Jump to content

Sorry but for my money this game is too hard


Recommended Posts

This is certainly an improvement on the new XCom which I can only describe as horrible but gameplay in this title is not well balanced making it overly difficult and frustrating when it should be fun.

The core of the problem having played for a few hours is:

(1)There is not enough time to develop new fighter tech before aerial combat simply becomes absurdly hard. As a result it becomes a crude numbers game where you have to slug it out hoping your fighters have enough clout to do the job. Worse still when you do outclass your opponents with a mix of tech and numbers the enemy craft are destroyed most of the time making it impossible to gain skills for your troops and money to advance your cause by visiting the wreck site.

(2) Why even when your troops become officers do they have the weapons skills of five year olds? Most of them are the worst shots I have ever seen, so much so you resort to the use of grenades 90% of the time to take out or disable the enemy. It would have been nice to, to apply points to build core skills like these to enhance gameplay.

For myself I gave up in frustration and walked away from this game. I wont be back unless gameplay improves markedly.

I had high hopes for this title but to be honest I'm still yet to see any title that comes close to the two originals I played and still love from way back when.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The changes in my mod that would be most relevant will be:

-Faster manufacturing

-Corsairs unlock earlier

-More money

-More accurate (slightly) weapons

Vanilla is in the first pass of balancing so things are going to be out of whack, but it now has a baseline to work from.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The point of the balance phase is that before it there is little or no balance but hopefully by the end of it the game is well balanced.

You may have tried the game at the wrong time if you were hoping for a finished product with the final balance and polish in place.

Currently ground combat balance is being adjusted so the weapons stats are at a baseline and being tweaked into something resembling balance.

I am not sure but I imagine soldier stats and progression will also be something that gets looked at in this stage.

Once the ground combat balance has been whipped into shape the geoscape and air combat balance stages will follow.

Try back in a couple of versions and see how it compares or add your feedback to the ground combat balance threads if you want as that may be useful for Aaron.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I guess I'll have to find some mods too then.

I've played the original xcom games a lot and I find this game very frustrating.

Granted I just started playing it but the battles are very hard (this is on normal).

In every one of my first 5 missions, I've lost at least 2 guys.

I hide them, crouch them, doesn't matter. The aliens are shooting at me from long distance and killing me while my guys never have higher than a 20% chance to hit.

The fifth mission was a night mission and I was getting shot from at least 2 or 3 screen lengths away with 50% accuracy. Lost my entire squad and a vehicle. Lost 2 guys before I even saw an alien and I even ran one guy ahead in a suicide mission to see if I could at least see one of them.

I know its still in development.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I know its still in development.
Be patient. It's still in beta and hasn't really been balanced yet. The long shot problem is known and being worked on. Also, just as a piece of advice, never, ever, end your turn with guys not under cover until you've scouted out well ahead of your exposed troops and gotten rid of all the aliens.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeah also one of the thing that you kinda need to is use classes more often...Like really costumize them...

For my taste I like to bring alot of smoke grenade and 2 flashbangs.My setup squad is formed out of 4 modified rifleman(lots of smoke and medkit),2 RocketMan(They are powerfull if you keep them back then shoot once your upfront soldier discover the alien,don't move him if he is in a good position,he will get a aim penalty,same for machinegun users and snipers) and 2 snipers(again with lot's grenades)

Also you don't need to advance quickly.You need to take precautions and advance slowly.Take an example:You are moving your soldiers up.You see a reaction fire out of your field of view.Then if your scout soldier has enough time units advence very slowly(one block per move) or if he has medium time units just back him up 2-4 squares so he is out of the aliens FOV.Next turn he will either remain in the same spot or advance on your position.After that just move the scout soldier again in the front...let him see the alien then back up.Now that you have seen the alien you are free to shot with the guys that are safe in the back.

This is one of my tacticts...Sorry if the text is to long.

Also I find that assaults are pretty useless...I mean,I usually don't want my soldier to be front to front with a grey man with a plasma rifle or a super evolved reptile.

P.S:Frag Grenades are also kinda useless...Grenade range is quite poor so it's always best to take a couple of turns just to cover a area that you are gonna move into with smoke...They reduce the chance of alien reaction fire to hit and to regular hit.I also find that in this version aliens are kinda to trigger happy with the burst shots(read my thread) so you might invest into taking low precent chances just to supress them with excessive amount of fire.

Edited by MisterLock
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Better to wait with the mods until this game is actually finished or it might go in different directions with multiple mods that cant be combined. I still hope the game wont need mods in the end or are already implemented by the producer himself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

LOL, I read the first line and though to my self...............do people not understand what Alpha and Beta mean.....

It would be best to say...................this game is not finished yet so saying its too hard is kinda premature to say the least.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

LOL, I read the first line and though to my self...............do people not understand what Alpha and Beta mean.....

It would be best to say...................this game is not finished yet so saying its too hard is kinda premature to say the least.

It's in Beta and Alpha that concerns like this are best posted, since it's feedback that makes the game polished and balanced.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just finished my first full playthrough, Veteran Ironman, managed to get snuffed out late December.

This is just my first impression on balance.

Ground Combat: Pretty manageable, I don't think it is as badly balanced or overtuned as some people are saying. If I were to change anything, i'd increase the sight range on our units at night(not equal to day, but better than it is now)... I tended to plan my flights to never land at night because it's not a 50% or 100% difficulty increase, Night vs Day is like a 500% difficulty increase. It's a little overthetop. It seemed like the aliens were scaling a bit too quickly as the game progressed, but I believe this to be a product of the geoscape more than the ground combat, as the geoscape decides what aircraft are out which dictates which units you are facing.

