KickStarter Xenonauts - XCOM-like set during the Cold War

[Sranchammer]

If you can't win the game with a squad of 3 or less, you're not a real gamer!

 

[Blaine]

What's the word for removing unique personalities and trying to remove differences?

Sawyerism.



I searched out this thread because I've been feeling the old X-COM itch again.

Open X-COM it is, then, and perhaps some JA2 later. X-COM and SMAC, two games I keep on playing decade after decade because no one is capable of releasing a decent successor.

 

[cvv]

I searched out this thread because I've been feeling the old X-COM itch again.

Open X-COM it is, then, and perhaps some JA2 later. X-COM and SMAC, two games I keep on playing decade after decade because no one is capable of releasing a decent successor.

Haven't read the thread but have you tried Long War? Because for me that one finally did it. I was disgusted after vanilla, appeased after EW and I'm currently overjoyed with LW. As I see it, it's currently the best UFO-type game ever made.

 

[Blaine]

As far as I recall, the biggest issues with NuXCOM are fundamental, such as maps being pre-made rather than procedurally generated, the 2 AP movement/action system, niggles with how cover and concealment are implemented, overwatch shenanigans, and special alien movement—e.g. standing stock still (or teleporting around; I'm not clear on this) until they see your soldiers, at which point they immediately get a reaction turn to run for cover or whatever (which isn't always to their advantage). Also, the SKYRANGER-1 or whatever the equivalent is in NuXCOM apparently always starts off in a nice safe corner.

That and the story-based, voice-acted narrative and FMV sequences, not to mention incredibly streamlined base management... of one base, I believe.

I just read the Long War page, and the description doesn't mention any of these issues being addressed, which again isn't terribly surprising since they're largely fundamental.

 

[cvv]

As far as I recall, the biggest issues with NuXCOM are fundamental, such as maps being pre-made rather than procedurally generated, the 2 AP movement/action system, niggles with how cover and concealment are implemented, overwatch shenanigans, and special alien movement—e.g. standing stock still (or teleporting around; I'm not clear on this) until they see your soldiers, at which point they immediately get a reaction turn to run for cover or whatever (which isn't always to their advantage). Also, the SKYRANGER-1 or whatever the equivalent is in NuXCOM apparently always starts off in a nice safe corner.

That and the story-based, voice-acted narrative and FMV sequences, not to mention incredibly streamlined base management... of one base, I believe.

I just read the Long War page, and the description doesn't mention any of these issues being addressed, which again isn't terribly surprising since they're largely fundamental.

The only thing that still truly pisses me off is the idiotic two-point move system. And yeah, that's beyond repair.

But as for the other issues:
- premade maps - after vanilla was launched people whined en masse about this but now nobody really gives a shit anymore. Maps are premade but plentiful and after a while you wouldn't give a shit either

- the cover system is actually great, there are a lot of options for aim reduction/increase, it's clear, precise and logical; the "weird" feature where aliens move into cover after they're discovered is a necessary part of this because otherwise the game would be piss easy since anyone caught out of cover is basically dead (therefore an important tactics is to destroy someone's cover - there are special grenades and weapons for that - to expose them, even the AI uses that)

- overwatch system is also great, with so many options, perks and stats to play with it

- in LW Skyranger most definitely doesn't always start in a safe place, often it spits you out right in front of a pack of Mutons and sometimes you actually have to run away and abort the mission to avoid a bloodbath; this new feature is actually a much lamented one by a good chunk of the community, apparently it's too hardcore but I love it

- I don't remember how much the base management is dumbed down compared to UFO but it definitely doesn't feel dumb; there are a lot of hard choices and options to consider and now there's also the base defense mission which is pretty fucking tough

And that's just a start, there are so many weapons to use, tech to research, perks and stats to play with, hard economic choices to consider plus three optional ways of transforming your soldiers - cybernetic, genetics and psy.

In short the XCOM-EW-LW is a complex, deep, rich and satisfying experience and I'd definitelly recommend you at least give it a try.

