What's wrong with XCOM 2?

I don't know much about the original X-coms or the nu-Xcoms but I've recently been checking out some gameplay of 2 recently out of curiosity and it looks kinda fun all things considered.

I remember Holla Forums shitting on it and laughing at it not performing as well as it could've many months ago; what was wrong with it? Were the devs jews or what?

also Xcom thread kinda, recommend me XCOM or XCOM clone games to play if I'm a newfag to the series

You can start with nucom if you want, that what I did. Then I played oldcom and had a much better appreciation for the series.
For Classic xcom I would recommend openxcom, bug fixes and a ton of other shit that helps it run on modern hardware.

It is not a bad game, it just wasn't as good as EW with LW and had completely garbage optimization

XCOM 2 kind of suffered a bit from a shortish development cycle. XCOM was 2012 while XCOM 2 was 2016.
It doesn't seem short until you realize they also released an expansion for 1 in 2013 and 2 itself wasn't radically different from the previous game, it essentially just continued the story from the previous game albeit by wiping all endings except the one they wanted to continue
It wouldn't be a huge stretch to guess that they probably started developing XCOM 2 a few months or so after or during the expansion for XCOM then rushed the release because they thought they had learned their pitfalls from the release of XCOM.
Instead they got an unoptimized mess and, rather than working alongside the dudes who created LW to have it as a launch experience Something that, in my opinion, not only would have caught far more of the optimization issues but also given them a huge boost in reputation they waited until the game released to pay them to make a second LW mod.
It really should have been released and priced as a $40/50 expansion to XCOM 1 but I suppose the marketing visibility was better for them to release as a new game.

Embed related is a good starting point. It's official Firaxis design philosophy that their games aren't fun to play if you're not playing them one very specific way and the answer to that problem isn't that their games need to be redesigned but that they need to "encourage" players to never try to play their games except by their own very specific way.

Of course, though, that's the issue with Firaxis' design philosophy in general, not the more specific issue of X-COM - or the issue of what X-COM represents for the broader state of strategy game design. X-COM is a very old game, from 1994, that was very, very innovative for 1994. Then by around 2000 developers were really starting to innovate on top of X-COM's innovations with games like Jagged Alliance 2 and Silent Storm. Then eighteen years after X-COM's release a certain studio releases a game with X-COM's name and likeness whose developers seem to not only have completely missed all the innovations made by other developers building on top of X-COM's design concepts, but seem to have forgotten all of the innovations of X-COM's design concepts themselves, and thanks to their influence (read: marketing) - thanks to the influence of Firaxis!X-COM, that wonderful game that's simpler, more barebones than its prequel that came out eighteen years before it - now the state of strategy game design is more primitive in 2018 than it was in 1994.

I loved nuXcom1 but this game was complete nofun. They dropped the ball so hard I can't accurately convey it.

So:
Play X-COM. Play Jagged Alliance 2. Play Silent Storm.

By the way, yes, Firaxis are sleazy kikes. Off the top of my head, there was a fan-made multiplayer remake of X-COM, with one player controlling the aliens and the other player controlling humanity, that was scheduled to come out shortly before the first Firaxis!X-COM before - guess what, it got D&C'd.

This user posted a very good argument and video on HOW the game is just much less fun than the previous iterations of it (including nuCOM EU/EW). The entire game wants you to play very risky and aggressive when the game doesn't give you enough flexibility (on higher difficulties) to actually let you do much more than grenade spam your way to victory (although taking more chances is what they intended). Destruction in 2 is actually way better than in 1 but to base the entire game off of it missed the point. Because of this timer, everything was balanced around it. Aliens had to die in 1-2 turns otherwise it will drag on for far too long and your soldiers had deal enough damage to take them out. It's why the power creep in 2 is WAAAAY fucking harder in 1 because every perk is an active that gives soldiers way too much utility to get them out of every situation on their own rather than combining every classes kit to become dependent on each other. The game feels completely unfair and unsatisfying in the early game when you do have to take those risks not because you can't take a few turns to negate or trick the AI into a certain strategy and even more so during the mid to late game because you've probably learned that grenade spam is the best way to go because grenadiers is the strongest class in the game.

