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I'm really enjoying the Second Wave options like Not Created Equally and Hidden Potential, but dang is Marathon highlighting how annoyingly frequent the abduction missions are. Hell, I've been excelling at getting my satellites up and right now am on track to go from covering 5 countries to all 14 in just over a month (and only a little over a month after my current game started), but I'm still looking at panic levels across the world that average about 3-4 because I've been getting abduction missions almost every day for this last game month! It'd be nice if the number of simultaneous abductions were at least random (like, usually two, maybe one if you're lucky or three if you're not), and even better if the panic increases only hit the countries that you couldn't help and not the whole region, but dang, even just a tweak to the RNG to lower the likelihood of abductions slightly on Marathon (because you're not going to be able to zero that panic out for a lot longer than you can in the normal game) would be nice.
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Jan 23, 2013 20:14
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pesty13480 posted:For what it is worth I do not think this is strictly true. From what I've seen, if you reject the first Slingshot mission, then Slingshot does not appear again (I ran a game for about 9 months before I realized I probably ruined the DLC). For every mission but the first Slingshot mission, you can put it off for as long as you like and the council will ring you up every God damned ten minutes until you say yes. Actually, according to [PEOPLE ON INTERNET] you can get the option to start the Slingshot missions again if you decline the first. But considering the number of people who've had an experience like yours, I'm assuming there's at least some amount of randomness involved.
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Feb 22, 2013 19:36
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Ravenfood posted:An interesting change to terror missions would be to have aliens keep spawning until either the civilians or XCOM is dead/evacuated. Maybe call them evac missions and have them pop up every so often instead of terror missions. Just a replacement stream that keeps coming forever and slowly ramps UP the difficulty of the aliens, not less. Make it so that if only a few make it out, panic spreads, but higher numbers start giving you rewards after a certain point that increase per civilian. You'd have to balance saving civilians with ever-increasing risks, and it would be one of the few times in normal missions that the vac mechanic ever got used for XCOMs. The only problem there is that that sort of mission sort of suggests that the city's megafucked as soon as XCOM leaves. That's fine as like, a last ditch "can you stop this country from leaving the council by saving at least like, 85% of civilians on the map?" sort of thing, but would be kinda' weird as just a replacement for a generic terror mission.
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Feb 23, 2013 19:07
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Bloodly posted:When you have a baseship, why bother with planets? I still question why and how they had a base on-planet. I think the original idea was that the base ship would be en route/possibly not even traveling to Earth for most of the game, hence why they'd have a forward base to test whether or not humans were/could be made into good psychic hive mind material, why they'd need an emergency back-up mobile command van when that was destroyed, and why that trailer for the game showed the base ship arriving in Earth orbit instead of just de-cloaking. I'm not sure why they ditched that aspect since the narrative flows a lot more naturally that way.
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Mar 28, 2013 17:40
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Hammy posted:Some urban maps that aren't Western in architecture would also be nice. I'd like to blow up some Rio style slums and Japanese temples and the like. All the maps remind me of California one way or the other. Yeah, at the very least some more regional variation in the maps would be welcome.
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Mar 28, 2013 18:27
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Fintilgin posted:It's one reason I was annoyed with Slingshot. Having three or four 'Asian' themed maps added to the general rotation when you landed in Asia would have been far better then a few pre-scripted story missions. Oh man, so they actually don't have different lighting conditions for each map? I thought I was just running into weird bugs whenever I arrived at an abduction at like 1 PM according to the day/night cycle on the geoscape, only to find it was actually more like midnight on the map. Hell, has anyone noticed that on that one construction map, the one where you're on top of the skyscraper, the signs are in Chinese regardless of where the map ostensibly is? It's weird since they totally have two different versions of that dock map so that your first abduction mission in the tutorial feels more like it's in the place it is. Some weird oversights in this game. Ernie Muppari fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Mar 28, 2013 |
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Mar 28, 2013 19:52
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Huh...so...I was just fiddling around with the panic settings in the DefaulGameCore.ini, and testing those changes in the game (I was contemplating a Classic Marathon game where panic only spread in nations where abductions happened, and not the whole continent), and after deciding that the panic values in each country could use some further tweaking (and realizing I hadn't backed up the original .ini like a moron) had steam re-download the .exe and quickly ran the game so it'd download a new .ini. So uh...the panic values have either carried over to the new .ini, or Firaxis dropped the continent wide panic from abductions in the last patch and I didn't notice, can anyone corroborate one of those for me?
