jamoecw

XCOM:Apoc was far more ambitious than what was released. this is the reason i think for the more varied alien structure from previous games. there was going to be a whole espionage and economics side of things that got cut. there was a lot of really cool things in the game, though parts of the game failed in execution as well. a real mixed bag.few games wanted to go the turn based strategy route, so the opportunity to try and do what they did properly was never really on the table. would have been nice to play a polished version of it. there are plenty of other games that really hit it out of the park and simply need a revamp on their engine/graphics that would be lower hanging fruit to get some interest in those old classics, but if there ever was a rush for remaking the old games i would really hope that apoc gets it day. edit: to answer the OP questions - the aliens they had were pretty good, though the dichotomy of UFO:afterlight was nice as well creating different enemies that were very different from each other requiring rather different weapons and tactics. the vehicles being very modular is a keeper, as it really is perhaps the most unique thing about the gameplay. the more complex economy and diplomacy that cut cut would be another thing to get in there. as for the real time part of it, i'd either make the combat similar to the UFO games as it lends itself to pausable realtime very nicely, or ax it completely. who works on it isn't very important, as long as it is done well.

i'm guessing the damage types will be moddable as well? i am not sure how useful it will be to the base game, but putting in kinetic and hardness damage types can give some realistic diversity to ballistic weapons. AP ammo doing more 'hardness' damage and less kinetic would help it to 'penetrate' certain armors and do less damage against less rigid armor. HP rounds would be the opposite of such relative to normal rounds. what about having damage dependent on what another damage type does to the armor, like HEAP ammo? so if a specific type of ammo does more of one type of damage then causes more damage of another type. something like 5 hardness+(dealt hardness*2 explosive)+2 kinetic against 40%hardness armor, 0% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 3 hardness damage (.6*5), 6 explosive damage (3*2*1.0), 2 kinetic damage. against 40%hardness armor, 50% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 3 hardness damage (.6*5), 3 explosive damage (3*2*.5), 2 kinetic damage. against 80%hardness armor, 0% explosive armor, 0%kinetic armor would do 1 hardness damage (.2*5), 2 explosive damage (1*2*1.0), 2 kinetic damage. it probably wouldn't help the base game too much as it would add some complexity to the game, and aside from maybe some poison darts, tazer, or particle stream weapons i don't see it as having much impact overall. it would be cool for modders though.

as for 2 they had an XCOM clone that made it so that you had to be damaged by the reaper to become infected, and then it took a little bit of time. XCOM apocalypse had the damage tied to psi i think, so that if you had high psi defense you could defend against it (which none of the lower level armor had, so it was a late game thing, and not that great either). it really all depends on how valuable your guys are. in XCOM the first 2 guys that walk off your transport were pretty much dead, so losing 1 guy to bad luck while clearing a room isn't that big of a deal, but in firaxis's XCOM you have 4-6 guys during the mission and losing 1 of them was a major setback for the rest of the game, so losing 1 of them due to bad luck is a big deal.

i think you hit the nail on the head. a kill sweep makes things easy if the strategy and lore are about killing the enemy. if things are a complex machine, then tweaking something may bring about a greater result than just trying to kill everything. once killing becomes not feasible or not desired things have to become more creative. the problem i see is that in traditional XCOM you are fending off an alien invasion, and thus trying to prevent your machine from getting tweaked rather than disrupting another's. so either the battlescape needs to become a small section of a larger battlefield in which reinforcements just keep coming (and thus killing won't work), or you need to do subterfuge (which is rather silly given how all the important bits of the enemy is out of reach in space). in apocalypse you were going to tweak the machine to undo damage the aliens did tweaking it, unless you were playing another faction, in which case you would be infiltrating and doing the initial tweaking. too bad it was cut short. though i am not sure it would still have the same feel if the main game was not going against aliens doing 'clean sweeps' for most of the game.

no. the first two of the three XCOM original games had you bring 14 soldiers, more than X1. the third is a bit more complicated as the vehicles are modular in design, so the main transport has a default of 8 passenger space with the capability to have an additional 12, though cargo space is a separate module, so you probably want to only add an additional 8, until you need to start capturing aliens and then you'll swap out passenger space for a bio containment module, reducing the extra PAX to 4 (12 total). you can repurpose the transport into a heavy weapons platform as well when you don't need it to be a transporter. the new XCOM games are different enough to not really be in the same vein as the originals, in fact the third game wasn't considered to be a true sequel by die hard fans back in the day.

