It looks like they took the template for the game from Mutant Year Zero. Tactical battles are lifted right from XCOM, set characters rather than random rookies with larger skill trees plus other progression systems, freeroam between battles where you interact with the world, etc.
Looks like 'RPG with XCOMs combat' is rapidly becoming its own subgenre.
Quite frankly the random rookies thing is what I prefer for my XCOMs. I haven't tried Mutant Year Zero partially for this reason.
King Arthur didn't have random soldiers but it did have permadeath and mostly didn't mandate squad members, so it gets a pass.
Speaking of King Arthur, it seems pretty easy to have your campaign land in an unwinnable state
I got locked out of a side mission by having Kay wounded, so I had to go tackle a level 4 mission at level 3, with just Mordred and a marksman, mage and rogue
Speaking of King Arthur, it seems pretty easy to have your campaign land in an unwinnable state
I got locked out of a side mission by having Kay wounded, so I had to go tackle a level 4 mission at level 3, with just Mordred and a marksman, mage and rogue
It, uh, it didn't go great.
Its possible to play up, but you have to very carefully manage the front line with Mordred and crowd control when you have a bunch of squishies like that.
It's tough at level 3, but essentially get all the slowing/damage zone abilities ASAP. King Arthur is all about mitigating the opportunities enemies have to attack, because injuries can be serious setbacks.
I'm turning down the difficulty temporarily, since Hard is pretty punishing if you're underleveled.
Early on there aren't really any AOE abilities except Cleave, which is tough when you're fighting more than twice as many enemies as your party numbers!
I'm turning down the difficulty temporarily, since Hard is pretty punishing if you're underleveled.
Early on there aren't really any AOE abilities except Cleave, which is tough when you're fighting more than twice as many enemies as your party numbers!
Yeah, for sure. I never turned down the difficulty from Hard, but I did reload from previous saves a number of times or restart missions entirely in order to shake up my approach.
I think if I replay to do the Christian/Righteous quests I'll go with the normal difficulty and Ironman.
Normal is profoundly trivial by comparison. Damn. I will turn this back up afterward for sure.
Damn, really? Hard is freaking HARD. Like I am reluctant to do ironman at that difficulty. More brutal than Classic XCOM.
But if Normal is babby mode...
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Homicidal All Stars demo is up for NextFest.
You get one match, with 3 high level characters, and no tutorial.
It plays exactly like XCOM. Hit percentages, two action economy - move+shoot/reload/grenade or move+move or overwatch as the basic actions with a bunch of cool skills, and the match has some cool, varied enemies on a dense, small map.
Normal is profoundly trivial by comparison. Damn. I will turn this back up afterward for sure.
Damn, really? Hard is freaking HARD. Like I am reluctant to do ironman at that difficulty. More brutal than Classic XCOM.
But if Normal is babby mode...
Hard started quite challenging, but enemies aren't keeping up with the heroes around level 6. But Very Hard is absurd — I walked into a room and there were twenty enemies, all pre-buffed, half of them crossbow men behind cover. And bonfires heal even less!
Watching a guy on Twitch trying to beat TFTD with out killing anything.
Just tazer sticks and stun bombs (or their underwater equivalents).
It looks hugely reliant on RNG giving you the necessary resources, but doable eventually.
Any suggestions for other hellish challenge runs to suggest to the guy?
I quit playing after my first encounter with a Berserker King. Has the game been rebalanced in any way?
I consider W40K Chaos Gate to be a far more reasonable and pleasant experience than WotC, and it almost makes me wish I experienced Long War first.
Almost.
Pedantic, but I believe it is a Berserker Queen actually. Gotta get dem horrible alien pronouns right.
The thing about Her Majesty is that she can't get onto rooftops without using ladders. If you stand on the top ladder space you can cheese her, which I fully support because the alien rulers are some bullshit, but their gear is top notch.
+3
SaldonasSee you space cowboy...Registered Userregular
Something that totally works is slapping a repeater on someone that fires a bunch and then getting lucky and one shotting the queen.
The Queen AI is also broken if you drop a poison grenade on top of her, because she'll go, "oh no, poison, I shouldn't move or I'll get poisoned!" and not do anything.
I'm ever grateful to Firaxis and Jake Solomon for recognizing that some people have terrible reflexes and have no desire to play games that aren't turn-based. Also punchy mechs.
Keeping my eye on the Long War-style revamp of Phoenix Point.
I wasn't into Long War, but some of the stuff they're doing sounds interesting...and it's not like screwing with balance is really a big problem in PP. The game has that roguelike quality of presenting you with a shit sandwich and giving you options for how to eat it. Changing the shit-sandwich-eating parameters around might prolong interest in the game.
