X-Com 1 and 2 (new versions) are great games, even if they moved away from the large squad slaughter that was Enemy Unknown, terror from the deep and partially Apocalypse. I personally really enjoyed looking at black sections of the map and thinking "that will cost 3 rookies to explore"
Everyone is aware of the "95% to hit meme" around X-Com, and if you've played Phoenix Point, the difference is especially jarring. If you haven't, aiming in that game is purely a probability cone, so standing point blank next to an alien means something. In X-Com it doesn't mean diddly squat.
I finally figured out what the problem with X-Com is, and why it's always uniquely frustrating. With it's pod based mechanics, fake stealth and drip fed enemies. What you are seeing on screen has no relevance and only serves as a distraction. Being right next to an Alien and missing is irrelevant because where the character and alien are on screen do not correlate with the game.
X-Com is, for all intents and purposes a very fun card battle game. If it were a Dos prompt game, with exactly 0 visuals, nothing would be lost.
Try it next time you play, completely ignore the visuals and imagine your character as a card drawing a dice based attack against another card.
Those % to hit chances are all effected by the location of your character in relation to them. The Flanking bonus alone takes impossible shots and makes them near guaranteed. Standing point blank to the enemy means a whole lot, and anyone whose ever actually played the game knows it. Everything visual is relevant under that umbrella and disproves your entire point. If you want to drag it to pedantic, literally every game could do without visuals and just be a number on the screen and accomplish the same thing.
The problem with the "95% chance to hit" meme is that its brought on by lack of information. There are a lot of pure raw numbers going on behind the scenes to make that final one, and often times your starting units just literally lack a high enough number even with every advantage multiplier to get to 100%. The game doesn't explain its own mechanics other than a vague notion that is good enough but leaves you with a lot of those Xcom Moments of confusion when they happen.
But that's why the most popular mod for the game was a literal higher difficulty, more complexity one. Because once you have access to more information the game becomes a lot more manageable and predictable to a point of needing more difficulty to return the challenge.
Both of the new Xcoms are littered with issues, like the retarded stealth and pod mechanics, but the RNG to hit thing isn't are egregious as it seems once you actually understand what its calculating and how to work within it (grenades bandaid everything).
I've played the literal Card Battle game that Firaxis made after Xcom 2 (Midnight Sun) and it plays nothing like Xcom.
And even if RNG were really bad, part of the fun/challenge of tactics games like XCOM is making a plan, and then having a plan to deal with if/when the first plan falls apart. It's a management game. And, just like in something like RimWorld or Dwarf Fortress, much of the !FUN! comes from managing those absurd and chaotic situations where everything goes to absolute shit.
I like missing high percentage shots, because it makes you think more and manage the new and more challenging situation. A string of bad luck can lead to some of the most fun gameplay, and the most memorable stories.
I've missed a 100% shot before, back in Long War 1, due to mod number rounding. I remember it a decade later, because that was hilarious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-iNE6zv90
There's also the point that 100% just means your chance of hitting, a mob can still dodge if the numbers are close enough and reduce your hit to "Grazed" doing only partial damage in later games.
Thin Mints from EU/EW and Sneks from XC2 were similar in that regards as both were
snakesagile fuckers.As the game shipped, overwatch watch so overpower, I usually got the fuckers. They kill a lot of dudes tho.
Also true, but the kind of people to complain about "le 95% miss" are the people who don't understand that to begin with so I skipped saying it.
The game gives you risky situations that you have to take, and then deal with the consequences of. There are ways to remove the risk (explosives) but that comes with a cost of materials or cover for yourself depending on the game. Higher difficulties teach you that those removals are the biggest part of early game strategy to a point of minimal actual firing for a time.
A comparison in a similar genre. Fire Emblem 6 and 7. 6 is notorious for its extremely low hit rates across the board, which means its incredible difficulty is one of its most remembered parts and it makes sure you have to engage with the game with both barrels at all times without a lot of fluffs. 7 on the other hand (as well as every later game) increases the hit rate to be basically 100% on most enemies who aren't specifically designed with dodge and it turns the game into far more of a slugging match of raw attrition where the difficulty comes from adding extra layers (skills, reinforcements) instead of number on number.