Funnily enough, nuCOM EW already solved this issue with having the player take more risks by hanging the meld carrot in front of them. You can simply ignore the meld and play safer, losing out on that sweet precious orange resource for MECs and gene modding or you can be a little more aggressive and take that meld canister right in front of a outsider. It was more organic and allowed the player to make the CHOICE in how they go about the situation.

If you honestly enjoy the nuCOM games but wish there was more to it (like me) then seriously consider trying LW with both games.

I haven't played enough Wot(((C))) to see if they solved any of my problems with it but from what I can tell from my time with it, they didn't do much.


It's a bit of a shame but if you already have a pretty strong base from which to work off of (which 2 did use code from EU/EW if you check the Unreal script files they used) then it shouldn't be that much of a hindrance.
It was certainly more of a marketing thing by 2k which was a massive shame. I'm not sure if the LW team were really interested in making a sequel to LW but they were probably more than fine with doing that when they were going to be paid. Hopefully their own game will be alright.

Both generations suffer from being repetitive and ending up boring as all hell once you know what's what. Nice cuckch filename.

WOTC solved the optimization issue easily but came with it's own issues. The intel system allowed you to make super soldiers so powerful even the special agents they give you can't compare in power.
Imagine a Ranger with abilities from both trees, or a sniper who could use both pistol abilities and sniper abilities with a sniper rifle that doesn't need both actions to fire who could *teleports behind you* as a free action. Imagine a system so broken it lets you make characters more powerful than a psychic warrior and a grenadier combined. That's WOTC.

Let's just get to the point and post snek

Hello newfag pretender.

This game and it's predecessor are nothing more than glorified mobile games. They have 0 depth, they never allow you to experiment through a complete lack of options and complexity and the only thing differentiating them from mobile games is that they have a serious marketing budget and purdy animations/graphics.

I don't know. Maybe the fact that the game is so broken that it corrupts your saves every other mission?

Your mother's a newfag failsatan


Your PC being shit is no fault of the game. But doing the same mission two dozen times is.

Reminder that snakehole is located pic related, otherwise you just have a shitty cosplayer with her legs in a sleeping bag.

this

Being completely unrelated to earthen serpentes, this is not actually correct. With no canonical information on the location of the genitalia, it is purely up to the artist's rendition.

They're fucking aliens user. The fact they look like snakes is because of the lack of imagination.

From the few hours I could stand playing it I was able to feel this problem, but it's nice to see someone be able to put it in words.

If I have to be completely honest I think they've hobbled themselves developmentally with the 'that's x-com baby' meme which seems fully adopted. All it really takes is the one time where you set up a perfect overwatch ambush on an enemy, only to have everyone but the grenade you threw to ensure no cover miss and you realize that it's just stupid to waste time or resources on anything else. I'm not asking for everyone in the squad to drop enemies with 75% accuracy at 200+ yards. I'm just asking for soldiers to be able to hit a target out in the open with no cover from about 50 to 100 feet away. And if they got their head out of their ass over this, then holding positions, covering people and getting pinned down would be where the tactical planning went rather than 'well i hope i'm lucky enough to not die' more than half the time early game.

But whatever, at least we got snek out of it. That's something, right?

I'm not sure I understand the complaints with Civ IV. An individual can play conservatively on lower difficulty levels, but they must learn how to play aggressively at higher difficulty levels. If the computer opponent is able to cheat by getting more resources, then it is in the player's best interest to be aggressive about taking those resources early and often. Pitting civilizations against eachother is necessary since it is the only way to neutralize the computer's advantage.

...

Everyone's wrong. What they fucked up is performance. Youtube and twitch stars with their GTX 1080s can put it on their top 10 lists because that's the one game that made them think whole year and they get sucked off by a dev. Firaxis keeps releasing shit that takes years to fix and they expect you to pay for it. They tried to push xcom 2 into mainstream, but forgot that normies will buy anything with high enough marketing budget that runs ok. They had neither.

