Sinfullyvannila

Well, the original's tactics can be summed up by the Zap Brannigan strategic theory. And no, that first comment is not from me.

Soldiers don't stop when they see the enemey. They cannot fire on the enemy and then run. they cannot use actions for things like to heal with the medkits then do other things. Soldier is locked to some things like weapons and ability if he is a certain class. Soldier classes are random assined to the soldiers. They cannot shoot the things in the world but by missing the enemy. The equipmrnt for them is making no logical reasoning for things like shirt or scope or grenade. I do not understand. All these things are not for more options. They are less. You have less flexibility in the order that you can do things, but none of that stuff is all too different from the original(you can blow up cover with explosives, and the soldiers' stats were randomly assigned in the original). Well other than stopping when you see an enemy(which makes planning your move less important), and restricted class weaponry(which I agree is a bad thing). So you still have roughly the same amount of tactical options as the original, the game just doesn't allow the same flexibility. You have to sacrifice some to gain others. lack of flexibility =/= lack of freedom.

Nah, it's cool. What I was asking specifically was how that limits the strategies you bring into play. Sure, Soldier can carry less equipment than before, but it's still more or less the same equipment from the original. You can still use pretty much the same strategies as before, you are just limited in the resources you can bring along. Actually, I'd argue than the new system gives you more options, since the original didn't even have the supplemental armor or SCOPE equivalents, although it did have proximity grenades. I do miss those.

The whole point of the two move system was so that you would have to commit to your actions. It makes you think about what you want to because you can't take it back. Anything that forces you to think more cannot mean dumbing down. And it more or less works out the same. In the old one, if you can't get a good shot, you spend all of your TUs to run for cover. You just get more chances to hit the less you move(which is still reflected by certain class perks and mechanics, like Double-Tap, Bulletstorm and the Rocket Launcer and Sniper rifle firing restrictions).

I started up UD again last night and I've gotten 3 Terror Missions in month 2 so far, all of them at night lol.

They're not really a big deal in either game once you learn to deal with them. I think they are actually a much bigger threat in this one because they always travel in groups and your squad is much smaller, so a 2 unit swing is much more dangerous.

Is it actually possible to capture any of the robotic things and gain something from them? Nope. Same deal with Chrysallids and Zombies. Grenades are useless once Mutons show up. Better to use either more defense or scopes. Grenades are always useful, but much more so the less experience your Soldiers have. They are great because they will ALWAYS hit and ALWAYS do the same amount of damage. They are absolutely the best thing for finishing enemies off, especially with rookies. They also get rid of cover, making it easier to hit enemies with follow-up attacks. And they are great for lowering HP to set up a stun. At least on normal, the game was over too soon, but I have read classic rectifies that Maybe not Classic, Ironman for sure though.

It's pretty graphical. We see units sticking from out of cover, not bullets going through it. You see both actually. Luck can't be restored with medkits and expenditure of luck doesn't put you in a hospital. I was talking about D&D's HP specifically as an illustration of arbitration.

It's just arbitration. That's why cover doesn't protect you fully in the game. You are meant to interpret how your soldier avoided taking damage. It's like AC and HP in D&D. You are more or less left to interpret how you were protected and how much physical harm your character sustained(2 damage to a character with 8 HP and 25 damage to a character with 100 HP could be interpreted as the same kind of would, or may not even be interpreted as a wound at all, just an expenditure of "luck" or energy to avoid actually being wounded).

