Attn: XCOM shit in this thread.

[Stark]

Oh, in this case I just went back to 'entire genre broken' and played completely different games. Its sad, though, that in comparison broken-ass stuff like SS and JA2 seem fun again.

Its worth noting that many of the problems of those older games are the race to 100% accuracy stuff, which XCOM also shares. XCOM just adds shooting through walls, dodgey LOS, boring missions, bad pacing, etc.

However, it does audibles better than SS's retarded 'man shaped silhouette you can headshot without actually seeing', even if the graphical effect is terrible.

The idea that its shoot directly through walls at totally obscured targets or SECRET HIDDEN NUMBERS OF ANALYSIS PARALYSIS is complete garbage. XCOM itself would be much less terrible if they hadn't broken squad sight and timed their animations properly. I personally am disappointed in the game because its terrible and basic failures may suggest to people that dropping all the sutpid spreadsheet shit led directly to this bullshit, but it's just Firaxis being shit.

Vendetta and I speculate that many of the visual problems with XCOM may be because of flaws in timing and viewpoint (ie, I believe squad sight may make bullets come out of the spotting unit, not the firing unit), but I have no desire to ignore such bullshit to enjoy a broken game.

Game is broken. Move on or not, but don't tell me its not broken.

[Nephtys]

It's not broken. It's not optimal or without some serious flaws, but not broken. Everything technically works. You do research. You get skills. You shoot down UFOs and make some decisions. Especially since otherwise, the entire genre would have been completely broken from the get-go. And I personally don't have an issue with removing 'shared hivemind squadsight'.

Suggesting that a game is 'unplayable and horrible' because there's a graphics glitch in an abstracted firing sequence is pretty irrationally reactionary. Yes, lots of shit peeves me. But that doesn't mean it's BROKEN.

[Stark]

Right, the game is full of flaws but you swallow it anyway. Just do a mental check and think 'how would I feel about this game if it wasn't branded a nerd totem' to see how amusing this is to rational people. It's another broken turn based tactical game in a long line of broken turn based tactical games. 10/10.

And we're speculating not that squad sight itself is broken (since most similar games have it for everyone by default) but that when calculating LOS for squadsight guys, it forgets entirely about the sniper's los and uses only the spotting unit's los. Thus, it believes that a guy can see an alien, and the sniper can see everything that man can see, so obviously the sniper has a line of fire. The sniper doesn't and it looks fucking retarded and invalidates the entire cover and destoryable terrain systems, but hey, it MIGHT be fixable if Firaxis doesn't believe it's working as intended.

And they probably do.

[Nephtys]

So I derive some measure of enjoyment from it. In the sense that it reminds me a great deal of a tabletop skirmish game. I also enjoyed VC. So... if something doesn't please me 100 percent, I shouldn't play it?

Also I wasn't aware of Squadsight Sniper LOS violating solid objects. When I tried it, the Squadsight Sniper couldn't see shit because slight bends and objects blocked his view, even with the scout seeing the target.

[Stark]

If you have never seen snipers shoot through multiple walls on a pretty much constant basis, the PC version much be pretty fucking different to the 360 version. A turn where nobody shoots directly through an obstacle without affecting it is a turn when nothing happened. This is the whole reason never moving snipers works.

And grow the fuck up, nobody is telling you you shouldn't enjoy it. There's just no mileage (or motivation) to justify away obvious problems. If you don't care, whatever, your time is yours to waste. Why do people shoot through walls? Because Firaxis is either retarded or fucked up. Why is the strategic level poorly paced? Because Firaxis is either retarded or fucked up.

Once you've solved the game (as descirbed many times in this thread) the whole rest of your XCOM experience will just be doing it over and over or losing. The things you do (move guys around, shoot guys, etc) aren't even very interesting, so it's not like a game where endlessly doing stuff is actually fun (like Dead Island where nothing changes but the player actions are intrinsically fun).

[CaptHawkeye]

I'm just always blown away by how personally people take the things you say about a god damn video game.

[Stark]

What's interesting to me is that the game was very well received initially (even though many people noted the problems in their review text) and that many discussions are happening on the internet around 'excusing' or 'explaining' these design elements. Its fascinating to me that saying 'they fucked it up' is too hard for people once they're attached for whatever reason.