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Mar 30, 2013 08:02
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nnnotime posted:Firaxis did not drop the continent-wide panic from abductions. Those values have stayed the same since the game's first release (which I have confirmed). I figured out what happened and it was the "I was stupid and forgot that the DefaultGameCore.ini that gets updated by the unmodified .exe is actually in the XComGame/Config folder, and the one with the weirdass values was the backup I made" option. Bloops, problem solved. Still weird that my backup changed after resetting everything, like, there were values that weren't either the defaults or what I'd changed in there, like abduction panic in a country being +3(!) on every difficulty and the US' funding being 1000 simoleans a month! I'm going to assume that I somehow accidentally copied over some other modified .ini during the course of this because otherwise how would that even happen?
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Mar 30, 2013 20:02
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So I found a pretty comfortable level of panic progression for marathon. I left the abduction panic increases for continents unchanged, but I set it so that a successfully thwarted abduction lowers continental panic by 1, and set abduction/terror UFOs to visible (which means you can occasionally only have two abductions to choose from). This does make panic swing pretty wildly early on in classic, but global panic still creeps upward as the game progresses, it just takes until about May/June before you absolutely have to try taking out the base to keep things under control instead of April/May (and that's assuming you're lucky enough to not get multiple abductions in the same continents/countries in quick succession, aren't losing a bunch of missions, or are suffering any other misc. setbacks that can keep you from effectively managing panic levels before then).
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Apr 9, 2013 19:32
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Execu-speak posted:So I had this gifted to me on Steam, liking it so far. Sadly no, and the whole barracks/soldier management interface is weirdly tedious specifically because of that (seriously, why do we need to go into a separate screen to equip soldiers instead of just using a drop down menu at the Skyranger?).
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Apr 10, 2013 00:24
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The Kins posted:Well, you see, it's becau--Oh hey! Boxart! Wait what? That's really the boxart they're going with?! Like someone seriously saw that and said "yes, the one that looks like someone's kid scribbled all over the box for their copy of Completely Generic Shooter Number: Subtitle, that's the look that'll catch people's attention." I get that they were trying to go for like, a document that's been heavily [REDACTED] look, but it just looks kind of lovely and forgettable. Rather a shame because I LOVE retro bullshit with big boards and reel-to-reel computers and crap, but the whole X-Com shooter project has yet to make me feel confident that it will be any good. Keeshhound posted:What exactly is the logic behind cross-genre reboots, anyway? If people liked it back when it was a strategy game, why would you expect them to want it as a shooter? And if you're going after the shooter market, why tie it to a franchise that shooter fans probably haven't heard of, or at least weren't interested in? Well, to be fair, an X-Com shooter isn't exactly a new idea. There've been several attempts to create one on the logic that it worked for SWAT so why wouldn't it work for X-Com? The problem is probably less that the series itself is completely incapable of being adapted into an SBTS (squak-biased-tacticool-shoetor), and more that the people involved in attempting to do so have either not really had a good grasp of how to make a game like that, or haven't even been going for that (which would seem to be the case here). Ernie Muppari fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 18:52
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Cityinthesea posted:I think it'd work better if it was actually blacked out rather than just... shaded, I guess. I'm mostly just impressed by how generic it looks. It literally could be for any FPS from the last decade, the only thing that stands out about it is the marker, but that doesn't stand out in a good way because it looks unintentional. toasterwarrior posted:^^^: The stupid thing about the shading is that it's all over the place and because of that, it doesn't even look like censoring. You can still see the not-Pipboy thing on the dude's arm for goodness' sake; that looks like something that you'd actually want to censor properly! Yeah, if it was like, only on the guy's face (why isn't it obscuring his eyes?), his proton pack, the bip-poy, his free hand and whatever space magic crap is going on in the lower right hand corner, you'd get waaay more of a "this is a game about cold-war era coverups that likely involves super-science, fedoras, and possibly aliens" vibe than...that thing. Ernie Muppari fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Apr 26, 2013 |
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Apr 26, 2013 19:08
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Shumagorath posted:Is the Elite Solider pack going to game-breaking on Normal? So far my main challenge has been trying to bring rookies along for the sake of getting them trained up, and my main Arc Thrower team's declining Willpower.  ).
