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[MetalSlimeHunt]

If you pay attention to those missions though they will outright say "Hey we need a few laser pistols (or plasma) to give to our police officers to disperse protestors" or something along those lines.

The protestor requests are for Arc Throwers.

[Mageziya]

What's funny is how brutal arc-throwers are. They're capable of making Mutons cry, after all.

They probably tone them down for civilians, but still.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The text implies they want to use them for large scale protest suppression. I guess they have a wide-angle setting or something.

[Leafsnail]

All the science stuff only really takes manpower and technology which I presume is covered by the upkeep costs of the base.  Or just paid for directly by the council maybe.

[Soadreqm]

Which is why they never should've run away from the original XCOM formula.

Personally, I think the original XCOM formula was shit. The game was (and still is) fun to play, but the inventory micromanagement minigame is definitely something I'm glad the new XCOM did away with. You hand-pick eighty items to carry in the Skyranger with every single ammo clip tracked and counted. At the start of the mission, you must manually assign every soldier to wield their weapons and ammo, because the computer can't handle it, and will give the rocket launcher to the guy with the lowest strength. Which is bad, since if a guy is carrying too many items, he will move slower. You can't view soldier stats while equipping squad, so you have to remember to check them back in the base, and keep track of them on your own. You can't view the encumbrance limit ANYWHERE, and if you want to know how many time units a certain load will shave off a soldier, you will have to test it yourself. Once in the field, every grenade and medkit is stored in some specific pocket on a soldier's body, and moving things from your hands to the backpack and back takes time units. (Want to know how many time units? Why don't you try and see? And then write it down because there's no other way to find out.) And grenades are not flawlessly accurate, and the only way to know a soldier's throwing range is to throw one. Before you do that, though, you need to prime the grenade to explode after a choosable number of turns. Primed the grenade already, but then discovered that the sectoids were too far away? Sucks to be you. Oh, and every single item also takes storage space in your base, and you need to build additional closets every now and then. This is not good inventory design.

I did like the ability to grab things off the battlefield, though. It'd be cool if the new XCOM had that.

Yeah but when you can get in a single exchange more then all the countries COMBINED fully protected can give you... for 7 plasma pistols... something they themselves could obtain.

Where would they obtain plasma pistols? The XCOM obtained its prototypes by killing a bunch of sectoids, studying their corpses to figure out the theory of stunning an alien, doing some more studying to figure out the practice, waiting for some more sectoids to start wrecking shit, giving one of the experimental never-before-tested stun guns to a soldier and telling him to run up to a sectoid and zap it. If they could pull that off, why would they even need the XCOM? You're the only one fighting the alien menace with any degree of success, and thus have a monopoly on all the cool alien loot.

[Flying Dice]

Frankly I like the original system more than the new one, even with the crappy item limit. Things like 'nade relays, scavenging ammo on the fly, and not restricting item use with a class/perk system all add character. Don't get me wrong, new X-COM is still a good game, but old X-COM did a lot of things in a more interesting way, even if it is primitive as all get-out these days.

Also, no base defense. I've seen absolutely nothing in new X-COM that replicates the feeling you got when you saw an attack fleet descending on one of your secondary bases, and you realize that all you have to defend it with are four rookies with three laser pistols, two combat suits, and a handful of smoke grenades. And absolutely nothing that can compare to going into that fight, against Mutons, and coming out on top because you were that damned careful and lucky.

[Parsely]

Which is why they never should've run away from the original XCOM formula.

Personally, I think the original XCOM formula was shit. The game was (and still is) fun to play, but the inventory micromanagement minigame is definitely something I'm glad the new XCOM did away with. You hand-pick eighty items to carry in the Skyranger with every single ammo clip tracked and counted. At the start of the mission, you must manually assign every soldier to wield their weapons and ammo, because the computer can't handle it, and will give the rocket launcher to the guy with the lowest strength. Which is bad, since if a guy is carrying too many items, he will move slower. You can't view soldier stats while equipping squad, so you have to remember to check them back in the base, and keep track of them on your own. You can't view the encumbrance limit ANYWHERE, and if you want to know how many time units a certain load will shave off a soldier, you will have to test it yourself. Once in the field, every grenade and medkit is stored in some specific pocket on a soldier's body, and moving things from your hands to the backpack and back takes time units. (Want to know how many time units? Why don't you try and see? And then write it down because there's no other way to find out.) And grenades are not flawlessly accurate, and the only way to know a soldier's throwing range is to throw one. Before you do that, though, you need to prime the grenade to explode after a choosable number of turns. Primed the grenade already, but then discovered that the sectoids were too far away? Sucks to be you. Oh, and every single item also takes storage space in your base, and you need to build additional closets every now and then. This is not good inventory design.