I doubt it. JRPG fans are infamous for making tall claims, while in the end it turns out that what "puts everything ever made in the West to shame" is another lost-love-story. Well, I'm not a JRPG "fan". I play them, but i don't attach any specific emotion or bias to them. Just like Western ones. Shiren just happens to be an awesome one. I know @play did a couple blogs about the Shiren games, so you may want to check that out. That guys does have a western bias and still really enjoys them, he doesn't think they are the best like I do though. Here is a link to it: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/03/play_the_delights_of_mystery_d.php And an exert: Shiren the Wanderer is really very well-designed. It has the tightest core game system of any top-tier roguelike other than Rogue itself. Nearly every item, even supposedly bad ones, has a purpose. Every monster, even those with tricky attacks and abilities, have strategic ways to make them less dangerous, even harmless. It is not unfair. The great majority of situations have ways out of them. Sometimes, it is true, you may have to make a sacrifice, or the way out is not to have gotten into it to begin with, but there are usually ways to have seen them coming. With good planning and economical use of resources, you can do a lot to ensure you'll have the tools to survive the later half of the game. It is likely not the same as other random dungeon games you may have played. Although nearly all random dungeon games are inspired by roguelikes, many of them neglect important features. Even among roguelikes, Shiren's a bit special. In the taxonomy of the genre, it's closer to being a Hack-like game than a 'Band, but it's really closest to Rogue itself. It's so simple it could have been automated. Steam vents are just where you place your steam generators. Ya, I agree it's simple, even relative to UD but UD's is pretty simple when you get down to it once you figure out how to make a defensible base. I'm saying that you guys are making UD's out to be a lot more deep and complex than it really is. In real life bullets tend to just go through almost all of what XCOM considers "cover". Over a foot of concrete is penetrated by 7.62 while maintaining lethality. Everything but old stone buildings would only provide concealment, maybe help armor protection, never full cover. Ya, I'm aware of the penetrating capabilities of modern ammunition, put it's still gonna take a hell of a lot of bullets to completely demolish a section of wall.

It's a japanese portable game. How hard can it be? Can't test and don't see any sources mentioning it for that reason. All jrpgs I know of are linear; this means that, most likely, everyone who played the game had to do that problem and did it. And even if it's hard, the game's small size makes it a mere logical puzzle. Dude, if you like roguelikes, you owe it to yourself to get Shrien(DS, not necessarily Wii). It's really not anything like your bias is telling you. Fay's Final Solution(it's the post-game dungeon) is by far the best roguelike i've ever played, and puts pretty much any Western RL to shame. You're seriously out of touch with JRPGs if you are thinking that way. Sure, that's a more or less accurate generalization of the mainstream ones, but they make by FAR the best niche subgenres(SRPGs, Wizardry Clones and their good Roguelikes) but the western ones to shame. ESPECIALLY on the portable systems(the Japanese generally only market titles they'd think westerners would find appealing on home consoles, while they prefer portable, so they design for their much more "hardcore" attitude towards games) ADOM's length and randomness is part of the difficulty, you can't just get lucky or figure out the solution by trial and error, you have to actually be good. That's why it's still the benchmark. Yes, you can do an ultra ending on every playthrough you want. You can even do Ordinary Chaos God (harder than ultimate) with a Necromancer ADOM is one of the less random RLs out there. Stone Soup or Slash 'Em(or arguably DF) have more or less inherited the "benchmark" position nowadays, since ADOM has been only recently seen new development since 10 years ago. Don't you need a AoLS to do an Ultra, which is not a guaranteed item? It's not. Doom respawns enemies if you kill them. ADOM punishes you for doing well by leveling the enemies up (with possible uberjackal bug). Tetris punishes you for doing well by speeding up Do you know anyone who actually likes the uberjackal effect? Tetris is different as the only "progress" you can make on it is to do ever increasingly challenging levels.

