I finally had my first crash! It was a handy one, actually, as I blundered into a Sectopod, an Elite Shieldbearer and an Elite Lancer while trying to handle some other nasty things, but it did hard lock my whole system and force a restart, so that wasn't cool.

@doctordonkey said:

Yeah, those have been popping up for myself and others in the thread. I've also learned that the line of sight indicator is YOUR line of sight and not the enemy's, so they can see you before you see them. I've triggered pods that I thought I was safe from by following the indicator a little too closely.

@mirado: I have to restart after every mission now, or the game will crash during the loading screen for the subsequent mission. Not just a game restart, a full machine reboot. It sucks.

It's completely reproducible, too. Do a mission, come back to base for some administrative tasks, launch next mission, crash.

Welp, I learned a few things from my first real mission in combat, and had some things I thought confirmed. First, man do I suck. Lose everyone in what I assume is still part of the tutorial? timed power source for your base. That said..I think my time with long war has taught me to expect some things which I can't seem to find with this version.

So first. I can't look at my troops statics? Nor the enemies? A advent commander marks one of my guys and..ok there is a display of it on the screen but literally no interface I can see which goes "marked +10 crit chance for enemies, over-watching enemies not trigger when this unit attacks" or whatever it does. So yah, the sudden lack of information is..alarming coming off of a game where I had not only my units hp in number form, but wilpower, movement speed, aim and most importantly of all, on-going status effects and read outs. I spend a lot of time on this because..man there -has- to be something I am just missing. This game has to have poison, mind control, etc with conditions the player should be able to read "ok this soldier is poisoned (1 hp a round) for 3 turns).

Ok second, yup my first thought was right. Melee weapons are a complete and utter joke. What's that? Run all the way up to an enemy and attack them? What so I can be out of cover and pop the next group of aliens? That went EXACTLY how I thought it would. What a complete joke. If my assumption about pistols is also correct..there goes two class editions which are essentially "haha, yeah I'm gonna ignore that progression line entirely."

And finally, and here I call complete BS. Once out of concealment, it would appear that if an Enemy moves (ala on patrol) into line of sight, they get a full round of actions! Oh good, so I can end my turn, and enemies can not only walk out of the fog, but get a whole turn after doing so? Yah, that's a 100% shift change from x-com and even long war..although..

Here's hoping this is just a bad first impression of the gameplay. Because holy crap, I'm playing in the bloody tutorial, the game clearly labeled the mission as 'easy' even though I set it to the next difficulty up and..yah, my sword-wielder going down was my own fault..but the bloody game gave me the tutorial pop-up for how to take the action I just did so whatever. But bad guys getting to move and shoot, after moving into line of sight on their turn? Er..I think I'll go back to LW if that's really true..less frustrating and more fun.

@bladededge: You can see the info you're looking for if you mouse over the specific buff/debuff icon either on your soldier when they are selected or the enemy when aiming at them. Took me a while to realize this too.

Melee weapons are actually pretty good with the full build. They upgrade faster and cheaper then regular weapons (through autopsies), do more damage initially, don't miss (outside of some special enemy abilities), can apply debuffs from second tier on, don't care about cover and can even go through some thin cover. My blademaster was my guaranteed sectoid one shotter through all of early to midgame, fastest soldier to get to colonel. You can manually position where you strike from (and therefore better position yourself in cover) by using the move to square and mousing to the enemy square from it. (That said I am starting to feel the damage slide a little in the later parts of the game)

Pistol builds are also really viable. They don't do a lot of damage per shot, but are infinitely more flexible then snipers, and frequently have the ability to do several shots per turn through various abilities, combining it with specialty ammo is even better. (The designers had a talk pre release where they confessed they had to nerf pistol damage because of how powerful the abilities were and I feel they were right to do so, atm it feels like a balanced alternate build, but if pistols had 1 more point of damage they would probably just be a straight out a better option)

The enemies are generally much more static after you break concealment, so them walking into your troops happens quite rarely I find, and i'm over 30 hours in at this point. Out of concealment if the enemy pod stumbles into you they should only get 1 full round of actions (ie move+shoot), so either you got a bug or it was an edge case. There are a couple ways this can happen, one is if you still have a soldier in concealment and they discover him/her flanked.

