Messages

1

Discussion / My observations on the game

« on: June 06, 2012, 04:49:42 pm »

I'm a longtime X-Com player going back to the original game when it was first released. I've played a lot of X-Com wannabees, and one thing I've seen in all of them is the insistence by developers to make changes to "make it better." It wouldn't be one of the best games of all time if you COULD make it better just by changing a few things.

First off, I'll say I like the look of this game. It has a lot going for it. The tactical maps are too small and the aliens just stand out in the open and say "shoot me." but overall I don't have may issues with the tactical game. However, one thing I really do not like about UFO:AI is the auto-deploy feature used in the tactical map. Half the time my guys are out in the open with their butts exposed!  That's not good tactics and it certainly isn't making it better. I break my team up into two identical squads to cover more area. I want to be able to determine where they go when they disembark the vehicle. Not have the game determine it for me. And the other is the ridiculous situation of having my men deployed on the other side of the base from the entrance when it's attacked. This completely negates any advantage created by using the entrance as a bottleneck to deny aliens access to the inner part of the base.
Everything in this game happens much too quickly. I normally play on standard because I don't like to have to play on easy.

The strategic game is a mess as far as I'm concerned. Everything is happening much too fast. The progression of the alien incursion is too fast to deal with. You shouldn't have a base attacked within the first week or two of the game. In X-Com, that didn't happen for many months.

After only a few days, I'm finding my ships up against aliens that can shoot them down easily. That didn't happen in X-Com except on the very hardest levels. I appreciate that there are people who can beat X-Com on superhuman. More power to you. I can't, so please don't ramp up the difficulty on the lower levels of this game to accommodate them. If they want an extremely difficult game, let them play this game on its highest level. But allowing UFOs to shoot down the troop carrier after successfully completing a mission is entirely unfair tactics, especially as it happens very early in the game. In fact, it's set up as an ambush. They just wait for you to leave the LZ then blast you out of the sky. That almost never happened in X-Com until you had Avengers which could hold their own against UFOs. And if I try to use my interceptor or whatever it's called to cover the troop carrier, that gets shot down because my weapons can't even compete with a simple fighter.
And since countries begin losing their confidence within the first 3 days, and each ufo missed reduces it more, which is absolutely ridiculous, money is very tight. You cannot survive more than one complete wipe out because you don't have the luxury of just hiring 20 more soldiers and choosing the best ones, you're stuck with the chaff that's left over after you pick your first squad. That may add to the realism but it makes the game a lot less fun. If you're going to do that, you might as well just have them invade with a 1000 ufos and 100 million men and get it all over with on the first turn. That's what a real alien invasion would be like if it ever happened.

And research is entirely too slow. I shouldn't have to do three or four crashed ufo's and a terror mission before I can research laser tech. If you remember from X-Com, laser tech research took 1 to 2 days at most, and by the 3d or 4th mission, you had access to laser rifles already.
Some people may consider this too easy, but even laser rifles were weak compared to the plasma that the aliens were using, but the balance of the game was good. You knew you were outgunned and out teched, yet you felt you had the chance to catch up. I don't get that feeling in this game. I feel completely overwhelmed in the first half hour and after my troop carrier got shot down, I just put the game away. To me, losing unfairly isn't fun.
Just having a strategic game system and a tactical game system does not an X-Com quality TBS game make. Be aware of the game balance and the pace of the alien growth. You game has the aliens with far too much of an advantage, and the humans so far behind that it is virtually impossible to catch up with the money and research time provided.

Either that or I just have no idea how to play this game.

2

Discussion / Re: Why is the "saved game during combat" thread locked?

« on: August 25, 2009, 02:48:03 pm »

Odie,
Thank you for your thoughtful and respectful response.

As I said, my gaming experience goes back to days before PC's even existed. I was in Okinawa in late 1971 on R&R from Vietnam when I saw a strange looking machine in a bar in Koza. I was called Pong and was being tested by a company called Atari. After waiting a considerable amount of time,  because it was extremely popular,  I was able to play it and became immediately hooked. It had just been delivered a couple of days earlier. I had been a board game player for many years, but this, this was something unique. So, I can say confidently that I am one of the first hundred or so Americans to EVER play any video game at any time. And I have been playing them since the introduction of the Atari VCS later known as the 2600. I've had computers of every kind including the Timex Sinclair, Commodore Vic 20, Atari 400, Atari 800XKL, Amiga 500 and 2500, one old classic one piece Mac, and PC's dating back to the Compaq 8088 portable which I still have. It has a 10MB hard drive and uses 2 5 1/4" floppy drives with Dos 3.3. and still boots BTW...so much for the Y2K bug. As you can probably guess, I'm in my late 50's and retired.

There are two sides to this issue. Those that like the idea of a battlescape save and those that think the game is better without it. But actually, that's only one side, because those who don't like it, don't have to use it. They can play ironman if they want. And that's the nature of the right to choice. And that's what the developers are depriving us of as players. The right to choose how we want to play. In some games, like Tetris, or video oriented games that's not a big issue, But in a turn-based strategy game where every move could result in losing a squad or a couple of players you've taken time to develop, it becomes important.
 
I've read other comments where the developers decided they wanted you to have to do things a certain way..lose players you become attached to, operate under a handicap. It's their game, they have the right to impose whatever limitations they want on the game. But frankly, I'm not going to subject myself to being placed in a gamer's box, so i guess I'm just going to have to look elsewhere for my entertainment. Good luck to everyone.

But I'm just going to say one thing..this IS a free, open source game, but were it commercial and the developers had this attitude, it would fail miserably.

Feel free to lock this thread also. I won't be returning to respond to any comments.

3

Discussion / Why is the "saved game during combat" thread locked?

« on: August 22, 2009, 07:39:46 am »

You decided a long time ago that you didn't want players doing the "kill an alien, save the game, Xcom thing."
So what? Why should YOU care how a person plays the game? Maybe I don't have umpteen thousand hours of playing time to constantly restart the game after my team gets wiped. What gives you the right to tell people how to play? You design a game based on Xcom and it's gameplay, yet you keep out one of the most useful features of the game because YOU want to insure that a person can't make it easier to succeed. That's despotic.

I'm getting the impression that you developers just don't want to hear what your playing audience wants.
Not allowing saves during a very long tedious turn based combat sequence is foolish to the extreme and frankly smacks of controlling behavior. What you game developers don't seem to understand is that saving and restoring is the ONLY way some people are capable of winning a game, either that or outright cheating. Not everyone has the same gaming abilities.
And if you don't allow saves during combat AND limit the number of replacement soldiers available afterwards, you have essentially doomed the player to failure after the first team wipeout. Or worse, they have to continually replay the same combat scenario until they get a favorable outcome. That is not only stupid, it's cruel. And for me it's a serious deal breaker.

Some of us, don't have time to replay a combat sequence every time we have a computer crash or in my case, power outage since I live in central Florida, one of the most active electrical storm areas in the world. It's a shame really, because I was beginning to enjoy the game. It is one of the best Xcom derived games I've played, and I've played just about all of them. Unlike most, you've managed to capture the suspenseful feeling of the original, something that is missing from most spinoffs. Unfortunately, without a save game feature in the battlescape mode, I will not continue to play this game...or yours.

And by the way, I'm not some angry teen. I've been playing computer games since first playing Pong in a bar in Okinawa in 1971.