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Pvt.Scott posted:I really hate that you never encounter combat capable friendlies, even in places where they should be. There are side missions where you encounter soldiers and bodyguards who just hang out and watch your dudes get shot. Thanks, bro! Xenonauts does this pretty well. Mission in the middle east? Pretty much every civilian is going to have an AK. Terror mission in a city? The military helps you - and they even get upgraded to your tech level (if you figured out how laser rifles work, you tell every nation). They've also got a great "you failed/didn't do this terror mission" result that city is nuked by human forces because they can't win any other way.
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Feb 6, 2014 20:11
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Tithin Melias posted:I realise it's only tangentially related to XCOM, but have there been any decent LPs of Xenonauts done? Xenonauts is still in Early Access, so it can't be LPed yet. Are there any special rules that modify the usual time limit for Early Access titles by the way? The whole EA thing is really messing with the LP format.
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Feb 10, 2014 01:35
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Jade Star posted:Early game they can be quite difficult as they usually feature air dropped Thin Men heavily. Early on Thin Men can pose a very real threat with their high mobility and the damage from the light plasma rifle can routinely one shot rookies and squaddies until you develop better armor. It's so incredibly stupid that this still exists in EW, when they solved that problem with the new mission types (where enemies don't magically spawn and/or don't get free overwatch when they do), but left the lovely broken version in the old missions. EW in general is, to a large degree, just piling more stuff onto old systems that were barely able to handle the old stuff, much less the new stuff. Hopefully the next expansion focuses entirely on the strategic layer and unfucks it. The FPS-COM and XCOM stuff is interesting and an inside view would be incredibly cool. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Feb 10, 2014 |
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Feb 10, 2014 16:57
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Jade Star posted:It's random. Just roll 1d4 I suppose. I think there was talk from the devs of the the game trying to promote to fill substantially lopsided gaps, such as if all of your assaults keep dying rookies would be more likely to become assults, but I don't know if this ever panned out to be true or not. The first 4 are guaranteed to be an even spread of all 4 classes though aren't they?
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Feb 10, 2014 21:41
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Speaking of rocket miss chance - it's really great that EW got rid of Thin Men having 100% accuracy on their poison spit.
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Feb 11, 2014 23:08
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Zudrag posted:The Thin Men drop is a flaw in the design rather than the player, in my opinion. I'd much prefer if squads came from of the map into positions of cover, or there was some sort of telegraph like seeing an effect on a spot on the ground, then next turn an enemy would drop there. Hey guess what they do for a new enemy type but not for Thin Men - it's running in from off-map and announcing enemy spawns before they happen. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 23:15
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Jade Star posted:Tactical Sense vs Aggression Another point against extra crit: Crit is inherently random, and you generally you don't take shots unless you know they'll do the job, no crit required. You'll never have a plan for your turn that includes "Soldier X must crit against Alien Y" - even if you've got an aggressive play style.
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Feb 14, 2014 01:55
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Having the Bureau and XCOM in the same timeline makes no sense whatsoever. But if you think of them as taking place in alternate realities of the same universe the whole thing makes a lot of sense. The same races inhabiting the galaxy, but events differ so you've got Mercenary Mutons and technologically enslaved Sectoids working for religious fanatics instead of genetically mutilated and psionically controlled races under the Ethereals. Also the Titan enemy in the Bureau - it's so ridiculously easy: after you've beaten the fight once and you get the document that tells you how to fight Titans. But then they never show up ever again. DatonKallandor fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Feb 18, 2014 |
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Feb 18, 2014 16:33
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Felinoid posted:Frankly I found it horribly annoying. I don't think I died to it, but the in-game advice of "take cover to protect yourself" was a complete red herring, as with a single shot it'd destroy a large swathe of cover and hit me anyway. It was easy enough after I realized I should just run around like a ninny whenever I thought it was going to fire, but that misdirection irked me, and the rest of the time whittling away its health made it feel like a very simple puzzle boss that had long overstayed its welcome. Oh taking cover works - but the cover has to obstruct the disintegration beam entirely otherwise the splash hits you. Also the trick they only tell you after the fight is that for a few seconds after firing the beam the center of the Titan is a gigantic weakspot. I think you can take down the whole Titan in a single magazine of the rocket launcher that way. Takes less than a minute for the whole fight. Pvt.Scott posted:So, as a guy that actually enjoys third-person cover shooters (and the awesome first-person cover mechanics in Far Cry 3) is The Bureau with checking out? Absolutely as long as you don't mind a lack of polish in the details and a pretty straight Mass Effect combat system rip (but executed better, frankly).
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Feb 18, 2014 18:02
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It's incredibly pretty on high settings. They really got some top notch lighting out of that old engine. Just disable cloth physics and directx 11 and you're good to go.