+3
SaldonasSee you space cowboy...Registered Userregular
I've been eagerly awaiting some good mods to roll out for Phoenix Point so I'll keep an eye on that one.
I've been eagerly awaiting some good mods to roll out for Phoenix Point so I'll keep an eye on that one.
I bounced off the original Long War stuff because XCOM was basically perfect as-is.
I like Phoenix Point and think it deserves a larger audience, but perfect it ain't.
+2
SaldonasSee you space cowboy...Registered Userregular
Yeah, I skipped the Long War mod in XCOM 1. Tried out Long War of the Chosen and while I love a lot of what it does, it also just makes so much stuff unreliable that some fights suddenly are crap-shoots. It tried a little bit too much to make the game difficult from every angle.
Things I'd like to see from PP mods: better class/equipment/enemy balance and useful vehicles. I never enabled the Festering Skies DLC but that air to air combat I saw was terrible.
I never enabled the Festering Skies DLC but that air to air combat I saw was terrible.
It wasn't great, no. Festering Skies is the most unnecessary of the PP DLC, but I will allow that the final mission is pretty awesome and intense, so it might be worth enabling once.
+1
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Long War is for me the best way to play Xcom1.
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
Mutant: Year Zero is 60% off on Steam (game + DLC ~$20)
I got it and it seems interesting so far.
Like: maps full of loot, setting ambushes, character improvement that seems crunchy but not overwhelmingly so (looking at you, Troubleshooters), gear visible on avatar.
Dislike: starting with only 2 pregenerated characters sucks, bullshit enemy reinforcement mechanic cost me progress.
I'm just not super enthusiastic about all of the NPCs so far being human while both of my PCs are anthro animals (duck guy and warthog guy)...makes it feel goofier than the super-serious, fighting for the last remnant of humanity text would imply. Like if the Vault Dweller was Mickey Fucking Mouse.
Still, I'm interested enough to keep playing for now, and the battle mechanics are straight XCOM with a scarcity twist (medkits, grenades, etc don't restore per "mission;" they're gone on use and can be purchased with scrap at the hub).
Watching a guy on Twitch trying to beat TFTD with out killing anything.
Just tazer sticks and stun bombs (or their underwater equivalents).
It looks hugely reliant on RNG giving you the necessary resources, but doable eventually.
Any suggestions for other hellish challenge runs to suggest to the guy?
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
edited October 2022
I tried Mutant Year Zero, and was having a lot of fun until I got to a game ending crash. Would not let me progress at all, and I wasn't going to restart, so that sad that I won't get to finish it.
I tried Mutant Year Zero, and was having a lot of fun until I got to a game ending crash. Would not let me progress at all, and I wasn't going to restart, so that sad that I won't get to finish it.
That blows. I haven't gotten very far yet, so I hope I don't run into that. Any idea what triggered it?
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
I tried Mutant Year Zero, and was having a lot of fun until I got to a game ending crash. Would not let me progress at all, and I wasn't going to restart, so that sad that I won't get to finish it.
That blows. I haven't gotten very far yet, so I hope I don't run into that. Any idea what triggered it?
No. It was a few hours in, wasn't even like on a level load or anything, just walking through the environment and *crash report*.
I tried Mutant Year Zero, and was having a lot of fun until I got to a game ending crash. Would not let me progress at all, and I wasn't going to restart, so that sad that I won't get to finish it.
That blows. I haven't gotten very far yet, so I hope I don't run into that. Any idea what triggered it?
No. It was a few hours in, wasn't even like on a level load or anything, just walking through the environment and *crash report*.
Gross.
0
-Loki-Don't pee in my mouth and tell me it's raining.Registered Userregular
Mutant: Year Zero is 60% off on Steam (game + DLC ~$20)
I got it and it seems interesting so far.
Like: maps full of loot, setting ambushes, character improvement that seems crunchy but not overwhelmingly so (looking at you, Troubleshooters), gear visible on avatar.
Dislike: starting with only 2 pregenerated characters sucks, bullshit enemy reinforcement mechanic cost me progress.
I'm just not super enthusiastic about all of the NPCs so far being human while both of my PCs are anthro animals (duck guy and warthog guy)...makes it feel goofier than the super-serious, fighting for the last remnant of humanity text would imply. Like if the Vault Dweller was Mickey Fucking Mouse.
Still, I'm interested enough to keep playing for now, and the battle mechanics are straight XCOM with a scarcity twist (medkits, grenades, etc don't restore per "mission;" they're gone on use and can be purchased with scrap at the hub).
