X-COM

anyone here play this series and planning on getting enemy unknown?

played the demo and i'm glad the combat system is somewhat similar to the original made by microprose.

I haven't really paid any attention to it. Is the demo good?

it's ok. the first level you pretty much have no control over your squad because you're forced to make specific moves. the second level, in the first turn, you aren't allowed free control either, but after that you're allowed to play freely until you win or lose.

it really doesn't offer much outside of that and base management in the first one was a significant part of the game. in the demo i was only allowed to choose to place my base in north america or europe, only one soldier upgrade was available, what i wanted to research (demo ends before research was complete, though), and i got to choose between two different alien siting missions. it also seems like you're forced to abandon a country in their time of need.

i got a decent glimpse of how the combat would be, but not so much with the base management

as of now the changes i don't like are: you only get one base for the whole game, smaller mission squads, and the inability to attempt to save everyone.

I honestly tried to read your post but I just kept getting distracted by your sig.

victoria justice does that. i try not to watch victorious while playing RE6 or i end up dying. hell, i accidentally abandoned my friend last night when i was suppose to pull him up out of danger just from thinking about her.

Naoaki's Magical Melody wrote:

victoria justice does that. i try not to watch victorious while playing RE6 or i end up dying. hell, i accidentally abandoned my friend last night when i was suppose to pull him up out of danger just from thinking about her.

If he doesn't understand your love love of VJ he deserved that.

I liked the demo so I picked this up, might do a playthrough and name my soldiers after people from here or something.

Do that especially if i'm your most awesome troop.

You'll probably die horribly as I'll be playing on Classic difficulty and I'm not that great at the game.

no worries, for the purposes of your game I'm hindu and so can be reincarnated as needed.

if sectoids and ethereals are as cheap as they are in the original we're all going to die unless we abuse the save function

Neo wrote:

I liked the demo so I picked this up, might do a playthrough and name my soldiers after people from here or something.

i was thinking of doing this with the original. you and skip would be head honchos at my base named kangaroo reserve located in australia.

Neo wrote:

You'll probably die horribly as I'll be playing on Classic difficulty and I'm not that great at the game.

Everytime i die I come back stronger, consequently i've actually died twice hence why i'm Super Buu the Third.

Did anyone pick this up? I'm late to the party, I know, but I tried the demo and thought it looked like fun. I've not played a turn-based strategy game since Valkyria Chronicles (and that's probably my favourite PS3 game) and I'm interested in how much depth there is to the various research option, and how much of a difference it can make trying to juggle the needs of one country vs another. I got the impression it was a big deal, but I know some games don't have the balls to follow through with that kind of thing.

Picked this up for £20 from Shopto, so I'll report back a little later. This does mean I'll be temporarily suspending my Far Cry 3 play through, but that'll be just another game I need to come back to later. Heck, that actually worries me... I never usually have more than one game at a time unfinished, but now I've got Kingdoms of Amalur, Far Cry 3, Tokyo Jungle and Borderlands 2 DLC to go back and beat. I must be getting old or something.

This is rather... unforgiving. I'm starting on normal difficulty, just to get a feel for the game though for the most part it's been a huge tutorial so far - all the base management has been doing what I'm told rather than having any real control over, and the fisrt two field missions even tell you where to put your troops without allowing deviation. It's hand holding, but the moment it lets go you understand why.

Needless to say, I got my arse handed to me. It's been a while since I played a strategy game and my lack of patience cost me, getting two of my specialised units downed because of stupid mistakes.

Anyway, game seems fun so far, and there's a lot of strategy to the combat and a lot of depth to the management side of things once the reins are off. Oh, and there's no autosave either, which I discovered to my cost after turning the game off. Well, there is an autosave - the game tells you as much when you load it up - but it needs to be manually turned on, which is doubly annoying. It also means I'm doing the last three missions again. Grr.

You could always turn on Ironman, it autosaves all the time.