[Nephtys]

Who's getting worked up here? Just saying that I think 'This game is BROKEN!' isn't exactly correct. It has things I like and things I don't like. And on the weigh of things, I'm having fun playing it. Sooooooooo yeah. I'm all for hostility for hostility's sake, but you're using it on the wrong subject matters lately Stark

[White Haven]

Yeah, the spotter AND the sniper both need LOS to the target. If not, squad sight snipers would be TRULY broken, rather than just vicious in outdoor maps. Cars, hills, bulkheads, walls, all of them break sniper LOS. The main thing that breaks LOS for shot animations is that units can see and be seen around corners if they're hugging a wall next to it due to the cover system, and the animations don't force the target to peek out of cover in time to get facepunched by plasma. Instead, they just animate to where the target is standing, no matter if that makes the bolt pass through one or more huge, solid objects on the way there. If someone's standing out on their own, they only take up their own square for targeting purposes. If someone's cowering behind a wall, they take up their own square and the square around the corner, so they can shoot and be shot.

It's an animation issue, or rather a lack-of-animation issue, not a problem with squad sight snipers. They're just one of the more visible symptoms.

[Covenant]

Again, point being most games have exploitable cheese, or overpowered tactics. But you can as a player choose to make a game more challenging for yourself by not resorting to them.

Honestly, this isn't as dumb as some people have said it is, in the sense that if I want to play a game where I do XYZ, and I'm allowed to do XYZ, but ZZZ is BETTER... I'm still not forced to ZZZZZZ the game into the grave and then complain about play experience. What I'm saying though is that it isn't a cheese strategy that breaks the game, it's that the core strategy is at odds with itself. Lemme clarify a bit:

It's one thing to impose limitations on yourself for additional challenge, but another one entirely if you have to do it if you want to have a proper tactical experience in the first place! Not that it would help, anyways, since from what Covenant says the problem is generated by the combination of monster closets which harshly punish attempts at actually experimenting with flanking and maneuver, and the fact combat results are all about to-hit rolls.

This is the problem here. Flanking and maneuver are the core precepts of the game's "Do This To Win" theory. In fact, some of the non-enabled "Second Wave" functions further emphasize flanking bonuses. Also, the game ORIGINALLY had a free-fire system where you could aim wherever, like with the rockets, but Firaxis found that people were gunning down cover instead of flanking or trying to maneuver around it, so they nixed the free-fire system and kept the flanking/cover system. That's a pretty stupid thing to do, since the solution is clearly to fix the flanking system.

To clarify, when "flanked," you not only get your cover reduced, but as a result the crit chance goes way up. The enemy is nearly assured of a crit against you (especially on Classic) when attacking a flanked Operative, and when you flank a foe your chances skyrocket. The numbers bear it out as just insanely effective. For example, consider a Muton hiding behind Full Cover, who is getting a +10% defense from his natural armor and +40% defense from high cover, and then is at range. That's enough to give a Rookie with ideal positioning a 15% chance to hit, and even a badass veteran non-sniper around a 35% chance to hit or less. So about one in three shots are likely to land, and without a critical hit you'll need about 2-3 Laser Rifle shots to bring him down. So on average you'll need around 5ish badass veterans to kill such a target in one turn or one guy will require 5ish turns to kill it. Or, in the game's logic, one character could flank the target and kill the fucker in ONE TURN all by himself.

To me this sounds not just reasonable, but brilliant. By making smart play 5x as effective as dumb play it allows the game to throw 4x the number of units or 4x the strength of the units, or 2x the number AND strength of the units, and still be assured of the player's complete ability to come out on top. And if you really want to challenge them you subject them to the same behaviors, and things like flanking are very very easy for an AI to understand how to do, since it's just math and angles and preferences for distances to targets and such. It's a really great setup, it really is, and applied properly it would make the game a lot MORE tactical than XCOM was.

But the whole thing crashes down because of the limitations the game has placed on the players. Maps are too small for tactical maneuvering because of the arbitrary walls placed around the 'action zones' where monsters are supposed to be, and attempting to maneuver through the 'action zones' of the map itself often leads the player into another monster spawn. This isn't a terrible thing (heaven forbid the aliens try to defend their objective!) but remember the whole reason we were spreading out in the first place was so that we could flank an enemy position. Now all I've accomplished is doubling the enemy force arrayed against me, possibly forcing myself into being flanked, and exposing myself to more danger.