There are several reasons, but the biggest for me was the timers. The dumbest possible thing they added to XCOM, a turn based game which centers around using proper tactics and strategy development, leans heavily (like 50% of the missions or some gay shit) on a mechanic that actively discourages you from using good tactics. Instead of taking your time and trying to tactically make the best decisions in order to most efficiently kill aliens and keep your soldiers alive, Firaxis made the most enraging, retarded fucking choice to put in a mechanic which doesn't allow you to do any of that. It's "rush rush rush" or you lose the mission. At the start of the game it seems doable, but as time wears on you begin to lose the war of attrition against the timers. You simply get too many injuries and casualties as a result of being very risky and making deliberately stupid moves (sprint into this dark area you haven't uncovered yet, for example) in order to finish the mission before the timer expires.

If you're not killing everything on the first turn you encounter them then you're going to lose. No tactics, only overwatch and wait.

Could one of you nickles absolutely spoonfeed the fuck out of me on how to get these games and LW?

Xenonauts 2 will fix it.

Please tell me there's someone else out there who has this problem.

Git gud

never lost a game either
i'm just so slow that by the time i get to lasers im already bored

...

it's so fucking basic a game and it's glitchy as fuck. Everything's bugged and glitched to hell, especially animations

How did you restart 250 times? It usually takes one hour to get to lasers.

Not me. It takes me like 20-30 minutes to finish the first mission and if one guy gets wounded I restart.

firaxis games are cancerous unoptimized, overrated shit. Why they aren't seen by everyone with the same disdain as other triple ayy titles baffles me

Because of the balance of this game. After a while it usually becomes very obvious that you're going to win and there's no challenge afterwards

Now that I posted that, I guess I figured out my problem.

Stop being so autistic. Soldiers are very replacable in Xcom 1 unless they are one of the special soldiers you can get later.
In Xcom 2, you mostly want the hero soldiers who are OP and possibly a few regular soldiers eith the right extra abilities.
Why does it take you 30 minutes to do a 5 minute mission? jesus christ

I want everyone to come home safe.
i actually keep a spreadsheet of all my soldiers
i was diagnosed with asperger's syndrome at the age of 15

It's a war, you have to expect casualties.
Just be glad you aren't playing the older Xcoms where getting out of a Skyranger is like the Landing of Normandy.

i didnt notice that when i saved it
ive found several others too and my only source is what i get on here so that says alot about the site lately

Letting in Cuckchan rapefugees was such a good idea. They contribute so much to our culture.
Diversity is our strength. We must allow reddit and tumblr in.

Here's your (You), Spend it wisely.

I've played WotC past laser weapons but I didn't have enough motivation to drive myself past them. Just for reference, I finished a Commander and Legendary Campaign both on Ironman mode. I found the (((Chosen))) to be more annoying than actually threatening with the only one being a massive (and partially unfair until you get battle scanners/scanning protocol) pain in the ass being the assassin. From what I've noticed with WotC is that it's doing everything it can get you men injured. Not killed outright, just heavily crippled.

The fact there is no cap on how those stats from being a special agent makes it kind of hilarious that you can easily break the game's balance over your knee but demonstrates that power creep in full force. Firaxis seems to want you to make everything past laser weapons a power trip even though I feel like it arrives way too early for it to be satisfying or maybe I'm just too good at these games and really makes the rest of the game pretty boring. It's probably why I enjoy the LW mods more than most of the vanilla game because at least with those they balance out the massive power creep with just as powerful enemies to compete against. Even if both mods have a LOT of their own flaws and bullshit.

My favorite things that came out of that expansion was more of the flavor stuff like posters and radio funnily enough. None of these special big features that will impact the game drastically.

You're lucky then, for me the Assassin would home in on my injured soldiers and kill them and completely ignore the many uninjured soldiers who are closer to her.

I've only had one time where a chosen killed one of my men and I think that was by mistake since the chosen's abilities aren't meant to kill any of your men deliberately, just incapacitate them so they can be snatched away.

Me on the other hand, The Assassin would kill a soldier every time I met her. She'd use her free turn to kill the one soldier who was on low health. It was frustrating and made beating her feel very good.