@nevergameover: Yea I really miss the Russian/German/Chinese voices :(

@tennmuerti: Thank you for the information, Partly this was a 'ok someone please prove my initial impressions wrong!

As for the last bit. Like, in the old x-com, if an enemy pod/squad/group moved on their turn or simply 'discovered' you, you get the animation of them going "oh my!" and they move to cover..end turn. That happens only the once, from that point on they can certainly come out of the fog and get the full move+shoot. Even in Long war, hard as it was, this was the case.

The problem here was, ok so spoilers for the first mission/second tutorial mission. I eliminated the 4 advent soldiers on the way too, and guarding the power source. I moved guys up, and since I saw and triggered no bad-guys, moved people up next to it, end turn. At that point the sectoid and troops move into view, and get a full turn (move +shoot). They were not visable on the map before this, there was no cut-scene of them being alerted. They simply seemed to either telport into place (because scripting doesn't spawn them till your right next to the device and thus assumed to have activated it, which I had not or, as I said, the enemies have the new and rather awful ability to on their turn move, see you, then move and shot again.

Essentially if true then what I am saying is. Your identified by a group of guys, not during your turn but theirs, and they then get a full move+action. Essentially meaning uh..they have conceal vs you? Only they get to take their entire turn once its broken, unlike you where the enemies get their "alert! move to cover!' once you break cover.

I assume it must have been a bug because that thing I just described is not how any of the other games played. It was a possible modification in long-war, but even then it was "Aliens might take a shot instead of move one they spot you" not "they get to move during their turn, spot you, then get a full move+shoot". I'll give the game another go, we will see how it goes.

Concealment is an element of surprise though. If you want until the surprise is gone, the benefit of it is gone too. If you're concealed, you can move that one soldier around safely without the enemy knowing where he is. So he can complete objectives and such, which is useful for the ones on timers. For example, you can have your squad engage a group of Aliens while your Ranger goes to the VIP and carries him to the Skyranger.

You can also use concealment to move around and set up flanks and such. Which is usually very dangerous since they'll target your isolated soldier. But when they don't see him, it is very beneficial for that. Lastly there are more skills that take advantage from concealment. Like the one with +25 aim and crit chance. Perhaps some items work well in tandem with it too. I haven't tested it, but perhaps Lightning Strike also works with entering concealment? Probably not though.

But yeah, it's useful in those cases. Waiting to get caught is not the purpose of it.

@zevvion: @bocckob I find the Ranger conceal abilities infinitely useful as even just a scout tool. They can stay in front of your main team and safely discover alien pods without instantly activating them. They can essentially pop 2-3 extra pods safely without having to use extra actions or slots on stuff like the battle scanner. Sometimes I even leave the stealth ranger concealed if I feel i don't need them to finish the current encounter just to scout the next one safely. Even if that was the only benefit you got it would still be amazing. But as Zevvion mentioned there are additional uses. Like giving safe lines of sight to your grenadiers and snipers on unaware aliens. Tactically it's the shits.

@mirado: In that case it will certainly have to wait. Not that I didn't enjoy Enemy Within (I did), but if even newer PCs are having random issues then my older one probably will...or won't? Just sounds too random right now. Not a risk worth taking on a full price game when there are others waiting in the wings. Thank you for being honest about it though. Considering it's a new release, I honestly expected people to just worship it outright. Nice to see I was wrong and get a fair shake on it instead!

I've played 13 hours so far. I'm really enjoying the game (I haven't run in to any performance issues so far).

For me the hardest part about XCOM:EU was the overworld stuff and the maintenance of satellites. I'm still wrapping my head around how to manage that in this game (not satellites but comms relays etc) but I feel less like my game is effectively over in the first month or two (though I could be wrong). Mission wise I'm enjoying the gameplay, I'm on Veteran at the moment so it's been relatively smooth sailing. The way I approach XCOM is to spend a few games working out the overworld stuff (and hopefully 'winning') before switching to an Ironman Classic style game.

