Or, XCOM: Enemy GETS TO MOVE DURING MY TURN
Or, XCOM: Enemy CAN BE HEADSHOT OUT OF SIGHT THROUGH A CAR WITH AN 88% CHANCE TO HIT
Or, XCOM: Enemy IS LESS DANGEROUS THAN MY OWN PANICKED SOLDIERS
Most of this article was written earlier in the year shortly after I’d finished with XCOM: Enemy Unknown. For a spell I was convinced it was going to lie indefinitely in my drafts but with XCOM: Enemy Within just around the corner, as well as Botch and a few others expressing interest in hearing my thoughts, it seemed as good a time as any to dust this off, brush it up and get it published.
Steam tells me I’ve put 29 hours into XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which isn’t a lot to be honest, especially given that Meho says he spent over 150 hours with it. Yikes. I expected to be playing it a lot longer but after my last few combat drops my desire to continue has waned so incredibly that I feel compelled to write about why. Perhaps I’ll return to it, but my snatches of time with OpenXCOM and hearing a friend’s stories from S2: Silent Storm has prompted me to re-evaluate which game I’d rather spend my turn-based energy on.
The title of this article and some of the alternatives above are based on in-game occurrences that, over the course of my 29 hours with the game, drove me mad, until eventually I rolled up in BollocksToThisVille and quit. Certain other foibles didn’t lend themselves to snappy titles so lets take a look at those as well as the aforementioned ones in a little more detail.
Two moves per soldier
At first I welcomed this change. Juggling over five or six soldiers’ time units in the original was often laborious, but as I played more I realised that this simplification lessened the tactical depth of the combat. In UFO Defense (I’m going to go with the US name of the original game for clarity) I remember dashing my soldiers out of cover, getting them to hurl a grenade into a bunch of aliens or taking a few crafty pot shots, then having just enough time units to get them back behind cover. Time units allowed my soldiers to do a number of things in one turn provided they were moved carefully. They were flexible. That sort of thing just isn’t possible in XCOM: Enemy Unknown (at least it isn’t early on) because the two move limit usually reduces your options to 1) moving a few squares and doing something 2) doing something and forfeiting any further action or 3) moving twice as far. Yes, there are certain abilities like run and gun that allow you to extend your move, or, as in the case of overwatch or suppression, potentially extend your move into the enemy’s turn, but my point is that your options are much more limited.
Me personally? I would have loved Firaxis to have done something similar to Frozen Synapse with its hybrid real-time turn-based combat. Plan your moves for the next 5 or 10 seconds (there’s your time unit currency), commit them, then watch them collide with the enemy’s moves using various clever calculations to determine the victor of each individual exchange. This would have had the added benefit of being able to watch entire conflicts in real-time at the end of a skirmish. How cool would that have been?
Move forwards and overwatch. Move forwards and overwatch.
That’s pretty much how most combat drops go until you encounter enemies. Why? Because the moment one of your soldiers spots an alien a cinematic plays that interrupts your turn before they disperse and take cover. Isn’t that great? Overwatch, an ability similar to snap shot from UFO Defense, allows your soldiers to fire at the first thing that moves in view until the next turn (with a -10 aim penalty) giving you a fighting chance of killing one or two discovered aliens before they scatter. If you decide to bowl forwards without employing overwatch then the odds that you’ll hit an enemy once it’s behind cover are seriously reduced without flanking it or blowing it to smithereens (wasting valuable explosives and destroying researchable items). Overwatch is crucial to catching aliens out while they’re in the open before they make their move.
In open areas however, the distance between the newly discovered enemies and your soldiers set to overwatch can be substantial enough to make their chance to hit so miniscule that you wonder whether it’s even worth bothering. The only way around this is to keep your squad closer together so that if your scout up front spots any aliens (triggering their dispersal cutscene), everyone in overwatch just behind has a better chance of landing their shots. The problem here of course is that moving a squad together so tightly is slow, tedious and really bogs down the experience — all because of that pesky bonus move the aliens get when you spot them.