Everything is wrong with it. The story and themes are cancer, the characters are cancer, the designs are cancer.
They completely fucked up the resistance theme by making your guys super powered soldiers instead of desperate terrorists, they didn't implement any kind of propaganda war or something like that, they even managed to make fucking Bradford unlikeable. Every character is OC donut steel tier (this "chosen" shit being especially awful), every weapon tier feels unsatisfying (fucking charge up time for mag and plasma, seriously?), new aliens are not interesting or threatening, there's no simulation of anything whatsoever so it's still a glorified dice game with an XCOM skin on top etc etc. I could stay here the rest of the day.

Also the customization is the most disapointing shite ever. I thought at least that would be decent but there's like 5 faces to choose from and that's it. Plus the armor designs are ugly and the voices are awful.

Oh, yeah, that's something I find really annoying about it. All its characterisation, all of its visuals, all of its setting is so fucking obnoxiously uninspired. Forced running jokes/epic memes. OC donut steels galore. Every returning alien design remade to have this funny, friendly, cartoony look to it. Gun designs seemingly modelled after Nerf blasters. Taking X-COM's art style that was explicitly modeled after manga like Akira and replacing it with one that was explicitly modeled after GI Joe.

How the hell am I baiting when you yourself called the game boring (past a point)? UFO wasn't any different in that respect when you got several fags with massive TUs who could fly three screens at the time and or had a bunch of can't miss tier reaction shots. Also the injury shit is a feature lifted from LW you hypocrite.


I think generic sci-fi meets power rangers is more appropriate than explicitly modeled after GI Joe. Maybe they picked the faggiest gear they could from the franchise?

This.

Nothing they promised actually works. No stealth to speak of, no guerrilla fighting, no resistance management.

So anyone excited for Phoenix Point?

Or you could, you know, use a smoke grenade.

I'm pretty sure it isn't. I could be not remembering this right, but I'm probably 85% sure that in XCOM Enemy Unknown injured soldiers DID have medbay wait times and the game released with that mechanic; it's only that the injury times were very, very short (3-6 days IIRC), and so you didn't often have soldiers sitting in medbay given the time between missions. Long War simply gave you a ton more soldiers and made medbay heal times far longer, making injuries way more meaningful than in the base game. They weren't lifted from the mod, they were in EU to begin with.

nothing is wrong, it is only nostalgia talking. I have played the nuxcom 1 and 2 and enjoyed it

Injuries and arbitrary injuries in the style of didn't have a scratch but fatigue that were weeks long was and remained a LW thing because muh hardcore.

Is X-COM designed to be random like that Dungeons game?

So many times I set up the perfect crossfire, only to have everyone miss and the Alien start one shotting everyone.

It makes strategy seem meaningless because its so lolrandom

The numbers and the RNG algorithm are sound, but it very much looks like the game is out to get you from a player's perspective. Hence why you try to minimize the RNG as much as possible - The most prominent tool for that being grenades.

Shit design is shit. Firaxis are bad and should not handle Civ or XCOM IPs.

SNAKE PUSSY

The problems with nu-com 1 and 2 is that they have worse design and less features than UFO Defense.

They lack stuff like actual projectile paths, which UFO Defense had or at least faked well: Random shots could kill your soldier, a civilian, destroy a wall or an alien near your target.

There is no more real in-combat inventory management, leading to less fun. You can't for example play hot potato with high explosives in nucom because it'd be awkward for consoles.

Its also why there is a 1 base limit, no manufacturing and selling said items whenever you want and so on, or why you can't give every rookie a rocketlauncher like you could in UFO.
HE, incendiary and rocketlauncher only runs are not possible in nucom


But the biggest part for why its worse than UFO Defense is the design:

The design for the actual combat is iffy too, it just gives you +numbers depending on distance and cover and rolls a die behind the curtain for when and if you hit, shit is rigged.
Of course UFO is also rigged, but it is very noticable and very frustrating in nucom for two reasons:
Standard shots only hit & roll only once, and after shooting you generally can't do anything with the soldier anymore.
In UFO one of your soldiers could shoot and roll ~20 times, you had like 3 or 4 times more soldiers, the more often you roll die, the more the average the overall result becomes and therefor it is more predictable for humans. It feels more like you have control over the situation and can predict shit.

