HWP

SW stands for Second Wave. Unless specified otherwise, SW is played with all non-broken options on. Flanking gives 100% critical then. And? It's 4 hit points normal, 5 merged. A rifle does 3 damage. So it's 2 hits to kill - merged or not. Only when you use shotguns does that extra hp start to matter. They'd be better off just shooting you than playing mergers. Heavies are for missiles and on higher levels grenades. It's Nexus, where, I think, like 75% of EU modding is taking place. All UPK work included. Well. If we discount "hey look I made this INI mod ripoff", it might even be 100%. No. You completely misread the issue. It's that in mid-game you one-shot them always, in early game you don't one-shot them anyway. There's but a tiny window where that extra hp actually affects the number of shots required for a kill.

One more hit point, not one shot. Most of the time it's one shot either way. In the very early game it's two shots either way. And even that only affects the recipient. He doesn't even have any extra hp points, not that it would make a difference. And flanking hits with SW are 100% critical chance. The "AI" for inactive aliens has been discussed on N when cracking the files and recording experience. There isn't any implemented. They are spawned at preset locations as you progress. Spawn points are predetermined by RNG. On lower difficulties some are one or more are left unused. Non-activated enemies are not capable of moving at all or investigating anything. "Movement" you hear on alien turn with the screen moving there is preset and exists for that purpose only, not actually moving aliens. Created but non-activated spawns may be teleported around clockwise or CCW, strictly between spawn points. You've probably seen them act after doing the merge thanks to the free turn - MM is processed as an ability, like all others. Not "now". I approach with two teams (obviously except the first mission). So far, whenever I've seen a merge, the rear sectoid doing the merge was usually as easy a shot as the first one - he doesn't get the bonuses. Since there are so few maps, I remember the more surprising spawn points so as not to trigger them. Grenades do work on Impossible, though, thanks to 4hp, leaving one for gun kill.

Depends on the tactic you use I suppose. I always have one team try and flank the enemy in advance, so I usually had a shot on the back one by the time it spawns and reveals itself with the merge. Wastes its free turn it could use to shoot my guys - what a tactician. First mission being an exception (actually on Impossible it can be the hardest mission in the whole game). Only two weapons don't one-shot a sectoid on Impossible: pistol and rifle (on all other difficulties it's just the pistol). Sectoids usually do their thing when one of them is hit, so the recipient just goes back to 4 hp. As such it only affects the survivability of a healthy sectoid, which merge much less often. And if you are stuck with rifles (running rookies), then it matters even less. Rifle wounded sectoids will be at 1hp, which goes up to 2hp after merge and 3hp after another turn; both are one-shots. Healthy sectoids will go from 4 hp to 5 hp - two shots either way.

By Vanilla I meant no mods and no second wave. So you are playing without Chitin Plating, without Combat Stims, and without Mind Shields? And you do this on Second Wave with all options on and Ironman to boot? It's quite difficult to block 3 continents with DR on, since it takes 9-10 satellites. The 9th satellite costs, IIRC, about 4,000. You only have that kind of money later in the game. Although you can exploit the system by not building any satellites at all, then building 10 at once, which effectively bypasses DR. Though in that case you would rather go with building 20 straight away, to cover all but one countries and have spares for losses (since you won't be able to build any more). First I started V on Impossible (what's the point of playing on difficulties below maximum?), then, as information about SW was out, with SW with all options on. Titan is just a couple extra HP and protection against things that don't matter. Ghost is a huge defense boost, serious mobility boost, and stealth on top. It's better every time. Ghost Armor is the Heavy Plasma of EU12. The only times to use armors other than Ghost are AA for DGG snipers (the whole reason to get DGG), and, obviously, Psi for psionics. That one is quite obvious. Pistols for snipers are just far more effective than snap shot with the main weapon. There are of course even more obvious choices... why did they even bother with the "executioner" perk? Yes, you can play with suboptimal builds. But wasn't that your criticism of the OG - that once you got HP for everyone, most other weapons became suboptimal for fun only? It's still *a* proper weapon. That a pistol using the same tech can do more damage just shows how ad-hoc and detached from common sense the balancing is. Well, then, to your multiple trollish choice question - this is what made X-Com X-Com. Unlike the new game, where everyone seems to be raving about fake choices (where one has "PICK ME" written all over in big red letters). All they've done is take the old game, take away all your choices, then let you have some back as perks. Really, how many new features can you name that are not a conditional re-enabling of something that was always available in the original? Bullet Swarm, Double Tap... just make the moves freely usable as they should be. Close Combat Spe... oh, they mean Reaction Fire. Deep Pockets... hurray, a whole two-slot inventory!