 

[SuicideBunny]

yeah, the 2ap system is a fundamental flaw, but it's somewhat lessened by the classes and how it ties into their abilities.

 

[KoolNoodles]

My big gripe is how everyone in over watch will shoot AT THE SAME TIME. Sometimes at a critical point, putting all your people on over watch is the only safe thing to do, and then a sectoid pops out and gets shot at 8 times. Followed by five other aliens that are MUCH BIGGER THREATS coming out.

It's ridiculous. When it's time to shoot, they should either go in sequence with initiative, or ask me whether I want my Mech trooper wasting his particle cannon on something with two HP.

This can be planned around, most of time, but really it's just lazy design.

 

[Grunker]

Why not just plays this (Xenonauts) Blaine?

 

[Blaine]

Why not just plays this (Xenonauts) Blaine?

Because I read through the thread and found stuff like this:

• CTD nukes saves
• AI shooting you through walls
• other weird shooting anomalies (e.g. shot by an alien pressed against wall of building while in middle of roof of same building)
• no anti-psi countermeasures, or psi training
• not truly randomized/not as much variety as X-COM/gets tedious halfway through
• no cargo space on transport
• pre-nerfs of alien weapons and flying armor
• "game falls apart halfway through" & researching new stuff = more damage vs. HP bloat (spectre)
• "mods will fix it" (every other poster)
• etc.
• Addendum: higher-tech graphics, but art direction is far less creepy, atmospheric, and evocative of setting

It's been a long time since I've played X-COM, so I see no reason to play Xenonauts when there's Open X-COM, not to mention Open TFTD on the horizon later on down the line.

 

[Grunker]

Fair enough

I'm only about half-way through my playthrough, so maybe I'll run into those issues down the line.

 

[Alienman]

I just lost my game. Apparently southern africa was critical for Xenonauts continuation. The ending month showed that I turned around my bad economy, from -50k to +50k... but southern part of africa pulled out and humanity is no more

 

[zeitgeist]

My big gripe is how everyone in over watch will shoot AT THE SAME TIME. Sometimes at a critical point, putting all your people on over watch is the only safe thing to do, and then a sectoid pops out and gets shot at 8 times. Followed by five other aliens that are MUCH BIGGER THREATS coming out.

It's ridiculous. When it's time to shoot, they should either go in sequence with initiative, or ask me whether I want my Mech trooper wasting his particle cannon on something with two HP.

This can be planned around, most of time, but really it's just lazy design.

I tried the new XCOM recently and that's one of my biggest complaints so far (haven't played enough to see maps repeat yet though). Apparently people just play "around" it by carefully managing the squad positioning so that certain members cover certain portions of the map or specific aliens on Overwatch.

There really should be some threat management skills you could choose for higher level squad members. I don't really mind rookies shooting at everything that moves. Although I've never had them kill another squad member, is there no friendly fire in the game except with grenades/rockets?

I read that the modding is pretty much impossible for things like extra skills, better/customizable AI, and similar (practically everything one would want out of the game that hasn't been done in The Long War), how true is this?

 

[GarfunkeL]

Tried out latest version of Xenonauts for a little bit. It's awesome and has come a long way from the first test version. At first I thought it's now too easy but my seventh or eight UFO salvage mission turned into a massive clusterfuck at night and I ended up losing my entire team thanks to being overconfident and careless. Brilliant.

cvv - you had to defend your base(s) in original UFO and TFTD. And because you had to actually defend multiple bases instead of just one, it was far more meaningful - because you couldn't just rely on your superior prime team to be always available. And the 2-ap system is utter fuckery and I fucking hate it in SRR too but atleast SRR allows 3, 4 or even 5 AP's. Does Firaxis crap do the same? And premade maps are premade maps. No matter how awesome handcrafted they are (and not all of them are), you end up going through the same ones over and over again. Whoopie doo. And it's a fucking disgrace that range is almost meaningless because holy shitballs, cover is the absolutely only thing that matters when it comes to hitting your enemies - and isn't that still only in 4 directions with 3 "levels" of cover? OH WOW, SO TAKTIKOOL. At the end of the day, it's a fucking puzzle game, not war/tactics/strategy game. Xenonauts and Jagged Alliance and Steel Panthers and Close Combat are war/tactics/strategy games.