the more i think about it the more it seems that killing everything would be the easiest way to complete a mission, unless there was some non-lore friendly arbitrary constraints. unless of course aliens can spawn on the map in the middle of a fight. that way you could have say a terror mission and instead of killing all the aliens and being done you would have to take a control room to get the city defenses back up to stop reinforcements, then clear out remaining forces or leave them for the local forces to deal with. you could have a rescue VIP mission in which every X number of turns more reinforcements come from off the map to stop you from getting to the VIP, so getting the VIP and getting out of there would be the only way to really win. there could be a mission in which you have to destroy a certain device, but since it is important aliens constantly reinforce the defenders and thus you have to fight your way to the device, and killing everything will just spawn more aliens. as for downed UFOs, the score at the end if you held the UFO instead of killing them penalized you for every living alien, if this wasn't a thing then it would make such just as viable. though getting rid of that score altogether would be a mistake as it rewarded you more for tougher missions, which is important.

i don't think too many people are old enough to have played xcom apocalypse back in the day, but this was the idea that they shot for. financial issues meant that everything but the xcom side had to be scrapped. the inner politics of the earth side made the xcom faction weaker than the aliens, and while the aliens had a good deal of resources, getting their forces to earth was a bit of an issue. the idea was that the aliens were inter dimensional aliens attack from a different dimension, so they had to only send a transport or two at a time, and they had to learn how to travel and operate in our dimension better in order to be a bigger threat. working with certain factions and corrupting others was how you were supposed to defeat xcom. of course xcom wasn't your only opponent as well, so you were outnumbered. in fact any faction you were going to play was going to be outnumbered, and have some sort of edge over the other factions. there is some talk that phoenix point (https://phoenixpoint.info/) is going to try and do that again (sort of) from the same creator.

jagged alliance 2 (1.13 mod) did a bit, it wasn't a big difference so you probably didn't notice a difference. xcom and most remakes have done stuff with vision cones and light. as for gamey trade offs for scopes, there has been a few squad games (JA2 included) that have it take a bit longer to take a shot, for increased accuracy or range. as for why not equip everyone with scopes, the same could be asked as to why not cover the entire game with bases on day one? cost often times is used to limit things that seem really good. personally i prefer extra costs to far outlandish downsides to equipment in order to keep balance. but of course if the downside (what ever that is, cost or otherwise) is too great then their isn't much point in even having it in the game. in the end weapons are pretty gamey in all games. JA2 which models things closer to reality than most games still has pistols being about 1/4 of their range and rifles about 1/15 of their range to prevent pistols from being completely outclassed. in reality the draw time is a big factor in their usefulness (one reason they are popular for guard duty), as well as the deficiencies of the human element. a rifle can reach well out beyond what you can see, so scopes are a no brainer for any military, but they aren't used much due to the tunnel vision they cause and their problems at close range. all of this is coupled with durability in the field and maintenance of the device. iron sights are very reliable, while a scope needs some attention to ensure it stays zeroed in. training new shooters also have issues if they learn on a scope instead of learning on irons, and then learning to use a scope. they tend to time their shots to hit their target instead of learning to keep their sights on target, which results in greater inaccuracies as they get better (glass ceiling essentially), and their inability to handle things too far away or too close with a scope, in addition to not being able to use iron sights effectively. these issues are something people not only don't realize exist, but consider to be artificial feeling when simulated, and thus disliked. think of it like fatal injuries, in real life medieval weapons cause fatal injuries far more gently than modern weapons (little concussive shock to your system). this means that if you stab a person in the heart, he will die, but not for a minute or two. if you put that into a video game people would tend to dislike such stuff very much and call it fake. balancing reality with people's expectations is an art that is delicate, too much realism and people call it fake, not enough and people call it fake.

that is pretty cool. back during X1 development i came up with an idea using local forces for air/radar cover and local ground forces to cordon off and help with the aliens on the ground. the underpinnings of this was a balance between developing for them to boost their capability to handle issues on their own, diverting resources from making your own team strong or to try and blanket the whole globe in coverage. it was amid the discussion about air cover ranges, and how realistic ranges would be much smaller than the original XCOM. i also talked about picking what sort of transport and thus what sort of deployment you wanted. using the traditional (for XCOM) VTOL method or to parachute in a little ways away and fight your way in towards the craft. the VTOL method means the aliens don't get to set up for your arrival, but it also means potentially charging into plasma getting out of the craft, and of course shorter transport ranges for your crack troops. paradrop of course means that the aliens know well ahead of time and can bring what ever big guns to bear (mortar equivalent) while you work your way to them and of course can hit you from range or set up ambushes. it also means more civilians dead and more reliance on local forces. ultimately the game turned out pretty good so i am happy that the idea wasn't picked up on (as doing it wrong could have ruined everything). i do like the idea of helping out existing forces to combat the aliens, as it just makes a lot of sense lore wise. it isn't like a single (or a couple of) AI trooper is going to help out all too much anyway (at least not consistently).