Usually not, and there's always plenty of free codecs.

If you claim to find the game overly easy on Impossible (even vanilla), you are either much better than everyone else or not entirely honest. The game is actually possible to lose on that difficulty level without intentionally throwing it, due to high randomness. If you stretch out your game, there comes a point when you can sell off some excess corpses, but most of the time it's "meet new species, kill new species, stockpile a couple dozen their corpses". They are an order of magnitude more valuable for item production, requests, production to fill requests than the pittance you are paid on the 'gray market'. It's suboptimal. Consumables are cheaper. Corpses are worth almost nothing when sold. So using them you don't waste as much money, which with Diminishing Returns is always tight. Which by the way comes up for every potential terror mission with intercept on mission enabled. Incorrect. That only applies in the vanilla, which you seem to scoff at. With SW - which implies most options on, and I explicitly mentioned RD on - funding decreases with panic level. Panic 4 pays almost nothing. Strange then that you didn't notice that the discussion was clearly about weapons, in that case.Armor is simple: use Archangel for snipers to exploit High Ground; use Ghost for everyone else; use anything else only if you find the game too easy. Perks are even simpler: every time there is the right choice and the wrong one. Yes, you can make a snap shot sniper, but that's dumber than ending turns with the "end turn" button instead of Overwatch. Yes. More damage than proper weapons for other classes even. Because none of them was even Captain. They go down easily on Cydonia, you need capacity to absorb losses or it's game over. I don't have a habit of stretching one playthrough for 10 years only to have a yawning walkover fight at the end. That is not so; I even presented an example of an intelligent argument in its defense. I've said a few good things about it myself as well. But the fact is, most defense of the 2012 game that you see comes down to ignorant dismissal of everything that made X-Com - X-Com, followed by childish delight with trivial or poorly implemented features. Almost all of the new "features" are created by taking away options and choices that were standard for every soldier in the original, and that only make sense as such, then giving them back to you as class perks.

Lots of questions. One answer: it wouldn't be hard at all to reward money on kill, if it was meant as a bounty; therefore, it's a corpse sale. I have completed the game on Impossible vanilla and on Impossible with SW, with M 1.99, DR and RD, and without any easymods like BA's WSE. You almost certainly haven't. What makes you consider yourself qualified to teach me on how to play the game? Your fighters - and that's all you have by the time stronger UFOs start appearing, with SW+M+DR, and intercept on mission=1, it's a while before you get a Firestorm - get toasted without consumables. Getting toasted or letting UFOs go raises panic and screws up the funding. You haven't been following the discussion, or you'd know already. You have misunderstood the subject. It's that these specs are exactly the same for all weapons in EU12. At least UD had ammo for plasma and not for lasers. In UD I brought along weapons other than HP because HP is easy to get a hold of on Cydonia, because for 26 soldiers you need to manage inventory tightly, and because they had utility. Before you ask why did I need 26 soldiers, I played without save-scumming and for fastest time, so they weren't ubercolonels.

That was not my experience. My experience was that they were usually about equal targets. There are very few weapons in the game that can't one-shot a sectoid even with mind-merge. And also waste of a turn (for them). I meant the 2012 game.

Basically lets you kill two sectoids with one shot. All it does. Actually the aliens don't even exist until you approach a potential spawn point. Then they are spawned and know where your guys are. It's not LOS, it's spawns. What difficulty setting were you playing at?