This is exacerbated by the movement, downtime and revelation behavior displayed by enemies. When not revealed by the player, 90% of enemies will not move. It becomes impossible to "ambush" a patrol to open up a flanking position because enemies do not reliably wander the map on patrol, and when they do wander they still perform their "surprise" reaction upon coming into contact with XCOM operatives. At least they nearly always do, I've seen a patrol of Sectoids not do this once, which was a rude surprise. For people who don't know, and for the sake of the debate, let it be known that when you run into a monster patrol or monster closet, the enemies go "oh fuck!" and then get a free move in order to dash to a defensive location. This is sometimes helpful to the player (when a dangerous foe rounds the corner on THEIR turn and then is forced to waste their move running for cover) sometimes detrimental (when your attempted ambush is foiled by enemies galloping away to full cover despite being surprised), but ALWAYS ridiculous.

Combine this with the elegant but unsupported Two Action Turn and you have a lot of situations where your soldier, looking for an enemy, will run forwards past a point where he could have stopped and been unseen (as sometimes happens, allowing you to get a free shot) or sometimes even dash right through an enemy swarm in a totally nonsensical maneuver that could have been solved if your character was allowed to entire complete or cancel their move action upon entering LOS with an enemy. This is a minor quibble, but when you combine it with the above problems (flanking required to finesse-kill a group of bunkered enemies, small and densely populated maps making flanking maneuver difficult to do without triggering unseen enemy spawn points) you have the following situations:

1) You cannot (without prior knowledge) successfully maneuver, redeploy, or reconnoiter the enemy's location without being spotted at the same time, triggering a monster spawn and giving them a free movement point, making it impossible to reliably flank opponents and nearly always a better solution to simply stay grouped and slog forwards like a bulldozer.

2) Most enemies do not move, advance, reposition, retreat, call in support or withdraw from the map unless first observed by the player, despite what damage the player has done to their forces thus far. Enemies that have been spawned by player LOS may or may not advance on the player should the player withdraw out of their sight, but since this seems to be done on a Unit by Unit basis what often occurs is two mutons deciding to hide behind mopeds while one charges heroically into six different overwatches. Enemies within a short radius of other enemies under attack may )(appear to) come to their aid, and sometimes alien spawns do patrol, but these situations are very rare and often still trigger the "Oh shit!" reaction camera and waste their turn. Because of this, the AI is designed in such a way that it cannot NOT be exploited to its detriment and abuse. The enemy's obsession with wasting their own turns WILL doom them to failure UNLESS you trigger them AND stay in their line of sight WHILE avoiding the urge to let your Overwatched Squadsight Snipers blow them away the second they spawn.

3) The cover system functions in such a way that cover is unreliable, damage is either extreme or none at all, and the only finesse 'Non-Cheese' strategy for eliminating dug-in enemies revolves around some flavor of flanking. Flanking fails as a core mechanic however, due to a combination of small map size and the above inability to redeploy. Given that enemies will never get help from the other group 20 feet away unless you spawn that group yourself, you are also further discouraged from even TRYING to flank or reposition or divide your forces because all you will accomplish is triggering more monster closet "Landmines" that put your group in further danger. This requires the player to trade RNG rolls in order to eliminate the enemy, and all things being equal, this favors the aliens more than the player--as it was designed to, in order to encourage players to make intelligent use of the cover dynamic.

4) At later levels, the accuracy of both XCOM operatives and Alien monsters rises to the high 90's, at least from what I've seen. Enemy accuracy is unpredictable since the exact characteristics of the enemy, its weapon, and so forth are obscured and I haven't the data on-hand. Though safe to say, their accuracy is usually quite good. Occasionally you can be shot by aliens you do not see, which not only does not trigger their "oh shit" reaction pose. Sometimes enemies will display very high levels of accuracy at long range, since accuracy does not seem to alter range much. And finally, alien weapons are usually a tier or two higher than the ones you are using, making an equal exchange of fire a losing proposition. You must strategically outmaneuver the enemy or make use of powerful special powers to put them down.

5) You cannot afford to have a soldier critically wounded because it incurs a permanent and massive WILL loss that renders the character undesirable for any further play. A simple thing to keep in mind...


