Thoughts & Lessons from X-COM: Enemy Unknown (by Firaxis)

[irongamer]

Playing through a Classic Ironman game of XCOM:EU. What I find most disappointing with the game is making cover only a dice roll and not a physical object that has to be removed. What this leads to is only one tactic that is functionally viable, that is an overwatch line of fire which you either setup for the enemy walk into or pull them into with a runner. You can try to flank but you better not be in LOS as cover is almost meaningless in classic. Perhaps with ghost (20%) full cover would put you at 60% and flanking would become a real option. Tactical gameplay on classic feels very restrictive with no diversity.

[TornadoADV]

Playing through a Classic Ironman game of XCOM:EU. What I find most disappointing with the game is making cover only a dice roll and not a physical object that has to be removed. What this leads to is only one tactic that is functionally viable, that is an overwatch line of fire which you either setup for the enemy walk into or pull them into with a runner. You can try to flank but you better not be in LOS as cover is almost meaningless in classic. Perhaps with ghost (20%) full cover would put you at 60% and flanking would become a real option. Tactical gameplay on classic feels very restrictive with no diversity.

That's pretty much why I tank with all Titan and Chitin armor, along with two Support Savior Medics and Two Defensive Assaults. Assaults when they hit Major become crazy stupid HP wise and when colonel can become immune to crits.

[Chris]

I found the Ghost armour was better than the other stuff, simply because it gives a defence bonus, can move further and lets you go invisible at will. Pretty hard to lose people when they're wearing that...

[Nemeo]

I agree a 100% with your first post, Chris. However the inverted difficulty curve is what bugged me the most and I wish you had given us your thoughts about it.

In my humble opinion, the problem stems from the stats progression. A colonel as twice the base HP of a rookie. The last armor is 9 times more efficient than the first one. And the best gun is 7 times more powerful than the pistol. In a MMO, such factors are manageable because you never face the same enemy twice. However, in a game with emergent gameplay, it's simply impossible to balance unless 1. you remove every early alien from the game at some point or 2. You put the player on rails for the strategy part. They went for a light version of 2. and they failed.

There's also a similar problem with money. There's a huge difference between your early game cash flow and the end game one. The result is that you struggle with money at the beginning and there's not enough project to spend it one at the end.

My point is, in a game with emergent gameplay, you can't use factors of 10 between early game stats and end game stats. If you go over a factor of 3x, your difficulty curve will be hard to balance with putting some obvious rails here and there.

As for money, my advice is to give the player a large ressource pool at the beginning, and to reduce it according to player efficiency. That way, the game won't be exponentially easy as game progresses.

[mercy]

Curiously there is still gameplay in XCOM:EU. But only with the Warspace 1.50 hardcore Marathon mod with Second Wave options, which i modified further by editing Base starting money: so i could fill up most of the empty space early. We should be able to build more bases and defend the bases. The Military Re-Texture MOD is a must so the soldiers look realistic movie commandos.

Cheating - redesign - this way shows new sides of the game. Could build a lot of "tanks" and modifications, could try out interceptor modifications that i couldn't - or ignored - in vanilla and it turns out they are fun!

For more fun, i gave civilians big defense and HP bonuses so when a Chryssalid attacks them during terror there is an indication of melee now, which is super fun!! Watching the karateka "Chuck Norris"-like civilians "fight it out" with the aliens is like watching post-apocaliptic movies, where average people suddenly become heroes, because of the circumstances. Even this way civilians drop like flies on Impossible.

Today i led a bunch of rookies in the first better armor that has +1 item slots to a very large UFO and set the game to impossible. I had to retreat almost to the Avenger in each case during the mixed Ironman-mode (alt-tabbed a few times to re-load the ironman save game) my rookies were always eaten up alive by waves and waves and waves of monsters. We were simply overwhelmed. No matter how much i tried to go tactical military. I think impossible mode is for veteran soldiers, who have awesome abilities, most notably multiple attack per rounds and lightning reflexes, etc..

Also more fun: enhanced my soldiers and gave them Tae-Kwon Do plus Thai-Box training focusing on how to beat the aliens (looking for their weak points) in melee = 8 DEF by default (vanilla is zero). These elite "rookies" were those who have been massacred. Even with special military sniper-training before being recruited to XCOM = 80 between 85 Aim.

Still turning on Ironman in case of smaller ships and bringing along professional soldiers of the highest rank in Warspace Hardcore mode - where the ranks have changed to include OPERATIVES plus much better naming is awesome fun!!!