Having played it to completion I’ve got to say:
- There shouldn’t be humans. I think it really drags the aesthetic choice of animal folks. Reminds you it’s silly. I think the enemies would be much more fun as various mutants too.
- Without more playable characters and no injury/exhaust mechanic you’ll end up taking the same characters to every mission. This means you’ll get your strategy down too well.
- The encounters, being designed rather than generated, are pretty good. I don’t want to play the game again though.
The couple additional PCs did seem like they only existed to be backup characters in case you got one of the original squad killed. Each of the starting squad had abilities I didn't want to give up and the spares didn't have anything that looked like a fair trade for losing those abilities.
Alien invasion stopped with no killing and at a total budget less than one billion dollars? US military should take note.
almost 50% casualty rate tho
If I tried to play TFTD normally I'd probably end up with a higher casualty rate than that.
Yeah, I never played the old X-COMs, but by all accounts they were total meatgrinders, and good players just built that into their strategies, instead of having Colonel Unstoppable's Band of Xenos Murderers roll every mission.
Alien invasion stopped with no killing and at a total budget less than one billion dollars? US military should take note.
almost 50% casualty rate tho
If I tried to play TFTD normally I'd probably end up with a higher casualty rate than that.
Yeah, I never played the old X-COMs, but by all accounts they were total meatgrinders, and good players just built that into their strategies, instead of having Colonel Unstoppable's Band of Xenos Murderers roll every mission.
Yeah, Colonel Unstoppable's Band of Xenos Murderers never really happens in OG X-COM because there is always the chance that on the first turn an enemy will mind control your unit with the rocket launcher who will promptly turn around and fire it into your Avenger killing your entire team. Or an enemy will fire a blaster launcher bomb into your Avenger killing the entire team. Or multiple units will be setup with overwatch on your ramp on the first turn and everyone who moves gets shot to death. Basically, you do not want to put all of your top units at risk until the final mission. And even then, the prime strategy was to take your best units + a bunch of rookies to absorb fire.
EDIT: I should say all of that was true for the original MS-DOS release of X-COM that I played back in the 90s when a friend lent me his floppy disks. That version was bugged so that the only difficulty was Normal regardless of what you selected, so all strategies revolved around that. I have no idea about the fixed Open version that people play today.
Original X-Com didn't have to be a meat grinder, you just have to play it extremely cautiously.
At the start that means every step you take is under cover of smoke grenades, you send 3-4 men to confront every possible alien, creeping along slowly and using explosively liberally (to kill stuff but more importantly just blowing walls up to open avenues of attack, etc.)
Late in the game it means to have your power armor badasses standing in the Avenger a few minutes while sending blaster bombs out into the darkness and flat out leveling everything in a huge radius around the LZ before walking out to take stock of all the other buildings you promptly would also blow up.
The final mission? My squad flawlessly executes it by having most of the team on overwatch at the top of the alien elevator shaft while the blaster bombs "explored" every corner of that place before descending down.
It was pretty cheesy and sometimes a bit boring but if you were attached to your men it definitely worked.
One nice thing about the classic system was that at times it could be more lenient about positioning/LOS, in that you had a large number of time units to split up between moving and shooting, rather than the discrete two actions of modern version. So if you botched your placement, you could just scootch over and maybe still get to take your shot. And you could take multiple shots on full auto if you rounded a corner into an alien and had a bunch of time.
It could also be awful if you walk out into a field with a bunch of aliens already in overwatch. There was no concept of "packs" so death was always threatening at all times, either in overwatch or aggressively coming to get you.
The original was more of a open simulation of an alien invasion while the modern one is a more tightly crafted game experience.
In the original you could decide to go the all explosions route to win OR have a couple psy adepts plus some psy-sponges and mind control your way to victory OR half snipers / half scouts OR a bunch of other variations.
You could also have not very fun but very possible simulation moments - oh you set up your 1st base in Europe but the aliens decided to focus on Asia and the US, so you don't detect any UFOs and your 1st battle is a Terror mission with all rookies and the default weapons.
For me, there was added difficulty of 1) being a kid and 2) not having any access to wikis to explain all of the mechanics. Sometimes I see an alien and stop moving, it doesn't shoot at me, but then I take a few more steps and it does? I guess this is related to my soldiers Reactions skill and higher seems to be better?
In conclusion, the original has some very interesting systems which if you can understand and master make it much easier to exploit but a lot of those systems are very opaque and either require lots of play time or standing on the shoulders of others.
+2
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
As always, I would suggest Xenonauts to anybody curious about the original Xcom games but want something updated.