UFO: After-series already had cybernetic and whateverelse "upgrades" for your soldiers, so whoopiedoo for modders literally stealing from another game. As much as that game was annoying for the clusterfucky RTwP system, they three games in the series are still far more tactical/strategic than this crap you ignorantly jerk over. This sounds exactly like the retarded morons trying to defend Civ V instead of admitting what a piece of shit that was. There's no reason to celebrate a simplified TB-puzzle game aimed at console gamers, not even if modders have managed to make it slightly better.

 

[Raghar]

I just lost my game. Apparently southern africa was critical for Xenonauts continuation. The ending month showed that I turned around my bad economy, from -50k to +50k... but southern part of africa pulled out and humanity is no more

I never heard anyone who cared about Africa. That's some quite unrealistic shit.

 

[Perkel]

Why not just plays this (Xenonauts) Blaine?

Because I read through the thread and found stuff like this:

• CTD nukes saves
• AI shooting you through walls
• other weird shooting anomalies (e.g. shot by an alien pressed against wall of building while in middle of roof of same building)
• no anti-psi countermeasures, or psi training
• not truly randomized/not as much variety as X-COM/gets tedious halfway through
• no cargo space on transport
• pre-nerfs of alien weapons and flying armor
• "game falls apart halfway through" & researching new stuff = more damage vs. HP bloat (spectre)
• "mods will fix it" (every other poster)
• etc.
• Addendum: higher-tech graphics, but art direction is far less creepy, atmospheric, and evocative of setting

It's been a long time since I've played X-COM, so I see no reason to play Xenonauts when there's Open X-COM, not to mention Open TFTD on the horizon later on down the line.

I also started game to put it up after just few house because AI is shooting through walls.
I can't fucking deal with that. I can deal with everything else.

There is nothing worse that to see your perfect imput ruined by fucking shoot through wall.

I mean it would be a lot better for example if this was incorporated into gameplay as for example different types of weapons can shoot through walls or aliens plasma being that good + they have advanced accustic scanners. But it is fucking bug and it drives me crazy.

 

[Haba]

Stop with the bullshitz, never had AI shooting through walls in my play-throughs. Dodgy-looking corner-shots? Sure. Through walls? Nope.

There was a glitch where they could shoot through UFO floors, but even that was fixed a long time ago.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Stop with the bullshitz, never had AI shooting through walls in my play-throughs.

I had it once. It was the last remaining alien on the level, so nothing else could have spotted me - it was hiding inside a house, while my dude was standing outside the room where it bunkered down. There were no windows along that wall and the alien didn't see me previously. Despite all that, during his turn, the fucking sectoid shot the wall with a point blank burst during his turn, blasting the wall away with the first 2 shots, and then killing my dude with the third.

It was one of Those Times when I really wanted to fucking ragequit.

But then again, it was the ridiculously buggy day 1 release version, so I would assume something like this would have been fixed by now.

 

[belated]

What's wrong with destroying the wall with the first few shots and killing the alien/person behind it with later ones? I took down many aliens in X-COM by aiming bursts at walls that I knew an alien was hiding behind. If the problem was the alien knowing your dude was there then just assume it had a motion detector. :p

I though you were all talking abour shots magically passing through walls leaving the walls undamaged...

 

[Grunker]

Stop with the bullshitz, never had AI shooting through walls in my play-throughs.

I had it once. It was the last remaining alien on the level, so nothing else could have spotted me - it was hiding inside a house, while my dude was standing outside the room where it bunkered down. There were no windows along that wall and the alien didn't see me previously. Despite all that, during his turn, the fucking sectoid shot the wall with a point blank burst during his turn, blasting the wall away with the first 2 shots, and then killing my dude with the third.

It was one of Those Times when I really wanted to fucking ragequit.

But then again, it was the ridiculously buggy day 1 release version, so I would assume something like this would have been fixed by now.