I think a game is really great, when MODS and/or cheats (can) are being used to elevate rpg-like skills of the characters and the game is still super-fun!

A non-cheater or non-modder never experiences the absolutely awesome chaos that ensues when a lot of units are fighting it out on the map. In EXIGO for example (RTS-fantasy), modding the money enabled to have a lot of the best Golem-like fighting titans in the game, i could create a lot of them and setting the game to impossible difficulty resulted in such a gigantic battle i never saw in RTS's before.

Edited November 21, 2012 by mercy

[Ignis]

the UI is great

Do we really played the same game? UI is good for gamepad, but it is awful for mouse/keyboard. it is literally impossible to move on multileyer locations, zones with height difference handled in weird way.

you can turn off all the cinematic crap if you want to as well

Actually no. Cutscenes can not be disabled. Controls block when NPCs are talking too. Even startup movie can not be even skipped.

you can instantly see what is cover and what blocks LOS etc

You can guess, but not actually see. Real LOS calculation is screwed up, and oftenly you can shoot through walls. And enemies can. Look at

movie: first, heavy can shoot rocket through solid wall, then alien shoot through solid wall.

Seeing walls and props destroyed by weapon fire is great, and explosives feel weighty and flatten the terrain just as you'd expect.

Walls are all made from paper. Even alien ones, which should be made from extremely durable alloys. In same time grenades have very small range and almost zero killing power. It simply doesn't match.

Your soldiers smashing windows and shooting through them

Yes, they love smashing windows. End doors. Even already opened one. Even if they shoot other direction.

[mercy]

Overwatch MOD:

XCOM ToolBoks by bokauk

Delay was the most hated feature of overwatch and there isn't a Squad Overwatch button.

The OverWatch MOD - solves these issues by killing the delay when selecting overwatch and hunker down and now i can hold one button pressed and the whole squad goes to overwatch, lightning fast!

Really speeds up the game and is fun!

Also i can now enable free camera rotation in any increments. 16 degrees feels nice usually.

Modifying the default Zoom in and Zoom out distances are also a godsend. More zoom in is nice and just a little more zoom out is needed to get a better tactical view.

Disable disappearing corpses looks awesome, bodies littering the floor, now the maps looks like a real battlefield!

Critically wounded will penalty: Should your soldier become less of a mental cripple after a grave injury? Now you can lessen the amount of permanent mental shock (Will damage) after getting critically wounded by aliens.

Rookie Hire Gender probability: Very nice feature. I instantly set it to 75% girls, and having a Charlies Angels girl squad because the girls are sexy in the Texture Modded military outfits. Must-see!

The Military Retexture Pack by kolt16 adds a new level of realism plus cool look to the soldiers, a must have for an XCOM commander.

Which country rookies shall come from the most and into which class they should graduate is also a feature, maybe other people love it.

[zzz1010]

whole squad goes to overwatch

Really speeds up the game and is fun!

Yea, sounds like super fun

[Nemeo]

Another lesson to learn from XCOM: their code is a pile of garbage. There are unused leftovers all over the place. This game is such a pain to modify. You spend hours tweaking stuff until you realize that half your modifications do nothing. I swear it, Chris, if you let such a thing happen to Xenonauts I'll cross the tiny channel which separate us and I'll f*cking kick your british butt.

[GoodGuyEddy]

I swear it, Chris, if you let such a thing happen to Xenonauts I'll cross the tiny channel which separate us and I'll f*cking kick your british butt.

Nah, you'll probably just stay at home and cry yourself to sleep like a bitch.

[a333]

Well, that's totally going to happen, if you continue pressing on developers =)

But for now the game is moddable to a high degree, and everything seems to be in a place, more or less.

[HWP]

Like 1% of the game is moddable.

And it supports a total of 1 installed mod.

edit: And 99% - almost 100% - of what is "added by mods" was in the game from the start, just disabled. Since there are just 80 mods, I can't say "99%", but easily 90% of the mods consist of as much as changing "0" to "1" to turn back on a disabled feature.

Edited November 23, 2012 by HWP

[a333]

Like 1% of the game is moddable.

And it supports a total of 1 installed mod.

edit: And 99% - almost 100% - of what is "added by mods" was in the game from the start, just disabled. Since there are just 80 mods, I can't say "99%", but easily 90% of the mods consist of as much as changing "0" to "1" to turn back on a disabled feature.