Not to mention both Fire Emblem and Xcom are designed with the idea of regular loss of soldiers and needing to replace them with lesser versions, so the loss is part of the intended process. Anyone whose played Xcom through without losing soldiers or having to Abandon missions should know how fucking easy the endgame is with how strong you are.
I won't say I like missing high % shots, but I've found that the people who complain about it endlessly are usually just bad at the game and trying to brute force everything and getting fucked on that. Especially as Xcom is probably the easiest to save scum of any in the genre.
It turns out, most people have no understanding of probability. A 5% chance to miss is the same as rolling a nat 1 in DnD. If you have a group of 12 aliens/monsters and each one takes around 2 hits to kill, then you are going to have a 70% chance of 1 or more misses.
It's the same thing with Rimworld. A horde of Mechanoids firing at your pawns, even with a <1% chance to hit, will hit that pawn simply due to the law of large numbers.
A gamer's goal is to ALWAYS reduce the randomness, so that the fewest rolls necessary take place.
That wonderful moment in the TLP DLC where you realise there is no loot to worry about and suddenly grenade spam is back on the menu. 💥
Especially in 2 where turtling forever doesn't work due to the various timers which mean you need to play aggressive. Overwatch kill boxes worked too well in earlier games.
Even understanding why the hit rates are the way they are, it doesn't align anywhere close with reality. An elite commando unit, that misses shots that are only yards away, or even point blank, it just pure frustration. It doesn't make logical sense, unless the characters you're controlling are untrained retards with the worst vision on the planet. No amount of "but we need it for gameplay balance" will overcome that disalignment with reality and reason.
That type of gameplay makes the player realize that the gameplay revolves around babysitting retards that couldn't tie their shoes without somehow dying horribly (oops, the 99% chance you had to succeed somehow rolled a negative crit, causing the shoelaces to somehow pierce the brain and kill your character, and the character behind him). That type of gameplay logic occurs in many more games than just X-Com, too, and is why I no longer play them. It's a souring experience.
What X-Com is trying to present to you is a simplified (& cinematic-fied) turn-based version of a chaotic battlefield. The overhead grid map with near-perfect visibility is a bad way to actually conceive of the combats. Instead you should be thinking about the first-person shaky-cam, night-vision version where your guy is mostly hiding behind cover or running flat-out into a dark building, only to see a grotesque alien waiting for him around the corner.
In real combats something like 99+% of "shots" won't actually result in a hit on target, even with elite soldiers. X-Com if anything is overstating how accurate soldiers in real firefights are.
I agree, to an extent. I'm not saying experienced special forces are perfect aimbots. But still, the game contradicts itself in that regard, which is why the "95% chance to hit" is so memed on. The dice rolls are not reflective of the information you're given. It would be better if the game gave you accurate percentages according to how they calculate it, which is just another layer of frustration in these games. It's obvious that the percentages given to the player aren't accurate. Also, I can't tell you how many times my characters had perfect shots lined up, on enemies that were in wide open terrain, with no obstacles or other impedances, at very close ranges, and they missed, over and over and over and over, even with automatic weapons.
This, in turn, forces another layer of frustration on the player, to save and reload countless times, just to not be screwed over by the game's dice rolls. And in harder fights, this has to be done multiple times, just so you're not gimped in subsequent fights by being perpetually worn down by attrition and undermanned, or staffed with noob troops with low stats, because your better troops kept getting sacrificed to bullshit RNG. It feels unfair, because it is.
The retarded part is that they clearly want your starter soldiers to be random retards barely out of Boot, but for story reasons they are supposed to be Elites already. Its one thing Xcom 2 does better. In that random Guerilla fighters make a lot more sense than the World's Best like Xcom 1 had. I won't defend it though because its a terrible integration of Narrative and Gameplay.
I like how Alien Dark Descent did it a lot better. Where the accuracy level is effected by their increasing fear/stress levels and you have actual control of accessing that risk and working to minimize it so you don't spiral out of control.
Apart from all the friendlies you "team up" with during Retaliation missions that are determined to plink every single alien possible which means you end up with a billion Codex clones, enraged Muton Berserkers, and perma-shelled Gatekeepers. 🙄
Its amazing how they managed to turn reinforcements, which provide completely free meatshields and extra damage, into a bad thing.