Very much the same attention to gritty granularity of actions, but with loads of gameplay improvements like cover affecting aim, being able to define class load outs, HD art assets, etc. But it's still very much the meatgrinder approach where rookies go first through the door, officers stand way back with the good guns, a dead exploded alien is a lot better than whole dead alien surrounded by dead soldiers.
Posts
Quite frankly the random rookies thing is what I prefer for my XCOMs. I haven't tried Mutant Year Zero partially for this reason.
King Arthur didn't have random soldiers but it did have permadeath and mostly didn't mandate squad members, so it gets a pass.
I got locked out of a side mission by having Kay wounded, so I had to go tackle a level 4 mission at level 3, with just Mordred and a marksman, mage and rogue
It, uh, it didn't go great.
Its possible to play up, but you have to very carefully manage the front line with Mordred and crowd control when you have a bunch of squishies like that.
It's tough at level 3, but essentially get all the slowing/damage zone abilities ASAP. King Arthur is all about mitigating the opportunities enemies have to attack, because injuries can be serious setbacks.
Early on there aren't really any AOE abilities except Cleave, which is tough when you're fighting more than twice as many enemies as your party numbers!
Yeah, for sure. I never turned down the difficulty from Hard, but I did reload from previous saves a number of times or restart missions entirely in order to shake up my approach.
I think if I replay to do the Christian/Righteous quests I'll go with the normal difficulty and Ironman.
Damn, really? Hard is freaking HARD. Like I am reluctant to do ironman at that difficulty. More brutal than Classic XCOM.
But if Normal is babby mode...
You get one match, with 3 high level characters, and no tutorial.
It plays exactly like XCOM. Hit percentages, two action economy - move+shoot/reload/grenade or move+move or overwatch as the basic actions with a bunch of cool skills, and the match has some cool, varied enemies on a dense, small map.
Big recommend.
Hard started quite challenging, but enemies aren't keeping up with the heroes around level 6. But Very Hard is absurd — I walked into a room and there were twenty enemies, all pre-buffed, half of them crossbow men behind cover. And bonfires heal even less!
I consider W40K Chaos Gate to be a far more reasonable and pleasant experience than WotC, and it almost makes me wish I experienced Long War first.
Almost.
Just tazer sticks and stun bombs (or their underwater equivalents).
It looks hugely reliant on RNG giving you the necessary resources, but doable eventually.
Any suggestions for other hellish challenge runs to suggest to the guy?
Pedantic, but I believe it is a Berserker Queen actually. Gotta get dem horrible alien pronouns right.
The thing about Her Majesty is that she can't get onto rooftops without using ladders. If you stand on the top ladder space you can cheese her, which I fully support because the alien rulers are some bullshit, but their gear is top notch.
Switch: SW-1493-0062-4053
https://gamerant.com/xcom-enemy-unknown-10-year-anniversary-franchise-reboot-firaxis/
I'm ever grateful to Firaxis and Jake Solomon for recognizing that some people have terrible reflexes and have no desire to play games that aren't turn-based. Also punchy mechs.
Keeping my eye on the Long War-style revamp of Phoenix Point.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/phoenix-point/phoenix-point-mod-evoking-xcom-long-war-adds-lovecraft-style-horror
I wasn't into Long War, but some of the stuff they're doing sounds interesting...and it's not like screwing with balance is really a big problem in PP. The game has that roguelike quality of presenting you with a shit sandwich and giving you options for how to eat it. Changing the shit-sandwich-eating parameters around might prolong interest in the game.
Switch: SW-1493-0062-4053
I bounced off the original Long War stuff because XCOM was basically perfect as-is.
I like Phoenix Point and think it deserves a larger audience, but perfect it ain't.
Things I'd like to see from PP mods: better class/equipment/enemy balance and useful vehicles. I never enabled the Festering Skies DLC but that air to air combat I saw was terrible.
Switch: SW-1493-0062-4053
It wasn't great, no. Festering Skies is the most unnecessary of the PP DLC, but I will allow that the final mission is pretty awesome and intense, so it might be worth enabling once.
I got it and it seems interesting so far.
Like: maps full of loot, setting ambushes, character improvement that seems crunchy but not overwhelmingly so (looking at you, Troubleshooters), gear visible on avatar.
Dislike: starting with only 2 pregenerated characters sucks, bullshit enemy reinforcement mechanic cost me progress.
I'm just not super enthusiastic about all of the NPCs so far being human while both of my PCs are anthro animals (duck guy and warthog guy)...makes it feel goofier than the super-serious, fighting for the last remnant of humanity text would imply. Like if the Vault Dweller was Mickey Fucking Mouse.