i am not sure if prone is planned to be in the game or not, but maybe the reaction could be to go prone, assuming the people see the grenade. this would mean that going prone reduces damage to you from splash damage. if the enemy can just run away from a grenade due to reaction fire then tossing a nade into an enemy hole could have them running into the middle of your men bypassing their reaction fire. if your men react then there could be a lot of friendly fire in that case. having things move for reaction can be fidly to balance and get right, especially if it is AI controlled.

i don't get why you can't use LOS to figure % to hit. JA2 did it eventually, xcom did it as well. you just draw a line from the person firing to the person being fired on. you draw lines to the edges of the target (hit box). if the first line isn't blocked then you have a non-zero chance. if the area made by the other lines intersects with cover decrease to hit by a % based on cover. you could get complex by redrawing the lines to shrink the effective hit box so cover behind other cover doesn't count. this pretty much means that the dichotomy of a complex system without accurate numbers vs. a simple system that doesn't take into account obstructions is completely false. the calculations are already done for LOS so the rest isn't much different really. one could have objects operate like smoke in that they obstruct LOS but not provide cover, though this would still provide a decrease in % to hit chance. maybe even something as simple as the object operating as 50% effective for cover calculations (if you don't redraw for cover calculations). in the end not giving the % to hit would be a bad design IMO. you need to tell the player what is going on, any good team leader needs to be aware of the nuances of the situation at hand that don't show up on paper.

xenonauts 1 had these, and weren't half bad in the early stages of the game. their AI wasn't that great obviously, but the national military NPCs would use the same ballistic weapons you used. i had a game in which a couple of soldiers pinned down the aliens in their ship, as they moved during the same turn the aliens did and thus would open up on them when the aliens opened their door to reinforce their guys outside. it kept the forces separated and allowed me to hit them in bite sized chunks and come out of that with no casualties to either my guys or the locals and in record time. of course as things scale up starting weapons and armor just doesn't cut it anymore and they become little more than old timey british cops with their whistles.

my understanding is that there is a chance for doing below stated damage value, and above stated damage value. if the below damage value is a limb shot, doing less damage but either slowing or reducing accuracy and adding a wound to the limb for bleeding damage then it would stay pretty similar gameplay wise, but have a slight advantage over a system that was just damage output. hitting and getting unlucky several times without killing the target is not quite as bad. not sure if it is worth the effort though. one could have wounds exacerbate existing wounds on the same location, so a wound on the torso would say have 5 hp of bleed, then a second one would have 7 for a total of 12 hp per round, and a third could have 11 for a total of 23 hp per round. this means that limb wounds on your guys would be preferred in the middle of battle, and torso/head for the enemy. so healing would be important, and armor. though again i am not sure if it worth the effort. fallout 1&2 did this quite well, but mainly it was only useful on high hp targets when you had weak weapons. they had blinding and other effects with each location in addition to damage, though most of the time you just aimed at the head or center mass. i am not sure with a whole squad that it would be good to manually aim the shots like in fallout. in the end it is as chris said, a critical hit feature dressed up as something more complex.

pretty much all games shorten ranges on weapons, and to a lesser degree spotting distance. the whole hitting unseen enemy has to do with the abbreviated way spotting and weapon ranges are done. if things were realistic one could radio back to the shooter to walk the fire into the target. of course in the case of snipers usually someone acts as a spotter, which means that they use their eyeballs for a wide field of view, then when they think they spot something they use binoculars to narrow their view (magnify) to the area in question, and on confirmation they then call it out to the sniper (which is in close proximity). the sniper then uses their scope to get a very narrow field of view and spot the target, line up a shot and fire. the recoil makes it hard to keep track of the target, so the spotter then gives feedback on the reaction of the target and the fire given. of course the team may decide on a different way of doing things, like having the spotter not track the target and fire using binoculars in order to keep a lookout, or the spotter may not confirm the target and simply have the sniper do that. this is just snipers. now we have machine gunners. they have people spotting for them as well, though in their case it is the whole fire team (squad). the team spots a target and calls for fire support from the gunner. the gunner then lines up on what they think is the target and gives a burst. the person calling for support then confirms or denies the target chosen. the team may decide to have their gunners hang back or they may use binoculars to spot targets at range. in any case the gunner would be firing beyond their spotting distance. grenade launchers are aimed at areas of suspected enemy activity, rather than at enemies themselves. people doing suppression fire aim at where the enemy might pop their head out, and not at enemies, often times never even seeing the enemy. of course only one of these is an aimed shot, but the idea of spotting your target is nebulous in real life. the game sets up a spotting distance that lets you see things clearly, if they had something a bit different it would be much more complex. you'd have a spotting distance, then an acquisition distance, and then a visual distance. these would change based on where you focused and what tools you used. so someone scanning the area are more perceptive of there peripherals, but don't focus on the details and thus would have a wider cone but a shorter cone. as the adrenaline increases, or the focus on a target increases the cone would narrow and extend. binoculars would narrow the cone quite a bit, but extend it quite a bit as well. of course too narrow of a cone would mean that you might not be able to see things right in front of your face, or things sitting right next to you. i am not adverse to attempting a new sort of visual system, but the safe method is to use what has worked for the past 3 decades.

