me then but I've found newcom harder. Also, in the very original, not openxcom, a glitch always reset difficulty to the lowest setting. You could still cope with the enemies by free-aiming and your soldiers, even if a few would almost always die on the first turn, could easily be replaced. Not to mention you could use legit tanks to take a beating for your soldiers. Also, you don't need to shoot down every UFO in the beginning to win, not to mention you won't be seeing them all as your crap radars only have a chance to find UFO's every half hour.* As long as you shoot down a few, and get some good score from missions, you'll stay afloat and soon upgrade to firestorms and avengers that can decimate swarms of UFOs.

*Correct me if wrong. Been a while since I played UFO Defense.

The computer version of oldcom had that glitch, but it never manifested in the playstation port (I had terror missions every two weeks and ethereals in February of the first year, just two, in a small scout (pod) and  a lone survivor from a medium scout (square)), as far as I can tell a lot of the seemingly lower difficulty of oldcom was how surprisingly decent recruits could be with no experience, I can't count the number of times I've taken rookies out and come back with no casualties.

[Toaster]

I think the "deterministic" nature of XCOM is its biggest flaw, and my gut tells me that Solomon et al have realized this and will move away from it with XCOM 2.  Since Long War already does that to an extent, I hope that they'll take its lessons to heart.

[Gabeux]

In newcom, I always felt like losing a single mission resulted in a death spiral in the strategic game.

True. It gave a feeling that if you'd fix a pipe that's leaking water, another one would burst out somewhere else in the planet..and you're just one plumber, with just one Piperanger. What.

No but really, this "I can't save the whole planet with such limited resources" is very cool. I do think it would be interesting to enable a second Skyranger for a lot of money, or something like that, because it feels kinda derpy that with mankind being in danger of being noobstomped, the most hi-tech protectors of the world can only operate in one place at a time.
Unless they add something like UFO Aftermath had in which you could delegate missions to be auto-resolved by the rest of the human resistance. Then again, UFO Aftermath had a f* load of useless repetitive missions, and XCOM missions are way more interesting and rewarding than that.

So I'd love to have a feature that lower this "My tiny organization can't save the world" to "If I try hard, Earth shall be saved", without breaking the awesomeness tactical/strategic gameplay and tension of the game.
Sometimes I just want to fast forward and focus on high value missions, because to hell with humanity I want to strip dem' Battleships!

[Flying Dice]

nuCOM's difficulty, 90% of it I'd say, was rooted in the strategic game in vanilla. It was full of things like the false-difficulty choice when you had to select missions from several options, the unadvertised importance of the satellite-building minigame, the poor quality and occasional buggy nature of the timers, &c.

In oldCom you could straight up ignore the rest of the world once you were able to mass produce laser cannons and fund yourself, and it was relatively easy to pull yourself out of a pit with good performance on the tactical level. In nuCOM even acing a dozen missions wouldn't do much to push back the tide if you messed up on the strategic level, and the fact that you were wholly dependent on the Council for funding (and had a hardcoded lose condition based on global terror) exacerbated the situation.

That's actually a big part of why I liked Long War so much, it removed a lot of the artificial difficulty from the Geoscape and shifted it over to real difficulty in the Battlescape, to use oldCom terms. It made the game more about your ability to effectively command missions and kick ayy lmao shit in, rather than how much of the wiki you read for guides on strategic-level buildorders &c.

[Toaster]

^This

XCOM on Normal wasn't hard at all for me, but when I switched to Classic and was told "Follow this build order if you want to not lose" and the idea of smooth sailing once you're past the early game... eh.  I lost interest until I installed Long War.

[EnigmaticHat]

The flow of newcom was just bad.  Then again, Jake Soloman did say in that one interview that he was surprised people liked his game enough to play it more than once...

[Quartz_Mace]

Sorry, what I meant by that radar statement was that even in OpenXCOM (which I have played) radars only scan their range every 30 minutes, meaning that a UFO that is flying through your radar range will only be detected on an interval of each half hour, and even then the radar may not pick it up because it's still only a chance. This is a feature, not a bug.

Edit: Entry from UFOpaedia.org, a fan-made website that contains info on every X-com game:

In practice, alien craft will often travel well within the listed detection ranges before being spotted. Detection "checks" are only performed twice an hour by the game, so fast-moving UFOs/Alien Subs may travel quite a distance before the next check is performed; the Small and Large Radars/Sonars have only a 10-20% chance of detecting enemy ships in-range; and alien vessels are not seen until they enter the Earth's atmosphere or surface from the deeper levels of the ocean, which can potentially occur right near a base. X-COM Craft, like the Hyper-Wave Decoder/Transmission Resolver, appear to have a 100% chance of detecting UFOs/Alien Subs that are within their detection range.

[sambojin]

But it wasn't a complete strategic hit/miss in oldCom compared to the satellite mini-game of new. In oXC, radars work fine stacked (you may as well consider openXcom as oldCom these days. Fewer bugs, same game).

Spread coverage as you want. But you wouldn't auto-lose because you just ran two bases with good coverage (lots of radars). Even without hyperwave decoders.

In newCom, at higher difficulties, you would lose if you didn't rush every satellite until mid/late game. It wasn't exactly a skill based thing. It was just what you had to do. It may as well have been in the instruction manual or tutorial.

Then again, you didn't get grenades chucked at you or get half a squad plasma'd first turn on hardmode either, so maybe smoke grenades and rookie deaths should have been mentioned more heavily in oldXcom. With a little mention in TFTD that "btw, they're crap now. Have !!fun!!"

I'm pretty sure Firaxis will do nuCom2 a bit better in both ways. No forced strategic layer, but no forced tactical either. Looking forward to it.

[Toaster]

Random theory:  Satellites as XCOM almost certainly won't exist.  There won't be grounded infrastructure to support them, nor any launch capability.

But surely there will be plenty in orbit anyway!  Hacking has been mentioned more than one, especially with side objectives; why not have them hackable and converted to work for us for a while?  Surely the feed split would be noticed and shut down eventually, but for a while you'd have a set of eyes watching over, finding more missions for you.

[Flying Dice]

That's one of the things I'm actually rather interested in seeing, a Geoscape where there is no lose condition for the player, and the victory conditions range from "very difficult" to "impossibly distant", so that if you can't hack it you can keep torturing yourself with a shoestring budget and terrible rookies until you lose the last fragment of hope of ever achieving victory and start a new game. The only way to lose is to give up.