The region perk for a bonus ally was a complete waste of a perk slot, and even if you had no others the actual performance would be so bad you were asking for shit to go wrong.
Baseline stats, so they would fail to hit anything. Baseline gear, so even if you were rocking T3 guns and gear you'd find yourself with maybe a T2 groupie that was never going to do much vs all the armour and hp late game brought with it. Even just the shitty grenades they had were pointless as frags had shit shredding, shit damage, and shit aoe.
I'd take any other perk over those if I could, even the ones for stupid shit like sending lightly injured soldiers into combat, which I'd never do in the first place!
At the very least, they were good at sussing out Faceless before they popped during a very bad time.
My personal "head-canon" as it were is that the nations backing XCOM started sending their soldiers that were not great and then claiming they are elite. It would certainly fit with the lore about how the XCOM Project was close to getting shut down as it seemed like something that didnt have a purpose anymore (which is why you are starting with pretty minimal facilities).
This shit happened way too much so I modded "Elite Mercs" and "Combat Veterans" as recruitable soldiers.
Was it any good though? It's finally trending towards a decent sale and I've been considering it. (Lot's of other games I'm still more likely to pick up though.)
I really enjoyed my time with it. It being a Card Battler that isn't roguelike lets you build towards strategies you enjoy and get synergy going that you understand how to exploit. Which leads to most battles feeling closer to a Puzzle than anything, as there is nearly 0 RNG (except for certain characters/cards explicitly made for it).
And for a lot of characters, its actually lets you feel the Power Fantasy each of them should bring. Spiderman runs circles around everything and laughs at how slow they are. Ironman overcompensates by trying to do everything himself and ends up just dominating the battlefield with missles. Venom just walks up and fucking bricks people. A legitimately good integration where every characters fights like it feels like they should narratively.
The biggest problem being that the game suffers from the same issue Xcom 2 had, where Jake Solomon is still pissed about Overwatch spam so he designed the game to operate on Triple Speed. Which means a lot of characters like Captain America or Deadpool, who are built for defense and building up end up very weak or near useless.
Its got an annoying Tumblr girl as a major character, but the morality system means you can literally tell her to shutup and fuck off everytime she opens her mouth. And since she is one of the worst characters period (the one who has RNG on every ability) you don't even lose much by doing so.
Its got a small tacked on overworld, but unless you play on the top difficulties you don't need to even interact with it as it just gives crafting mats for consumables and some costumes.
The Ultimate All DLC Edition (worth it for the additional characters like Venom and Deadpool) is usually under 20$ and a first playthrough got me a good 50 hours where I was having legitimate fun doing random missions, so I say its better than it has any right to be given its a Modern Marvel product.
Awesome, thanks for that detailed response. I'll keep an eye on the sales.
The game also had errors making the display wrong.
You end up loosing alot less squad members in the original X Com if you take the scorched earth approach.
Set things on fire. Blow up buildings. Thrown grenades and high explosives work great. Breech and clear? Pfft, fuck that - blow up the walls and watch as sectoids pass out from smoke inhalation. Massive fields of wheat in a night mission on a farm? It's not a night mission anymore if everything is on fire! Sectoids holed up in thier ship? Set up a crossfire of 8 guys and just wait patiently under cover. They'll come out. They always come out.
Man, now I want to go play the original X Com again.
I do miss this option from the later games. Being able to actually tell your fireteam where to fire so they can blow down the side of a wooden hut or concrete wall, or even an alien ship so you can then lob a fusion bomb in.
It's like 8 MB and very easy to find online if you don't want to repurchase it somewhere.
There is also Xenonauts, which is a more recent (than the originals) Xcom that plays like the originals, but with a different name.
I miss the Megapol Autocannon with HE ammo from Apocalypse. Yeah the Toxigun is just objectively better (as long as you have soldiers that can aim at least a little bit), but it will never be as cool as one-handing a 40mm minigun with explosive rounds, that's some Warhammer shit.
This has been my go-to strategy.
Have a dedicated demolitions expert and another squad mate who just lugs around high-explosives in his backpack, and let the demo guy just place explosives everywhere and level the stage. It's also how I would approach entering into alien craft: use tanks and just blast the walls down for a couple of turns and have multiple squads surround the craft. No need to worry about getting shot in the face when entering through the front door.