This is the most time I've sunk in to a single game in a weekend in a long time (13 hours might not seem much to some, but with a 1 year old son, that's quite a lot)

@neozeon: As much as I'm willing to look past certain issues because of how much fun I am having, it's intellectually dishonest to pretend those problems aren't there. PC gaming features a wide variety of bugs that can vary in intensity from person to person, but enough people have reported on XCOM 2's issues to warrant caution if you are hoping for a smooth experience.

I cannot stand apologists. The only way we stop getting broken games at launch is by letting developers know (with our wallets) when the quality of gameplay is being overshadowed by the problems a game has; Firaxis is fortunate that the equation is still working out in their favor, but if I were having the same issues that some others seem to be encountering, this would have been the last time they got my money without confirmation that the next game released relatively bug free.

I just had my first crash; if that turns into what @mike now seems to be dealing with, my postiion may change, despite the fun I've had. A crashing, frustrating game isn't worth $60, despite how good the game underneath it all may be.

For some reason I am just not enjoying this game like I did the previous XCOM.

I am playing on the 2nd difficulty (out of 4) and no matter what mission I go on, people always die or become unconcious and I don't have time to evac them so they die as well (and yes I know this is expected, but not to the extent it is happening to me). This has led to me having absolutely no promoted soldiers, which in turns means whatever next mission I try always has the same result (since rookies are next to useless). Adding on to this I also have to spend supplies to even keep my roster stocked with enough people to send on a mission since there are so many injuries as well, so I have no resources to upgrade my base.

And at this point each mission has so many bad guys of higher caliber (multiple sectoids, stun stick guys that can run halfway across the map, the 3 health minions are no where to be seen only 5 health minimum). So I am finding it extremely difficult in my current situation to even win one mission considering the vast majority of them have a strict time requirement.

I have no idea what I am doing wrong.

Now that I've decided to just try to put up the horrible performance, I have to say, this still seems like a step back from the previous game.

These timed missions are bumming me out. You can fail a timed objective, be able to still finish the mission / defeat all enemies, then after you've done that, you get a message saying that it's game over, because you failed the timed objective. Why not just stop me after I fail, instead of letting me play on only to invariably get a game over a handful of turns later...?

Secret XCOM 2 MVP so far:

The loading screens. The art and design itself, the digital screen type filter, the buzzing sound design. SO GOOD.

@nevergameover: A lot of the customization, both props and colors, especially the helmets, are locked behind character rank and equipment progression. You won't start seeing cool helmets until you've got the power armor they're associated with, and the cooler hats and tats are only unlocked for ranked up soldiers, that sort of stuff. And I actually really like the billion different options for the same language, there's a lot of variation in them. I've got a crass medic with a new zealand accent, a sniper who sounds like a seattle teenager, and a stammering genadier who's always nervous about where I'm sending her. The variety of voices within the same language allows for a lot more customization while still being able to understand what your soldiers are saying to you.

Surprisingly disappointed. I know Xcom is supposed to be tough, but the really tight time limits on most missions are not for my taste. When I can't make it through the first two missions without keep more than one character, it's not fun. Refunded. Glad everyone who enjoys it is enjoying it.

@doctordonkey: Constantly.

I really enjoyed the conceit that I, as the Commander, was basically freeze dried in a bag for 20 years. It was a real nice touch and even provided an in-universe reason for you having no tactical control in the opening mission. Great stuff.

I didn't have a problem with timers until I started encountering multiple Andromeda's on one such mission with a time limit, and the objective was anything but accessible. This was actually my first profound loss. One soldier was killed and all 5 others were captured. All the gear they had is gone too. It's real hard to deal with. I just got an awesome Stasis Vest that gives +2HP and regenerates 2HP each turn up to 8HP regenerated total. Gone.

I've heard a mission pops up later where you can liberate your captured soldiers. This prevented me from losing my shit, but it's hard to do missions now without great gear and when most of my best soldiers are gone. Hope I can come back from this.

