X-COM XCOM 2 + War of the Chosen Expansion Thread

[34scell]

Actually, TftD buffed armour and nerfed alien weapons, making ion armour slightly more cost efficient than cannon fodder, in my experience.

 

[Black]

I like it too. Since they made squads so small, there is a lot more attachment to individual soldiers, no more of that rookie bullet sponge that we do on the old UFO/TFtD, so the more customization there is, the better.

FALSE!
In OG X-Com you developed attachment precisely because out of all those mountains of rookie corpses, some of them stayed alive. Some even against improbable odds, like taking an alien grenade to the face with no armour and surviving. It was attachment through weeding out the heroes from the cannon fodder.
Now you get attached to them because, well, you have to. One of your guys dies and you're a quarter of your manpower down.

 

[sser]

Right. The small amount of soldiers means a loss = far more damaging. It's one of the reasons why the import of the "panic" feature made no sense. In X-Com, a panicking soldier shoots randomly and if someone dies, they die. But in XCOM, where you can't target terrain with all weapons, they would pinpoint a fellow soldier and then if they died it was a 25% loss in squad efficiency + additional panics more often than not. The problem is you can't really implement wanton destruction, aggressive strategies, panic-features, etc. while at the same time limiting the player's squad size. Watch five different Let's Players of XCOM on the harder difficulties. What do you notice? That they all play the same way. Casualties are nearly unacceptable. It pushes you down an A-Team path while simultaneously being super-punishing for even suffering one loss. What does that lead to? Devolved gameplay where players inch about the map, too afraid to take risks.

Long War alleviated a lot of this, not just through expanding squad-count but by implementing the injury/rest features which forced you to cycle through your roster.

However, what Long War made me realize is that the gameplay is always going to be mediocre so long as they have that enemy-popping feature. I mean, that's really the crux of pretty much all of XCOM's faults, IMO.

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

And there I thought it's not possible to dumb it down even further...

 

[Black]

Right. The small amount of soldiers means a loss = far more damaging. It's one of the reasons why the import of the "panic" feature made no sense. In X-Com, a panicking soldier shoots randomly and if someone dies, they die. But in XCOM, where you can't target terrain with all weapons, they would pinpoint a fellow soldier and then if they died it was a 25% loss in squad efficiency + additional panics more often than not. The problem is you can't really implement wanton destruction, aggressive strategies, panic-features, etc. while at the same time limiting the player's squad size. Watch five different Let's Players of XCOM on the harder difficulties. What do you notice? That they all play the same way. Casualties are nearly unacceptable. It pushes you down an A-Team path while simultaneously being super-punishing for even suffering one loss. What does that lead to? Devolved gameplay where players inch about the map, too afraid to take risks.

Long War alleviated a lot of this, not just through expanding squad-count but by implementing the injury/rest features which forced you to cycle through your roster.

However, what Long War made me realize is that the gameplay is always going to be mediocre so long as they have that enemy-popping feature. I mean, that's really the crux of pretty much all of XCOM's faults, IMO.

Ye, in OG you got attached just because you did, maybe they did something crazy, maybe they brought down that cyberdisc when you needed to kill it.
In the nu one you get attached because you have to. You NEED that assault, are you shitting me? Or that sniper with squadsight? You depend on them more than they on you.

 

[Jimmious]

Although these arguments do have some points, I get the feeling you guys didn't play a lot of nuXCOM or were too biased to start with. I never had that feeling of "I must not lose this guy or I'm fucked" to the point you say. And I played a lot. And yes, there were awesome moments you would remember some soldier for, like surviving alone a mission that almost went bad or killing a couple of cyberdisks or surviving against odds out of cover etc.
Generally I get the feeling you tried to not have fun with this game more than you should have..

 

[Black]

you tried to not have fun

The dumbest thing I've read on the Dex today.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Although these arguments do have some points, I get the feeling you guys didn't play a lot of nuXCOM or were too biased to start with. I never had that feeling of "I must not lose this guy or I'm fucked" to the point you say. And I played a lot. And yes, there were awesome moments you would remember some soldier for, like surviving alone a mission that almost went bad or killing a couple of cyberdisks or surviving against odds out of cover etc.
Generally I get the feeling you tried to not have fun with this game more than you should have..

 

[Average Manatee]

Actually, TftD buffed armour and nerfed alien weapons, making ion armour slightly more cost efficient than cannon fodder, in my experience.

Definitely, and this is what I liked. The biggest change was going from a 0-200% damage range to a 50-150%. An enemy that deals 0-100 damage is a lot scarier vs. a soldier with 65 armor and 20 health than an enemy that deals 25-75 damage. Plus auto-fire was removed from alien weapons, though they were a lot more accurate.