To avoid misunderstanding, i was talking about the Xenonauts. I'm quite understand how the "mods" for the EU are working, so i respect those people trying to make the game as good as it could be.

[irongamer]

Overwatch MOD:

XCOM ToolBoks by bokauk

Delay was the most hated feature of overwatch and there isn't a Squad Overwatch button.

The OverWatch MOD - solves these issues by killing the delay when selecting overwatch and hunker down and now i can hold one button pressed and the whole squad goes to overwatch, lightning fast!

Really speeds up the game and is fun!

Also i can now enable free camera rotation in any increments. 16 degrees feels nice usually.

Modifying the default Zoom in and Zoom out distances are also a godsend. More zoom in is nice and just a little more zoom out is needed to get a better tactical view.

Disable disappearing corpses looks awesome, bodies littering the floor, now the maps looks like a real battlefield!

Critically wounded will penalty: Should your soldier become less of a mental cripple after a grave injury? Now you can lessen the amount of permanent mental shock (Will damage) after getting critically wounded by aliens.

Rookie Hire Gender probability: Very nice feature. I instantly set it to 75% girls, and having a Charlies Angels girl squad because the girls are sexy in the Texture Modded military outfits. Must-see!

The Military Retexture Pack by kolt16 adds a new level of realism plus cool look to the soldiers, a must have for an XCOM commander.

Which country rookies shall come from the most and into which class they should graduate is also a feature, maybe other people love it.

Some nice sounding mods. After discussing tactics with some others in the steam forums a team of assaults with ghost armor and alloy cannons works well, almost too well. I'm still disappointed with the cover mechanic. It is pretty much pointless on classic and up. Yes, you can use full cover 1 tile in to completely block LOS. But you can't specifically target cover to destroy it. The whole cover system and movement system seems like a hobbled tactics engine, with the inability to target cover with any weapon and the inability to fire and drop back out of LOS.

Would love to see something along the lines of Silent Storm... although with faster AI and path recalculation.

The major difference I noticed after playing some XCOM:EU and then playing Xenonauts was that Xenonauts turns felt much faster, even though I was controlling more guys. It was refreshing.

[Nemeo]

Like 1% of the game is moddable.

And it supports a total of 1 installed mod.

edit: And 99% - almost 100% - of what is "added by mods" was in the game from the start, just disabled. Since there are just 80 mods, I can't say "99%", but easily 90% of the mods consist of as much as changing "0" to "1" to turn back on a disabled feature.

What did you expect? That they would release the whole code and let us make a "dinosaurs vs nazy" total conversion mod? Modding first started with clever people going off road to tweak a game to their own liking. That was something game developpers did not expect players to do. Now every kid in the block expects every developper to release "modding tool" so that they can add a bunch of naked girls in the game.

They did not want us to mod their game, they even try to block us. But guess what? A couple of clever people still manage to tweak the game to their own liking. Yes, it's painful because their code is a mess, but most stats can be modified and that's exactly what we needed to make ground combat more appealing.

Hell, the way it's going we're probably going to get naked girls as well.

[centiles]

Cutscenes can not be disabled. Controls block when NPCs are talking too. Even startup movie can not be even skipped.

Startup movies are annoying as hell, but you can turn them off. Currently I cannot look where exactly, but you can delete the respective entries from one of the config files which are in "DOCUMENTSFOLDER\My Games\XCOM..."[1] maybe search for "nvidia" or "movie"- not sure. Then XCOM:EU starts up just lightning fast (if additionally on ssd of course ).

[1] WHY THE HELL DO GAME DEVELOPERS SPAM MY DOCUMENTS FOLDER? WHY THE HELL DON'T THEY JUST USE %APPDATA%? IT SUCKS SOOOO MUCH.

[HWP]

They did not want us to mod their game, they even try to block us. But guess what? A couple of clever people still manage to tweak the game to their own liking.

Not a couple, more like 8 people at the moment. And it's not very hard... you just have to know how to decompile UVM bytecode into UnrealScript, to understand what it does, then figure out what bytes would need to change, then find those bytes in the bytecode and patch them for this specific version of the game, because it will break in the next - fortunately Firaxis doesn't care about its users enough to update the game regularly.

Hell, the way it's going we're probably going to get naked girls as well.

Not really. Even retextures... they have to be basically shoved in rectally. That is using a utility that intercept textures as the engine grabs them and jams in its own. How perverted is that?

[Wintermist]

I agree with most apart from the UI, which is useless, especially so when you're trying to juggle equipment between your operatives.