You don't suck. The game is 10% strategy and 90% luck.

Been playing a bunch more since, and here are my biggest gripes with the game (reviews have already talked at length about the good parts so i don't feel too bad being whiny):

* Performance tanks in amazing ways. Even at significantly lowered settings the game degrades so badly over time that what starts off pretty good becomes an incredible slideshow later. Even after quitting the game my PC stutters and chops for a while trying to recover. Even an event popup on the strategic map takes a second to show up as the framerate tanks. I'm not on a superb PC but it's specced for flight sims and I can run The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 blazingly fast. It's disheartening.

* Information systems are poor. I still haven't found out what being marked means. Buying something in engineering requires resources but doesn't tell you how many of those resources you have. It's flat out poorly designed, which is odd considering the devs have been talking up the UI as one of the benefits of PC exclusivity. Mousing over a unit's name doesn't give you any indication you can click it for stats. Shouldn't the stats be an instant tooltip? It's really poor.

* Wound system is restrictive. There are so many unavoidable ways to get hurt in this game, having your guys be out of commission for 14 days because a snake man gave them a hug from across the map when they were hunkered down in full cover feels pretty lame.

* Notifications on the world map are intrusive and non stop. I'd prefer an event queue rather than this constant interruption. Repeatedly clicking on the scan button and being INSTANTLY interrupted repeatedly just doesn't feel good, it feels like being badgered. The strategic game is basically a board game this time around, but its realtime contrivances makes it feel staccato. I'd feel better about being told "this journey will take N days to complete" and then give me an update once the journey was complete, like it was my "turn", rather than repeatedly bashing this scan button to get on with things.

* The graphics can not be trusted. XCOM2 sorely needs one of two things: A "tactical" view that abstracts down the world down into the basic rules, or better "realistic" visual representation of the tactical space. XCOM2 is a board game. It treats rules as sacred and even though something looks like it shouldn't work, if it goes by the rules it's ok. For instance the hard 180 degree sweep rule to cover, where you can be at an angle where it makes no sense for the cover to apply, but according to the rules the unit you're trying to flank remains in hard cover. Other times are the game's concept of line of sight seems totally crazy, with units getting shot and spotted through walls and ceilings. It's just hard to know what the game wants me to know.

* Surprise! A lot of game mechanics seem taught by trial and error. First time I encountered a codex I had no idea that would happen when skulljacking a dude. The result was me spawning in a super dangerous enemy right in the middle of a pitched firefight and getting wrecked, even after having spent close to an hour on that mission already. The weird vortex thing the codex can spawn told me my weapons were disabled, and i figured it was an area of effect thing that i just needed to stay out of to shoot. Nuh-uh, weapons will reenable shortly even while staying in the vortex, and the whole thing just explodes after a few turns. I had no idea and the game gave me no way to know. I did not want to play more for a while after that. New mechanics are encountered a LOT in this game, it's really super dense, and I feel like most of the times I'm just upset that the game elected to put me in a bad position to learn it. I'd appreciate the tiniest bit of warning. Maybe this is me asking to be coddled a bit, but making a game a pleasure to play is also part of game design. It seems to me XCOM2 thinks I should be ok with failing and restarting my campaign with new information. But this isn't fucking Dark Souls, this is a strategy game. I finished XCOM1 on my first playthrough, and never felt wanting of information, and failures felt entirely my own. Something was lost in the transition here.

* Stun lancers and magical melee. Melee is hugely important but at the point lancers are introduced you have one maybe two rangers, and suddenly you're dealing with 6-9 lancers per mission, dudes who can run across the map and perform game-breaking feats of violence. Melee can go through some cover, but what the game considers some cover seems wildly out of whack, cue lancers killing through walls. Whenever I see them my heart sinks, and not in a "fuck this'll be tough" way, more a "fuck, remember to quicksave a lot".

In spite of this I have had excellent, EXCELLENT times with this game. I sincerely think it just needs a patch or two with some brave changes, performance fixes aside. Specifically tooltip timing and line of sight fixes would radically improve the game.