Still, I'm interested enough to keep playing for now, and the battle mechanics are straight XCOM with a scarcity twist (medkits, grenades, etc don't restore per "mission;" they're gone on use and can be purchased with scrap at the hub).
EDIT: NASA creates real life XCOM squad.
https://www.pcgamer.com/nasa-creates-real-life-xcom-squad/
😄
A couple of weeks later, and that challenge is completed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/ybo8yh/i_beat_xcom_terror_from_the_deep_without_killing/
That blows. I haven't gotten very far yet, so I hope I don't run into that. Any idea what triggered it?
No. It was a few hours in, wasn't even like on a level load or anything, just walking through the environment and *crash report*.
Gross.
I'm sure we were super nice to the 774 catured aliens.
Like, put them up in a bed and breakfast on the coast for their incarceration.
We totally didn't autopsy them at all. no sir.
We sold them to Oscar Meyer.
The checks cleared. No further questions were asked.
almost 50% casualty rate tho
Having played it to completion I’ve got to say:
- There shouldn’t be humans. I think it really drags the aesthetic choice of animal folks. Reminds you it’s silly. I think the enemies would be much more fun as various mutants too.
- Without more playable characters and no injury/exhaust mechanic you’ll end up taking the same characters to every mission. This means you’ll get your strategy down too well.
- The encounters, being designed rather than generated, are pretty good. I don’t want to play the game again though.
3/5 XCOMS
Yeah, I never played the old X-COMs, but by all accounts they were total meatgrinders, and good players just built that into their strategies, instead of having Colonel Unstoppable's Band of Xenos Murderers roll every mission.
Yeah, Colonel Unstoppable's Band of Xenos Murderers never really happens in OG X-COM because there is always the chance that on the first turn an enemy will mind control your unit with the rocket launcher who will promptly turn around and fire it into your Avenger killing your entire team. Or an enemy will fire a blaster launcher bomb into your Avenger killing the entire team. Or multiple units will be setup with overwatch on your ramp on the first turn and everyone who moves gets shot to death. Basically, you do not want to put all of your top units at risk until the final mission. And even then, the prime strategy was to take your best units + a bunch of rookies to absorb fire.
EDIT: I should say all of that was true for the original MS-DOS release of X-COM that I played back in the 90s when a friend lent me his floppy disks. That version was bugged so that the only difficulty was Normal regardless of what you selected, so all strategies revolved around that. I have no idea about the fixed Open version that people play today.
At the start that means every step you take is under cover of smoke grenades, you send 3-4 men to confront every possible alien, creeping along slowly and using explosively liberally (to kill stuff but more importantly just blowing walls up to open avenues of attack, etc.)
Late in the game it means to have your power armor badasses standing in the Avenger a few minutes while sending blaster bombs out into the darkness and flat out leveling everything in a huge radius around the LZ before walking out to take stock of all the other buildings you promptly would also blow up.
The final mission? My squad flawlessly executes it by having most of the team on overwatch at the top of the alien elevator shaft while the blaster bombs "explored" every corner of that place before descending down.
It was pretty cheesy and sometimes a bit boring but if you were attached to your men it definitely worked.
It could also be awful if you walk out into a field with a bunch of aliens already in overwatch. There was no concept of "packs" so death was always threatening at all times, either in overwatch or aggressively coming to get you.
In the original you could decide to go the all explosions route to win OR have a couple psy adepts plus some psy-sponges and mind control your way to victory OR half snipers / half scouts OR a bunch of other variations.
You could also have not very fun but very possible simulation moments - oh you set up your 1st base in Europe but the aliens decided to focus on Asia and the US, so you don't detect any UFOs and your 1st battle is a Terror mission with all rookies and the default weapons.
For me, there was added difficulty of 1) being a kid and 2) not having any access to wikis to explain all of the mechanics. Sometimes I see an alien and stop moving, it doesn't shoot at me, but then I take a few more steps and it does? I guess this is related to my soldiers Reactions skill and higher seems to be better?
Today I could go here and read all about it:
https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Reaction_Fire
In conclusion, the original has some very interesting systems which if you can understand and master make it much easier to exploit but a lot of those systems are very opaque and either require lots of play time or standing on the shoulders of others.
Very much the same attention to gritty granularity of actions, but with loads of gameplay improvements like cover affecting aim, being able to define class load outs, HD art assets, etc. But it's still very much the meatgrinder approach where rookies go first through the door, officers stand way back with the good guns, a dead exploded alien is a lot better than whole dead alien surrounded by dead soldiers.