This is what happens when you haven't got soldiers named after us. Neo was so over protective he just stopped playing the game after seeing Moose sent to the hospital.

I named my soldiers after myself and the Mrs, my best mate and then made up a few names, though I do have a Mr Kaio Lino as a reserve sniper. Having caught up with the progress lost through my autosave blunder, I've advanced another mission or two, still without loss though the Chinese aren't very happy with me - I've ignored two of their requests for assistance to go and help other nations, and I'm now in danger of losing their funding. Uh-oh. To remedy this, I'm currently expanding my base to accomodate a power plant (to provide the required power, obviously) another Laboratory (to give me extra engineers for research projects) and another satellite uplink (to allow deployment of another satellite over China).

In case you can't tell, the game is a lot of fun. Whether it will have the staying power to sustain multiple play throughs I'm not certain, though time will tell.

I said the game is unforgiving, and I've just been proved right. I've managed to appease the Chinese, but only at the expense of Europe. I had an urgent mission come through, heavy alien activity in the UK - the bastards are hitting my home soil! This gave me two issues; the UK was now under a four star panic warning, so refusal to accept the mission would have meant they'd withdraw from the XCOM project entirely. However, the mission was classed as "very difficult", so while I had to accept it, I was likely going to be outnumbered and outgunned.

As it proved.

The difficulty doesn't relate to the intelligence of the enemy troops, only their number and type, so rather than facing off against half a dozen sectoids (the basic "grey" aliens who most of my crew can one-shot now) in easily manageable groups of two at a time, I revealed a group of floaters (cyborg looking things with built-in jetpacks that hit harder and have much greater mobility than the regular sectoids). I moved to flank them, only to reveal another group comprising three sectoids and two thin men (gangly looking things semi disguised as business men, with a nasty habit of poisoning your crew). The odds were uddenly against me, going from five-on-three in my favour to eight-on-five in theirs. I knew it wasn't going to be my day when my sniper missed a shot with a 95% chance of hitting, and it quickly went downhill. Two of the floaters moved behind my party, flanking all of us in one move and they then attacked and killed my sniper, who was the highest ranked squad member. Not only was the loss of such a valuable infantry unit rather upsetting, it also panicked the two squad members closest to the incident, prompting them to randomly open fire upon two of my other veteran units killing one and reducing the other to 2 hit points.

Upon the next turn, and now with eight-against-three, the thin men and sectoids mopped up the leftovers. My party was wiped out, and I lost three experienced units and both rookies all in two turns. I'm now sat back at base wondering what the hell I do now. The three experienced units are almost irreplaceable, they were simply far superior to anyone else I've got in the barracks, and due to my failure, the UK is likely to pull out of the project at the next council evaluation in three days time.

All this, and I'm still only on freaking Normal difficulty. Heck, Classic and Impossible would be... well, really, really bloody hard. Still, the game is awesome. It's tremendously compulsive, the just-one-more-go factor keeping me playing til the small hours, and you know that if you fail it's because of an error on your part, be it in resource management or tactics and strategy out on the battlefield.

Whoops, just checked and I'm actually playing on Classic, not normal. Unsure when that changed but it would explain how ruthlessly tough the game has been, especially for an XCOM virgin such as myself.

Do I ever get to create a character, Or do I have to settle for "Edit this Swedish Female or Asian Male or whatever into whoever you want of the same sex"?

You can't create them, no, you can only edit the existing troops.

SimianWonder wrote:

You can't create them, no, you can only edit the existing troops.

Well... I'll just change all the soldier's names into Metal Gear Codenames, then.

A colonel ranked sniper is just ridiculous. My sniper has more kills than the rest of my squad combined, thanks to superb accuracy and hard hitting weaponry, not to mention the colonel ranked skills basically guaranteeing at least one enemy takedown per turn, usually two or three.

Difficulty has increased now, most enemies having a bare minimum of ten health points and their numbers having increased from six per map to between twelve and fifteen.