You can't level up your soldiers the way you want. The skill perks? pfffft... lame. Hell you can't even choose which class they are. It works out pretty much the same way. Instead of your "Strenght" going up, you pick the perk that gives you another rocket, or another grenade. Wanna increase "TUs" give them the one that gives you a free attack. It's the same effect, but it doesn't require an absurd amount of stat farming. You couldn't choose your soldiers attributes in the first one either. You can't equip your soldiers the way you want. Why can't I give a heavy a sniper rifle if I want to? Why do they have to choose between a vest and a grenade?! That doesn't even start to make any sense! Ridiculous. I actually agree with you on the first instance. I really wanted to equip Snipers and Heavies with Assault Rifles because Sniper Rifles suck for the first few levels and LMGs suck, well, all the time. About it not making sense though, that's immaterial. There's a lot of stuff in both games that make NO sense. It comes with the terrritory for soft science fiction. You can't even interact with the game world the way you want. Yes I'm talking about free fire. No I'm not talking about using my heavy's single rocket or some other soldier's single grenade. That's just idiotic. What's idiotic is that you COULD pull that crap in the first one, and that the aliens never did. It's much more logical in this one, cover only get's destroyed by explosives(you know, thintg that are actually desinged to demolish other things), or sustained fire from powerful energy weapons. You have almost no choice in building your base other than where to plop the next square. Seriously what's the point of even thinking about that? It never gets attacked so why does it matter? The adjacency bonuses? What a joke. They could have automated that entire mechanic and it would be virtually the same just with less clicking. You have steam vents to consider, and whether or not you want to do a Nexus. It's not as thoughtless as how you are portraying it. The first one there really isn't much strategy in making a base besides making sure there is a choke point and also making sure you can dismantle your radar when you need to. I never said TBS's should be sandbox games. Wow LOL! Talk about reading your own lines into my post and then twisting it into a defense for your own point of view... I mentioned those games as examples of wildly popular games that understand the fundamentals of freedom in gaming. Designing ANY KIND OF GAME and placing it on rails by taking away basic choices the way XCOM: EU does is simply unacceptable to me. It gives me the impression the devs (or their management *cough* jerk that tricked me into buying it on YouTube... you know who you are) are either incredibly unfocused or extremely lazy. Well, that's up to you if you enjoy broken, easy, poorly designed games with an absurd amount of bugs and the illusion of freedom and consequence, that is good for you. I'm fine with freedom, but it's not the be-all end-all of gaming. I enjoy all kinds of games and to put such an arbitrary requirement for their enjoyment as that is anathema to me. And honestly, I think most of those games are unfocused, and while not necessarily lazy, definitely half assed(I do love me some Fallout 1&2 and NV though).

I've beaten ADOM, but didn't do an Ultra. That game takes way too much time for a roguelike. You can't accomplish that on every playthrough. If you want a challenge, do Faye's Final Problem on Shiren, then call yourself a gamer. It's considerably more difficult as well as concise. My problem with base defenses aren't that they are difficult(because nothing in X-Com is very difficult), it's that it's a punishment for doing well. That's a cardinal sin of game design.

Don't know what you guys were playing, but the tech tree actually required a lot more thinking in this one. The tree was pretty linear(it was in the first one too) but since you also need weapon fragments to research stuff, and(if you are playing Ironman) you are always in short supply for them, you had to choose which ones were the most important. Interrogations and Autopsies were useless in the old one too, not so much in this one. Labs are usesless, which is really disappointing. They should have tripled the later techs' research time, but that's not a problem with the tech tree. And why would you need an additional flanking bonus for shooting from behind? The one you get already is already very sizeable. There's not really too much difference in base design either. They just consolidated all of the expansion limits(living space, workshop space, lab space, stores) into power. The only reason you had to think about base design was because of base defense, which they took out because it's stupid(oh, you're playing well, here's a potential "lose the entire game" scenario). And limited you to one base, which is because the extra bases were redundant beyond having radar bases. Facilities are expensive enough that having a build strategy is critical on Classic or Impossible.

So how exactly does XCOM limit you guys from playing the game the way you want to? Please elaborate. I don't get it, you guys want your strategy games to be sandbox games? That's cool I guess, but I'm willing to guess a lot of people are going to disagree with you if you want XCOM to be more like Skyrim, you know, the game where the best strategy is to literally just run at your opponent and swing your weapon like a 3 year old with a temper tantrum, you're going to have a hard time selling that to X-Com fans. Or maybe you just want your Interceptors to fly backwards when they patch the game, or have seizure mutons. Like I said before, if that's the game you want to play, feel free to make it, and then tell me how it goes over.

It's funny that nothing today can compare to a game that came out all those years ago, considering the hardware we now possess. Let's hope this one can deliver... If you really believe that, and you have actually tried the other X-Com clones, there is no way Xenonauts or any other game is going to "deliver" for you.