This game has the best loadout screen music since MGSV

I'm not saying that I dislike having a lot of different English options, but I would much rather have, for example, a single Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, or Portugese option. All of my Asian and African soldiers speak fluent, unaccented English. That's dumb.

@sunjammer: tbh I think with a little more thought dice rolls could be removed entirely and the game would be better for it. I don't feel anything about winning or losing a mission because luck is usually by far the biggest deciding factor. When coupled with the procedural generation, luck is occasionally the only factor.

I had a unit take 2 damage, which I accidentally healed because I didn't know how the fuck to use the little flying robo-mfer to heal, so she's back at full health right, then I finish the mission and that characters apparently gravely wounded and out for like a month. That's the main wtf is this issue I've had outside of all the other things mentioned in this thread.

@sunjammer:

You can see what marked means by mousing over the debuff icon when the soldier is selected, this was already mentioned in the thread. The resources you have are all listed at the top of the screen at all times, including in engineering bay crafting menu. Personally I really like the more severe wound system. It forces you to rotate your characters more then the previous Xcom, and can be mitigated with a staffed medbay and a good bench of dudes. Compared to Long War mod this wound system is pretty mild honestly. The realtime aspect of the strategy layer is what allows it to be so flexible, but I see where you are coming from the ratio of interruptions is indeed a bit high.

The graphics couldn't be trusted in the previous Xcom either, rules need to be king for a reason so that you can rely on them, and as soon as you get into that mindset all the line of sight stuff falls neatly into place (I just see a grid) and this time around they give even more information like indicators what enemies will you be able to shoot from any particular square. Granted occasionally Xcom still fucks up and does dodgy shots that even mechanically wise there was no indication could happen.

Codex spawning was a story related progression moment. Honestly i felt that considering the big blue glowy shit remained in the area that was my cue to move out of it, games 101. The weapons simply needed to be reloaded. I get what you mean by wanting trial and error, but at the same time Xcom was marketed in the first place as not just another strategy game, but one with rng, perma death, discovery and general nastiness, that is actually a bit reminiscent of Darksouls or roguelites. It kind of does expect you to fail. And this vibe is exactly what revived this niche and spawned so many indie games in it between then and now. I guess it comes down to personal preference.

However in general i think that them changing the UI for the tool tips was for the worse indeed, the tiny buff/debuff icons themselves on top of the unit icon stuffed into a corner are easily missable unlike the giant question mark and ability to press F1 in 2012 Xcom and just get a nice big full list of every buff/debuff and ability active on a unit. I was as frustrated as you at the start with lack of explanation and only finally discovered them several hours in after deliberately looking for the tooltips, because i was unwilling to believe they removed them completely.

It would be a completely different game tho.

"Insert here standard platitudes about the better you are the less rng maters and it being about the migitation of bad outcomes."

Having finished my first playthrough of the campaign now my biggest gripe with the game (other than the bigger issues of direction I've already mentioned) is that it actually cuts back on the strategical layer.

At first it seems like there's more to it with their new geoscape, but ultimately the supplies you get from it are largely useless (you will probably spend more supplies to generate more supplies than actually buy things) while the alien materials (which are the actual resources you need) are largely random. But outside of the geoscape they've cut back on the base building, there are less things to research and you're not even engineering much (and there's no ship combat). The only major addition is the proving grounds, which again is a slot machine driven by random resources.

Even not considering the fact that the game doesn't really expand much on the original concept, there are some really glaring omissions from that concept that I miss dearly. Not to say that the game is worse, but I can't help but feel that this one is even more of an unfinished package than the first remake was.

I'm sure you're kidding, but really it's closer to the other way around if you are using sound tactics. If you sincerely think this game is 90% luck, maybe go watch some Ironman Legend on YouTube and see how those guys are doing it.

@tennmuerti: Yeah disbelief in omission is a pretty bad way to learn an interface ;) I haven't played since last I posted but I can't remember where the debuff icon is. So much of the UI is hidden away or inconsistent, like how moving the geoscape map is a click-drag but moving the base view is edge-push, or how clicking a unit name brings up the stats but mousing over other things bring up tooltips etc. They have made a lot of mistakes here.

