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[etgfrog]

Spoiler: The real gunslinger (click to show/hide)

I have no clue how to reproduce this bug, lets see if it persists through missions.

[EnigmaticHat]

I'm imagining that as a stick up.  Not pictured: 2 seconds later the trooper drops his gun and puts his hands in the air in abject terror.

[Graknorke]

Could you get cyber-wrists?

[scriver]

I was quite surprised to see that xcom welcomes every kin into their ranks.

Spoiler: Even Drow. (click to show/hide)

[Greenbane]

Even if you're tactically perfect, eventually some jerk AI is gonna hit you for half your health or more despite your full cover.  Or the suicidal melee units will just run in and whack you. I got out with two gravely wounded soldiers out of the 4 I started with and even that was heavily due to luck and a ranger that danced through bullets and explosions like she was the RNG's main squeeze.  She killed a mech, 4 soldiers and a Sectoid just in melee. Didn't get her a promotion though, somehow.

Dunno, all that sounds pretty true to oldcom's spirit to me. You can be tactically perfect, doing the slow tactical movement thing, covering your approaches and laying down smoke grenades. But eventually a guy is going to run up and not trigger reaction shots and then murder your goddamn commander whom you've spent bloody ages training up. Or a chryssalid is going to appear out of nowhere, run up to your firing line and just fuck your shit up.

Yeah. The original games had plenty of ways to fuck you up without you having any agency. Reaction shots from the dark, psionic attacks on turn 1 from unseen aliens, BLASTER BOMBS out of nowhere.

And there's a fundamental reason "alien free move" detractors seem to forget/ignore: there's a functional cover system in place since XCOM:EU, with heavy penalties for being caught out in the open. The player generally has a chance to move their people into cover before the enemy gets a chance to fire, so the "free move" is merely an attempt to even the odds. It'd be an absolute walk in the park if you could routinely walk in on unaware aliens and consistently get flanking shots at them.

The original games had only a very rudimentary cover system and it was largely a turkey shoot between the aliens and your squaddies, with crouching the only tool to improve your odds. Reaction fire was as much of an interrupt as the new "free move", and even harsher as your men could drop all of a sudden as they advanced. Reacting like that wasn't free for the aliens, but they did do a lot of standing around, which means it wasn't uncommon for them to have TUs saved.

There's a great deal of thought put into this, but some people just aren't interested in thinking about the big picture and how the systems actually compare when they criticise the new mechanics.

[scriver]

1, 2: Because difficulty. If you got to shoot at every enemy while they were out of cover and had no time limit on any of the missions, even a chimp could beat it.

The original x-com didn't do that shit though and it was way harder than this.  In the original they just moved around with the same rules as you, with spheres of vision. You could ambush them, they could ambush you. And if you got the drop on them it actually meant something.  In the firaxis games you just have squads of enemies standing around at set points  and when you see them, they sense your murderous intent and immediately run into cover before you can act. That whole "inch along" strategy that people employed was specifically the result of this "Random encounter" style of setting the ai's up rather than having them patrol around or act independently. It's the natural response to this condition.

While I agree that it's not without fault that enemies get a bonus turn when they spot you when the TB system (at least from a general game design viewpoint) is supposed to abstract what is actually simultaneous actions into turns for ease of interaction, remember overwatch shots do not get penalties when fired on the "discovery bonus turn". You might not be able to personally give the enemy an ambush barrage before they get to move, but at least this way you get still get to rain shots down on them as they scurry for cover without being penalised.

[Sonlirain]

And there's a fundamental reason "alien free move" detractors seem to forget/ignore: there's a functional cover system in place since XCOM:EU, with heavy penalties for being caught out in the open. The player generally has a chance to move their people into cover before the enemy gets a chance to fire, so the "free move" is merely an attempt to even the odds. It'd be an absolute walk in the park if you could routinely walk in on unaware aliens and consistently get flanking shots at them.

TBH everyone is telling that and for some reason people woulkd rather have blaster bombs hit them from fog of war (or would they? I blame amnesia and rose tinted goggles).

I'm doing easy runs on Xcom:EW right not to get the continental archivement (basically smashing through the campaign) and the first thing i do is give mimetic skin (because it literally breaks the game) to my people and train opportunist snipers.

Every encounter goes like this:

Camo soldier finds aliens.
Snipers move into position (also camo'd)
One sniper goes into overwatch (opportunist)
The other sniper takes out the first alien with a crit (uncovered because the pod didn't activate yet).
The opportunist takes out some other alien (hard to tell who an opportunist sniper will shoot really but the shot will usually be a crit if the shot is taken within their own sight).

If i have in the zone then my first sniper just blasts the third alien from cover(vanilla pods were 3 aliens tops and they used the first suitable cover with their free move... even if it's half cover.)

Note that i did some relatively intricate crap to take out 2 aliens in one turn. If the aliens never got a free turn then all i'd need would be one in the zone sniper.
Blam crit blam crit blam crit. Pod clear (because crits are common when shooting targets not in cover).

They knew this shouldn't be allowed to happen back in EU. That's why aliens interrupt your turn and scurry to cover whenever you enter their 18 title detection radius.