if you never tell the developer what is wrong, how can he tell what needs to be fixed? besides only people that play the game care if a game is fixed or not, so people that say everything is great and wonderful might just be kissing up (even if they have nothing to gain). FTL is a good game, he should be proud of what he made, and not need people to tell him that. people that tell you what is wrong help you improve, people that tell you what is right make you feel good. if all you hear is what is wrong, eventually you'll be a god who thinks himself a man. if all you hear is what is right, eventually you'll be a man who thinks himself a god. i'd prefer the former to the later.

i may not be the most responsive person here, but if you post it, i will test it. besides it would be nice to have a decent map for using the door breachers. it also bugs me about the lack of a secure layout on scifi ships in general, definitely a must with any military vessel.

well overall i'd say the thing that sets xcom:eu apart from other turn based games are the in game scenematics. most elements that are done right are taken from other games, either fantasy turnbased games, tabletop rpgs, or xcomish games. most elements that are done wrong could have been done right if taken from those same sources. i doubt it will do well due to the fact that they are reinventing the wheel, instead of learning from what others have done. some examples of easily fixed flaws: movement - basically taken from tabletop rpgs, being able to move a little bit then move again in order to pick a path, until you are done is something that pretty much is always allowed, for obvious reasons made crystal clear when games decide for you. luckless shots - in tabletop rpgs having an interchangeable order for shooting and movement allows for deciding whether to increase odds of a successful shot in exchange for greater sacrifice for a failed roll, such as choosing to move forward to get a better shot then shooting, if it misses then the guy is going to suffer retaliation (how it is in eu), or one can chose to take the shot from where they are, resulting in the ability to move to a safer area should it miss. in jagged alliance 2 (not sure about the first game) the shots tended to follow more of a bell curve, with each shot calculated in a realistic way so that rapid fire wasn't just 3-4 shots at the same accuracy (which would just compound accuracy of a single shot, making balance tough). fallout 1 had the range determine the scale, while cover and such modifies the chance on the scale, which means that if you have a high chance of crit based on range you would have at least that amount of chance to hit, making close accurate shots less risky, while making far off shots more so (which gives benefit towards actually getting close, instead of just flanking or blowing them up). enemy activation - in tabletop rpgs when encountering an enemy suddenly, there is a surprise round, which is a half round, allowing the surpriser (and only the surpriser) to do something before others can react, sort of like as if before the enemy activated it would allow for either a move or shoot from one of your soldiers (providing he has the tick for it) before they run for cover. also in tabletop rpgs if someone does something on an opponent's turn, they end up using their own turn's action to do so (so no getting a double move). fallout had plenty of people walking around and being kept track of in realtime, in fact more so than there are aliens on a map, so the delay of simply having them move from point a to point b shouldn't be too much for the alien's turn, unless they decide to have random maps at some point (the trick is to not have the aliens calculate anything combat related until they are in fact 'activated,' which wouldn't result in insta move since they would already be in position, or properly ambushed). all in all i'd say it is a good first step for a modern AAA turn based game, the second game will probably fix all of the easy to fix stuff, and possibly make some innovations else where, though fraxis isn't known for making sequels to it's own games (unless it is civilization).

just did a force update, and it worked. at least i am at the install stage, which is usually past the mcf error stage (download stage). i force updated desura: start menu>desura>desura (force update). after the client updated itself i was able to update the game.

how long have you been diving chris, i have been diving well over half my life. p.s. enjoy the food, from what i hear the food is cheap plentyful and good in thailand.

