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[Iduno]

I'm not good/paranoid enough to play X-Com (original)/Piratez on Ironman.

A relatively common "Help the Lok'Naars" mission means either reapers (a few big tanky enemies with low armor that go down to repeated shots or any source of fire) or ninjas (similar to our gals) with pretty decent rewards. I got reapers, but they had the fire. I can't find our molotovs. A lucky stray shot took knocked out one of my gals, we took down the reaper, the rest were wounded when somehow all of the rest of the reapers surrounded us and blew up a nearby gas station. Being near the gas station was mostly my fault (although it was right next to our ship). Complete party wipe, taking our ship and weapons with it. 3 rotoguns firing at a team that isn't spread out enough (right outside of the ship) is devastating.

I've been considering trying to get the original.  After watching some videos of people playing it, I can't decide if it would be too clunky to play if I don't have nostalgia for it.

The unmodded original is still a good game. The newer ones have, from what I can tell, added more options in the tech tree. Firaxis re-developed the game to be much more like the old ones after fans told them where to stick their FPS that they called X-Com. However, in the last 25 years, people have made "some" mods to add more to the original. That does mean you have to deal with how modders think things should be, but they're not too insane.

I'm not sure what you mean clunky. It's not pretty, but it's not buggy or overly difficult to understand. Terror From the Deep is a bit buggier (all difficulties are superhuman), but you should be able to find fan patches for that. If you're willing to look at mods and patches (they're pretty easy to find all in one place), the $5 to try it isn't bad. Or wait for a sale.

[Rolan7]

I mostly played the DOS versions where the UI felt very clunky unless you set the Dosbox CPU time juuuust right.  Otherwise it's a tightrope between jittering or scrolling way too fast.  That's probably not an issue in the CE version, dunno which GOG has.

Thing is it doesn't matter, since OpenXCOM (along with the files from a legit copy) gives the original experience plus responsive UI and Quality of Life improvements.  It also fixes the dozens of glitches and bugs that came from the originals being rushed, almost cancelled even.  The unmodded games through OpenXCOM just works and feels better.

[Telgin]

Just by reading over the UFOPaedia wiki articles on the original X-Com, including the bug and strategy articles, I just got the impression that the game actually was fairly buggy, just not usually in game breaking ways.  I suspect fan patches have fixed a lot of the bugs though, like incendiary weapons dealing damage to anything on the map standing in fire when they're fired, or blaster launchers having "dud" shots if you don't put enough waypoints in their arcs, or elerium powered aerospace craft being limited to 50% range.  Maybe the grenade hot potato exploit too, but at least that's not game breaking and you have to abuse it yourself.

But anyway, referring to clunkiness, I meant that the game is just a lot more complicated compared to the new ones in ways that are arguably unnecessary.  Inventory and item juggling, for example, is way more complicated in the original, and the way you have to manufacture and keep track of ammo for almost everything is a headache.  The way TUs work is way more complex than the later games too, though I can see some value in it over the simplicity of the two actions in later games.  It looked like you have a lot more options for positioning for soldiers too, like having them kneel (or go prone?) for situational benefits that are kind of automatic in the later games.

I would say that the original is also a lot more unfair in general, since you have things like chryssalids that can run up to you from beyond visible range and zombify soldiers even if they do no damage when attacking, but I fully recognize that the later games are kind of too easy in that respect.  Lots of soldiers should be dying in an alien invasion.

[Kagus]

I quite liked X-Com. It's definitely buggy, and while there are community patches that fix some things there's still a lot of weirdness left over (I'm not sure there's anything that fixes the exploding tree stump bug, for example). Inventory management is indeed an absolute pain, and that comes up a lot when dealing with new/recovering soldiers.


I think the thing to keep in mind is that it is a different game from NewCOM... The gameplay is significantly different, and while there are certain shared themes in both, they're generally just too far apart to really compare them side by side.

OldCom (and TFTD as well/especially) will always have a special place in my heart just because of how well it did the good parts, even if it was a quirky, barely-functional mess the rest of the time.


If you want an experience that's closer to the original while still ironing out many of the faults, check out Xenonauts. It does a pretty good job of capturing the essence of the originals, while including some amazing quality-of-life improvements (note that this may make it really fucking difficult to play the originals after playing Xenonauts, specifically because going backwards from those improvements may hurt too much). Definitely worth a look, but also definitely more expensive than nabbing the original package.



And then there's Apocalypse, which is its own whole ball of wax yet again...

[GiglameshDespair]

I went back to the originals after trying to get into xenonauts several times. The lack of randomised maps and small map set really grated, and I felt they got the balance for income wrong as well. It felt lik the worst of both worlds with soldiers having the irreplaceability of Nucom but the fragility of oldcom.