[LordPorkins]

Spoiler: The real gunslinger (click to show/hide)

I have no clue how to reproduce this bug, lets see if it persists through missions.

YOUR FORCEFIELDS ARE NO MATCH FOR THE POWER OF FREEDOM!

…Also, the fact that he's holding the rifle gangsta style makes it more badass.

[EnigmaticHat]

1, 2: Because difficulty. If you got to shoot at every enemy while they were out of cover and had no time limit on any of the missions, even a chimp could beat it.

The original x-com didn't do that shit though and it was way harder than this.  In the original they just moved around with the same rules as you, with spheres of vision. You could ambush them, they could ambush you. And if you got the drop on them it actually meant something.  In the firaxis games you just have squads of enemies standing around at set points  and when you see them, they sense your murderous intent and immediately run into cover before you can act. That whole "inch along" strategy that people employed was specifically the result of this "Random encounter" style of setting the ai's up rather than having them patrol around or act independently. It's the natural response to this condition.

overwatch shots do not get penalties when fired on the "discovery bonus turn".

Wait what.

[etgfrog]

Yes, that is correct, it even says so on one of the loading tips.

So I got a psi soldier, the first skill was soul fire, then he had null lance as a choice, so I called it good there. Bring him into his first battle and the operation was called "Magic Beam". Is...this intentional?

[Sonlirain]

Original Xcom was cheating with difficulty as well. Your vision range was shorter then the aliens (even in daytime) and during night missions you could only extend your vision range with flares to be as much as your normal daytime vision (so it was still shorter then the aliens even with flares)
No one seems to remember that tho.

[Flying Dice]

(removed)

[Krevsin]

I really disliked the aesthetic of EU. It felt like very bland generic sci-fi. XCOM 2 is more of a cyberpunk dystopia so that's cool.

[BFEL]

I'm curious if failing a mission is as bad in this as it was in EU.  In EU on impossible fleeing a single abduction mission could doom the whole run even if no one got so much as shot at.

I know you can definitely fail to stop dark events and be fine (for some definition of fine).  Guerilla missions seem less so.  Not sure what happens if you fail a retaliation strike, because I always bring my A game to those.

It is by far the least harmful to lose missions... in that except for SOME missions (and which ones they are is obvious) there is no penalty for leaving missions except... failing them.

And even the ones that you CAN fail have obvious penalties but they are not enhanced by difficulty.

I am 60% sure that failing resistance missions (such as convoy raids) will cause you to lose contact with a region.  Not sure what ignoring them does.

While we're discussing gameplay mechanics, anyone know if the rapid construction scanning bonus improves excavation and by how much?  I'd really like to build my new power generator onto of that power coil...

Edit: Can confirm that it does both excavation and construction, by about 2x.  So that's pretty handy...

Be careful with that though. I sure wasn't and now I'm in a position where I have like 10 intel and the first two region contacts. Avatar is one pip OVER halfway and the bases I can hit to push it back are both two regions away.

[Kruniac]

List of WHY:
1. Enemies still get free movement turns when you see them.
2. Obnoxious timers have been shoved onto 80-90% of the missions.
3. Graphics look identical to the old game yet it runs far worse.
4. Stealth, which could be great, is super simplistic. And I find that it often ends up going poorly for me because of issue 1. Hard to do a good ambush when the enemies can just run away and flank you the moment you appear.

1: Yeah, the devs are retarded.

2: I'm getting used to the timers. It's the "timer" on the main map I have the most problem with.

3: I strongly disagree. I think the graphics are an amazing improvement, particularly with the physics. The game runs a little hiccup-y, but I'll blame my rig.

4: I agree completely.

The issue with free movement for aliens when you break stealth isn't that they get a free move per se. It's because you have to have everyone in Overwatch to ambush successfully, so the sequence of play goes like this:

Your Turn: Overwatch all but one, shoot at xenos.

Free Move: Overwatches probably trigger. Xenos move into cover.

THEIR TURN IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD: Xenos move AGAIN, flanking and/or otherwise killing you.

So on ambushes, the Xenos get a double movement phase to respond, which isn't acceptable.

NO Turn-Based squad game works that way, and for good reason. Strategic planning in a TBS game is all about knowing when those turns will go down. Giving the xenos an extra movement phase, is just a bad idea.

Also, to those who say "Well, you'll just roflstomp them otherwise", there are two points to consider.

1: That's a balance issue which isn't our problem.

2: If the AI were dynamic enough to move around in the FoW (And this is more geared towards EU) than just stand around like retards until you discover them, then it would be quite possible to get ambushed by THEM instead of the other way around.

I suggest that people who don't mind this garbage feature play X-Com, Jagged Alliance, or Silent Storm to see how to properly make a game in this genre. The meta-dynamic of turn based strategy really changes when you implement a free turn for anyone (I mean, interrupts totally change tactical decisions in the games I've mentioned), and with how wiz XCOM 2 is in a lot of other ways, I think this feature could have been nuked.

TL;DR - Free movement is shit, XCOM 2 is a good game, I'm going to go play it now.