I had no idea: never in the game does it say that. Bounties are paid on proof of kill, so you'd have most of the body to yourself, rather than choose between having it and selling it. In EU12, they are explicitly sold on the "gray market", but you don't sell most of them because you need them for items (which on the correct difficulty you do need). This, then, only counts as fan explanation. Only for two classes there is even a choice at all. And it's little more of a choice than Plasma Rifle vs Heavy Plasma in UD. Plasma Light Rifle (that's how it is called) only has enough damage to kill a weak opponent with two hits or a critical. Plasma Rifle has enough damage to kill weak opponents normally, midrange opponents with a critical. The probability of scoring one hit is higher than that of scoring two hits even with the 10% bonus. Since everything in the game, you and enemies, has so much damn health, it all comes down to just how fast you can wear off theirs before they wear off yours. And all non-plasma weapons become useless the moment you have plasma. They don't even have a token benefit like unlimited ammo - which mattered within the 80 item limit, even if unintentionally. Or explosive capability like you got from Heavy and Auto cannons. I actually brought some lasers and even starter tier weapons with me to Cydonia. They still had utility. So why bother with laser cannons at all? 1) 20 million is enough to win the game if your monthly bottom line is at 0 and you don't lift a finger to earn a cent more. 2) It's 5-6 months till you start seeing net profit on them. If you already have loads of heavy plasmas, you'll have won this playthrough well before that.

It takes an approx. $1 million+$4 million starting investment per line to organize LC production. The net profit is $1.9 million with perfect management and closer to $1.6 million with practical. The buildup time is approx. 1 month + 1 month for a new line. A complete LC project, from scratch to a production base with defenses, will set you back $25-30 million, with 2-3 months of buildup time and $8-9 million monthly income. That's another 3 months of recouping your investment. So it's a total of 4-5 months (with perfect management) up to half a year (with practical management) before you actually start seeing net profit on your investment. It's not a huge profit, either; comparable to combined national funding for a well-performing player. Half a year is a long time. I think, with skill, the game can be won in half a year. And it takes a lot of effort to earn enough money to build a factory base in the first place. You're looking at another half a year just for that. The game is quite typically won within a year. Furthermore, the game can be won with $30 million without looking for more sources of income, making the whole effort little more than a freeform sandbox venture. You don't seem to be quite that quantitatively familiar with the game's actual economics. So where is my salary? My overboss telling me what to do? My bonuses for aliens killed? My gaudily decorated office with a promiscuous administrative assistant? My stock options? Wait a moment. You sound like you've played the original game... but how do you forget this? Aliens are captured with Small Launchers, not with stun rods. You only use stun rods very early in the game. Weapons in EU are class-limited. It's that which dictates how you apply them, not spec differences. The only difference from UD is that instead of "Heavy Plasma for everyone", it's "Whatever plasma weapon this class is allowed to use" for everyone. Fake choices. Instead of X merely being the best weapon for its tier, now it's the only weapon the appropriate class is capable of using.

I suppose it looks that way. Though in all the years that I didn't install WMP, this is the first time something doesn't work because of it. The video even plays fine in FAR manager (plugin enhanced), which is essentially a remake of Norton Commander. There exist versions of Windows that come without WMP included. They are not especially popular, but they exist, not to mention all the people who remove it. If it's a design decision to tie things to WMP, it's strange - if a less OS-dependent solution could be squeezed into a console mode app, one can be made to work in a Win32 launcher.

Aerogavins. This thread needs more Aerogavins. Then you will go after aliens on a Spacegavin.

That means that I have seen very little praise for the game, in comparison to criticism for it, phrased in the form of intelligent arguments. Let me clarify what I mean by the term. I'm not using any elitist definition. "Wow mega awesome alienZZZ!1!" is not intelligent. "I don't miss the TU system, class perks eventually upgrade your two moves to a reasonable degree of freedom" is intelligent. Let's try and see where you come in. You didn't present anything in defense of the new game. You argued that the better parts of the old game didn't matter to you, which is more relevant to yourself than to the game. And then you finished with trying to sneak in at a personal attack. Where, in your own opinion, does your post fall on this spectrum? Yes. It was a harder way to win the game, you'd need to build up factories, invest in them, spend a lot of time. It should work this way. You are transnational, not just international. Your initial source of funding is national contributions. But no single nation has the power to magically switch off all your lights. And if no single nation has that power, as they fall out of the project, neither does the last remaining nation, provided that you pay your own bills. It's certainly not unreasonable - proprietary technology has consistently been a source of solid profit margins - and the ability to balance your fiscal strategy between pandering to every single nation and solving your own problems provided a major boost to replayability. It works the same way in EU2012 - you use the same load for each class. I don't see your point. And yes, a good player would divide his soldiers into "classes", although more subtle and free to make his arbitrary choices, not presets. At the very least you'd have riflemen, grenadiers/missile operators and psionics. And you could make your own choices. Certainly. There's even a new term for people with severe limitations - "differently able". Perhaps, then, we should consider games that excessively limit player choices to preset options to be "differently well-designed"?