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Apr 27, 2013 03:23
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Hace posted:Also you can never get in close at all when you have a sniper who's using Snapshot, since sniper rifles actually lose accuracy if you end up getting close enough. That doesn't seem like a huge deal, but between the -15% penalty and the proximity penalty, you end up screwing yourself over on a number of choice flanking opportunities that would be better served with just Gunslinger + Pistol. Yeah, that's my issue with Snapshot. Like, in theory it's totally a good idea, but the fact that you already lose out on an accuracy bonus by having to move your sniper closer to their target is the big deal breaker to me if I'm also looking at an extra penalty on top of that. Like, drat Good Ground vs. Gunslinger is a lot more debatable (particularly if Firaxis ever decides to fix it so a Squadight sniper can't take pistol shots on overwatch outside their own LoS), but Snapshot's utility just doesn't quite stack up against Squadsight's.
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Apr 29, 2013 07:25
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The Midniter posted:I wish this bug was usable on the console version of the game. Wait that's a bug? I just assumed it was a convenience thing so you could like, switch a rookie back to their rifle if you forgot to do that before telling them to overwatch since the game doesn't think that takes an action to perform. I can understand the sniper version of that (where you can overwatch with the rifle after moving without snapshot) being considered a bug, but I had assumed that was really the only variation of this which wasn't intended.
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Apr 29, 2013 20:04
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SpookyLizard posted:Id loving kill to make arc throwers have infinite uses and longer range. Or so that they could be used after run and gunning. Yeah, why can't the arc thrower be used after running/gunning anyway? It seems like such a no-brainer way to use that skill.
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Apr 29, 2013 22:27
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Execu-speak posted:That chokepoint on the base mission is a serious pain in the rear end. On my first run through that muton pack activated and could shoot at my guys through that gigantic rock wall, but my guys couldn't shoot back. Yeah that version of the base is always a giant slog for me too. That whole area is a cluster of LoS bugs and low cover surrounded by aliens with height bonuses that there's really not much you can do to avoid getting into a slugging match with. The other version of the base only has a couple areas with stairs to screw over your squad's LoS but other than that feels like waaay less of a pain in my rear end to go through.
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May 1, 2013 01:03
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Doctor Reynolds posted:Well, that was weird. I was sent to rescue this Van Dorn dude... but when I rescued his nameless soldier friend first, the mission ended as a success. Uh. One of the things I think is funny about the Van Dorn mission is that that soldier tells you that he and other surviving soldiers will cover you...but the only other survivor is Dorn and both he and the soldier are unarmed. It'd be p. cool if there were other soldiers who engaged the aliens on the map but were out of your control and mostly sucked and died or something. In fact it'd be pretty neat if that was something that could happen in terror missions too, just with like police or something else map appropriate. You could even tie the number of living, armed NPCs on the map to some sort of random alien spawn algorithm to even the odds if they were too effectual.