Geoscape: I believe the balance on geoscape right now is completely broken and makes ground combat look more unbalanced than it is. It is ridiculous trying to keep up with the fighter scaling, I mean it takes like 30 days and 750k to build a marauder with 30 engineers or something like that... Meanwhile you are stuck barely being able to down stuff which means less money, less xp for your units, less approval from regions which snowballs everything in a negative direction.

This is all fine by the way, because it is the beta, I'm not complaining just giving my impression. I do somewhat wish we could choose separate difficulties for Ground combat and Geoscape just because i believe they are on two different difficulty levels right now because of the balance. Not that having that option would be bad even if they were evenly balanced.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I usually find you can down any middle class alien craft with starting interceptors.I mean hell...I took out a landing ship with just sending my MIG in to shoot it's four heavy rockets and then let the condors engage.If you want to do this you are gonna have a hell of a time strategizing a dogfight.I usually have one plane in front(never in the red FOV of the ship) acting as bait(the alien ship will go for it) while the other 2 condors are just a little bit over the ships speed(900/KM i think?) in the back just firing theyre gatling guns at the back of the UFO.This strategy works as long as you pay attention to all fronts.Like you gotta move your front bait plane around so that the ship doesn't catch it and then you gotta reposition your atack planes in the back of the UFO to not get damaged or to have good shots on the UFO from the back.

Overall this strat done correctly will bring down the craft easily.

Also I used this setup when I didn't have advanced torpedos and stuff

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Remember you don't have to intercept every UFO you see. If your crafts aren't up to the task you could let it just fly by. I don't know how badly this affects score though. Anyone?

I think most UFO missions only cause ticker increases when they cause an Event. I think they drop your nation score just by flying around.

So ignoring ships because you can't take them down makes bigger ships arrive faster. Catch-22.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I usually find you can down any middle class alien craft with starting interceptors.I mean hell...I took out a landing ship with just sending my MIG in to shoot it's four heavy rockets and then let the condors engage.If you want to do this you are gonna have a hell of a time strategizing a dogfight.I usually have one plane in front(never in the red FOV of the ship) acting as bait(the alien ship will go for it) while the other 2 condors are just a little bit over the ships speed(900/KM i think?) in the back just firing theyre gatling guns at the back of the UFO.This strategy works as long as you pay attention to all fronts.Like you gotta move your front bait plane around so that the ship doesn't catch it and then you gotta reposition your atack planes in the back of the UFO to not get damaged or to have good shots on the UFO from the back.

Overall this strat done correctly will bring down the craft easily.

Also I used this setup when I didn't have advanced torpedos and stuff

I do that as well... But I don't believe it is a sustainable strat and it's completely impossible if they are escorted/against multiple units. Considering the costs to replace a fighter, it is very very difficult to take on half the ufo's that pop up later in the year, you really have to pick your battles.

Which means less Money from missions, less xp from missions, less money from nation approval, as Sathra said bigger ships arriving faster. It is a snowball, it is impossible to know how you would be fairing on ground combat if you could actually keep up with the geoscape side of things because your money/xp/situation as a whole would be entirely different because you would be facing weaker units from smaller ships for longer.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So ignoring ships because you can't take them down makes bigger ships arrive faster. Catch-22.

That's a bit disappointing. For balance and fun it would be nice if you could ignore a few UFO encounters without making things worse when you are going through a rough spot like all soldiers being wounded, planes downed, or being very slightly behind in production/research. Having a bit of breathing room to catch up and not being instantly doomed when you have an unlucky streak would make the game more fun IMO. Maybe it could be an option in the difficulty settings.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The plan is the have the smaller ships show up even in mid-game. Gives you a breather and lets you train up rookies easier.

That's one mistake I did in one playthrough(or multiple).I just stuck with my starting squad only hiring new soldiers as backup in case anyone died...Only losing 1 soldier every 4-5 missions didn't seem to big of a deal to me...Until the 4th terror mission kinda ripped up my whole veteran squad and I was stuck with 1-2 surviving veterans and a bunch of Corporals(Still Rookies in my mind)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honestly, I think most of the problems above could be countered by a funding increase. I've been playing through on normal, I've been doing really well and losing very few soldiers, but I simply haven't had the funding to do anything other than equip my soldiers to having a snowballs chance in hell of putting up a fight, let alone play around with any cool toys. Then north america dropped out and at no point was I even close to being able to afford to get another base up and running. Maybe I have just been doing it wrong.

I do have a suggestion though that could work for everyone - let us have customizable difficulty sliders for different aspects of the game. For example, due to my funding problems I want to be able to slow down the alien escalation so that I can learn to do it properly without having to do the same sort of thing over and over and fail a bunch of times. But at the same time, I don't want the aliens getting weaker weapons and so on that comes with easy difficulty.

Edit: Additionally, part of my problem might be that, and I'm not sure if this is a bug or a feature, aliens don't obey the same LoS rules as you at night. That is, it appears that the aliens can see at night as if it were day time. This has led to me ignoring several terror attack because they happened at night and there is literally nothing I could do about them without being totally wiped out (I am generally reluctant to attack anything at night because when you can't see the enemy until you're right up in their face and they can shoot and kill you in one shot from normal distance, it's suicide) and maybe that escalated things quicker (plus I had to let a number of ufo's go, but again this was always due to funding).

Edited by Person012345
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...