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[alway]

That's not quite as bad a ratio, as these are Super Magic Nano medikits. Recruiting soldiers is probably, at most, half a million dollar bonus. Some super-magic-medikit might be $1 million or something; but the problem, again, are the ratios if you compare with fighter jets. Those are approximately $230 million each for a modern F35. Unless recruits are being paid $75 million bonuses... it just doesn't compute.

[Parsely]

So, uh, back to our discussion last night about the timing of misses and hits being kind of wonky:


I just had a 100% accuracy action fail.


so.

yea.

….I don't believe you….Shotgun?..

[Kilroy the Grand]

what if all the mundane weapons, aircraft, and structures are subsidized by world governments? While super advanced medkits and reversed engineered alien weapons cost a bit more?

[Parsely]

what if all the mundane weapons, aircraft, and structures are subsidized by world governments? While super advanced medkits and reversed engineered alien weapons cost a bit more?

Don't we build our own aircraft though? Or maybe we do order them, evidenced by the United States country bonus.

[Sirus]

what if all the mundane weapons, aircraft, and structures are subsidized by world governments? While super advanced medkits and reversed engineered alien weapons cost a bit more?

Don't we build our own aircraft though? Or maybe we do order them, evidenced by the United States country bonus.

I'm pretty sure we order interceptors.

[shadow_archmagi]

It's dumbed down because the basics are way less detailed and emergent than the original. You have no real inventory, instead you choose a really limited loadout that prevents soldiers from taking more than 1 grenade or 1 medkit unless they get some equally gamey class-based upgrade.

I'll admit that the old Xcom allowed for much more flexible loadouts. I'll also admit that spending five minutes ordering my men to acquire SANE loadouts, every time, was a huge pain. I remember more than one time arriving on the field to discover that instead of one rifle, one pistol, and two clips per man, my troops had decided on more interesting loadouts, such as one soldier carrying three rifles and no bullets, another one with a pistol and a pile of rifle ammo...

Yeah, I might wax nostalgic for the old days of carrying two grenades, but I don't think I'll go back.

The strategic layer is very gimped, as the aliens no longer act with purpose, but instead are just there to get fought off by you when the script deems it appropriate.

Did they 'act with purpose' in the old one? As I recall, scouts and battleships and whatnot tended to just wander around. I mean, they had those ten mission types, but they all boiled down to "Fly around a bit, land maybe." Doesn't really matter whether it's labelled an abduction mission or resource mining or what. None of them fulfilled any strategic objective. Even the supply ships did not, in fact, carry supplies- You could shoot them down all your wanted and it'd nerve starve out the alien base. Heck, you could interrogate everyone onboard and not get the base's location.

Even moreso on the tactical map, where 90% of the time you'd just fine snakemen moseying through random fields of grass. The aliens never really had any sense of tactics or any real objectives.

There is nothing intuitively realistic about the Simoleon prices in the strategic layer, they're all really nonsensical for the sake of balance. There's a slew of oddities and limitations only there to introduce balance to X-Com features broken by streamlining (such as explosives that liquidate weapon fragments).

Were prices ever realistic? 500,000 dollars for an interceptor is incredibly low. Even 1970's aircraft cost four times that, according to my incredibly unscientific ten second wikipedia search that could easily be inaccurate. I don't mind the elimination of all the extra zeroes anyway.

The only reason it's more tactical in any way is because it's easier to program an AI for a simpler system. And even with that in mind, a lot of the difficulty stems from gamey bullshit, such as the soldier limit or the inability to respond to more than one location at a time.

I wouldn't necessarily say that the difficulty stems from superior AI (Certainly, I've seen my fair share of aliens completely ignoring cover) or that the new cover system is easier to program for than the old. 


By and large, I'd make three statements about the new XCOM

1. It has definitely gained much in the way of efficiency. Many of the old headaches are gone.

2. Some of these simplifications did result in a "Dumbing down" that reduces tactical complexity and makes impossible options that should very much be possible. Picking up a dead soldier's equipment, for example. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to use kyle's medkit.

3. The number of dumbs gained is much smaller than the number of headaches removed or the number of worthy features retained, and the spirit of the game remains the same; XCOM is a worthy successor to the X-COM name.

[Puzzlemaker]

I think that you can actually intercept UFO's before they reach their target sites.  I have had cases where I took out a UFO, and then only got 2 or even 1 missions at the same time instead of 3.

Sometimes you can also find them after they landed and before they trigger the mission.  It especially becomes obvious later on when you get the ability to see what their mission was.  AKA, This landed UFO's mission is abduction.  You take it out, and later only get 2 abduction missions at the same time.