Also, not enough fun stuff to research, not properly being able to modify equipment. UFO Afterlight had this down perfectly, you could tweak and enhance so much it was always fun and you could always get it just right.

[MrJenssen]

I wholeheartedly agree with all your points, Chris. But the things you appreciated as a developer, I couldn't really appreciate as much as a player.

I played Classic Iron Man too, but found it too "hard" for me. Not hard because I couldn't figure out good strategies. But because the game took my strategies and threw them back at me every time. No matter what I did, everything seemed random in the most wrongful ways. The game just kept punching me below the belt, it never felt fair. The original X-Com games never felt CHEAP like this. The aliens could feel cheap, some luck-based things sometimes happened that could also feel cheap. But the actual game always felt balanced, even on higher difficulties (Veteran was my place to be though). I ended up going down to EASY for the new XCom, just to see it through. I had grown tired of it. There was NO sense of strategy, no smart tactical decisions. Any decision could screw up your whole mission.

But when you met a group of aliens and had them flanked, you'd be set to win, right? Nope. Because with "higher difficulty", the developer really meant "less fair". The only difference with the lower and higher difficulty settings, is that enemies take a ridiculous amount of damage, your men can die instantly when hit, the aliens ALWAYS hit you, and you NEVER hit them. EVER. It's not "classic" just because you use the word "classic". It's just cheap and unfair. And me being a die-hard fan of the old X-Com games, stating that something is UNFAIR to the point of it barely being playable, should say a lot - because UFO Defense and Terror could be bloody unfair at times too.

So I ended up just playing on Easy. Even then the game took cheap shots at me, but at least now my men could get hit like 3-4 times before dying. I just wanted to see it through, see what the next research would lead to and where the story went. The combat-gameplay basically became the least interesting and entertaining part of the game for me, and I ended up focusing more on the other factors for entertainment. And for a game that's 90% about the combat-gameplay, that's not exactly a very flattering "compliment"....

[wanderer]

The more I hear about this game the more I think I'll wait for it to be overhauled by the modders. Or just play Xenonauts.

[StellarRat]

But when you met a group of aliens and had them flanked, you'd be set to win, right? Nope. Because with "higher difficulty", the developer really meant "less fair". The only difference with the lower and higher difficulty settings, is that enemies take a ridiculous amount of damage, your men can die instantly when hit, the aliens ALWAYS hit you, and you NEVER hit them. EVER. It's not "classic" just because you use the word "classic". It's just cheap and unfair. And me being a die-hard fan of the old X-Com games, stating that something is UNFAIR to the point of it barely being playable, should say a lot - because UFO Defense and Terror could be bloody unfair at times too.

If your description is accurate then I'm taking the game off my list completely. I hate cheesy AI. That's really not even AI. Some games make intentional "mistakes" to make them easier. That's OK with me, but to just blatantly turn every alien into a super hero to make it harder is just bad. I'm all for having more aliens to make the game more challenging or even giving them advanced equipment earlier on or allowing them to build up their forces quicker, but that uber stuff is just dumb.

[sectoid]

up to certain extend, XCOM:EU makes me feel like not playing a game, but turned me into a scripted-event-triggerer cum tester.

[Squeegy]

If your description is accurate then I'm taking the game off my list completely. I hate cheesy AI. That's really not even AI. Some games make intentional "mistakes" to make them easier. That's OK with me, but to just blatantly turn every alien into a super hero to make it harder is just bad. I'm all for having more aliens to make the game more challenging or even giving them advanced equipment earlier on or allowing them to build up their forces quicker, but that uber stuff is just dumb.

This is explicitly untrue, the developer himself said that the changes in Classic were specifically geared towards strategy and forcing the player to change tactics, not extra HP and unbalanced hit chances. See: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/10/06/xcom-s-classic-ironman-mode-is-an-even-match-for-its-creator.aspx

[TrashMan]

I don't care what the developer said, they lied.

I checked the files responsible for difficulty.

Also, the game is no "challenging" - it's unfair.

Aliens get a free turn on detection (sometimes two free turns) and they can suddenly spawn in the middle of your team. Yes, I had 3 muttons spawn in the middle of my team, just like that.

Tactics? That has nothing to do with tactics, you don't "prepare" for that. You can't.

[ToastedDragon]

There are times I just want to throw my mouse across the room because some of the decisions. (mainly the free move on detection one)

Cleared the game on Normal and doing decent in Classic Iron Mode untill the Ethereal / sectopod combo annihilated my squad in one move.