Right. The small amount of soldiers means a loss = far more damaging. It's one of the reasons why the import of the "panic" feature made no sense. In X-Com, a panicking soldier shoots randomly and if someone dies, they die. But in XCOM, where you can't target terrain with all weapons, they would pinpoint a fellow soldier and then if they died it was a 25% loss in squad efficiency + additional panics more often than not. The problem is you can't really implement wanton destruction, aggressive strategies, panic-features, etc. while at the same time limiting the player's squad size. Watch five different Let's Players of XCOM on the harder difficulties. What do you notice? That they all play the same way. Casualties are nearly unacceptable. It pushes you down an A-Team path while simultaneously being super-punishing for even suffering one loss. What does that lead to? Devolved gameplay where players inch about the map, too afraid to take risks.

Long War alleviated a lot of this, not just through expanding squad-count but by implementing the injury/rest features which forced you to cycle through your roster.

However, what Long War made me realize is that the gameplay is always going to be mediocre so long as they have that enemy-popping feature. I mean, that's really the crux of pretty much all of XCOM's faults, IMO.

It's not strictly the small amount of soldiers, it's the fact that soldier experience is the dominant factor in combat performance rather than the equipment you give them, and there is no strategic option to fix a loss of experience.

In X-Com, completely green soldiers with Laser Rifles + Rocket launchers in their bare clothes could take on most missions and perform competently enough to give you a good shot. You felt the pain when good soldiers died, but as long as you could field the equipment you could hold your ground. The only time this changed was with Ethereals, at which point if you couldn't psi screen you had to hunker down, wait until you could, then you had to psi screen soldiers (greatly increasing the cost and time to field troops) before being able to fight again. The point to take is that losses in tactical could be made up by performance in strategic.

In nuXCOM this is not the case. 90% of your power comes from experience, which you get by doing missions without dying. If you *only* finish 75% of your missions flawlessly and suffer 1 casualty in the other 25%, you are on the course for never getting high level soldiers. And if you wipe? No amount of heavy plasma or armor can help the useless fucking rookies take on high level threats. If you have a loss in tactical the only way to make a comeback is through playing even better in tactical while using worse soldiers to do it. Strategic is just a footnote really, something you have to handle in order to not lose the game outright. I'm pretty sure you could win on impossible with ballistics, with the only obstacle being the same "hope you run nigh-perfect missions the first 3 months" thing that a normal game requires.

Long War's greater group sizes and fatigue doesn't really fundamentally change any of this. The same concept of a 75% Win 25% 1 loss rate that leads to never getting ahead and eventually falling behind on the experience rat-race still exists (having larger groups probably shifts the breaking point to a 66%/33% split). The fatigue system doesn't really alter this besides preventing you from putting all of your eggs in one basket, you still are destined to lose if you are losing soldiers with any regularity. What Long War does do is give a number of opportunities to purchase high-leveled characters, which is what allows you to sustain losses and still field good teams. It's still a bit screwy in that the things you need to get soldiers to run tactical missions is usually items/corpses/captures that you find on tactical missions, and the number of soldiers you can get tend to be limited in number, but it provides a better cushion than anything else in nuXcom. Ideally it would allow you to trade strategic resources for soldiers rather than tactical, and do it in greater quantity more often.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

That's why you rotate your soldiers, instead of taking the same team over and over again.
The biggest mistake I made on my first run was to take the same guys on a mission instead of spreading promotions around evenly. One squad wipe, and I found myself with rookies fighting a terror mission.
It didn't go well.
Doesn't Long War have a mechanic that forces you to do this?

 

[Jaedar]

Long War's greater group sizes and fatigue doesn't really fundamentally change any of this. The same concept of a 75% Win 25% 1 loss rate that leads to never getting ahead and eventually falling behind on the experience rat-race still exists (having larger groups probably shifts the breaking point to a 66%/33% split). The fatigue system doesn't really alter this besides preventing you from putting all of your eggs in one basket, you still are destined to lose if you are losing soldiers with any regularity. What Long War does do is give a number of opportunities to purchase high-leveled characters, which is what allows you to sustain losses and still field good teams. It's still a bit screwy in that the things you need to get soldiers to run tactical missions is usually items/corpses/captures that you find on tactical missions, and the number of soldiers you can get tend to be limited in number, but it provides a better cushion than anything else in nuXcom. Ideally it would allow you to trade strategic resources for soldiers rather than tactical, and do it in greater quantity more often.

You can get requests which reward Rank 3 people in Long War. It's pretty good, but after September, you can barely tell the difference in performance between a corporal and a rookie.

But Long war does force you to have a way more reliable roster. Losing one max level soldier is going to sting, but when you have 20 soldiers hovering around the last 3 ranks, it's not that bad. You have a point when it comes to percentages though, it takes a lot longer to level them, so they need to survive more missions.

Still, in vanilla, if you lose your maxrank sniper/assault, it's pretty much GG. Not at all like that in LW.

 

[Average Manatee]

That's why you rotate your soldiers, instead of taking the same team over and over again.
The biggest mistake I made on my first run was to take the same guys on a mission instead of spreading promotions around evenly. One squad wipe, and I found myself with rookies fighting a terror mission.
It didn't go well.
Doesn't Long War have a mechanic that forces you to do this?