If you want the bugs fixed on the original x-com, download openxcom and enjoy.

Honestly, ammunition isn't really a problem. Buy a big bunch of rifle ammo at the start, lasers don't need any, you'll be swimming in plasma ammo at endgame (especially heavy plasma).

[Rince Wind]

I never got into Xenonauts. I spent more time and had more fun with some free clones.

It actually feels clunkier than oldCom to me, especially than oldcom with openxcom. And there is no reason not to use openxcom, as you can get the original experience but better. Everything else is optional.

You can loose soldiers to crits in the new game as well, that is not much different from the old one. But in the old game a soldiers life is a lot cheaper as you just field a lot more of them. In Firaxis' game it can really fuck you over to loose one person in a mission, because suddenly your healer/hacker is down and you have a lot fewer options to deal with stuff now. Even loosing a mission or just ignoring missions is not a problem usually. Can't be bothered to go to small UFO #150? No problem, but don't you ever ignore abductions in the new one.
In the old game, even if the dead one was for some reason carrying the only medkit you can just send someone else over so pick it up. You start with I think 14 crewspace in the Skyranger/Triton, and have about double that at the end. (tanks cost 4 crew spaces though)

And Chryssalids do so much damage that they nearly always instakill you if they hit.

[Kagus]

Are you talking about old chryssies? It's not that they deal so much damage, it's that their attack is literally an insta-zombification ability. It cannot be blocked or stopped. Your only real defense against them was flight or extreme fucking prejudice.

And then TFTD came around and asked the question "What if Chryssalids, but flying?", and then Tentaculat was born.


It was however a mercy that those shits can't appear in terror missions...

[Rince Wind]

Ok, I might be misremembering here.
I am pretty sure I survived tentaculat hits what wounded my aquanauts.
And those always waited in the middle part of those communication thingy missions.

[BurnedToast]

Xenonauts grew on me somewhat as I played it, except for two things that really frustrated me and caused me to quit my second playthrough halfway

1. Line of fire/hit chance issues. I don't know how to explain it without posting a lot of pictures, but whatever system they used to calculate line of sight was pants-on-head retarded. Things where bullets would curve at unrealistic, nearly 90 degree angles out of the gun barrel to hit a friendly off to your side, or you'd have a 5% chance to hit an alien... but a 70% chance to hit your friendly standing next to it, or situations where the aliens could shoot you but you literally couldn't even see them because a wall was blocking... etc.

It was not like it happened constantly, but it happened enough that there was always a low level of frustration that never quite went away.

2. Psionics. Whoever designed the psionics system for the game needs to go back to game design 101. Infinite range, no line of sight required, no limits on usage, the aliens that spammed them always sat unmoving on the bridge (aka the most defended spot) forever without moving, and there was absolutely no defense against them - bravery had only the most trivial of effect and was near impossible to train. Literally the only counter to psionics was the incredibly tedious metagame tactic of dropping your weapon at the end of every turn then picking it back up at the start of the next turn.

I really can't believe how bad it was, it turned the last 1/3rd of the game into a RNG crapfest, there's just no excuse. It's the perfect example of how not to make your game "harder".

[pisskop]

Yea.

Xenonauts was fun until psyonics and mid-game weapon accuracy effects hit.


Nothing like missing 4 95% shots every third turn.

[Telgin]

Psychic powers had infinite range and didn't require line of sight in the original X-Com too, right?  In that case at least though, if I remember right your soldiers at least had a reasonable chance of shaking the effects off.

[Kagus]

Psychic powers had infinite range and didn't require line of sight in the original X-Com too, right?  In that case at least though, if I remember right your soldiers at least had a reasonable chance of shaking the effects off.

Indeed! Infinite range, no line of sight, infinite usage, and the only defenses were PSI defense and Bravery, and PSI defense you could only improve if your soldier had gone through PSI-training, while Bravery only helped against fear attacks (which were admittedly the most common).

[Rince Wind]

Yep, I screened my troops by bravery.

Once you had psi it was the same though. Mind control an enemy, scout, mind control more enemies that the scout sees.
You couldn't go into their inventory though, so no blowing them up with their own grenades.

[Kagus]

You couldn't go into their inventory though, so no blowing them up with their own grenades.

'Cept you could though, by going into your troop roster and then scrolling left or right until you wound up on their inventory screen. Couldn't access it directly, but you could if you did that. Also you had to be careful, because alien inventories stacked multiple things in a single slot, and if you picked something up from there and didn't have enough TUs to put it somewhere else you'd be forced to hard-exit the game.

What, you thought there was an aspect of the game that worked as intended? Goodness no.

[Rince Wind]

Why didn't you tell me that 25 years ago?!?