The only tricky tactics is later on with the battleships and their teleport entrances -- but you can still toss explosives up the teleporter and kill anything on the upper floors. Absolutely loved that about the original trilogy.
If xenonauts 2 ever comes out.
wut
it absolutely does matter. Where things are determines hit chances, including cover, etc. You also get height advantage, etc.
If you're going to make that argument, the originals were the same way. sometimes you just got instagibbed on a bad roll and there was nothing you could do about it. Dice rolls, etc.
It means a 'lid is about to eat you.
In all seriousness, in X-Com 2 it meant more crit which was of particular use to Rangers using shotguns.
There are mods to fix this.
And this. Various difficulty mods exist that either flat out buff mobs, like Beta Strike so you won't be 1 shotting entire pods, or The Hive which can end up throwing so many 'lids at you that you really do need to specifically build loadouts for them, namely Bladestorm Rangers, otherwise you're not going to have enough AP to deal with the never ending waves of teeth and claws.
Yeah, no. This isn't true in the slightest, and again especially for X-Com 2. You gain bonus aim for being higher than a target. Sharpshooters gain even more stats from this as well as learning perks like Death from Above that grant an AP return if you kill something with a shot. Positioning is vital in some situations where you can block off ladders being used by Lost and if you are lucky enough to have the Between the Eyes park then you can pistol fire down every Lost in range and LoS providing you have the sharpshooters or modded classes which also take a pistol. Early game it can matter so much that Gatecrasher goes from a suicide run in Holland to shooting fish in a barrel in Hong Kong - this references Holland being flat and HK having more skyscrapers than anywhere else. Position, both elevation and proximity, absolutely fucking matter in early game.
Seriously, have you actually played these games are you literally just falling back on the first line of your second paragraph?
It's a meme because people remember missing a 95% shot. Same reason Repeater executes are mostly remembered because they are low RNG, then even more so when it ends up 1 shotting something like an Alien Ruler or Ethereal hybrid with 40++ hp. So a 95% miss which causes a TPK gets remembered far more than one which at worst fails to stop a 'lid eating another civvie.
This doesn't even work as an example either because there are card games which do care where you place things. Gwent from The Witcher 3 has actual combat locations: Close Combat, Ranged, and Siege. There are effect cards which can specifically target those locations or the entire map which then significantly change how a game might turn out.
For example: Biting Frost - Sets the strength of all Close Combat cards to 1 for both players.
Followed by: Villentretenmerth - Scorch - Close Combat: Destroy your enemy's strongest Close Combat unit(s) if the combined strength of all his or her Close Combat units is 10 or more.
If there are 10 cards in the CC locations, of which the Monster deck in particular will easily manage, then you destroy every single card with a two-card combo, which even the Witcher wiki points out.
Your entire opinion post reads like that of a casual tourist who asked ChatGPT to summarise X-Com and lacked the knowledge base to know whether the result was complete garbage or not.
You're very wrong about the accuracy thing, but dead on with the pod mechanic. Inactive pods don't behave in a realistic way, and the turn based system means that being spotted by an alien can mean instant ruin if it happens at the end of your turn. The player shouldn't be punished for taking actions in the wrong order if it's not possible to know what the correct order is.
I can't personally think of a way to remedy it without just removing the "entire team goes at once" mechanic, but it's uniquely frustrating to accidentally reveal the wrong tile and basically give the aliens a free turn. Activating a pod should at least give your entire team free overwatch or something.
Mods can help with some of the AI issues, the stealth thing is actually intentional design where pods move towards a fireteam.
This ends up as more of an experience thing in the reboots that comes down to slowly moving up a map and never double dashing - blue and yellow moves at the same time - unless you're doing something drastic like running a Bladestorm Ranger/Templar into a pod because you know it will scatter than and Bladestorm will still mean several attacks of opportunity. Templars are slightly better for this than Rangers as sometimes a Templar can learn Fortress which prevents fire damage, so accidentally meleeing a Purifier with a flamethrower doesn't end up being lethal.
It used to in the original if you left soldiers with enough AP.
In harder difficulties/battles, it forces the player to move their characters very slowly to compensate for that unfair mechanic. So if an enemy is spotted, at least it's at maximum range, and gives the player more chances to counter it. In addition to what I listed in an above comment, this adds another layer of frustration to these types of games, and why I no longer play them.
