Another EU vs XCOM and Hi to the Xenonauts forums!

Hi all, another xcom/tftd/apocalypse veteran, wanting to jot his thoughts down for both reference and for anyone else who wants to read. It will meander a bit as I do enjoy the drink, but feel free to ignore!

First off, I did play almost 100 hours of the new XCOM EU, and while I was amped about the whole thing at the beginning, I hadn't actually played any of the demos (busy with Guild Wars 2 and Borderlands 2) so I was actually hoping for something more like Xenonauts.

I might have even gotten the two confused.

Nevertheless, at 100 hours I imagine I've gotten my money's worth, even if I did end up just blasting through impossible to be sure I could do it and be sure there were no surprises. Ended up with a partial normal game where I got my ass kicked because I didn't appreciate the 20 day build time on satellites or just how important satellites were in general, and then wrecked normal, classic, and impossible in turn (though I lost two countries on impossible, sadface). A lot of what I'm including has been said before, but I'm adding it all in as a summary for my personal impressions. I don't think I'll feel any need to revisit it so many times like I did the original and TFTD.

I enjoyed the game for what it was. Not XCOM in the classic sense, but a fun enough quasi tactical game that took a lot of elements from the original XCOM and used them in a more "mass appeal" sort of game. I started out with high hopes, and managed to enjoy some aspects of the game, although that largely involved turning the whole thing into a drinking game.

I found the graphics to be fine, I didn't need super realistic graphics for a strategy game like this. The music droned on nicely. Nothing edgy or amazing, but I also felt no need to mute it and turn on a playlist most of the time.

And the game itself... well it was a decent game. It kept me interested. The AI was shit, the forced choices were a rather blatant gating system after years of playing MMOs, and the removal of large amounts of control from the play in order to force the choices and gating system grated on my nerved, but I found an easy counter to that.

I took a drink every time something reminded me that this wasn't really XCOM any more. So... basically every time tactical combat was interrupted by an unskippable cutscene or I wished I could blast a hole in the side of anything without using a rocket or a grenade. I definitely feel I got my 50$ or so out of it, but I was also disappointed by what it ended up being.

1. Difficulty level = how deep of a hole will we start you in. Honestly, after the first 3 months, none of the difficulties felt too terribly different. Once I was up to a squad of 6 and had at least laser weapons and a few promotions under everyone's respective belts, well it was mostly just mowing down aliens as they magically popped into existence.

2. Squad size: worked very well for what the game was. In order to make the streamlined squad size work, however, they had to linearize all the maps, and replace randomly (or cleverly if the AI was up to it) wandering enemies with "spawns" that just happened to be in your way. Terror missions were actually some of my favorite missions simply because it actually felt like the aliens were THERE before I actually triggered them. Most of the time. If I drank enough.

3. Soldier promotions, skill trees. I actually really liked these and felt this was an improvement over the original XCOM. Admittedly, with the squad size of 6 and dynamically spawning enemies it felt something like Dragon Ages 2 of XCOM (and don't forget to take cover!), but I liked the flavor that it gave to the game, and the utility it gave to individual soldiers.

4. *B#@^ing: I wish to hell I had found out I could mute soldiers earlier. I swear "I've got my eyes on" is going to haunt me. At least they had that option for the people who found it, and disabling SOME of the action cam scenes. However the inability to skip the voiceovers after the first game (YES explosions destroy gear, THANKS, can I shoot them now please?) or the silly animations whenever you spawn an enemy was irritating.

5. Given that you could only have one Skyranger, thus forcing artificial choices into the game (I really do wonder how much I might have enjoyed the game if I hadn't played XCOM, or if it hadn't been named something related to it), I actually didn't mind having only one base. Until I started playing the Xenonauts preorder. Sigh. The fact that you could intercept or get a Skyranger to anything you could intercept was just one of many things that made the game feel like a collection of mini-games, and not a "world."

6. Ruining the immersion. Well, in addition to the single Skyranger (lets see, the first thing they said was that the aliens were testing our defenses... no one figured it might be a good idea to build a second and third skyranger for this?) being able to reach anything that landed or crashed, and interceptors simply reaching anything that appeared over their continent (or in the case of the firestorm, reach the overseer... anywhere), there were several other things that bothered me even through my stupor. Credits?