Another aspect is the whole leveling your soldier thing: Losing a soldier in nucom feels and is absolutely terrible for you, you need them to survive and if RNG just happens to not be in your favor they're fucking dead through absolutely no fault of your own.

UFO Defense is more forgiving there - bullshit happens, a alien can whip a grenade into the skyranger, but for the largest part your soldiers are very expendable. Unless you have psionic soldier getting murdered by that, but at that point you have multiple bases and can afford the loss.
Or you can have your base invaded as your first mission, but people aren't frustrated by these things generally and are rather amused.

Among restricting items and weapons to armor, the biggest downfall of nucom is the awful fucking spawning system. The aliens move in groups as pods, get a free move for when you accidentally stumble into them or they into you and there is no more ambushing of them unless you happen to know where the pod is, overwatch and hope you rail whatever is there.
Its the shittiest system ever, sometimes you dash for cover with a soldier and he runs into a pod of fucked up shit that immediately flanks the fuck out of you.
You have to intentionally counter this spawning system to minimize its impact, and that is plain fucking terrible.

Original or nuX-com?

Original is pretty fair. If in doubt use explosives. Early game you want most of your squad as Heavy Cannon HE, a few Heavy rocket snipers, and some pistol/grenadiers.

It's RNG is just poorly designed and runs entierly against the player with a razor thin pass at 'balance' to justify stupid design. And is best exemplified by perfectly set up ambushes with multiple fire arcs, cover, the element of surprise and absolutely no cover for the enemy to hide behind resulting in only 1 enemy being hit. More subtly it is exemplified by trained soldiers less than 100 feet away in a flanking position missing with a burst fire.

The RNG from the game affects both sides of a fight in an attempt to present the effects as 'fair' to the player and under the pretense that it will ultimately be the players tactical decisions that decide the outcome of a fight. This, however, is largely a lie if you do not use grenades and explosions to negate the to hit RNG. While your troops have a rather limited moveset, many of which are still tied to that RNG system, it takes a long time to fudge the numbers up enough to actually use them. (and since their classes are determined at random, you can't maximize someone with a high aim score guaranteed or minimize the impact of someone with poor stats as support). The enemy, on the other hand, has the whole games system designed around them. First, and most obvious example is that the combat is determined by RNG, and the enemy is going to get hundreds and hundreds of attempts on each of your squad members. The second, far more insidious example is just what it means when an enemy hits your soldier compared to what happens when you hit an enemy. Sectoid panics a member? They're shut down. Snek binds one of your members? They're shut down and have to be saved or they'll die. Sectoid mind controls one of your units? Now you've effectively lost a unit and added one to the enemy. Sure, each of these is also determined by RNG, as are your shots. However you quickly realize that your 2-4 damage rifle that wont kill most enemies early game in 1 hit doesn't quite compare to these 'save or suck' abilities. But this system is even more insidious than you would think, as it actually works against the player by cutting off the most logical way of approaching warfare otherwise. Because of the way these enemy unit abilities work, you HAVE to take out certain members of the enemy group first. You can't leave the sectoid alone, or the commander fucker that gives everyone a bonus to hit your guys and extra damage for free, you have to target those first to shut down those abilities. These units, however, are far tougher than their companions, and often like to be further away from combat (which they get to move to for free, even when you ambush them). Mathematically speaking, what you want to do is to eliminate as much of the enemies resources as possible on your turn, which would mean cutting through the 3-5 regular enemies on your turn so that you have the numerical advantage when its their turn. However with unpredictable effective damage output and with just how horrific these special unit abilities are (each hard cc ability at least somewhat equivalent to 2-3 enemy shots that hit) you do not have the option to isolate these units. Because of these factors, you are more or less forced to play the game in a very particular way. where skill is reduced to simply when you say 'fuck it' to picking up alien tech and just throwing grenades to avoid RNG entirely.

This is ignoring things like panicking and the injured status, which are in there entirely to dick over the player.