And that slow movement was directly cited as the "wrong way" to play by the game's director, which is why he added a very low time limit to basically every mission in Xcom 2. Which had a mod to remove it within like 2 days of release for how much everyone hated that idea, and I believe one that doubles it is even a baseline difficulty option now.
The Pod system heavily punishes speed, which worked in EU/EW because it worked as a soft stealth approach to all missions in exchange for being a bit boringly slow at points. Xcom 2 throws that out the window and basically forces you to make bad decisions in the name of "speed" because you will literally die unless you use every single blue move going towards the objective.
Initially the game rewarded moving slowly, which is why they added the controversial meld mechanic.
As amended, an aggressive strategy that risked your soldiers had long term rewards.
This is why Reapers were so OP in WotC. They could end up telling you everything about a map and do so while in stealth and often almost right next a hostile. Getting them before the other factions could literally make or break some playthroughs they were that good.
I didn't realize you could get reapers. Actually, I may not have played with WotC because I was done with the game before the expansion came out. I get your point tho.
One of the best things about X-Com 2 is that is was made alongside planned workshop content, which is why Long War Studio/Pavonis was able to release 3 content mods on release day because Firaxis had not only been working with them to help improve the workshop setup for launch, but also letting them play test things. It's why the actual upload dates for those 3 mods are before the release day.
Later on LWS/Pavonis would release the actual Long War 2 mod which included the 3 smaller mods and a whole revamp of the game which gave it a refreshing second wind between the original release and eventual War of the Chosen DLC which yet again revamped how the baseline game worked.
Throw in all the various other mods and you got a game with at least 3 ish "official" modes and a lot of other PGCs/Player Generated Content that meant significantly more content than most games would have expected from just the official devs.
I only played LW2 when it was in beta, and it was fucking nuts because the only way to complete a lot of the missions was to solo and duo them, which was apparently intentional or at least not minded by the beta testers. When people complained, a beta tester released videos of him YOLOing it with a flamethrower. I was among the people who wanted to kill the aliens more than run from them, so I gave up the game before LW2 was done.
The game values information. You have to move to get information. You have to make guesses. You win some. You lose some. It's not a perfect game. But it's a great game.
XCOM 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. I just really hate having a great run destroyed because the enemy pods all sprint directly toward my squad while the game pretends they just coincidentally all happened upon us.
Yeah XCOM 2 original unmodded was the one with "line of play" right? I think Long War did away with it.
People who complain about "95% chance to hit" in Xcom are the same as people who complain about "doom stacks" in Civilization 4: they think they know a lot more about the game than they do and they want to sound smart online.
In addition to what Adam said about hit chances, positioning affects line of sight, which affects the stealth and pod activation (which definitely have problems, but not to the degree that I’d call them “fake”). Positioning also affects AoE, availability of cover, ability to reach objectives, some environmental hazards, and the effective range of many abilities. To call it all fake and say it’s actually a card battle game is so strange that I can only assume you’ve either never played the game, completely failed to communicate your idea, or are reaching so hard to say something revelatory that you’ve diverted your point into retarded.
It's a risk management game.
It could be described that way, yes. That doesn't mean that it's a card game, and it also doesn't mean that positioning and terrain isn't a big part of managing that risk.
I agree with everything you say. 100% you manage that risk on both layers. One of the creators said something like "losing to random numbers" about hard difficulty. And that he loses 1/3 of his games. The big picture of the game is not losing to random numbers.
We may die, but la Resistance lives on.
Never going to see this kind of thing and think of anything other than the strategy games first.
I disagree on rng but enemy movement doesn't make any sense when you haven't been discovered yet, especially in 2.
In one mission I had most of my team fatigued except the Reaper and it was a retrieval mission so instead of taking rookies to the meatgrinder, I went with Reaper alone. Was undetected 98% of the mission just sneaking and then suddenly the enemies ALL started to shift patrols to EXACTLY where I was. I still managed to grab the item and bail before they had time to shoot at my Reaper but that's bullshit design.
It does, but for the wrong reasons. Players tested the stealth AI, it hones in on your fireteam even when they are still in stealth. Mods exist to change this and maintain a more realistic patrol pattern.