Well of course they'd deal with the obvious crap like that! Goodness! Do you really think that in the age of convenience the devs wouldn't think to provide some shortcuts for that kind of thing? Please!

[Neonivek]

Where would they obtain plasma pistols? The XCOM obtained its prototypes by killing a bunch of sectoids, studying their corpses to figure out the theory of stunning an alien, doing some more studying to figure out the practice, waiting for some more sectoids to start wrecking shit, giving one of the experimental never-before-tested stun guns to a soldier and telling him to run up to a sectoid and zap it. If they could pull that off, why would they even need the XCOM? You're the only one fighting the alien menace with any degree of success, and thus have a monopoly on all the cool alien loot.

The game outright tells you the that Alien war is going on constantly. You are actually facing a very small fraction of the entire war.

[Lightningfalcon]

I liked the original system better.  But I will agree that it was annoying having to guess everything and write everything else down.  I miss giving the worthless rookies primed proximity grenades/stun rods and a few packets of high explosives. 

[Sonlirain]

Where would they obtain plasma pistols? The XCOM obtained its prototypes by killing a bunch of sectoids, studying their corpses to figure out the theory of stunning an alien, doing some more studying to figure out the practice, waiting for some more sectoids to start wrecking shit, giving one of the experimental never-before-tested stun guns to a soldier and telling him to run up to a sectoid and zap it. If they could pull that off, why would they even need the XCOM? You're the only one fighting the alien menace with any degree of success, and thus have a monopoly on all the cool alien loot.

The game outright tells you the that Alien war is going on constantly. You are actually facing a very small fraction of the entire war.

Well at the ending cinematic you are shown some (apparently US) soldiers lying on the ground with a wrecked tank nearby and since you don't have tanks...
Also the US army asks in one of the Council missions for some heavy lasers to mount on ground vehicles and decide to create more of tham... and since they cost elerium/alloys we can assume they have their own supply of those.

[Darkening Kaos]

My dream version of X-Com would be: X-Com: UFO Defence with Apocalypse-style soldier and inventory management.

Combine those two games, perhaps with dashes of TFTD for extra fun, and that would be full of awesome.

Actually, just thinking of the multi-enviroment options of having land and sea missions from the first two games would be even better.  Update the graphics to take advantage of modern hardware and ramp up the AI a tad for more challenge.

[Sergius]

My dream version of X-Com would be: X-Com: UFO Defence with Apocalypse-style soldier and inventory management.

You mean with soldiers running out of clips and not bothering refreshing them, so that you have to go back to the management screen and drag and drop clips one by one back to their inventories?

[Darkening Kaos]

They always keep whatever you assigned to them.  Yes, you would need to replace consumables like grenades, rockets and extra ammo clips, but if you didn't use a full clip, it would be topped up when they return to base.

But you would not need to give them every piece of equipment at the beginning of every mission, you can also see the effect of adding stuff to each soldier as soon as it is done, in Apocalypse when you gave them something, their AP dropped immediately.

You mean with soldiers running out of clips and not bothering refreshing them, so that you have to go back to the management screen and drag and drop clips one by one back to their inventories?

There was a key/mouse combination that allowed you to pick up one piece of equipment and put in that same place on all soldiers in the base, or was it that you had to select several guys at once, I can't remember.

[Parsely]

The game outright tells you the that Alien war is going on constantly. You are actually facing a very small fraction of the entire war.

Thats another thing that Enemy Unknown sucks at. Capturing the scale of the conflict. Sucks. :l

[Lightningfalcon]

I think UFO: Enemy Unknown captures that perfectly.


But yeah, while the combat feels a lot more like, well, combat, it feels like it's much more of a small spec ops fire-team attacking small scout teams.  In the original it felt more like an actual battle going on, even thou it was much slower paced.