LWs larger squads and fatigue don't really change the fact that you need to hit around 75% of your missions perfectly with zero losses to succeed. It only provides more cushion against the randomness, which is done by adding far more missions. You lose less from any individual mission failure but in the end your average % of successful missions needs to be very high in the long run, same as vanilla.

You can get requests which reward Rank 3 people in Long War. It's pretty good, but after September, you can barely tell the difference in performance between a corporal and a rookie.

But Long war does force you to have a way more reliable roster. Losing one max level soldier is going to sting, but when you have 20 soldiers hovering around the last 3 ranks, it's not that bad. You have a point when it comes to percentages though, it takes a lot longer to level them, so they need to survive more missions.

Still, in vanilla, if you lose your maxrank sniper/assault, it's pretty much GG. Not at all like that in LW.

Yeah, I forgot about a few other ways to get soldiers in LW. But the real problem is that you still need continued success in the tactical element to get them. You can't really just "hunker down" and take only the very easy tactical missions while you invest in the strategic layer to catch up. In fact in LW you'll suffer the double whammy of losing tons of experience/cash and letting the Aliens get their huge research buffs bonus to make tactical more unbearable for you.

Rank 3 people are "good enough" to at least reliably do something IMO. That's what Rookies can't accomplish.

 

[Zeriel]

You can get requests which reward Rank 3 people in Long War. It's pretty good, but after September, you can barely tell the difference in performance between a corporal and a rookie.

But Long war does force you to have a way more reliable roster. Losing one max level soldier is going to sting, but when you have 20 soldiers hovering around the last 3 ranks, it's not that bad. You have a point when it comes to percentages though, it takes a lot longer to level them, so they need to survive more missions.

Still, in vanilla, if you lose your maxrank sniper/assault, it's pretty much GG. Not at all like that in LW.

This was never true on difficulties below Impossible. On the Iron-Man Classic LP I did on the Codex I had a total squad wipe in vanilla after beating alien base, 6 colonels dead and dusted, used fresh rookies from there on out and completed the game without issue. I try not to generalize, but I've noticed a sad trend on Codexia of blaming a game's design for PEBKAC. It is a design issue, to be sure, but "YOU CANNOT DO ANYTHING IF YOU LOSE ANYONE, EVER" is such a load of bullshit I can't believe people even think it, let alone say it.

 

[Black]

The hell is pebkac

 

[Zeriel]

Problem exists between keyboard and chair, i.e "yo nigga, you dumb as a load o' bricks".

 

[Raghar]

Zeriel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWkfFE7GiTQ
Looks like we will not be able to see that lets play.

 

[Black]

This video is unavailable.

Yeah, looks like it!

 

[Zeriel]

Zeriel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWkfFE7GiTQ
Looks like we will not be able to see that lets play.

Are you referring to the video I posted in it? It's just all my guys dying to a dumb mistake. (3 sectoid commanders pop up out of nowhere on a SMALL SCOUT of all places and do the psi shenanigans, I had never seen so many at once before, so wasn't ready for it) But after that happened I then recovered by using rookies for missions, it wasn't as bad as people here seem to believe. Sure rookies died, but I didn't fail any missions.

 

[Jimmious]

People continuously saying that if you lose high level soldiers in nuXCOM "its gg" simply didnt play enough or didnt play well. I tried to say that before but was bashed for my wording.
Its simply a false statement.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

People continuously saying that if you lose high level soldiers in nuXCOM "its gg" simply didnt play enough or didnt play well. I tried to say that before but was bashed for my wording.
Its simply a false statement.

game sucks. stop being lame

 

[Space Satan]

I saw let's plays where people lost missions, 90% of their squads and still managed to pull through nuXcom. It's hurting but not instant game over

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Zeriel]

Yeah, it's the footage from Gamescom without annoying presenters talking over it. Ending is new, though--maybe a lead-in to them talking about the Base (or would that be Ship?) Defense mission.

 

[Zeriel]

Okay, here's the version you should see:

http://www.twitch.tv/firaxisgames/v/11897944

Same gameplay clip, but with Firaxis talking about the game and providing details. Nice to see Jake again.

 

[LESS T_T]

Delayed to early next year: http://xcom.com/news/xcom-2-now-coming-to-pc-worldwide-on-february-5-2016

XCOM 2 NOW COMING TO PC WORLDWIDE ON FEBRUARY 5, 2016

Hello XCOM fans,

We want to give you an update on the release date for XCOM 2. We’ve set a high bar for the sequel and the entire team has been working hard to make sure we deliver a great follow-up to Enemy Unknown. We just need a little more time to make it the best possible game.

With XCOM 2, we want to have more depth, more replayability, and more investment in your soldiers and this extension will give us the time we need to deliver on our promise to you.

We appreciate your patience and continued support as we move towards February. Good luck, Commander!

-The XCOM 2 Dev Team