Aside from the shitty RNG combat (which should be completely overhauled in my opinion) is the fact that there are several factors in combat that could be made into long term meta-game 'long war' goals that just aren't. Particularly in Nucom2 where you're playing as terrorists and the aliens are on the planet. There's no missions to go and terrorize a certain aspect of an alien group to disadvantage them long term. No ability to sabotage communications equipment, or blow up a cloning center, or frame one group so that they have both short and long term detriments to their forces. No blowing up a sectoid production facility so there are less of them per mission until its up and working again, no poisoning the clone soldiers soup so that they are prone to panicking like your troops.

I dunno, I think the biggest problem with Nu is that it's more board game than simulation, and what I really want is a hardcore xeno occupation terrorist simulator.

No they aren't sound, they are completely fucked. Compare it to Xenonauts or even X-COM and you'll see.

Is that fucking long war? I enjoyed that mod a lot in the beginning but later on when the ayys started getting bullshit perks and stats I just quit. And the airgame seems intentionally designed to be the opposite of fun.

Did you notice the ayylien jumping THROUGH the ceiling also?

Seriously I never had 5 96% shots missing consecutively in either of these games, but in NUCOM that's basically every mission. I can take a burst at 39% or 46% each shot on Xenonauts and almost every time 2 or 3 of the shots will hit but in NUCOM taking a 39% shot is unimaginable. I haven't had a single 50%- shot hit in that game. Even 70% is risky as fuck.

i started playing openxcom after watching autism runs of ufo defense and tftd. using his autism run techniques they were pretty easy on veteran. i wanna play other games in the franchise but dont know which ones are good or have the motivation to try them out

>>>/cuckchan/

I thought that was already in vanilla, if I recall correctly one of the gene mods in EW that you could get from thin men was being able to jump up roofs without needing to climb or anything.

That video is disingenuous. Aside from the thin man jumping through the ceiling which is goddamn retarded and obviously a glitch (or the ceiling is destroyed but doesn't show it, which is still a glitch) that turn played out exactly as it should. Reaction shots have a penalty to aim, and Lightning Reflexes is an ability that gives a major penalty to aim to anyone reaction firing at the target. Each of those soldiers probably had like a 15% chance to hit, if anything has Lightning Reflexes the chances of it getting shot by overwatch is very slim. Then the crit at the end of that video is fully expected, since that soldier was flanked.

The jump through the ceiling is utter bullshit. If you pretend there was a hole there he could get through and that was fine, the rest of it is just the game mechanics working the way they designed them. Don't act like any of those reaction shots should have hit.

It's funny to hear niggers complain about RNG in NuCOM considering the it always cheat in the player's favor even on the highest difficulty.

Apocalypse is the type of game where you either really, really love it or really, really hate it. I think it's worth trying even if it's just for thereal-time mode.

Advantages don't exist when they are given just to compensate a fucked up system.

Truth be told I feel the true problem with nuXcom's rng is not the system itself but rather the lack of options. You can't spend your two moves to increase your shot chances. You don't have alternative armors, weapons or even stats(unless you're playing on that one modifier). The most you have are grenades, which are absolute and the reason why grenade spam is good in either game, or replacing the grenade with something to heal your troops who can die in one to two hits, or something to make them aim better but not by much.
Compare that to Xenonauts, you have the ap system which is already a huge plus but you also have more soldiers with more options from the start(particularly the shields which alone really opens up a lot of tactical options and decisions).
Hell even Silent Storm lets you target specific body parts with the downside of losing some accuracy. And said body parts can affect a soldier's efficiency. That shit is just the coolest. I hope Phoenix Point(whenever is that releasing?) takes full advantage of that limb targeting system.

The thinman has more than 3 hp so yes.

Ufo defense is probably the best in the series. Terror from the deep suffers from frustrating level design, but is worth a try. Apocalypse is very different, but it's worth a shot to. Nucom 1/longwar mod is decent, but is shallow compared to the previous games. I have not played Nucom 2.

Is that how it behaves in longwar? In enemy unknown lightning reflexes is an ability that can be used once a turn. If it can proc multiple times like that it's pure bullshit because it's a guaranteed miss.