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Feb 18, 2014 21:16
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Doesn't it also have you dash through a closed door that you can't see the other side of? The Tutorial is really bad.
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Feb 19, 2014 19:46
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Felinoid posted:Does anybody have a weapon they always skip? I'm not terribly fond of the laser shotguns, so my assaults always go Shotgun -> Laser Rifle -> LPR -> best shotgun. The other three classes I just climb the tree one branch at a time. With EW you can skip all the laser weapons that aren't rifles because you can just take your heavy lasers, scatter lasers and sniper lasers off the corpses of Exalt dudes.
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Feb 26, 2014 20:46
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MJ12 posted:The thing is, MECs have low defense, making them incredibly fragile despite their deceptively high HP. Their main method of survivability is offense and mobility. They're fast cav, not heavy armor. You know there is a way to get more defense on XCOM units. And it comes standard on the same unit that can heal the giant HP pool of MECs.
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Mar 4, 2014 19:27
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FredMSloniker posted:One of those games I've thought it would be neat to be able to play is some sort of three-way game between XCOM, the regular aliens, and, I dunno, the TFTD aliens. Have all three sides have different ways of acquiring tech and supplies. Maybe the regular aliens don't need to research, for instance, but they're desperately short on supplies, so they need to run lots of missions to gather stuff to clone Mutons or fuel their alien alloy forges or what have you. The upside is, at least at first most of their missions will automatically succeed (I was thinking closer to the original X-Com games, where at least at first you'd miss a lot of alien activity). Xenonauts has a really great explanation for why aliens don't just crush earth with their big ships, but instead slowly ramp up from the small scouts up that doesn't rely on comedy options - they have to refit their space fleet to be atmospheric and they start with the smaller ships because they're faster to refit. That would make an interesting mechanic for playing the aliens - constantly playing for time so you can bring the big toys.
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Mar 6, 2014 22:09
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Screen Door Slams posted:I've been having a fun XCOM run. The sniper with HEAT ammo is pretty drat awesome too.
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Mar 7, 2014 01:54
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Peanut3141 posted:They got foundry projects to increase moveent by 3, HP by 3 and also a Sentinel Drone that heals them for 2 HP/round indefinitely. They also got automatic free shot on enemies moving within x distance of the SHIV (and unless my game is bugged, with no cap on the number of times it can happen). I've had a single SHIV blast a Muton 3 times in one Muton movement. It's still bullshit the SHIV doesn't get the MEC line of heavy weapons though, since they clearly start with the same one.
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Mar 24, 2014 17:49
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Bruceski posted:I like to keep my guys in as much cover as they can get, and so often end up with thread-the-needle rocket shots through two doorways and a window. That means that 10% of the time the rocket blows up in my face, because there's no room for it to actually wind up "two squares over from the target" or whatever. I usually rush hard in the construction skyscraper Exalt mission. You can chain-disable their weapons, so that gives you complete leeway to dash into perfect positions to gently caress Exalt when they spawn. Having at least one sniper sitting on the raised platform suspended from the crane is hilarious, because they can see pretty much all Exalt spawns from there.
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Apr 21, 2014 21:03
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Rick_Hunter posted:Wait what? Do tell. It basically does everything Firaxis should have done with Enemy Within. The strategic level fixes alone (one mission per trigger instead of 3, but a lot more of them in quick succession so your bottleneck actually becomes soldiers like in a proper XCOM game) are things identified about a week after basic XCOM came out, but they never fixed them. Adding any depth at all to the interception layer and an attempt to make all perks useful are also really nice Long War features.
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May 5, 2014 23:36
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There is no reality in which the default XCOM remake strategic layer is not fundamentally flawed. 3 Missions and you can only choose one, while eating guaranteed morale penalties regardless of how well or badly you're doing strategically or tactically is simply dumb. It's entirely random with no skill component. I agree the air game is bad too, and Long War doesn't entirely fix it, but that's because the air layer can't be fixed. Every XCOM game and XCOM clone has struggled with making the air game fit. Leaving it out entirely and focusing on the ground and global layers is probably the smartest move an XCOM-like can make (see the UFO:AfterX series).
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May 6, 2014 00:19
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KittyEmpress posted:And yet, every page in this thread has had someone complaining that they can't manage panic, and that the panic system is bullshit and impossible. I didn't say it can't be managed. It said it's bullshit. It's bullshit because it auto-fails you two missions without letting you play them. The fact it lets you choose which two missions to auto-fail, and that the panic fallout from those is easy to math out (even though it's hidden, which is another layer of bullshit) doesn't change that. It's still auto-failing two missions without letting you play them, no matter how well you're doing on research, money or recruits.
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May 7, 2014 11:48
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