A lot of your understanding for what i perceive as faults with the game really stem from our points of view and doesn't mean either of us are wrong. You are okay with the visuals being essentially superfluous garnish on a hard tile based system you know, while I'm expecting those visuals to be an accurate representation of that tile based system that lets me intuitively make decisions. I replayed some XCOM:EW and I don't experience the same problems as I do in XCOM2, so I don't know how to respond to that. This one just feels more abstract.

Codex spawning is entirely up to you. The moment you bring a skulljack to a mission, that shit is going down. I just happened to bring it to a mission that was already really hard. I could've done it in a much less challenging one. I had no information with which to make that decision, even just a text telling me using the jack would cause serious alert with Advent would be enough to tell me it was a decision i had to consider more. In my mind it was just going to be like the capturing a sectoid objective in EU.

About the blue aura thing, again, I thought all it did was disable weapons in its radius, or otherwise behave like a "gas cloud". It became a decision I decided to use, where i figured ok no guns means i can still charge in with my ranger and melee. Cue explosion and dead ranger.

You're expressing a lot of things that I keep reaading from other veterans, most of which tends to stem (and correct me if i'm presumptuous) from fans of the original game (especially players of LW) having expectations of brutality of the new one, but the idea that classic ironman is the "real way to play xcom" is a fallacy at best. At default difficulty XCOM was an absolute pleasure to play for anyone and it taught itself well to new players. This one feels like a giant middle finger to newcomers: Even me as a veteran find it jarring.

Anyway it's all fixable with a patch or two.

I've been playing a bit more tonight, and got to the point where my dudes are now all prancing around in fancier armour, and all the while I kept thinking "this reminds me of something". Then it hit me:

Still loving it, despite the performance, the wonky line of sight and other issues.

Not kidding at all. The difficulty of any early mission will vary wildly depending on how lucky or unlucky you are with dice rolls and map generation (especially whether mobs are close enough for you to trigger several at once). If you happen to trigger multiple undetectable mobs at once, each of which is roughly as powerful as your team, then you are getting overwhelmed whatever 'sound tactics' you employ. Even against one mob you're only ever 2-3 unlucky dice rolls away from being dead early on.

If you have enough prior knowledge of the mechanics / enemies you will face / exact right upgrade path to take then no doubt you only need to string together a few missions before you are OP enough to negate the huge luck factor in the game. I imagine once you're ahead of the difficulty curve it becomes increasingly easy to stay there.

It's quite a compelling game when you're fortunate enough to be served up something reasonably balanced and the shots land as the percentages suggest. I just think it'd be even better if they made it purely strategic / tactical instead of a game of chance.

I'm on a phone so I can't elaborate much, but I finished the tutorial and things immediately got way easier and I started having fun. The only other game I've played with such a ridiculously luck based first hour is SMT IV and that game balanced itself out after a few hours, hoping this eventually does the sam. Fire Emblem Fates comes out soon, I'd honestly recommend waiting to see how it turns out if you need a turn based strategy fix. This one is a little problematic.

Feel the same way about the previous game. RNG they had felt forced. I'll wait for heavy modding or an expansion before buying.

Are you kidding me? The Archon's bomb attack still hits once activated even if you KILL IT BEFORE it fires?

@nevergameover: AND it doesn't land as a pinpoint strike like the overlay suggests, but instead blows up in an undefined wide area around those points. Fun!

It'd be far too easy without the random chances of failure. The game has to really stack the odds against you by making your hits up to RNG, giving the aliens a shitton of health, and putting a whole bunch of them in one mission for it to hold up at all. The AI just isn't up to snuff, and as you said it's already too easy to snowball into an unstoppable death squad, so I'm not sure how removing the element of failure could improve the game without them drastically altering the formula to the point that it really wouldn't be XCOM anymore.