All tallied, you're faced with being asked to trade punches with a never-ending horde of very competent enemies, try to flank them and in the process usually trigger even more of the nasties (especially on Classic or Impossible), or simply stay as a dense kill-team, trade land for security, use the overwatch and your special abilities, and facepalm at how stupidly the game behaves. I still have fun, but it would be incorrect to say that I'm merely using a cheese tactic that takes all the smart and fun out of it. I could either not use the snipers the game hands me and rewards me for killing things with, restrict my weapons to pure ballistics to give the enemies a greater effective hitpoint edge, choose not to use my abilities or choose ones I deliberately believe to be poor, or I can play the game the way it is begging me to play it and just watch it fall over at my feet (or grind me into a red pulp) because of the incoherent design sense that tasks you with spreading out to flank foes, but punishes map exploration with monster spawns.

[Agent Sorchus]

Here is a simple question, did you ever have a use for pistols in this game? It just seems too... unnecessary and speaks to weak game design that with no concerns for ammo, no weight restrictions/ tu advantage there is no reason to have pistols as a separate slot from weapons.

Note I have only seen a short bit of gameplay and most of it was early. It wouldn't surprise me if the pistol slot was used for psy items or something later on.

[xthetenth]

Pistols are for setting up tasers, finishing off enemies when you run out of ammo in your magazine and snipers with squadsight who've moved.

[Nephtys]

Given how fast ammo goes down in this game, especially with special fire modes... I use pistols a LOT. Laser Pistols and better are also reasonably lethal. Also, to soften up tougher enemies for stunning.

[Covenant]

Pistols are for setting up tasers, finishing off enemies when you run out of ammo in your magazine and snipers with squadsight who've moved.

Snipers can also get the Gunslinger perk, which is actually pretty decent, since it grants +2 damage with pistols. In the unfortunate occasion of your sniper actually having to move this will let them still do appreciable damage at medium range. Assaults can benefit from the same thing, if you gave them a shotgun that is, since then they may be caught at times without a good distance weapon. Personally I just give my assaults rifles and call it a day.

It does smack of poor design sense though. Pistols sit in your third inventory slot for no substantive reason in the current build of the game. I appreciate them treating pistols as a legitimate piece of gear but it really isn't, the way the game is designed. They weren't in UFOD either, but UFOD had a better excuse since they had carry weight and admittedly the laser pistol was the best weapon in that game.

In terms of gameplay they provide the player with more than one option for when they're drained of ammo, but burning an entire clip is very rare in my experience, especially since the Foundry grants an upgrade to ammunition capacity and you an just reload without risk between battles. I think they made have had a greater role in a previous version of the game, since at one point they DID have ammunition tracking, so you could have burned all your clips. I doubt they ever had BULLET tracking, but there was a clip limitation at some point, so you could see the value of the pistol then, especially if it was considered an optional piece of equipment.

One class is allowed to ignore pistols, and that's the Heavy, allowing them to carry a bazooka in their secondary weapon slot. Now, I wouldn't say that players should be given the freedom to put anything they want in their second weapon slot, but it seems a bit silly to give such prominence to the pistol without doing anything with it the way the heavy does something with the bazooka. The bazooka clearly is a relic of a previous build as well, since it has an accuracy rating (but no actual chance of missing since it just goes where pointed and blows up in an AoE anyway) so my guess is that at some point the bazooka was a piece of equippable gear and not a class perk. Shredder Rockets may have been an alternate rocket model as well.

There's a few other relics too. Laser weapons which are specifically stated in their UFOpaedia entry as not using or needing ammunition, yet in game they use ammunition just like every other weapon. I don't know why they decided to make lasers consume ammunition again, it doesn't really make much sense to me, but I suppose they wanted to make the reloading aspect something that everyone had to deal with no matter what their weapon type. Which, again, doesn't really make sense given how easily you can ignore the issue entirely by reloading between fights.

Given how fast ammo goes down in this game, especially with special fire modes... I use pistols a LOT. Laser Pistols and better are also reasonably lethal. Also, to soften up tougher enemies for stunning.

