I can remember back in high school buying a 4 pack of Microprose games. Master of Magic, Master of Orion, XCOM, and XCOM2. Such an awesome package of games. Even now I'm not sure which of those games was my favourite... Not XCOM2, since I refused to really play it until I beat the first one which I never did manage to do, but the other three were all incredible in their own ways.
Last year Firaxis put out a remake of the original XCOM game. I heard good things, and wanted to play it, but for some reason never got around to picking it up. Probably I was playing too much League of Legends or something. Patience paid off as I was able to pick it up on sale during the Steam summer sale. It sat there in my 'want to play' category on Steam for a while and yesterday I finally got around to installing it and giving it a shot.
I haven't put in all that much time so far, just long enough to lose one game to a crash and then actually lose one game. It's not just a graphical update, it's more like a reimagining of the game. It's still a turn based tactical combat game with aliens and research and the like, but it feels a lot more streamlined. Far fewer finicky details. Which may be a good thing, more time will tell, but it may well be a bad thing. Finicky details are part of the charm of those old Microprose games!
Squad size on a mission is down to 4 instead of the 12 or 16 from the original game. When you have 8 extra dudes in the fight you can afford to lose a few and not care. With only 4 dudes it's a real problem when one of them goes down. You lose a lot of your firepower. Even worse when they get turned into a zombie! Night time doesn't seem to be a thing anymore in terms of vision. Each person in the squad gets to carry around two weapons and one extra item which is a big change from the past where you got to load your ship down with as much as you could fit in and then load your dudes down with items. It might slow them down if they weren't strong enough, but you could do it!
Movement is drastically changed. You used to have a number of action points to spend and could use it however you wanted. Move a bit, shoot, move some more. Shoot multiple times. Stand still and reaction attack a bunch of times instead. Now you get two actions, but if the first is an attack your turn ends. So you can attack, move and attack, or move and move. You can still skip an action and reaction attack. It felt like there were fewer options on things to do, but there were still relevant decisions to make.
The maps seemed significantly smaller and less exploration based than before. All the maps I was on at least were pretty much a straight line. Start at one end, move forward to the other end killing the enemies on the way. Of course with only 4 people I guess that makes sense. Splitting up is a bit of a disaster so having 3 or 4 ways to explore would be deadly.
On the plus side losing all my dudes didn't also cost me my ship. It was still terrible since I'd lose 4 leveled up dudes, and wouldn't get the reward for the mission, and would suffer terrible terror related consequences. They did add in a leveling system with classes and talent trees which seemed like it could be really interesting.
Perhaps the worst change is the inability to buy scientists and engineers. I'd researched some better weapons but I couldn't build any because I needed to have 10 engineers on hand to start the project and I only had 5 and couldn't get any more. I may well have skipped a mission that gave them early before I figured out what was going on? But it meant I couldn't gear my team with reasonable weapons and eventually hit a wall where I couldn't win and eventually got overrun by aliens. Live and learn for next time though!
I found the new XCOM fun, but I have more of an urge to play the old one than the new one now. Actually, what I really want to do is play Master of Orion...
Showing posts with label XCom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label XCom. Show all posts
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Wednesday, July 06, 2011
X-Com: Autocannon
The internet said it would be good to buy autocannons for all of my dudes. I decided to give it a try and outfitted my army solely with auto-cannons. (Well, and one girl with a rocket launcher.) It turns out most of my guys could barely move with an auto-cannon and I had a hard time actually going anywhere. Eventually the enemies swarmed in and my guys couldn't react in time to support each other and I got wiped out. Not technically game over but it might as well have been. It's a little laggy in the emulator so maybe it's going to go back in the vault for now...
Tuesday, July 05, 2011
Cheating AIs: X-Com
I got the urge yesterday while watching Independence Day to play X-Com: Ufo Defense. I've never actually completed this game and not having done so bothers me. It's a pretty hard game but it's not impossible by any stretch. I started a new game up last night and ran into the cheating AI on the very first fight which was frustrating.
The game has two main parts to it. The first is a city building, tech researching, money making game on a map of Earth. Sometimes some alien UFOs fly by your radar stations and you can send a ship out to shoot them down. Or sometimes the aliens just land to pick up some cows or terrorize a city. Once the aliens are actually on the ground you can send a troop transport to go engage them in a turn based battle. The game simulates day and night, so it's possible this turn based battle will take place in the dark. This drastically reduces how far you can see for both you and the aliens. However, once one of your guys can see an alien the rest can shoot at him regardless of distance. That's a little weird, but I guess they didn't want to worry about adding ranges to all the weapons and deciding what happens when a laser beam travels beyond max distance. At the end of turn you lose these established locks on the aliens though, so if they manage to kill your scout on their turn you'll need to move someone else forward to see them again.
