New Version of Xcom

[Sirian]

Now I need to find some way to keep busy for the next four days. Preferably productively so I can afford to spend time playing once the game is available.

Happy to do my part. Consider this post an excuse to elaborate more, and the writing of your reply should fill an hour or two.



Or, at least, you can laugh at my feeble attempt, decline the bait, but still manage to kill a minute or two.


The news about AI actually behaving differently at difficulty levels is welcome indeed. Sure, it comes by "dumbing down" the AI for the easier levels, but still. Strong AI that plays hard is welcome news in itself. Chalk up another passing grade for the new version.

Oh look! I managed to kill five minutes myself. TYVM!

Er... still 3.5 days to go tho.


- Sirian

[haphazard1]

Happy to do my part. Consider this post an excuse to elaborate more, and the writing of your reply should fill an hour or two.



Or, at least, you can laugh at my feeble attempt, decline the bait, but still manage to kill a minute or two.

Sometimes bait is a good thing. Some more thoughts below.

The news about AI actually behaving differently at difficulty levels is welcome indeed. Sure, it comes by "dumbing down" the AI for the easier levels, but still. Strong AI that plays hard is welcome news in itself. Chalk up another passing grade for the new version.

How good the tactical AI really is won't be known without a lot more testing. Lots and lots of testing. :D And the change is definitely from the AI not performing at full strength on the easier difficulties, but as you say that is expected. What I saw so far just from a few limited fights seemed promising. But maybe a lot of the issues are from my not yet having worked out good tactics on my part? Also some of the difference is certainly that the different alien opponents I set up are tougher and have more abilities. More testing needed...three more days, grumble, mutter, grumble....

The modded/hacked demo is still working within some pretty stringent limits due to the structure of the scenario: you only face a pair of enemies at a time, the demo map is small and rather linear, and the opening is controlled by the tutorial -- your first two moves are forced by the tutorial and they are not good ones. But after that you are in control, trying to extricate yourself from where you got dropped -- sort of like inheriting a seriously messed up SG turn.

Cover -- On the easier difficulties the aliens will take advantage of whatever cover is immediately available, and then generally engage in a fire fight with my squad. Not bad, but not all that challenging to deal with. On Classic the aliens would move to gain better cover if they only had light rather than heavy cover, and they were much more active at trying to flank my cover. Or they just removed my cover using grenades and then the second alien would open up on the exposed units.

Grenades -- I don't have comparative data on this, as the lower difficulty runs I played had alien types who do not have grenades. But the aliens are certainly aggressive with their explosives on Classic. If I left my soldiers grouped up at all where the aliens could hit multiple targets -- BOOM! They were relentless about this, and keeping spread out enough to avoid grenades but close enough together to provide mutual support is going to be a crucial skill to master. And as noted above the aliens would also use grenades to remove my cover -- the placement to destroy cover for multiple soliders when they could not actually hit multiple soldiers seemed too frequent to just be chance.

Flanking -- Even on Easy difficulty (the demo default) the aliens will sometimes try to flank your troops. But they only do it occasionally -- it does not seem to be a priority. On Classic flanking seemed to be a very high priority, only behind grenading multiple targets. Flying units especially were extremely effective at flanking (not a surprise given their movement options) and I was constantly having to adjust my soldiers' positioning to stay out of serious trouble. Not always successfully, as the full squad wipes should make obvious.

Special abilities -- Similar to grenades I don't have much comparative data here, as the easier aliens had fewer abilities to begin with. I did see some use of what they had even on Easy, which is encouraging. On Classic the aliens were using their whole bag of tricks throughout the battle, including a couple I had not read about and got nastily surprised by. With Firaxis having worked to hold back info on at least some of the later game aliens, I expect people who choose to go Ironman for their first play through to suffer some very tough losses. The discovery process will be painful, but that is part of the fun of the game. I have tried to avoid later game spoilers for just this reason, and expect to find myself saying "What?!?!? They can DO that? How is that fair?!?!?!?" at least a few times.

Also, cyberdisks are absolute beasts. Just in case I didn't mention that already.

Oh look! I managed to kill five minutes myself. TYVM!

Er... still 3.5 days to go tho.

Steam pre-load is now available. And at over 12 GB, you certainly want to get that out of the way ahead of time.

[Serdoa]

haphazard, can you confirm that the aliens always move around as soon as you spot them? Looking at the gameplay video and playing the demo it certainly looked like this, but maybe this behaviour changed with your modded version?

Speaking of that, you wouldn't have a link available for that modded version of the demo, would you?

[haphazard1]

haphazard, can you confirm that the aliens always move around as soon as you spot them? Looking at the gameplay video and playing the demo it certainly looked like this, but maybe this behaviour changed with your modded version?

This is certainly true in the demo, but it is a special case in a number of ways. But having watched quite a few game play videos this seems to be standard when you discover an alien or group of aliens -- there is a glam cam shot/mini cut scene where they react and scatter into cover. This happens during your move and before you can react. I don't know if you can reaction fire if you have someone in overwatch, but it would be an odd case since the line of sight rules pretty much mean that if you can see them they can see you.

I find this a bit annoying -- it is apparently impossible to "sneak up" on an alien, at least without advanced tech. There are cases where aliens will be moving on their own -- "patrolling" as Firaxis describes it -- and will discover you as they move. You can reaction fire when this happens, if you have a unit in overwatch in the right place.