Yeesh this thread blew up, thanks for all the detailed replies anons.
expect autism for this post as I make up for being a lazy OP.

thanks user I'll keep this in mind. Classic xcom looks a bit dated for me, but I'll see about it.

I already had Jagged Alliance 2 on my backlog but I've not heard of Silent Storm, should be entertaining, can you tell me anything more about it user?
I know now not to give money to them if I wanna play nu-com, thanks user

that's the long war mod right user? Is it okay to play it right from the start with the long war mod or do you recommend running through vanilla first? I have mild experience with permadeath SRPGs like fire emblem.
I'll probably go to the classic older games after trying out the nu-shit to get me acclimated, they sound simplified but that might be helpful for a scrub like me to get into the better vidya.
also thanks to you and all the other anons for explaining why Xcom 2 (and to an extent nu-com EU) is bad. Its crystal clear to me now.

Basically its all style, much less substance than the classics they took from, while also having bullshit systems and coin toss mechanics with fucked up RNG?

this is somethign I haven't seen touched on yet. The gameplay i saw made the characters (at least on first glance) look vaguely intriguing? Though I wasn't aware that they're all special snowflakes. They just seemed like special hero troops to me so that's a shame.

Eh?

I've heard that in nu-com the RNG rolls in favor of the AI, or at least the AI cheats or something with its crit rates and whatnot/

No, on every difficulty but Impossible, the game cheats in the players favor. Otherwise you get 10% bonus I believe.

Each consecutive shot has a lesser penalty than the last though but yeah it's bullshit.

Because you were trying to bait some cuckchan shit stirring over a filename (despite that we've been able to save as the unix timestamp for at least a year now). I didn't disagree with you, it's a major problem with all the games that once you learn what the fuck you're doing the game becomes a major pushover.

Nigger, I wasn't talking about the fatigue system. I'm talking about actually taking injuries rather than my soldiers going on a little holiday for merely getting PTSD over seeing a sectoid. The fatigue system was a (shitty) means to an end to make sure you cycle soldiers out and don't simply stick to one A team because you're less likely to get injuries unlike in UFO Defense where you're guaranteed to get shot as soon as you take your firsts steps out of whatever transport you used.


That's what almost all Firaxis games are today.

I don't remember. I've played both and have vastly more fun with Long War, as frustrating as the long game can be. I think in the base game it's an activated ability only your shotgunners can use and it gives you a big "bonus to dodge" essentially for a move, and I think in Long War it's a passive. I could be completely wrong there, it's been forever since I last played, all I know is that having that on one of your soldiers gave them remarkable survivability and comboed great with making a "tanky" soldier that distracted the enemy.

They are the snakemen of the original game but female.

Oh right, these.

It's Long War and I'm not so sure if you should have a run through vanilla first. You could try it and see how far you get before you just want to drop it. The most important thing I can really recommend you learn going from vanilla to LW is just the core stuff. But do try the classic games first. You'll learn what the design differences are between what Firaxis and Microprose had in mind for their games.


In Vanillia, LW1 and LW2 it's a passive you have on a soldier that drastically reduces the chances of you getting shot but also drastically increases that chance for every overwatch they get caught up on for that particular run. In vanilla 2 it's only a guaranteed missed first overwatch but for LW2 they restored it back to vanilla. Do keep in mind that it's not a guarenteed miss and enemies with high chances to hit (like Outsiders with 150-200~ aim in the late game) are very likely still able to hit you. Thankfully in LW1 LR is the scout's class ability.

war of the chosen not included in the goyim pack.

I like this.

Is that how cucklings call arbitrary bullshit that behaves exactly the same as wound recovery does? And don't lie. Even if you're playing whatever difficulty level and with additional mods there's no guarantee the enemy will have clear or at least land shots. Also, heard of tanks?

I wish X-Com was as good as I wanted it to be. I heard "Campy Sci-Fi Final Fantasy Tactics" and came running. What I got was an RNG skinnerbox with less player-influence in the RNG resolution than the tabletop games I play where I throw literal dice.

Ufo-defense is more about resource management, and risk mitigation than tactics. This is considering you're troops are likely too retarded to actually make any of your tactics work. I think it's better than FF tactics though because you can lose a mission, and keep going.