I'm three thirds through my playthrough now, and I haven't had it happen once. My problem with the game is that the balance seems to go to shit around halfway through.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Never seen it happen either.

 

[palmito]

Xexonauts is a great game. I really like it.
I don't give a shit what are you saying here.


Just play the game and have fun.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Xexonauts is a great game. I really like it.
I don't give a shit what are you saying here.


Just play the game and have fun.

The problem is that it just begs for a direct comparison to X-Com, in which it falls short in some ways, which make people critical of it. Also, I do agree that the progression of weapons is a bit flat and (frankly) just damage-bloat, but it's still very good. Honestly, of the KS'd games released this year, this is by far the most .

 

[kyrub]

But as for the other issues:
[snap]

In short the XCOM-EW-LW is a complex, deep, rich and satisfying experience and I'd definitelly recommend you at least give it a try.

The game is fonctional, deep and complex with LW, I'll give you that. As a good kind of a board game, with very nice looks. It's not stupid at all, on the contrary, it has clever mechanics which require good choices. But it is not what original X-COM pretended to be: a game for adults who can imagine the brutality of an alien assault on earth. And what it would require in terms of personal commitment and individual herosim to face that, and, eventually, win. The NuXCOM feels more like a fantasy game where, instead of dragons and sorcerers, the aliens were depicted.

- The enemies are not overcome with research, but with "magical" perks that somehow transform the soldier into twice-as-capable-guy, in a moment of "plop".
- Rapid fire, shoot twice, double your power magic trick. Wow. Lightning reflexes, wait, dodging laser? Ah, that was the crap from last episodes of Starwars, I see... And other warriors suddenly see what is on the other side of map. --- Why not? Just don't pretend it has anything to do with the genre of original theme of "this is serious matter, not for kids". You could even tell, with a bit of sarcasm, that the soldiers feel more like aliens rather than their opponents. They are not human if they can dodge laser, for sure. The predicatable and formulaic zero-to-hero transformation, as seen in B-movies, pales compared to NuXCOM, these guys are half-gods and should be called so. (And the game should be fantasy and not XCOM.) LW just makes the half-gods more diverse and puts more enemy sorcerers on board, that's all.
- Another trait. Everything that is "normal" is too boring for NuXCOM. Like: stat progression. Can it improve a soldier? Hard to notice. Does anybody really care? Perks matter, and I bet you could win the game (with a bunch of max perked guys with basic stats. Even LW, I'd say, but then, nobody finishes LW, as it is, nomen omen, too long.
- "only 2 kind of cover" is what makes this game a board game for me. It is fonctional, yes, but it never makes you feel in a real world. Somehow typical for the game...
- the best thing about Nu is that it takes the spotlight back on squad tactical gaming.


NuXCOM (in LW variation or without it) is thematically a childish fantasy, a game with clever strategy, but horribly distant from the serious x-com theme.
In that respect, the Xenonauts are a game a lot more fitting for anybody who likes the reality and gives fuck about sorcerers. It's great for me, for sure! It feels like a cross betweeen Ja2 and X-COM, the 2 of a few games worth losing one's time on.

Roll on, bloody Xenos! And you guys of Nu, enjoy your toys.

 

[Infinitron]

GameBanshee review by Steven Carter: http://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/114633-xenonauts-review/all-pages.html

 

[kyrub]

Carter : "...it's about as close as you can come to playing X-Com: UFO Defense with a modern interface."

People who repeat that in their reviews, have either never played original X-com, or have a serious problem with their memory. This is not an interface update. Original game had many shortcommings (annoying anybody who would try to replay it), and Xenos make most of them right. They insert suppression mechanics to counter reaction fire, they give a pretty good use to vehicles, they give new intrinsic properties to weapons, they make the economy more brutal, they increase the suspension by showing you the alien actions on the globe, they put humans on more maps, they give some use to base defenses [and more]... And LBNL the balance seems to be really good.

I always thought the game would not make the inovative side right, with too much reverence to the original, but it seems they did.