I can sell an alien propulsion source for 75 credits? Has the world come to a massive recession? Too many zeros scare people away now? Oh, and the ground combat. Oh god the ground combat. I've already seen the complaints of animations failing and soldiers firing backwards (worth a drink), or a crouched alien firing through an entire semi truck, a wall of a building, and its roof to hit my squaddie! At least that I could forgive eventually since for me it always worked both ways, but the fact that shots couldn't miss and hit any other alien kind of ruined the immersion and made it feel like a bunch of dice rolls. This terrible resolution of shots in combat was fine once I got used to it (that's the game, may as well beat it!) but it ruined any kind of feeling like there was an actual world there, not just a bunch of percentages getting played out. Hell I could shoot the soldier right in front of me multiple times... and do no damage since it was just a miss on the alien I was aiming for. But again, that combat resolution worked both ways so I was willing to put up with it in the end. It just felt more like a card or dice game than a much much older game had managed to do already. Add to that the AI dropping enemies WITHIN your squad when it decides to spawn something... (and I'm talking about crash landed ships here, not the "incoming waves of XRAYS" from some missions). It really felt like a game. A game for drinking, and that was how I played it!

7. Research and the foundry. Like the solider perks and leveling, a big +++ from me. Making the interrogation of live aliens have a real and tangible impact on the progress of the game, and not to mention making all of the alien autopsies potentially useful in some way was fantastic. How many times had I just not bothered to dissect a snakeman because... well, fkit. Who needs a ufopaedia entry the 15th time they are playing the game. Aside from the one base one Skyranger limit they did to force "choices" I found a lot of the levelling and research changes to be quite nice.

8. On that note, pure opinion, but where the @#$^ were snakemen. Really? Thin men? Get #@$^ed.

9. Soldier inventory. More unrealistic dumbing down in the name of forcing "choices." Wait, we could have spawned 5 or even 6 enemies at once if we'd given them an expanded inventory? nowai.

10. Item use for the interceptor fights was nice, although the limited number of interceptions and limited ways you could engage kinda took the punch out of how nifty I found it. Nice to see similar things in what little Xenonauts I have played.

11. Bugs vs Ironman. I haven't actually given an actual ironman game a try due to the bugs I encountered on normal. Too many turns stuck on alien activity that I had to reload and force the AI to change it's procedures (easy enough to do once you've seen enough) to avoid the bug becoming a problem, or autosaves just plain not happening before a CTD. I'm sure it's possible, I just don't feel like risking it vs playing with saves. I was very happy to see the ability to name saved games in Xenonauts! I'll blame consoles for the lack in EU.

12. Story. I actually liked the story in EU, and while I hated most of the characters and the voice acting, I felt like it tied the whole thing together fairly well, for what it was. It also helped explain the complete lack of a morale/panicking mechanic in the aliens, which annoyed me at first.

13. Inability to sell gear you crafted or found via stunning aliens... well, I could sell those laser rifles for 300ish credits to a country IF IT ASKS. But heaven forbid I try to pawn them off to anyone who wants them for less. It may have fit the way they balanced the game, but with all the balancing and forced choices they used to create "the game" it became less of a game and more of a set of structured hoops to jump through. Speaking of hoops to jump through, I don't think I ever felt any more obviously than when I was trying to shoot down my first Overseer UFO.

14. On the upside I liked the way the council assigned missions mixed things up. Especially on impossible it was fun racing to disable the bomb or covering the path out for the VIP. Such mission options definitely added to the game, and it would be great to see something similar in Xenonauts!

Really looking forward to xenonauts, it's nice to feel my excitement growing for the game as I play, not my alcohol tolerance. So far the base interface and the aerial combat have been great! Ground combat... well, aside from the game crashing very frequently, a couple more keybindings would be nice! Especially "Next soldier" and an option to set a key to any given TU setting. It would be great to just hit a key upon selecting a soldier the first time to reserve snap shot! Or another to go back to "none" so you could take a shot without clicking off. Or maybe I am missing something, I have only explored about 4-5 CTDs worth.

TLDR Hi all, looking forward to more xenonauts and... I'll need to look into how to get the preorder to show at some point!

Hello and welcome! I was planning on getting EU, until I played the demo. Anyway, have a rummage around, and try the new 16.1 build. Should be more stable. Also, you can find your pre order badge in the stickied thread in this forum subsection.