The launcher works, but I don't see any animation in it, seems to fall back to the (crisp) static image. Run from separate folder. Video plays fine in MPC-HC on Win7 64, ffdshow, madVR. WMP not installed. On a test machine with XP 32, the launcher runs and the video plays fine. This image looks a lot like it's been rendered with nearest neighbor scaling algorithm, as setting it produces a very similar image. Seems to be output render settings related rather than codecs per se.

I can't agree. A correctly modeled and drawn weapon is easy to tell apart from another. Especially if you add stylistic aids in terms of exact shade, et cetera. I can tell shotgun aimed opponents apart from rifle aimed ones in other games even at a long distance. Won't even mention real life, where grip is a dead giveaway. And did they have to make every single soldier look like a complete moron for gameplay reasons too? Dwell on this for a moment: the ugliness of EU2012 uses the same engine as the visually stunning Mass Effect 3. It's not a problem with gameplay and identifiable guns. They wanted to make the game appealing to... I don't know who, 10 year olds? It's actually harder to tell guns apart in EU than in other games, because they all look so moronic and plasticky, and don't trigger any associations with real-life objects.

Just some programming experiences. These were around the cycle times for implementation of similar routines in native cpp and .net. It can be moving entities that, for the time being, have no animations. Anyway, from Chris' response, that seems to be the case, and the intended solution similar to that.

We should just have a thread for "Have you guys played %game%."

It certainly doesn't. So what? Each move should take microseconds for a well-written engine and maybe 5 milliseconds for crude .net code. You don't have to redraw in between. I don't imagine the whole sequence taking more than half a second or so on a modern PC. I just want to press "end turn", see if anyone's shooting at me, and have the next turn. No sitting in black trying to listen to sounds of things I don't care about.

It's certainly not only applicable to US, but to most every nation except for some parts of the Western Europe and SEA...Also, quoting from the article: Phasers!Was I the only one to see it as obvious?

Both these terms have well established definitions already; different definitions, too. Meat shields wear heavy armor, carry healing supplies and take enemy fire, rookies are recruits.

Well, glad that we have finally come to an agreement: it's immoral for an American to pirate, but only questionable for a Canadian, and perfectly within the moral rights of anyone in Taiwan, Turkmenistan or Seychelles. But you just did. Because the law says you must in one country and doesn't in another. Like they say, Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. Most of the time, the roles are distributed differently... so perhaps there is justice in that now, for once, it's Americans who estis boves.

Well, then, if you are basing your morality on laws - then it isn't in any way immoral there yet. Might someday become... but Xenu might return someday too. Not at all. For a very long time it used to be thought of exactly that way. Yes, that was quite a while ago. But exactly that way, a noble duty. Piracy rates have gone down a long way since. Hard to even imagine from our perspective; but it was like that. Back in the day, more than 99% of the books you could buy were pirated. And not even under the cover of darkness; they were pirated by supposedly respectable men and bought by men thought of as even more respectable.

Indeed. Murder has been illegal and deemed immoral as long as human society existed. Content replication? One day there is no copyright at all, another day there is, then there is but it's legal in one country and illegal in another, then - who knows. So, does this mean that piracy becomes a moral right, a moral duty, a moral wrong or a moral ambiguity depending on what time and country you are currently in?

Hardly. The new game is playable and even entertaining - and just that. I've seen very few intelligent people actually praise it; the game survives on being, today, a sole survivor of its genre, without competition or alternatives. It's that or nothing, and it's certainly better than nothing. You might have me confused with someone else. Or confused the very reasons to play UFO - flexible financial system, full inventory, etc - with truly awful ones - difficulty bug, crashes, TFTD ship missions. Or, consistent with your unusually low standards for excellency, confused tolerating with championing.