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May 3, 2013 07:12
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Orgophlax posted:My question is how did the thin man come to be on top of the soldier? If he dropped down on top, was the soldier hunkered down? If so, I'm guessing the thin man "inherited" the defense from the soldier, who would've had the equivalent of high cover if hunkered down. Which would mean when hunkered down, it's not the SOLDIER that gets the bonus, but the square, which is a really odd way to do it. You'd think they'd have set it up so there's some sort of algorithm that checks to see if the default spawn location for an alien dropping in is empty or occupied, and forces them to drop into an unoccupied space nearby. Though if the game made checks like that we'd probably be seeing fewer issues with teleporting patrols and cover bonuses.
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May 3, 2013 17:43
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:You know, gently caress Terror From the Deep. I truly hope that Firaxis's next X-COM game will be a take on the Apocalypse concept. That game was so ambitious and had so many great ideas. It's a shame it failed the execution on a few aspects, but if Firaxis could do that, and do that right, it could really become the best X-COM game ever. My hope is that if Firaxis does something like this, they go with a very Captain Scarlet or Stingray-esque (for a hypothetical TftD remake) look, and that that they go with that to the point that characters look like they've got all the weight and physicality of a marionette and every exploding vehicle looks like an RC car that was stuffed with fireworks. It'll never happen, but I can dream. 
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May 3, 2013 22:20
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WarpedNaba posted:I was more hoping for seeing how the graphics department would revamp the Triscene and Deep ones myself. Plus, imagine how gorgeous the battles would look under the water. Imagine the environment! Imagine I shall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOZeKH_1pEg 
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May 4, 2013 03:36
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Zoran posted:That particular cyberdisc is scripted to activate on a timer after you reach a certain point in the map, basically right at the second power node. If you wait long enough it'll come to you. And the doors on that part of the map have a bad habit of not needing to actually be opened when the aliens pass through them, so if you say, had to run some people back to concealed cover to get a better shot at killing the last muton and thin man on the map, it's entirely possible for them to just teleport back through one of those doors without triggering any overwatch shots from your team and pop a grenade/poison cloud/blast a couple squaddies in the face. On the plus side, the fact that these glitches are reliably glitchy on this map means you can plan around them at least.
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May 9, 2013 23:59
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Andre Banzai posted:I certainly agree with you and, actually, that can happen even if you win. In my headcanon the hivemind's quest to find the perfect species is continuously and tragironically thwarted by their own heavy handed and callous methods rather than any failings inherent to the species they encounter. In my hypothetical post-bad-end game, the hivemind, simultaneously frustrated and fascinated (I like to believe that the alien attitude to Xcom is equal parts "jesusdamnitfuck!" and "let's see where they're going with this...") by Xcom's ability to reliably thwart its efforts on the ground, uses its domination of the Council/Optimus Prime to find Xcom's base and destroy it/capture many of Xcom's personnel (ironically destroying their best chance to find Gifted humans on Earth in the process). While there may be survivors of this who continue to resist the hivemind's efforts, the hivemind's growing power over all Earth governments means that the efforts of these scattered survivors is ultimately doomed. Meanwhile, with no organized resistance to their efforts by the governments of Earth, the aliens can switch back to plan "abduct and conduct tests on all humans indiscriminately" without even having to do it marginally in secret. Their methods being deeply flawed however means that the hivemind never manages to unlock humanity's full potential and are "forced" to radically alter them to create another serviceable yet "flawed" servant race (like super-sectoids or something). It would all be rather sad if they weren't such massive assholes.
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May 16, 2013 19:03
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I wish New Economy was a monthly variable. It'd be really cool even if it was a variable with the default funding values essentially being the "unmodified" amount you could get from each country before the New Economy bonus/penalty was applied. It would synergize with Results Driven and War Weariness and could make for some really interesting funding situations.
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May 16, 2013 19:29
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Y'know being able to respec your guys would be a really useful addition to the game. It could be tied to the OTS, and it could even cost a small amount of credits every time, but it'd be neat to be able to potentially adapt your squad's skill set according to mission, as well as each squad member's individual stats.
