I played this game on normal without retrying and didn't lose a guy or lose a country. I have played the original X-COM, but I found this game very easy. I am currently doing classic Iron-man and finding it a bit harder. I should add that I played very safely, but am I the only one who found it this way? People keep complaining about the difficulty, but is anyone finding it this easy?

I played this game on normal without retrying and didn't lose a guy or lose a country. I have played the original X-COM, but I found this game very easy. I am currently doing classic Iron-man and finding it a bit harder. I should add that I played very safely, but am I the only one who found it this way? People keep complaining about the difficulty, but is anyone finding it this easy?

Ryan was WAY over hyping it, normal is easy, i lost like 11 people and they were all cannon fodder rookies and didn't lose a country. Al ot of people have mentioned that normal is easy and are having no problem. I have also tied classic Iron man mode and its better, I keep trying a very difficult mission to keep panic down and I am getting wiped out.

@bigsmoke77: Thanks I talked to someone who was having trouble and I wasn't sure if it was me or if the GB guys are just bad at this game.

No, I totally breezed through Normal no problem. Of course, the same can not be said for the Classic Iron Man playthrough I started and immediately botched.

I just finished on Normal today. I'd never played an XCOM game before and so there was a bit of a learning curb to figure out how to balance everything and how to play, but once I got into the rhythm I found I never lost anyone.

I think the reputation it gets for being hard is really because it's unforgiving, which is quite different. You can quite quickly get wiped out if you don't play cautiously.

Nah, you're right, Normal wasn't too bad. I wiped on the alien base invasion but after that I didn't have much trouble. Classic on the other hand, I've probably failed at least 10 times and restated. God damn it.

I've already lost about 30 people and I've only played for about 4 hours on normal. What's wrong with me!

The alien base assault, I believe it was. I had been sweeping through quite handily. The next area was clear, but my soldiers kept hearing activity on the other side of a barricade. Moved some soldiers atop it to find ALL THE CRYSSALIDS.

Seriously, like twelve of them at once.

And that was pretty much the end of my first Classic Ironman run. Normal is in no way indicative of what the game has in store.

If you don't build more satellites early, things get pretty effed pretty quickly, but if you get a decent build order it's not too tough. I did end up having to start over after a few hours, but on my second try I am absolutely destroying.

@kingofpeanuts: It's challenging, but if you're just doing normal and being super cautious, it's not too difficult. It's not like bang your head against a wall or something. When you go ironman with the higher difficulties, though, you can certainly find yourself with a very stiff challenge.

Ironman on Impossible is... impossible. But everything else is quite beatable with enough patience and proper management. :)

@Scrawnto said:

If you don't build more satellites early, things get pretty effed pretty quickly, but if you get a decent build order it's not too tough. I did end up having to start over after a few hours, but on my second try I am absolutely destroying.

Yeah, my first ten hours or so on Normal were a learning experience wherein I probably built a few less satellites than I should have, I lost 2 countries, and had about 90% of my total soldier fatalities occur. After that, I launched a bunch of satellites and got around to getting titan armour and plasma weapons, and then the rest of Normal was kind of a joke as I had like 4+ colonels on every mission and basically everyone who made it to major or higher survived all the way to the final mission.

If Ryan thought Normal was crazy balls to the wall hard, he must have no sense of caution whatsoever, or he must've researched literally everything else possible before getting better weapons and armour. Normal can be tough but extremely fair as long as you don't act like an idiot.

The game can be Challenging because it tells you what everything does, but it dose not tell you why your going to need to use it. Such as the Aircraft, I am still fuzzy about that stuff. Which is what I think the intention is. Because then, you learn by failure. It feels like you are encountering these aliens, for the first time when you have no clue what you are doing.

if you want a challenge try ironman impossible where all countries start out at threat level 2 and when you choose a mission that comes up and fail the whole continent threat level increases. i have failed 30ish games so far on ironman impossible then tried classic it was so much easier

Normal is pretty manageble as long as you don't play it like a typical hero RPG, over extending guys and leaving your people open. It's just something different where you're expected and almost suppose to lose troops while managing resources. All the "unforgiving but fair" statements are akin to Dark Souls where you need a slightly different mindset to play well.

Well, um, I guess I'm just bad at it then =( I ended up losing a heap of people (good people too), and four countries.

I'd like to hear what you think after playing Classic Ironman. I thought normal was easy, too.

Yeah, normal was a very smooth experience for me.

I did some reloading from the beginning on Normal missions. I'd say about 1/3 missions, I'd do something totally stupid and be like, "Ok, I can do better than that." Sometimes it's easy, but I wouldn't say I've found it to be too forgiving. I mean, my dudes lose half their health when they take a hit from behind cover.

It's XCOM, it's a stickier wicket than many mainstream releases these days, but you just gotta approach it in a certain way, like, ya know, an XCOM game.