well the core of desura is better than steam, you don't have to be connected to get to your games, and the desura games don't need a desura load up shell. steam has some great features, a better network, and a much stronger line up of games with better sales. origin is new, and used mass effect 3 as its catch to get started. impulse is old, and never really took off, but didn't fall into the same coding issues that steam did. in short if you want to be sure you can play the game you bought, go for desura. if you want neat community features, go for steam, unless you fear a monopoly taking over the game industry, then go for either origin. impulse is not quite steam or desura, but fills a niche somewhere in between. i personally remember the days when big studios bought out little studios, and the games were either innovative and half done, or well polished and simply a clone. the time when blizzard was king of quality, before WOW (not saying WOW is bad). as a result i fear a monopoly and so i like any decent competition for steam.

well i hope lee's house is okay, not the best thing to be homeless with a new born. if no one has heard there was loads of flooding exactly as predicted by the experts, though some people are surprised that areas different than the katrina floodings got flooded.

got a recent promotion to ET3 (E-4), USNR.

in my experience (also lives in california) if the cops are hitting up honest people for ticket money then they probably are doing so for some shortfall in the law enforcement area of government. therefore the safest places can be seen by police not hassling honest folk, and also clean streets. look at walnut creek, martinez and oakland. in walnut creek the cops are around, but rarely do you see them pulling anyone over, typically they sit back and watch. in oakland if you call them they might ask you if you are getting robbed at this very second, and if not then they probably won't bother. in martinez you most likely will get pulled over if you drive a nice car, and if you dress nice you'll get a nice fat ticket. haven't really spent much time in irvine though, so maybe it is an oddity.

at first i though they might do something innovative for air interception, but then it seemed like they were dumbing it down, and the screen shots make it look like it is pretty much the same thing. the news about multiplayer seems odd, like the guy never did actually bother to find out why the ME fans were worried about multiplayer. i hope he isn't the brains behind this new xcom.

i've actually thought about this a lot ever since i beat halo 2 with a friend. short answer: yes. long answer: the end needs to reflect why you played the game, not story wise, but game wise. if you played the game for the cut scenes then you need to have a nice cut scene at the end. if you played in order to build your character up, you need that building to mean something in the end. if you played for the challenge, then you need the ending to be challenging. in halo 2 the end of the game played very different than the rest of the game, it was an adventure style puzzle level, so it didn't offer much of what i had been playing the game for. there were cut scenes as well, and the cut scene at the end was just a cliffhanger scene like what happens right before a mission, not even an act ending cut scene was played but one that told me i was going to get an acceptable ending, and then ... nothing. everyone knows about the flop of mass effect 3. in the first game it played out as a first person RPG first and foremost (slow paced, emphasis on skill/equipment use). the second game played out as a FPS first and foremost (faster paced, emphasis on shot placement/ammo conservation/smart though limited power use), it also added a lot to decision consequences, cut scenes, and character development. the third game had nearly the same core game as ME2, good cut scenes, many decisions from the previous game came back (as opposed to the less than 10 from the first to the second), characters that were still developing came to a nice stopping point for an ending. there was no ammo conservation, though there was still shot placement, there was many end game powers available, with preset 'combos' to amplify their power, so smart power use wasn't necessary. the enemies you did face were clumped together, resulting in fast spamming of combos and ammo, with less encounters overall in the game and frequent 'adventure' style mini bosses. overall ME3 was lacking, ME2 didn't have that great of a boss. ME2 made up for a poor boss with great end game cut scenes, so most people that were thrilled about ME3 came because of the cut scenes. ME3 had no end game boss, and poor end game cut scenes, while throughout the game, the one aspect that was consistently good were the cut scenes and wrapping up of characters. alpha centauri (by fraxis) is a civ like game, through out the game you have steady gameplay, punctuated with a screen of text at certain times or research points which are significant to the story (which isn't what is important to a civ game if you didn't already know). there are no bosses, but when you defeat other factions or become stronger the enemy gets more hostile, resulting in an increasingly hostile world. the game lacks any sort of boss, but you get story text with increased frequency as you get closer to the end, culminating with a end game story text telling you about your world after you win. this game has no special cut scenes or bosses or anything else that most people would consider a 'big finish', however you do get a 'big finish' with regards of what the game had in reaching the end. ME3 a 'finish,' halo2 had a 'small finish' and alpha centauri a 'big finish.' ME3 had a long cut scene, halo2 a short one (relatively), and alpha centauri none at all. people tend to notice the major flaws and lose sight of the minor ones, so if you are going to screw up make sure you have a major one that easily fixable, that way you can make a big deal out of it and then fix it, and people will see how much better the game is with the fix and not really notice the numerous small flaws for some time.