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Jun 11, 2013 01:49
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Coolguye posted:Why would you ever bother with a B-Team, then? The humans already have a ton of advantages over the aliens after soldiers start getting promoted, no need to make them even more stacked. I dunno, I was just thinking that I'd probably experiment with skills a little more if I didn't have a guy who was stuck with something I'd almost never use as a result.
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Jun 11, 2013 02:00
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ninguno posted:I'd rather go the other way, where you get random abilities on levelup that you're stuck with. That would be pretty awesome.
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Jun 11, 2013 19:05
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nomadologique posted:Those guns inevitably end up in the hands of villainous criminals, not legitimate institutions of society like Lockheed-Martin. That or Lockheed-Martin et al. are just buying the lasers and poo poo at bargain basement prices (seriously, $267,300 sounds pretty good for a plasma beam), then selling those back to the government for like, a billion dollars each.
Ernie Muppari fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 06:59
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LordNad posted:This. Double Tap is one of those skills which is a lot more attractive with Not Created Equally and Hidden Potential switched on. A guaranteed second shot with a sniper rifle is a lot more valuable for a low aim sniper than potentially unlimited shots contingent on their being able to hit and kill each target. Snap Shot still sucks though.
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Jul 29, 2013 19:53
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I've spent far too much time trying to craft a suitably sentai/"real-robot" show-esque system for dressing my computer dolls up. Basic guidelines: Rookies/Squaddies use color 0 for their armor. Corporals/Sergeants are color coded based on specialization (Yellow=Heavy, Green=Sniper, Blue=Support, Red=Assault) Lieutenants get a special color scheme based on their call-sign. Colonels don't wear helmets or hats. Early game: Rookies-Corporals wear the basic beret. Sergeants get a different hat depending on specialization. (Goggles + headphones=Heavy, Cap + headphones=Sniper, Beret=Support, Beret + sunglasses=Assault) Rookies-Lieutenants use body armor deco 1. Captains and beyond wear body armor deco 2. (err...or deco 3? The one that comes with Slingshot) Carapace armor researched: Rookies-Lieutenants use body armor deco 2. Squaddies get different hats. Sergeants get the Hyperion helmet. Captains and up wear Hyperion armor. Alloy armor uses the same rules as early game body armor (save that everyone up to colonels wear the Slingshot helmets appropriate to their armor instead of hats). Titan armor researched: Full Hyperion armor is the basic body armor look. The Slingshot alloy armor deco gets the same bump down to the baseline that the body armor did. The Elite Soldier Pack deco replaces it. Low rank dudes wear the basic power armor design with the Slingshot helmets. High rank dudes wear the heavier looking Slingshot designs. Overseer ship tackled: ESP deco is the default alloy armor. Slingshot deco is the default power armor. 
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Aug 16, 2013 04:16
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Rinkles posted:I'm pretty astounded at the number of bugs this game has, and can only imagine what it was like on release. A lot of the time they're mostly benign, but it's frustrating nonetheless. Well, on the plus side the game wasn't all that much worse on release...on the minus side, the game still has most of the same bugs that it had on release in spite of those supposedly being patched out.
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Aug 18, 2013 19:16
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Phoenix Cannon also cost like, $12 with a few additional engineers, so it's probably not going to break the bank to equip your small force of early interceptors with them if you've got the cash.