The only cases you have really where you're less likely to take in injuries than outright dying is with Mind frays and poison. And did you know that the armor in LW1 gives you points of health that DO NOT wound your soldier if it passes that threshold? Alas resulting in fewer wounds. Again, fatigue is there because in at least LW1 there's much less chance of your soldiers getting wound timers. It's also there because let's say you have one really bad mission (and you're almost guaranteed to have at least one) and you squad wipe, you at least have a back up squad.

I'm not gonna argue with that because it's more about differing playstyles.

It's even funnier i had less misses on 40% shots compared to 80% ones over the same sample size of 50 each.

It's funny to hear niggers defend a system that needs to skew the numbers in players' favour in NuCOM because the AI doesn't need to preserve soldiers, gets a magical free move, has better weapons and outnumbers the players 3 or 4 to 1.
Working around a broken system is just not fun. NuCOM heavily punishes players who actually want a firefight instead of overwatch into trigger into mop-up. Devs are complete morons who when told that their system sucks put in turn limits to punish the best strategy and responded to complains about AI cheating a free move by adding a once-per-mission ambush mechanic, yet aliens STILL got the free move.

I remember that you had fewer chances to get hurt because when you did even a "lightly" wounded soldier would take like 30 days early game, so good fucking luck using ever again that one soldier who didn't die out of pure luck

Are you special? Seriously, you can shove that goalpost moving shtick where the sun doesn't shine. Fatigue "wounds" are word for word wounds that apply regardless of anything else namely whether any damage was suffered at all.

No, but you'd rather take a stab and drop it? Tough. HWPs have more HP, TUs and armor than squaddies early to mid game by a ton. What's more they're immune to PSIshit, smoke/fatal wounds, don't require living space, don't require salary, don't require rearming and don't require healing downtime. They also always go first off the ramp and provide cover even in death for hobos in gear that's worth more in engineering hours and material alone than their price tag.

So I've been playing open xcom, and just realized that alien bases are not just discovered, but you need to fin them using stuff like interceptors. I am currently in the year 2000 and have found alien base 15, five of which are ethereal bases. Luckily I now have powerful psi soldiers, and just go beat the ethereals with soldiers with no weapons.

Thanks for reminding me OP I never finished that vidya XCom 2 thing because I got wrapped up in other shit

I believe they have repair times if they get damaged but that might be a Long War only thing. In any case, HWPs are a crutch. Mid to high level soldiers are far more powerful and versatile than HWPs, but you're not going to get there without leveling a rookie. You can't level rookies when you're replacing them with HWPs. It's a short term better tactical choice that sacrifices long term strategy at building your roster. Of COURSE they're better than rookies, that's the whole point, if they weren't they'd be useless, but if you try to rely on those your roster is going to suffer massively later in the game and you won't have enough good soldiers for rotation.
Using them as a crutch all the time is probably doable in vanilla, but the same sacrifice is still there, albeit probably far less severe than in LW.

You really are special. For the sake of clarity since you're either one dense motherfucker or purposely trying to piss me off: fatigue being bullshit is related to LW which is derivative/mod nuXCOM. HWP/you're-full-of-shit talk is UFO defense as per the can of worms you opened in as if fatal wounds and time units weren't a clue enough.

And I didn't double check the ID. Fuck. Anyway, the repair and rearm* for UFO or TFTD tanks is free provided their ammo type is las, plasma or sonic.

...

I'm not the same guy m8. You also didn't address the central point of what I said, if someone is wrong you provide a counterargument for why they're wrong, you basically just did a "no u" because you thought I was someone else.
I'm not saying HWPs are bad and they definitely have their uses, but they're still a long term strategic sacrifice. Whether that's big or small depends on what game "version" you're playing. I wouldn't suggest something like "don't ever use HWPs because rookies are a better long term payoff" or whatever, even though that's true, HWPs are a tool and should be used when the situation calls for it.

Yeah, I saw the post count and jumped to the conclusion. I'm still arguing with a guy over something in the original games unrelated to either nucom or LW. As for bots in the new games I honestly don't even remember using them.