This game doesn't really limit the choices of how you play though, it just limits the amount of especially effective items that you can bring in. You can choose to blow up a lot of cover, like in the old one. Bring in a bunch of heavies with shredders, dual grenades and Dual Rockets. Expect your research to slow down though. Wanna cowboy it up? Bring in a bunch of assaults with titan armor, but your soldiers are gonna have a lot of downtime for their injuries. Wanna play defensively? bring in a mix of Supports and Snipers, but expect to have a harder time in close quarters. They aren't limiting choices, they are limiting resources to balance those choices, which is what you yourself are saying they should do. I'm getting sick of this whole "developers forcing me to play the game the way they want to play, not the way I want to play." attitude that's been going around the internet. That's how it's always been, that's how it always will be and that's how it always should be. Why? Because they care more about how they want to play, and THEY DON"T HAVE A CLUE ABOUT HOW YOU WANT TO PLAY. They can't read your mind. If they work on what they care about, those bits are going to be high quality, if they just blindly take shots in the dark about what some random dude on the internet wants, they don't even know how to go about in developing it in a quality way, because they don't have the same standards for it as you do. It's not lazy design. I'm sick of people calling devs lazy for not adding features that they specifically want, but the devs think would take away from the game, either because they think it's a poor design decision, or because they don't have the resources to cover every base. Game developers are some of the hardest working people on the planet, and they are because they care about what they are making. They work 40-80+ hours a week because they want to make a quality product. Gamer Entitlement gets thrown out a bunch, and I try to use it as sparingly as possible. This is a shining example of it though. If you want to play games the way you want to play them, become a game developer or modder. I have no problem with experiencing immersion when it comes to video games. My point was, immersion is not the entire point of video games, unlike horror movies. I can see where you're coming from with the immersion angle, because that was something that the original did pull off extremely well. I'm just saying that these specific things you are talking about don't break the immersion for me any more than the silly unrealistic stuff in the first game. For instance, in the original I always envision rookies getting a speech that goes something like this: "Ok men, you're here for one reason and one reason only; Killing Aliens. In order to prepare you for that, we are going to teach you vital skills to survive and thrive against the alien menace. The first skill you will learn is 'Hot Potato', but before we teach you that, you have to get the chant right. Oh, and by the way, all training exercises will be live fire exercises, during which we WILL be engaging the enemy. Speaking of which, the Alarm just went off. Drop that pistol Scrawny Joe, you get the rocket launcher because you are first in line! Now move out men!"

I guess agree to disagree then, because then it becomes a matter of balancing immersion and good game design. To me, design beats out immersion, because a)It's a video game, not a horror movie. b) There was a lot more stuff in the first game that broke immersion. c) it really didn't affect my immersion personally.

It's not like there isn't really silly stuff in the other X-Coms.

http://www.sessions.edu/notes-on-design/resources/design/how-limitations-influence-creativity/ It may not be comparable on a 1-1 basis to this, but this sums up my view on the matter. Too many choices and you fall back on the familiar. Less choices force you to think harder to find a solution within your limitations. I wish I knew whether or not that concept has a name or not, but I've heard the same thing said quite a bit in the past.

Well, they are carrying unlimited ammo.

First off, why would you run into enemy overwatch without Lightning Reflexes? You either make them waste it with LR, Flush them out of cover, use an explosive to expose them, or throw down a smoke grenade if you are desperate. Secondly, all of the stuff you mentioned makes you actually think more. Can't pick up a medkit? Don't put your critical guys into situations where they will risk dying as easily. You CAN destroy walls to uncover aliens, but you have to choose whether or not you want to do that, or save the explosive for damage. You can't abuse the throwing mechanic to "time warp" gear from one side of the map to another(you do that to save "TU"s which represent time spent)? Well, I never had to rely on stupid gimmicks like that because, wait for it, your guys could carry so much stuff into battle that they were never at want for anything. All that stuff may have been more "realistic" or "deep", but it cheapened the experience and made it rather goofy and brainless. And fair enough, it is my evaluation, but the guy clearly has a lot of experience with strategy games.

It's clearly dissimilar, but I don't think it(or any of the other changes) are remotely enough to put them into different subgenres.

Ah, I thought you meant specifically UD.

X-Com is 19 years old. I guess you are right though. XCOM is tactics based and UD did not require tactics.