Hot Tip: If you lose the Skulljacker you have to reresearch/build it from the proving grounds(or whatever it's called). I didn't know this and thought it was a bug.

I'm really enjoying it so far!

One of my favorite aspects of X-Com: EU was building that connection with your soldiers. X-Com 2 has done a lot more to help me build those connections, like having the outfits of the soldiers vary and giving them each a little bio. These are small things that don't really improve the systems in any way, but they've really improved my experience with the game. The time limits haven't annoyed me, but I'm only about 4 missions in so there haven't been any super-difficult missions. Overall, it feels like a less turtle-y EU with minor additions that I really enjoy.

Sadly, the performance has been hit or miss so far. The game has stuttered a bit, which will hopefully be fixed by lowering the Anti-Aliasing. When it works it's great, but more often than not X-Com 2 has been a little janky, nothing game-breaking, but just enough little problems to be annoying.

Hmm. I feel like I'm enjoying it.. but it's also not super hooking me like I feel it should.

I'm playing it on Easy, because I never played an XCOM game before and I like building/customizing a team(s).. but them dying permanently sort of ruins that.. I thought that was an Iron Man only thing.

Anyway, I lost one or two from my initial crew and that kinda made me depressed. Then the others get stuck recovering forever and the Rookies just end up like fodder. Feels rough when any one of your team members can essentially die from two attacks.

The other part I don't like is the overall global event timer thing. Avatar project whatever. I forgot that was a thing in EU. The game is throwing seemingly endless amounts of cool items, research, missions, stuff to do etc at me and then its like "OMG Do this one specific thing now!" while I'm trying to have my dudes recover or get supply caches blah blah blah. It went from feeling like there is so much to see and do too feeling like I've already lost the game because I'm sure there is some optimal route to build and approach missions in a certain order/pace and I'm behind the curve, losing members, getting stuck with rookies while the missions get harder etc etc. If I could turn that aspect off, then I'd probably be okay with the rest of the game.

Also, running it at 3440x1440 on max settings I think with a 980 and an old sandy bridge i7 OC'd at 4.4ghz and the game seems perfectly playable. FPS avg seems like 30-45? Only had one weird bug/glitch thing so far with a grenade explosion acting all wonky. The only concerning technical thing I've seen is the load times/transitions being hitchy or long.. And I'm pretty sure it's installed on my SSD.

Thats not what reproducible means. If you could get the game to crash on another system or a fresh install by following those exact instructions then it would be reproducible and a solid bugreport. When i do that it doesnt crash for me so you have hundreds of parameters to exclude on your system/gamesetup before you can call it reproducible.

Yes, those are rad! The style and colors are super reminiscent of North Korean propaganda posters.

It's not just my system, one of my Steam friends is experiencing precisely the same thing, and we can both get it to happen every single time.

What would you call that if not reproducible?

So far the game has been incredibly frustrating. So far I've twice encountered a bug where a soldier is unable to move at all, and both times it has caused me to flat out fail a mission. Since I'm playing on Ironman I can't just revert the save and avoid replicating it. Add to that the grenade UI being a bit inconsistent on what it does and doesn't hit, the crazy performance issues, the random maps making the concelement mechanic occasionally broken, and the fact that this game is flat more difficult than the previous edition, and the game just isn't fun right now at all for me.

@jimbo: Sound tactics mean never activating more than one pod at a time unless absolutely necessary. I have found most maps have between 3-5 pods of 2-4 aliens in them. A good opener + ambush generally kills at least 2-3 dudes. If all else fails you can always fall back and have the enemy come into your overwatch trap. The missions are small enough that you can easily use a frag/flash for each pod just to ensure an easy victory. I'm not saying the RNG can't feel brutal sometimes, but if you think victory in the game is mostly down to luck than you may want to adjust your playstyle and play more carefully.

I suspect it'd be a lot easier to balance and easier to make a decent AI with dice rolls removed. I would just treat cover as a set bullet damage reduction (full cover reduces by 100%, half cover reduces by 50%, flanked or out in open 0% reduction), then have -1, 0, +1 bonus damage based on range and again for height difference. The AI wouldn't waste half its moves firing with a small chance of hitting, and I wouldn't be perpetually frustrated by point blank flank shots missing. It's hard to consider the game tactical when you have no idea what the outcome of any move will be.