I never really have this problem. I don't use suppression much, I don't see the value in it whatsoever, and without suppression sucking my ammo dry I almost never have need for an in-combat reload. My main killers are two snipers, each of which have four shots worth of ammo, and given how my rifles 2-shot enemies that leads to me being able to kill about 4 enemies between sniper reloads. Most enemies spawn in packs of 3 so that's more than I need even before you consider the damage my assaults and support and heavy are doing.

The only one of my guys who ever runs dry IN combat is the heavy, since I use it for the incredibly useful Holo Targetting even if there's no chance of the heavy hitting. But the heavy is the only class that can't use pistols anyway, so regardless of what I want to do with pistols I never get a chance to without feeling like it was my own mistake for not spending a calm turn to reload.

I still think it seems pretty clear that in a previous version of the game the Arc Thrower was originally allowed to be stowed in the Pistol slot. It would make perfect sense given the way everything else in the game treats the unfinished concept of the 'secondary weapon,' and it makes no sense for the arc thrower to be an item when it is held and aimed like a gun with the exact same to-hit mechanics of a gun. Unlike a bazooka or a grenade, it would make sense to have someone be in Overwatch using a stunner. It would also make it so much more convenient if my assault could swap to his Stunner and run up to tazer the fuck out of an alien.

[Zinegata]

I never found much use for the pistol either, at least once you get some stuff later on which essentially doubles everyone's ammo capacity. Before that ammo does run out fast enough that it may become an issue once or twice in a fight, but even then I generally just fall back / reload.

I wouldn't mind it if they had made it possible to replace the pistol with one other piece of miscellaneous gear. As it stands the current gear limits (only one special item per trooper with some exceptions) does feel a bit limiting.

Also, getting close to the end of the game. And my verdict on the game is looking to be "Typical Firaxis" - fun and follows a successful formula, but they rushed some elements in very bad ways (which describes pretty much every game they've made recently).

[Stark]

Yeah, the spotter AND the sniper both need LOS to the target. If not, squad sight snipers would be TRULY broken, rather than just vicious in outdoor maps. Cars, hills, bulkheads, walls, all of them break sniper LOS. The main thing that breaks LOS for shot animations is that units can see and be seen around corners if they're hugging a wall next to it due to the cover system, and the animations don't force the target to peek out of cover in time to get facepunched by plasma. Instead, they just animate to where the target is standing, no matter if that makes the bolt pass through one or more huge, solid objects on the way there. If someone's standing out on their own, they only take up their own square for targeting purposes. If someone's cowering behind a wall, they take up their own square and the square around the corner, so they can shoot and be shot.

It's an animation issue, or rather a lack-of-animation issue, not a problem with squad sight snipers. They're just one of the more visible symptoms.

Yeah, you guys are definitely playing a different game. Aside from guys shot too early or too late in a move(which is a possible, although hilariously bad in itself, explanation for some), I've seen guys spin aronud and react fire through the featureless front of a warehouse to shoot someone inside. This isn't the constant-and-lampshaded primitive LOS, this is shooting directly through solid objects that extend for tiles in either direction. I constantly shoot people through entire structures, and in one notable battle right after getting squad sight, my sniper fired through four walls and two height levels on a construction site map, at one of two spawned sectoids... not the close one that was visible, but the far distant one that was behind all the obstacles. In alien bases and ships in particular walls might block LOS, but they emphatically do not block bullets. It makes the miss-shots that destroy cover look really inconsistent, because the wall a giant space laser just passed effortlessly through is then exploded into tiny fragments by a missed pistol shot.

And to be honest, working out the tortuous logic for this stuff is entertaining but can't change the fact that its totally fucking ridiculous. If they patch it to actually time the shots to the right point in a move or animation, it just shows they're useless. If they don't, it shows they're retarded.

And this isn't even the worst part of the game! Its just the most obviously broken or stupid part. The reasons I returned the game are, in game terms, much worse, but less outright amusing.

[Keevan_Colton]

The accuracy rating for the rocket launcher does actually mean something, if you roll over it then the rocket goes somewhere else...this can be unpleasant.

[GuppyShark]

I can confirm this, it literally just happened to me.

I'm at the final mission, I am about to finish the entire game with one rocket... and it misses and then the game crashed.