A word of warning for tougher aliens and higher difficulties: some aliens do not react by finding cover. Some immediately advance to attack. From what I have seen they do not get to actually attack by this, since it is still your turn. But having them immediately charge your units, sometimes getting into positions to flank you, can be a serious problem.

Let me note again here that I am developing a serious hate for cyberdisks. Draw your own conclusions on how that fits with the previous paragraph. :D

Speaking of that, you wouldn't have a link available for that modded version of the demo, would you?

Sure. Check here at the 2K forums.

Demo Editor thread at 2K forums

Lots of good info on the forums, along with lots of spoilers, meaningless babble, duplicated threads, and people boasting about how they will be playing Impossible Ironman for their first games. (Likely to be rather short games, those, I suspect.) Pretty much like the net anywhere, with a high and increasing anxiety level as people wait not at all patiently for the unlock date.

There is pretty good info scattered through the demo editor thread, but my experience was that some combinations of options did not work -- the demo would lock up, or all your soldiers would be invisible and unable to move, etc. Just quit (or kill) the demo and try a different combination. (You can always go to Steam and select validate local files -- it will check and replace the few that get changed, takes very little time.) Experiment a bit, as overall it does work. Unfortunately the hack to skip the first fully scripted tutorial segments does not seem to work properly -- would save a lot of time and exasperation if it did.

Happy alien hunting!

[Sirian]

Sometimes bait is a good thing.

Even lazy bait?

Oh look: Sirian has posted lazy bait!

What am I supposed to do with this, eh?


Not spilling spoilers is a good thing.

Wait! They can DO that?!?!! How is THAT fair???

I can't believe I read this stupid post.

At least another minute has gone by. Not a total loss. Wake me up when release date arrives. :zzz: ... Whaddya mean you FORGOT to wake me up and it's already Thursday?? I coulda been PLAYING for two days! :mad:


- Sirian

[spellman]

unlocks in a few hours. Should I pre-purchase or wait until Steam Sale?

[antisocialmunky]

I dunno, I was going to give civ 5 away to a irl friend or try and trade it on the steam forums.

[antisocialmunky]

And unlocked :D

[mostly_harmless]

Grrr, so jealous! Have to wait 3 more days in Europe!

mh

[haphazard1]

Just spent 7.5 hours playing when I should have been sleeping. Now I need to go to work and think about things other than X-COM.

I will avoid spoilers of anything but the most general concepts: there are abduction missions, you shoot down UFOs and send squads to recover them and kill the surviving aliens, you build base facilities, etc. Nothing too specific about the ongoing plot (not that I have progressed all that far yet!), specific aliens or techs, etc.

The game has been tremendous fun so far. :D I am playing Classic, nearing the end of the second month, and have run maybe 10 missions. The missions have been a decent but not huge challenge so far, with the in-game rating only having one as difficult and the rest easy or medium. There was one hard rated mission, but I chose a different one that time or I would have lost a council nation. The estimated mission difficulty ratings feel fairly accurate so far.

I have not yet lost anyone (to my own amazement) although a mission without at least two soldiers spending time in the hospital is a rarity. I did prioritize armor and it has saved a few lives as I have had several critical injuries. Permanent will losses for those soliders, ick. On the plus side I am building up a decent reserve of soldiers with one or two promotions as different troopers rotate in and out of my active lineup.

The really big change compared to the original game is the strategy layer -- everything is much more complex with many more trade offs and limitations. So far it has been really well balanced, with hard decisions to be made on where to invest my very limited resources. There is never enough cash, never enough engineers, never enough facilities, never enough power...I am constantly scrambling to actually be able to get new options into play and boost my soldiers and my global position. No countries lost yet, but Mexico is at panic level 5 and three other countries are at 4. I have already had to make mission choices based on panic, as well as placing my one new satellite to quell panic.

I did play the tutorial all the way through (there are several additional stages compared to what was in the demo), but then I started a fresh game with the tutorial off. I wanted to play my own game from the start rather than being railroaded. Unfortunately the tutorial gives you a free satellite as a mission reward, which you do not seem to get otherwise -- I don't like this pressure to play the tutorial start or be disadvantaged. The extra satellite early is a huge difference.

I have encountered one bug/issue: during a mission there was a sort of sloping section that was part of a collapsed roadway. When I tried to move from a higher section onto a lower one, the usual movement/destination cursor would freak out if I tried to select a different level. It would just sort of vibrate graphically without resolving to show what cover was available. And when I tried to select that spot, which should have had cover and was the place I needed to move to, the game decided I must have meant a totally different spot about 10 tiles away. So it promptly dashed my soldier into the open where he (of course) immediately died. Things like this are why I am not playing Ironman for the first run through -- total interface screw up costing me a solider is unacceptable. Other than this one thing, the game has been very polished and reliable.

Customizing soliders has been very enjoyable, including the silly Guile haircut from the pre-order bonus. And the rank/perk customization system has worked out really nicely so far: tough decisions have to be made on what perks to choose, and then they really make a difference on the battlefield. With my frequent injury substitutions I am developing some very different builds for all the classes, trying different things to see what works best. It adds a lot to the game by making each soldier a bit different.

Anyway, tremendous fun so far. Firaxis has a winner with this one. I haven't even seen several of the mission types yet: terror, bomb disarming, etc. are still to come. As well as tougher aliens, at which point I am sure soldiers will start to die. My run of luck can not last forever, although I will try to extend it as long as possible. I have upset Dr. Vahlen by being so free with explosives :D, but bringing my soldiers home alive is too important. I did just finish the Alien Containment unit, though, so it is time to take some risks to capture a live alien....