I like overwatch, I think it’s a great mechanic and it works admirably in more enclosed spaces where your squad is naturally closer together but the fact that enemies are allowed to move during your turn to take cover necessitates this tedious creep-crawl approach. In UFO Defense getting the jump on an alien was an opportunity — a gift not to be squandered — but Enemy Unknown quite literally snatches them out from under your nose. You see them, they disperse, they hide. So you move forwards and overwatch, move forwards and overwatch, just to try and catch them out. It feels cheap and gets old, fast.
There’s also the danger of moving inadvertently forwards during a firefight and spotting (and thus triggering) even more aliens. This is guaranteed to ruin your day and considerably reduce the life expectancy of your squad.
To hit or not to hit
I think it’s time for some pictures.
Predicting how XCOM calculates the to-hit percentages is baffling. Sometimes I’ve had better chances of hitting an alien further away than I have when I’ve moved a soldier in closer. Sometimes I’ve had better chances keeping a soldier lower down than moving them higher up to gain a better vantage point. Sometimes aliens have been easier to hit when completely out of sight than when they’re at point blank range practically perched on the end of my soldier’s gun. To add insult to injury such misfortune rarely seems to befall aliens in similar situations. It’s really quite incredible, and when the game hinges on each one of these unpredictable calculations it’s unsurprising that your soldiers end up going home in body bags. It completely undermines the very strategy that the game is supposed to be built upon because you can’t reliably position your soldiers to maximise their effectiveness. It’s a mess.
No free-aim and the panic system
Picture the scene: you’ve lost a few of your best soldiers to chrysallids, and their reanimated corpses, as well as a few zombified civilians, are sloping their way towards the last vestige of your original squad now entrenched amidst a few burnt out vehicles. Oh, and I forgot to mention the chrysallids themselves are huddled around the nearest car. It’s looking grim to say the least. But wait, what if you blew up the car so the chrysallids and a couple of the closest zombies were caught in the blast? That would conserve ammo and buy you some time! Well, you’re out of luck, because in Enemy Unknown, you can’t free aim with standard weaponry. Cars can be shot and they do explode, but only if caught up indirectly in crossfire. I should know, I lost a few soldiers this way. I just can’t fathom why this artificial restriction was implemented. It’s madness. I remember in UFO Defense shooting at a petrol pump to blow an entire station sky high because it was crawling with aliens — this was before I knew for sure that certain world objects could actually combust. To see that station explode, one pump at a time, leaving behind a cloud of impenetrable smoke, was a real watershed moment for me despite playing it over ten years after it was released.
Anyway, the design decision to omit free aiming has other far more egregious implications.
Panicking. Soldiers panic just as they did in the original. That’s great. What’s not great is that, because there’s no free aim, panicked soldiers shoot directly at aliens or directly at their squad mates — and nothing else. It wasn’t uncommon for me to lose one soldier who would then cause a chain reaction of panic firing amongst my squad resulting in several deaths and heavy casualties. In UFO Defense, soldiers panic fired everywhere. They sprayed bullets, beams and missiles in every which way because free aiming allowed just that. This made sense. If an alien got caught in the fire then excellent. If a soldier did, then that was unfortunate — that was X-COM (or Murphy’s Laws). In Enemy Unknown however, I found that freaked out soldiers zeroed in on their comrades with merciless accuracy and annoying frequency. In fact, it seemed to me that panicked soldiers were better shots when they’d lost their shit. It’s telling that I tried modding panic fire out but unfortunately it didn’t work.
Freak spawning
On a few occasions I had enemies appear out of thin air in areas I’d just ‘cleared’ or in direct sight of my soldiers. And no, these weren’t Thin Men. Apparently it’s a glitch that has something to do with the way aliens ‘patrol’ using spawn points rather than physically walking around. Not only is this potentially catastrophic (particularly in ironman if a bunch of aliens spawns behind or on top of your squad), it’s downright sloppy handling of alien movement when UFO Defense had proper free-roaming aliens.
Update: apparently this issue has been fixed or ‘minimised’ according to the XCOM wiki.