[GuppyShark]

This isn't the constant-and-lampshaded primitive LOS, this is shooting directly through solid objects that extend for tiles in either direction. I constantly shoot people through entire structures, and in one notable battle right after getting squad sight, my sniper fired through four walls and two height levels on a construction site map, at one of two spawned sectoids... not the close one that was visible, but the far distant one that was behind all the obstacles. In alien bases and ships in particular walls might block LOS, but they emphatically do not block bullets.

I've not been able to replicate what you're describing on the PC. I have a Squadsight Sniper on my squad and in the last mission I tried maneuvering so that walls etc were between the Sniper and the targets, and it would definately not allow me to take the shot.

Here is my Sniper in a Terror mission.



You'll see here that the Sniper has two alien targets in range that have been spotted by squadmates, but cannot fire despite not having moved and having the Laser Sniper Rifle selected.

[Covenant]

I too rarely see people shoot through walls on the PC version. It did happen to me twice in Classic Ironman at the hands of sectoids though, which basically contributed to me throwing up my hands in disgust (along with a truly abysmal set of random rolls, I'm playing classic non-ironman and the game feels infinitely more forgiving on the rolls). It is frustrating. The problems come from some of the way the game handles LOS objects, and this is a known issue.

One of the places you can most easily replicate it on a PC is in UFOs, especially multi-level UFOs with aliens on a level below your Operatives. UFOs seem to have poorly handled LOS for some reason, perhaps because of their odd curves or who knows what, but the times I've been shot through a SOLID WALL without being at the corner has been in a UFO. I wonder if the UFO walls are sometimes improperly treated as corners, or if there are just some missed flags for partially passable terrain on it. But I do remember having the bullets fly through the wall of a UFO to kill an agent stationed on the 'middle' of a 3 or 4 wide section of UFO outer hull.

I can confirm this, it literally just happened to me.

I'm at the final mission, I am about to finish the entire game with one rocket... and it misses and then the game crashed.

Well that's lame, and not what I was expecting from a missed rocket. Does the game always crash on a missed rocket fire? If so it doesn't refute my point, just add a hilarious layer of stupidity to it.

[White Haven]

Not at all, in fact I've never had it crash on a missed rocket. I've had a missed rocket go wide and incinerate Anna Sing, so much for that council mission, but not a crash.

[TheHammer]

I wonder if we're getting to the bottom of why certain user experiences are so drastically different. Add my voice to the chorus of PC users who don't see the magical squad sight issues Stark and others are talking about, and the firing through objects. The 360 version may well have some serious issues, and I'd probably feel differently if that were the version I played.

[Skgoa]

PLaying on PC:
- Rockets and grenades do miss sometimes.
- My operatives can and do spot aliens through walls. These aliens then get their freem move and can be shot through these walls. For me it only happened in the alien base aussault mission, though there it was true for all rock walls.
- And since beating said mission, I now have aliens spawn directly on top of my team at least once per mission.

[Vendetta]

I've not been able to replicate what you're describing on the PC. I have a Squadsight Sniper on my squad and in the last mission I tried maneuvering so that walls etc were between the Sniper and the targets, and it would definately not allow me to take the shot.

I've found it mostly happens where you have partial sight of an enemy. If you enter aim mode on a sniper and can see, for instance, only the top of an alien's head then take the shot, the shot will actually travel through any obstacles in its way and hit the alien centre mass.

It mostly seems to happen as well where there's an elevation change between the shooter and the target.

I never had straight up magic shots on the 360 except for overwatch firing at the wrong time and/or target (dudes shoot at one of a squad of aliens as they move, kill it through a wall, the rest end their turn visible, or become visible at some point in their move.), but I had plenty of times where I had partial sight of an alien in the shooting window but the animation drew a straight line from gun to centre mass and that line was obstructed.

It seems to me that the cause is that the effective line of fire is not being drawn from the gun, but some other point, either the model's head or maybe more likely a point hovering somewhere above it.


Also, I had a sectopod appear out of thin air four squares away from my squad. Which was a bad time for the sectopod, since it was right next to a Bullet Swarm/HEAT heavy.

[Zixinus]

Am I the only one that wonders why the green-spiderwebbing missile-things that show up in Abduction missions are never research-able or explained? I mean, they explain why you don't have to worry about I WONDER WHAT'S IT LIKE IN THE CROSSFIRE civilians, but you would expect to at least research them if not scavenge them for a little alloy.