If it worked both ways that would be fine. Unfortunately the aliens cheat. They need to actually see your guys before they can shoot them just like you do, but they don't lose their target lock at end of turn. The higher the difficulty, the longer they can still see you. This can set up some absurd scenarios. If the aliens have one guy who can see into your ship at the start of the map you'd be in serious trouble. Every alien unit can now shoot at all of your guys for turns and turns. Snipers can be really hard to find and destroy since they can attack you from huge distances, well out of your line of sight (especially at night). Later on in the game you fight aliens that can cast mind control spells through walls. Some grunt saw you 3 turns ago? Legal target for mind control from the other side of the zone! There's also a weapon that's essentially a remote control rocket launcher which you can program 9 waypoints into so it can move around corners and down elevators. These can be huge problems and a lot of the micromanagement of later combats is making sure you can't get screwed too badly by these things if the AI decides to actually abuse the powers it has. (Often it doesn't with the rocket launchers. The mind control it will abuse all day long.)
What happened yesterday is I did a fight at night because I was afraid the site would despawn if I waited for day. One of my guys caught a glimpse of an alien right at the edge of her movement. She shot at him and missed. Then on his turn he took off in the other direction. Do I chase? If so I need to run across an open zone where the enemies can see me and take attacks of opportunity on me and I can't fight back until I get in range. I ended up running 3 guys in the direction of the 'hidden' alien and managed to kill it after losing only 1 to attacks of opportunity. He sucked anyway, so not a big deal, just annoying.
Like in most games I don't know how you would fix it though. It's a brutally powerful advantage (let me control the aliens and Byung control the humans and I'd crush him) but the AI just isn't good enough to abuse it properly. Maybe forcing me to have all my guys immune to mind control (hire hundreds of dudes, train them in psionics, and fire any with weak psi abilities) is a reasonable price to pay to have an AI that scales somewhat?
The game has two main parts to it. The first is a city building, tech researching, money making game on a map of Earth. Sometimes some alien UFOs fly by your radar stations and you can send a ship out to shoot them down. Or sometimes the aliens just land to pick up some cows or terrorize a city. Once the aliens are actually on the ground you can send a troop transport to go engage them in a turn based battle. The game simulates day and night, so it's possible this turn based battle will take place in the dark. This drastically reduces how far you can see for both you and the aliens. However, once one of your guys can see an alien the rest can shoot at him regardless of distance. That's a little weird, but I guess they didn't want to worry about adding ranges to all the weapons and deciding what happens when a laser beam travels beyond max distance. At the end of turn you lose these established locks on the aliens though, so if they manage to kill your scout on their turn you'll need to move someone else forward to see them again.
If it worked both ways that would be fine. Unfortunately the aliens cheat. They need to actually see your guys before they can shoot them just like you do, but they don't lose their target lock at end of turn. The higher the difficulty, the longer they can still see you. This can set up some absurd scenarios. If the aliens have one guy who can see into your ship at the start of the map you'd be in serious trouble. Every alien unit can now shoot at all of your guys for turns and turns. Snipers can be really hard to find and destroy since they can attack you from huge distances, well out of your line of sight (especially at night). Later on in the game you fight aliens that can cast mind control spells through walls. Some grunt saw you 3 turns ago? Legal target for mind control from the other side of the zone! There's also a weapon that's essentially a remote control rocket launcher which you can program 9 waypoints into so it can move around corners and down elevators. These can be huge problems and a lot of the micromanagement of later combats is making sure you can't get screwed too badly by these things if the AI decides to actually abuse the powers it has. (Often it doesn't with the rocket launchers. The mind control it will abuse all day long.)
What happened yesterday is I did a fight at night because I was afraid the site would despawn if I waited for day. One of my guys caught a glimpse of an alien right at the edge of her movement. She shot at him and missed. Then on his turn he took off in the other direction. Do I chase? If so I need to run across an open zone where the enemies can see me and take attacks of opportunity on me and I can't fight back until I get in range. I ended up running 3 guys in the direction of the 'hidden' alien and managed to kill it after losing only 1 to attacks of opportunity. He sucked anyway, so not a big deal, just annoying.
Like in most games I don't know how you would fix it though. It's a brutally powerful advantage (let me control the aliens and Byung control the humans and I'd crush him) but the AI just isn't good enough to abuse it properly. Maybe forcing me to have all my guys immune to mind control (hire hundreds of dudes, train them in psionics, and fire any with weak psi abilities) is a reasonable price to pay to have an AI that scales somewhat?
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