This can still work for some missions once your Reaper is high enough in rank. Remote Start doesn't break stealth/Shadow for example, so hostile VIP missions where you CBA to kidnap the target become extremely easy if the VIP is next to a car and also within LoS and range of the evac point. You can move all the way to the evac point then spend your last turn setting off Remote Start and then hitting evac.
It's options like this and other facets of the Reaper which in my opinion make them both the strongest hero class out of the three, but also the most important class to have on any mission when things like Target Definition which lets you track previously seen pods through FoW and out of LoS. They don't even need to attack to be the MVP of a mission, simply feeding info to the rest of a fireteam with Target Definition or spotting for a Sharpshooter with or without Long Watch due to Squadsight.
If you really want to play unfairly you take 1 Reaper and 3-5 Sharpshooters with Spider/Ghost armour to grapple to a sniping spot and just lay waste to everything on the map the Reaper spots. The ship defense mission can benefit from this extensively since any custom turrets you build also have squadsight. So a Reaper booking it for the EMP device or Chosen cannon power source then has 2-4 turrets with 100% aim and infinite range against objects, aka both those objectives, as well as however many Sharpshooters you may have at hand.
tl;dr Reapers are the most powerful unit in War of the Chosen.
I'd probably go Reaper, Templar then Skirmishers in terms of power. Reapers have solo'd chosen and half of the enemy with their Banish ability
Templars were just great at running around, causing chaos and avoiding all damage after
Skirmishers were ok but to be honest they were on par with mechs on terms of damage they could do.
Reaper supremacy!
Plus they, which included Troi, were led by Riker while the others, which included Worf, were either led by Tasha Yar or Q.
Templar will carry you hard for the first half the game between their guaranteed hit melee and their one ability to deflect any one shot at them after a kill. By the time they fall off, you have your other units ready to get the slack.
Considering the early game is the hardest part by far, I'd lean towards Templar being the most powerful in general terms as they provide something concrete at a time when no one else can reliably do so.
Reapers are capable of doing some wild shit and cheesing the fuck out of the game, but by the time they can do so you probably have many options at your disposal. And they rely heavily on the, as you said, broken Stealth system unless you mod it.
Before I clicked, I thought this was gonna be a thread about Twitter.
You probably have if this is the kind of game you are interested in that kind of game, but have you ever heard/tried Xenonauts? It's essentially THE spiritual successor to OG Xcom. I have not played the second one (still in early access) but the first one is pretty good at scratching the itch. Very open ended game and often very cheap. On sale right now, actually on GoG
have it but haven't played it yet.
It does when you're holding a shotgun.
Wut?
I think the algorithm the game uses for RNG is also a bit broken iirc, which is why there's a few mods that try to include solutions to specifically address it. For both games iirc.
Also reminds me, another odd issue the games occasionally seemed to have was something where it seemed like RNG results were somehow stuck in buffered memory or something. So if you loaded up a save in the middle of a mission (in the 2nd, couldn't do that in the 1st iirc), RNG results would get extremely lopsided.
Chaos Gate Daemonhunters perfected the formula.
See my review.
All shots hit, damage is determined by range and cover. Activating a pod resets your squad's action points AND your squad goes first so no more "move one guy end turn dumbness.
For the story Space Marines are all men, and the one strong female character gets shit on by the male commanders, and she actually has a story arc (as much as these games have stories).
I loved the Shadowrun games, but bounced off of XCOM. I never figured out what exactly the problem was, but SR felt great and XCOM felt terrible.
I just can't play those Firaxis games.
I have replayed the old Microprose games and they just hit in all the right ways; all the micromanagement and not wresting control from the user. The squad limitations and the focus on "personalities" and also forcing in so many female characters was just a huge turnoff to me.
All the people who justified Firaxis dumbing down the game turned me off even more, and the fact you need a dozen and one mods to try to bring it up to the quality of the original trilogy just made me realise I can stick with the original trilogy and actually have fun instead of fighting with the game.
Someone also Jagged Alliance 3 here on this forum, and it was a good departure from some of the typical turn-based strategy games that all seem to mirror Firaxis' design. However, it does still suffer from the aiming nonsense that you brought up with the newer XCOM games, where you're standing next to someone point blank with a shotgun and they somehow miss a body shot while fully aimed in. It creates save-scumming situations and makes the game feel cheap.