@kingofpeanuts: Jake Solomon is on record saying that this game was tuned to be challenging and tough on Classic (even better on Ironman Classic) while Normal was balanced to be a little tough make the player feel powerful by the end. I mean, hearing Vinny talk in the podcast about teching up to Titan armor and plasma weapons before going into the base and hanging out for a year? I don't think you could get away with that at all on Classic.

ooo an "im better than teh internetz" thread!

On my first try I went with classic and lost 10 people in the first 5 missions, made a lot of bad decisions, never spent money on satellites and got closed down for losing too many countries.

I started over on Normal and it was almost too easy. I've probably done 30 missions, have never hired a soldier, have everyone on my team leveled up fully, only lost 3 people and only one country has pulled out.

It sounds like you're better than average at the game, yeah :) Classic Ironman pissed me off, I went back to regular normal & am gonna finish the game that way before trying classic again.

I don't know, I'm on try number 2 on normal ironman and it's certainly not easy. Playing carefully makes a huge difference, but the random element isn't to be underestimated. Especially in the metagame, your luck with which countries get attacked when and the dice roll on the alien crashes affect everything. So that's my 2 cents: battescape is not-so-bad, geoscape surprisingly hard.

Playing normal and i'm right around the end having lost a total of 9 soldiers so far. Ryan seemed to make it out to be harder then it is but all in all i would say it's nicely balanced on the normal difficulty.

Also i wonder if Ryan knew about the ability to sell damaged and novelty UFO components in the Grey Market. I didn't realize until way late in the game that you could do that and it helped make things a lot easier.

Yep but classic iron man is the a real bitch. With that difficulty level, before you get tier 2 armor and end a turn with more than 0 ennemy in your field of vision 1 of your guys is likely going to die.

Guys, check out the size of my huge e-penis.

@BoG said:

I'd like to hear what you think after playing Classic Ironman. I thought normal was easy, too.

I had the same experience - absolutely wrecked house on normal, rarely lost a guy and had too much money once I'd figured out how important satellites are.

I went into Classic but I refuse to do Ironman. The game fucks you over in some totally BS ways too often for me to consider that.

Case in point - the 90% hit chance on rockets is a straight up lie. 50% of all mine fired veer far off course.

I just had 4 mutons appear in the middle of a battle. Out of nowhere. I had sight on every other enemy around them and the area where they stood.

I've missed 4 85% shots in a row which is just not cool - the chances of that actually happening are ridiculously low but this isn't the first time it's happened.

I've also had snipers unable to see an enemy despite clearly having line of sight while the game told me otherwise. And when you're doing a panic mission, that is not cool. I've also had enemies hit allies who they clearly can't see due to walls and other things but the game still lets them.

In short, I don't trust the game to actually play by it's own rules the whole time so I'm not willing to let it dictate my saves. Now, if I screw up a lose a guy, I won't reload. It was my fault. But if the game screws me over? I'm happy to start the battle over again.

EDIT: Oh for the love of... I just had enemies be detected inside a building, get a free move and position themselves right on me. The thing is, NO-ONE HAD SIGHT IN THE BUILDING. No windows and I hadn't even opened the doors.

Seriously, sometimes I just think fuck this game...

Normal is a cakewalk  in comparison to classic.

@Vitor: I did an experiment once. I lost a character early on in a mission, and I was frustrated, so I reloaded. The turn began with one of my characters taking an 85% chance shot. She missed it in my botched turn, and missed again when I reloaded. I thought that it was odd that I would miss such a high percentage shot twice in a row. Not impossible, simply not probable. So, I reloaded. Miss. I reloaded multiple times, and missed every time. I changed things after a while. I moved her up a few places, bringing my hit chance to 90%. She still missed every time.

I really don't know what to think about this. When is the hit calculated? When are the dice rolled? Does the game blatantly lie to you about the chance of hitting a target? It seems that, in reality, those shots had a 0% chance of hitting the target. If this was the case, the game should tell me. If the game is calculating these things in another way, it shouldn't lead me to believe that it's a dice roll.

@BoG: Dice rolls are seeded on mission start so it's harder to save scum. If you shoot with someone else then you can waste the bad roll and try again with the high percentage shot.

Normal is, quite frankly, piss-easy. I'm not sure why Ryan was making it out to be such a difficult task.

@kingofpeanuts said:

but am I the only one who found it this way?

There's ~7 billion people on this planet, so no, you're probably not the only one.

I don't have XCOM yet, and I am not very good at strategy games like FF Tactics, but should I start on Classic if I want a challenge?

@BoG said:

@Vitor: I did an experiment once. I lost a character early on in a mission, and I was frustrated, so I reloaded. The turn began with one of my characters taking an 85% chance shot. She missed it in my botched turn, and missed again when I reloaded. I thought that it was odd that I would miss such a high percentage shot twice in a row. Not impossible, simply not probable. So, I reloaded. Miss. I reloaded multiple times, and missed every time. I changed things after a while. I moved her up a few places, bringing my hit chance to 90%. She still missed every time.