At least, I believe that's the way it works.  It's hard to say because getting more coverage is difficult.  You can't see as much of the world at once as you can in the original until you get a lot more sat coverage.

[Cthulhu]

It's times like these I'm really glad Ioric Kittencudder's banned.  He would've burned this thread to the ground with PC master race nostalgia rage.

[Tellemurius]

WE ARE THE FIRST AND YOU ARE THE LAST, PC FTW

close enough?

[Zangi]

In the future, the government funds xcom with bitcoins.  Bitcoins inflated by 100s of thousands in the previous years.

Soldiers are paid so much because you also have to attract 'skilled' people and pay up front their life insurance.


Oh yea, classic.. running with 5 out of 6 cause everyone else is in a hospital bed and I can't really afford more...

[Jacob/Lee]

Floaters fail forever at tactics.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

He was in that building about to get his ass shot by my soldiers there. He flies out the southern-most window on the side of the building, goes up and over the building, then lands right next to my soldiers with no moves left.

[Vel]

So, uh, back to our discussion last night about the timing of misses and hits being kind of wonky:


I just had a 100% accuracy action fail.


so.

yea.

….I don't believe you….Shotgun?..

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The PSI attack 'Mindfray', actually.

[Kagus]

Points

You do realize, of course, that just as there are and will be mods for the new XCOM, the old one had some fairly outstanding modifications and community patches?  Including the one that saved loadouts for individual troopers?  Really, old XCOM was horribly buggy and terribly optimized.  Just as the new one has its quirks and quarks.


Yeah, I never really saw that great a deal of cohesion or purpose in the old UFOs either, other than picking some place to terrorize, or supplying a base, or trying to scout out/assault your base.  But on the tactical map you would get aliens hiding in buildings, then popping up to a window or out the door to toss a grenade at your troops before heading back inside and out of sight.  They were generally just as clueless as you were to start off with, and the way they were spread out and wandering around for a good position seemed more reasonable (not to mention unpredictable) than a perhaps more prepared design.

Now, I *still* haven't seen any new-XCOM LPs (still watching Kiko and yup, there's the Glitchalid at episode 51), so I don't know what the current placement and movement is like on the tactical map.  But I've seen a few people writing about aliens "spawning in", and from what I've gathered it seems like placements and activities aren't much different from what they were like in the demo (effectively "instances" that don't do squat until you bump into them).  Not completely sure how I feel about that, but for as little as I liked hunting down that last damned alien hiding in the freighter (gaaaaaaah), I did like the fact that you could never really be sure where you'd find someone wandering around.  Or how many would be there.  Or if some previously-unseen alien had, in fact, managed to circle around behind your troops because you weren't paying attention in your sweep.

Again, acting with purpose?  Difficult call.  Freedom, perhaps, but I never really felt much "purpose" at hand.


As for pricing, while you could get an interceptor for $500,000 and hire a new grunt for $40,000, you also didn't have to pay more than maybe $198 for high-speed shipping costs of small items or amounts.  But since new-COM has apparently done away with shipping, it's not really much of an issue.  Although having medkits cost that much is...  Strange.


I would however argue that the new cover system would be easier to get an AI to comprehend than the old one.  Since the old one was more "free form", it really just came down to having something between you and them.  And getting the computer to figure out what's "between" what and what can be something of a hassle.  Since the new system is a bit more contrived, yet also comprehensible, it really just needs to check and see "is this square cover?  Yes?  Okay, go there".

It's times like these I'm really glad Ioric Kittencuddler's banned.  He would've burned this thread to the ground with PC master race nostalgia rage.

Ioric got himself banned?  Man, just how long *have* I been out of the loop?

[jocan2003]

Just watched a "let's play" on Youtube and no, I'm not impressed by this product.

Send me a link to that let's play, im interested to know how horrible he is ( most likely me... )

[sluissa]

RIP Maj. Leah "Cookie" Wood. 15 kills 12 missions. My loyal support girl, with me from the beginning of the campaign, made it up to Major. Scored a good number of kills over the war and ended up dying to save someone's life. A rookie support she was training during a routine abduction mission got a face full of alien grenade. Cookie stabilized her, but had taken a bit of the grenade herself. Normally it wouldn't have been life threatening, but the next turn she had to dash to get into cover and two mutons came out, pelting her with two more grenades, and it was just too much to handle. I always knew I could depend on her to do the job. She never failed me in any mission where it counted. She will be missed by the rest of her squad, especially the newly promoted sniper Col. Rebecca "Lockdown" Amar. She had been in almost every mission Cookie had been in.

(Normal, Ironman, btw.)

Surprised how attached I get to these characters, even without doing any of my own customization on them.