Still, at least Jagged Alliance 3 doesn't have the same sort of squad limitations as the new XCOM games, even though it still shares some of the same annoying AI problems and smallish map designs.
But yeah, I have Phoenix Point on my wishlist so I will probably give that a go next.
It's good, the combat system is far better than X-Com, the rest of it is slightly worse IMO.
That would be an interesting game, an XCom based card battler. You have the characters and whatever cards they have assigned plus any bonuses you have on hand.
Only 2? LOL
The issue I had with it vs. the original (and old Jagged Alliance games) is that firing in burst mode is a "special attack" instead of just firing three regular bullets (and hence 3x the damage potential). Burst fire is supposed to be a function of the weapon not some kind of super attack that only a special 'class' can do. And unfortunately Phoenix Point does the same thing.
This is an interesting take. I always figured the accuracy bullshit in XCOM was a deliberate mechanic concocted by lazy, idea-deficient devs who couldn't think of a more creative way to make the game challenging.
Either way, for a gamer like me who values story every bit as much as mechanics, it was always immersion-breaking. Supposedly the soldiers recruited to the XCOM project are the best of the world's elite special operators, yet they can't hit a barn with a barn-seeking missile.
Regardless of the reason for it, it's extremely frustrating. Not in a fun way, either, like games with a good problem-solving element can be frustrating, but also force you to find another solution. In XCOM it never mattered how good your strategy was or how well you maneuvered your troops. Getting the drop on the aliens never made a difference. You're supposed to be leading an elite military unit, but even your seasoned veterans can pop out from behind a perfect piece of cover and shoot at an alien point blank, only to vaporize a tree and end up getting cut to pieces. It's stupid.
Getting the drop made such a huge difference that the entire strategy in EU was "Overwatch Spam and slow crawl." It was so effective that the expansion and the entire sequel was built to break the ability for it to work with time limits and force different strategies. Said sequel proceeded to have an entire stealth mechanic added in to give you an alternative to getting the drop, and guys up there are talking that the stealth focused hero lets you almost solo missions with how strong getting the drop on alien pods is.
Like, it cannot be overstated how completely wrong that sentence is. And it furthers my theory that a lot of people's complaints about the game were just they were bad at it.
And it didn't even work at first. 'The Beaglerush Maneuver' specifically "exploited" overwatch by having a soldier intentionally set off a patrol during the alien turn by standing out in the open. The pod would then try to run for cover only to get caught in an overwatch trap.
This was hot fixed so that any pod stumbling upon a soldier in the open like this would instead just shoot the very flanked X-Com operative, which meant a lot of bonuses to the attack being made and likely a soon to be very dead X-Com operative.
What do you mean? I've save scummed through the game plenty of times and its perfectly fine in this one just using the 3~ turn autosave (until you get the bug where it stops autosaving randomly). The ability to re-roll your seed is way higher than most similar games that use beginning of the map determination on a lot of values.
The rng stays the same if you save scum, the only way it improves is if you make DIFFERENT decisions.
Like your trooper charging at an enemy and missing with his shotgun. If you reload the save and pull him into cover then overwatch, there's a good chance he'll hit them in overwatch.
They just don't allow the 'ram your head against a brick wall' approach of save scumming.
Having played both of the nu-Xcoms on release it has always been active seeding, down to the enemy placement. Any move you take changes the seed, enough so that save scum advice often became "use your blue move differently" or "attack in a different order."
But it is seeded, which means yes if you load just before a combat roll and redo the same action it'll stay the same. Which again is easily reshuffled with something as simple as moving in a different order.
If you save scum hard and often enough, as I did when I was worse at the games, you can see that even things that should be "beginning of map rolled" aren't like enemy pod placements, which is why you can go multi-turns without seeing a soul and then see 9 enemies in the same turn.
Their seeding style is actually quite useful. The EXACT same actions will have the EXACT same results, which is very realistic, and helpful gameplay-wise to get you back to the point you were at from a prior save. But any change in actions creates a butterfly effect, changing the probability seed. A soldier moving one step to the left or right from the Save Point might make a prior crit a miss, or a miss into a crit.