I really don't know what to think about this. When is the hit calculated? When are the dice rolled? Does the game blatantly lie to you about the chance of hitting a target? It seems that, in reality, those shots had a 0% chance of hitting the target. If this was the case, the game should tell me. If the game is calculating these things in another way, it shouldn't lead me to believe that it's a dice roll.

Yeah, so apparently the dice rolls actually happen at the start of the mission. Before you've even moved, the game knows that a 60% from a certain location won't hit.

Which makes sense as it stops being reloading saves but if you're playing Ironman, you can't do that anyway...

I reloaded a save to find that enemies can randomly change their spawn positions mid way through a mission though. That isn't predetermined.

Had 3 mutons first appear inside an alien ship (in what was clearly visible ground - in fact, I'd already shot a rocket there but because they hadn't been spawned yet, it did no damage to them). I reloaded because I thought that was BS and then they spawned outside, in the middle of all my men. No way in hell they were hiding there as I had sight there also.

I like the game a lot, but this kind of stuff means I can't take it seriously as a strategy game. There aren't enough units for it to have great diversity in styles and the random rolls negates too much strategy for me. It has some serious issues which unfortunately become more apparent the more I play.

As mentioned on the last bombcast, believe it was Brad, who was having problems with a mission & reran it with extra careful moves to get through it without problem. Biggest difficulty is just being impatient in this game.

I cannot fathom how people are playing Classic Ironman when I've had enemies spawn literally two spaces behind my people, completely out of the blue.

"Oh, this mission is going well, not sure why it was labeled very difficul.....ah. Glad to see those berserkers were invisible. And now we're a four man team. Nice."

It doesn't happen all that often, but it has happened more then a few times and each time it occurs in such a way that I ALWAYS wind up with casualties. So, no more Ironman runs for me until that's fixed.

I guess I really suck at this game. I made it through the alien base mission with one guy alive, and he was the only ranked character I had left. I have lost three countries so far. And every time I feel like things are going well, I run into a new enemy that decimates my party. Also, I'm playing on easy just to learn the system, and I'm still getting fucked. Alough I think part of my problem is that rit near the beginning of the game I bought planes for each continent, and now I never have any money because I don't get any fees from satellites because I only have a couple up. As such I don't have the money or supplies to research the best weapons, meaning that I have one awesome sniper and everyone else is fodder

I've seen the old Xcoms and heard them described but never picked them up, so I went into this blind on Normal. My experience was feeling immense pressure during the first act of the game and went into the initial assault with Cara Armor, 3 majors, and normal weaponry due to not understanding the importance of not selling some objects since I was trying to save up money for supporting a larger sat-network.

Anyway, that mission went off without death.

I lost 2 majors and had to retire the 3rd (willpower low) in a later mission involving getting surprised by Chrysalids and the surprise that Mutons had grenades after spending too much time in a stand-off in a doorway on a UFO site. (Mutons didn't use their nades on me in the Base Assault, believe it or not)

After a couple really tense terror missions where most of the civvies died, squaddies died, and a Corporal, I was able to get some pre-trained soldiers as a reward and start rebuilding my fighting squad as well as unlocking the use of Liteplasma rifles and access to Titan Armor. From this point on, the game was a cakewalk, with my only losses being squaddies I was attempting to train up due to the officer willpower perk. Satellites were being launched. None were shot down in the end. The only last hitch I ever had was because I didn't have a BOOST perk for Interceptors, it took several missions to accrue enough weapon fragments to research Firestorms and then even more time to begin rolling them out 1 at a time to each country.

So to someone new to Xcom, Normal is a good intro and the only time I reloaded was to save a guy I accidental-click-moved, but was one of the guys I lost later anyway.

I'll probably do Ironman Classic next.

Also, is it me or does Titan Armor reduce the rate of wounding?? It felt like none of my guys, even squaddies were coming back from missions with wounds even after taking 2 or 3 shots that in Carapace, would've left them wounded.

@Veektarius said:

I did some reloading from the beginning on Normal missions. I'd say about 1/3 missions, I'd do something totally stupid and be like, "Ok, I can do better than that." Sometimes it's easy, but I wouldn't say I've found it to be too forgiving. I mean, my dudes lose half their health when they take a hit from behind cover.

Yeah that's been similar to my experience so far. I'm new to this sort of game outside of FF: Tactics and Valkyria Chronicles. So making use of saves as safety blanket for me doing tragically silly maneuvers that invariably get my people dead dead dead. haha.

I plan to do an Ironman run on the next playthrough, see how that goes. Maybe Ironman on easy or something so I don't lose my mind and blow a gasket when XCOM decides to be oh so very XCOM-ish. :)

Classic is pretty goddamn hard. Normal is very easy. I wish there was something in between.

The difference between normal and classic is day and night. Normal is like a gentle massage. Classic will have you smashing controllers and calling the game names.

Personally, I think playing the game on classic is one of the most frustrating experiences I've had with a turn based game. I haven't been having any fun with it at all, with squaddies missing 75% shots regularly and sectoids sniping hunkered down guys in hard cover from across the map.