Thanks! Totally missed that, somehow, despite needing to use the above sticky to avoid the Desura download.

Welcome and well said on all points about xcom:eu

Maybe needs a spot in the suggestions forum (and may already be there) but I would also like hot keys for TU reserves in xenonauts.

I say it again, we don't need multiple threads for this, just use the existing one Also your post is hard to read to end because its big wall of text.

Welcome aboard svidangel!

Good point, I added some spacing that I thought I had done when I was bumbling through it. Also I knew it was going to be a long post and felt equally awkward post-bombing another discussion with it.

hi, i wanted to ask - is it ok, if v16.1 xenonauts crash at first mission's 3.-4. turn (hiden movements) so i have no oportunity even to shoot at someone. should i try to start new game again and again...? i know what alpha version means, but was expecting more.

Hi Frukc, yes the current patch has a few problems. The guys are working on it

I think it might be that particular farm map/maps. I seem to get it on a mostly featureless green map, but as long as I pack up and avoid that one, I haven't had many other problems. Stalking aliens through the snow at the moment.

8. On that note, pure opinion, but where the @#$^ were snakemen. Really? Thin men? Get #@$^ed.

My sentiment exactly. After voting for the Lizard People, you'd expect them to honor their brothers, but no!

Well, enough's enough. That's it. I'll be supporting Snakemen for 2012!

I didn't mind the thin-men. Especially once I saw some of the concept art for them, at that point the mental image I had of them made them far more awesome than they would have been other-wise.

I will say this though, Xcom:EU and the OGs have very, very different pacing. Which is a major, major reason I like Xcom:EU. I can actually play a game "right" and still finish in under 20 minutes. Often times an OG game could last over an hour if you wanted to do it right, and avoid a lot of casualties; especially the trawler missions in TFtD, so many corridors...*shiver*

Wouldn't "right" be more like the "only" way of playing it? I mean, just asking but - what kind of variation does Xcom:EU offer?

Wouldn't "right" be more like the "only" way of playing it? I mean, just asking but - what kind of variation does Xcom:EU offer?

I was talking in regards to a game like Terror From the Deep. Where you could advance your guys pretty quickly, but you would take more casualties depending on how much faster you advanced.Again, it really came down to how many casualties you were willing to accept with units scouting, and being bait to draw enemy fire.

Go run a trawler mission in TFtD, or an equivalent in the old game(or a large ship in one the free Xcom clones like the more recent UFO: AI) and you'll know what I mean. Heck, you may already know what I mean; if you don't want a blood-bath then you need to move very slowly, and very deliberately.

This also plays into how the UI was streamlined in Xcom:EU, and how much easier it is to do things quickly compared to the OG.

Wouldn't "right" be more like the "only" way of playing it? I mean, just asking but - what kind of variation does Xcom:EU offer?

It's all about big choices, just like Ass Effect 3.

In fact, the whole game is about one huge choice:

A) Dump all your resources into building more satellites, always choose the engineers reward, always respond to the country with the highest panic level and use overwatch at the end of almost every non-shooting turn

B) Lose the game

Well, on imposiburu at least, on classic B just makes the game artificially harder.

They should have called it Theme Satellite Services Company.

Hmm. I guess that just doesn't click as well as "XCOM".

Theme Iridium maybe?

Well, there was the possibility of using other options in the meta game... like sacrificing South America HARD in the first month because you knew you could build two satellites to cover it by the end of the month. And then use the bonus to get free interrogation 50% off research bonuses from everything you captured/capture in the next month.

But other than that... pretty much yeah. How much can you afford to not spend on satellites? Impossible was "entertaining" as a technical challenge. But not really entertaining.

Wait, you already completed it on impossible? I'm only midway.

So how was it in the late game, gets easier like on other difficulties, much difference from classic?

The whole game is pretty meh, difficulty seems to be its only redeeming point.

Impossible was harder to get things going in the first months. After about month 3 it wasn't too different from any other difficulty level. The change in hitpoints is negligible once you have the full squad and the best gear, and in the Temple ships some of the enemies don't even have the impossible level HP.

Is it "just" impossible or is it ironman as well?

If you are that far on ironman I applaud you. Only once have I reached the mid-game on impossible ironman out of 60 tries or so.

Not Ironman.