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Aug 19, 2013 02:17
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immortal flow posted:So this is weird: http://xcom.wikia.com/wiki/Uber_Ethereal (spoilers~) Yes? It's not super clear in game, but there've been a few ideas floated in this thread to explain the aliens' motivations. My personal interpretation is that the Ethereals you fight in game are essentially meat puppets of some Star Trek style, ascended glowy super-psychic-hive-mind consciousness. That hive mind is constantly looking for newer and better species to "uplift" into it/use as meat puppets. The non-Ethereal species are all "failed" in the sense that they just didn't meet whatever semi-arbitrary expectations the hive mind had for them, and were instead redesigned to serve the hive mind in lesser roles (like being sad little front line science guys like the Sectoids). The way XCom's story plays out is basically that you're constantly disrupting the Ethereals' plans, but in such a spectacular way, and using so few people, that they don't just turn on the mothership's guns and win. Instead, each battle is looked at with sort of a "let's see how they respond to this" attitude, with the Ethereals getting progressively more excited at the prospect of finally finding another species worth joining the collective. When XCom fights its way through the corridors of the mothership, the Ethereals are treating it as a final test: if an agent can reach the bridge, then Humans have demonstrated that they are worth absorbing into the collective. Unfortunately for the Ethereals, their offer isn't terribly enticing to anyone who isn't already a part of the hive mind, and XCom just blows the crap out of the bridge and everyone on it. I also like to believe that if XCom had accepted the offer, that the Ethereals would've just gone back to abducting people (with XCom's help), experimenting on them, and, because their criteria for judging a species' "perfection" aren't actually like, objective, or written, or anything (because what even?), would eventually just get all pissy that Humans weren't "perfect" enough, and then just turn Humans into a replacement for Mutons and Sectoids.
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Aug 20, 2013 20:29
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Not that I don't think what they showed looked neat or anything, but I was kinda' hoping the emphasis would be more on new aliens to deal with/new maps to deal with aliens on than new ways to deal with aliens. Plus side, fukkin' farm map and Exo-Sectoids  .
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Aug 21, 2013 09:47
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Also why is it called "Enemy Within" if there's no enemy...uh...within? Like...Prime even says stuff about enemy agents something something... Though, the trailer for EU also showed the mothership in Lunar orbit whereas in game it's just parked above the ocean somewhere...doing nothing...so whatevs.
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Aug 21, 2013 10:12
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Rinkles posted:I don't know. It's sounding more like $20 worth of content to me, but maybe there's a lot of new events, variety added along the way. Yeah, not that I don't appreciate exo-suits (though...I thought the power armor was supposed to essentially fill the same sort of powered...armor...niche), robot punches, or cool/creepy/hot(?) cyborg limbs, but this stuff seems mostly like answers to problems the base game didn't have. Like, we can totally handle the aliens in the base game with the equipment from the base game, people aren't running into trouble because they lack for ways to one shot Mutons late game. 
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Aug 21, 2013 10:19
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Rinkles posted:loving genius feature: Localized voices are in all versions! (give your soldiers non-american voices) Woah woah woah, wait, hold up, I missed this. loving sold. <---A person with super good judgement.
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Aug 21, 2013 10:25
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Leb posted:Now we just have to get someone to ask the team if they've finally fixed the teleport/flanking/berserker bugs... Hopefully Microsoft dropping the cash requirement to patch games will at least increase the frequency at witch Firaxis releases patches for the game (if not decrease the time those patches take to get certified).
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Aug 21, 2013 10:29
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Welmu posted:Different branches of armed forces usually have differing insignia, just like you color you classes differently. Don't you? Yeah, thinking about it now, that emblem (assuming that the teaser isn't 100% apocryphal at this point) is probably from some sort of mirror mirror version of XCom run by people who either took whatever offer the aliens may have made to "help" humanity "better itself". It would make a certain amount of sense if the new toys the player gets to use are slightly less limited version of what the Dark Rangers you periodically encounter have (because the aliens are really big on trying to slot entire species into specific roles). This would also open up some interesting new possibilities for council missions if you were eventually trying to say, save a VIP from not-XCom. The in-game explanation for the meld canisters on the maps they show up on might be that they're supply drops for not-XCom (who might be doing the whole secret base thing just like XCom to ensure that a council nation doesn't just fire an ICBM to eliminate them?). If that's part of what they're doing with the exo-suit and eugenics-monster stuff then I'm pretty down with that.
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Aug 21, 2013 19:15
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gannyGrabber posted:Now all it needs is a %chance of people not surviving the MELD/MEC surgeries. I can't think of a better way to put those choices on par with Snap-Shot.
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Aug 21, 2013 21:49
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