Removing dice rolls doesn't have to mean easier. Granted, it's certainly arguable that it wouldn't be XCOM anymore. I think perhaps I'm just bored of faux strategy games flipping a coin and telling me whether I won or not.

I do think any game with a difficulty curve which starts hard / very luck dependent and ends in the player steamrolling with an unstoppable death squad has probably messed up somewhere.

@jimbo: I actually have a thing to say about this! Despite not really being part of the conversation...

. Any strategy game, whatever it is, has the end state of "The player ends up with an unstoppable death squad". They also have a "The RNG screwed me the moment I hit start". The good ones however have both of those things at the extreme ends of their spectrum, with a wealth of compelling gameplay in the center. So that, in theory, for the 95% of people who play the game, its fun, for the 3% that get bad luck, (like generated my opening statement) can just try again, and the 2% that can reach 'nirvana..er the ultimate death ball. Congrats, you are real good at this game.

Like I'll switch games. Take any of the Paradox strategy games. The vast vast majority of games are centered in one area, are basically as intended. But there are people who can, given any country, essentially conquer the entire map. How? Giant death ball, absolute understand of game mechanics/ways to eliminate RNG and etc.

I made a shockingly, to me, similar argument actually for Rogue-likes in a thread about the darkest dungeon. I think I'll make it here. A good strategy game needs to have that "ultimate death ball" potential, to be good. Else the best a player can ever hope to achieve is "Well I'm pretty sure my skill is responsible for this victory..maybe".

As it is with rogue-likes. The good ones just make that end-state, the ultimate way of 'beating' such a game, either next to impossible to achieve for an extended period (i.e. rogue likes) or reserved for the very very tip-top of the scale.

Er..thinking about it. This applies to MMOs as well. Like, you don't make content for just for the raiding guilds, but the success of your game is determined by how hard the latest content is for the top 1% of your players to master. So uh..maybe this is a fundamental game design law? Then again, every single person in that DD thread disagreed with me so maybe not.

Do you mean the one where they target several squares with your team in it and comes down from the sky?

If that's the one, you can see them launch the rockets up, and the targets appear. So even if you kill them the rocket pods have already been launched into the air and are coming down regardless. In effect they already fired, unlike the Sectopod that has to maintain targeting.

After playing with the settings the game runs okay for me. Mostly just framey in the loads before missions and during some of the action cams. The only issues I'm having now is some intermittent crash to desktop. That said, with some patches this could really be one of my favorite strategy games. Love the resistance kevlar, really adds to the just scraping by atmosphere.

@jimbo: The difficulty curve in this game is nowhere near what you describe though. I just started a new game after finishing it earlier today and the early missions are much easier than the late ones, even with all the upgrades etc. Much of the perceived difficulty curve has a lot to do with information (sorta like Souls games), once you understand your tools and how to approach the game things change quite drastically. And this happens at intervals as you learn more and more about the new skills and enemies.

As for the game being about luck, yes it's a factor of the game, but some of the beauty of XCom is that you can play the game however you want. It's not like other recent games where your stuck having to deal with bad rolls no matter what. If you want to you can completely eliminate bad rolls, or you can play it somewhat recklessly and reload if things go horribly wrong or play it super careful and never reload at all (or anything in between). And if someone is telling you you're playing the game wrong they are just being assholes.

Also, have you played Hard West ? It has a few similarities with what you're describing.

I agree with the RNG aspects of the game being pretty anti-fun. Earlier I had 4 overwatches proc and they all missed, which caused me to lose a member of my team. Then 2 missions later I had 7 out of 8 shots each over 70% hitrate miss. And the amount of times I've had a character 1 unit away from the enemy and still miss despite their rifle being literally inside the enemy's face is ridiculous. This kind of shitty dice roll stuff is why I dislike CoH so much and like Men of War so much.