No picking up
Time for another scene to picture: your support soldier goes down — he’s the guy with the medkits. Thankfully you’ve a soldier nearby so if you send her over quickly she’ll be able to pick up a medkit and stabilise him before he bleeds out. I tried this thinking that the 2013 XCOM would feature something as simple as picking up items, but nope, the best she could do was watch the guy die. I’d have no problem with non-support classes being unable to use medkits due to insufficient training but this limitation applies to weaponry and other equipment as well — items simply cannot be picked up, and they can’t be thrown either. There’s no throwing magazine clips across an opening, or passing primed grenades to soldiers closer to the target. There’s no rummaging through fallen squad mates’ gear for precious supplies or to commandeer that rocket launcher to deal with the cyberdisc that’s got your squad pinned down. Whatever is equipped is set in stone and immovable until you start another mission. I’m fine with there being no inventory but taking away something as basic as picking up items is just stupid. Perhaps XCOM armour is too bulky to bend over or something?
One forum commenter obviously knows the truth:
Every item is super glued to XCOM soldiers’ hands. Super top-secret battlefield strategy.
Captains, rookies and pawns
To break things up Firaxis created four main classes (heavy, assault, support and sniper) that rookies can (randomly) specialise in once they’ve acquired enough combat experience. These classes gain unique abilities which add a great deal of variety and dynamism to the combat. The longer they last and the more experienced they become, the more abilities they acquire. For me this class system is one of Enemy Unknown’s better new features but rather perversely it brought to light another issue.
In XCOM your soldiers have a tendency to expire. They expire quickly, unceremoniously and often. The leveling system further compounds that sense of loss when your favourite high ranking soldier takes a zap to the head or — worse still — a chrysallid to the throat. This all works. In UFO Defense soldiers gained steady stat increases so that sense of progression was fairly subtle. Here though, that progress is right in front of you: your heavy now has suppressive fire, your sniper can disable enemies for a turn, your support can toss smoke bombs, your assault can flank that enemy and so on. When you’ve got a crack squad of captains and majors the combat really opens up; you’ve got options and the ability to handle situations with some degree of finesse and creativity rather than just lucking out on dice rolls behind useless cover, as is often the case with rookies which you inevitably have to deploy, either to get them into fighting shape or because your elites died horribly in a previous drop. Rookies have no special abilities, they aren’t especially good at anything (particularly aiming) and they shit their pants if so much as an alien lets out a cheeky parp on the other side of the map. They’re a liability, especially when panicked, but more pertinently, a real downer after utilising the abilities of your higher ranking soldiers and getting a taster of better, more nuanced and intentional combat. To go back to rookies, particularly a squad of them, is to boil your options back down again; it’s like playing with nothing but pawns in Chess. Move forward and overwatch. Move forward and overwatch. Enemy Unknown allows you to promote rookies to squaddies when they’re enlisted — provided you upgrade your officer training school — but I would have preferred a few more generic abilities right off the bat to make the basic rookie combat more interesting, not necessarily easier. Like, I don’t know, a focus ability where a soldier can forfeit a turn to increase their aim substantially on the next.
Base invasions and other stuff
And finally, XCOM doesn’t feature base invasions which is just really disappointing. (Apparently they’re coming with XCOM: Enemy Within. “Within”, hint hint.) I also miss being able to scramble multiple interceptors and send out several skyrangers at once to different UFO sites. And I miss the day and night cycles affecting combat drops too. Oh and the cool autopsy images to accompany reports.
Enemy Unknown can be incredibly silly, unfair and rage-inducing thanks to all these things. The dodgy chance to-hit calculating, freak alien spawning, lack of free-aim, doolally panic firing, the inability to pick items up (or throw them), aliens moving during your turn the moment they’re discovered, and I’m sure there are plenty of other things I’m overlooking or have blanked out. UFO Defense was often nasty but it was rarely this cheap.
When it comes down to it, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has simplified, reworked and in some cases discarded entire systems from the original. But I can’t help but feel as though quite a few babies have been thrown out with the bathwater. Yes, it’s more accessible, and sure, there are a number of improvements and welcome additions in there (like the more dynamic combat and the sleeker interface), but it’s also a more regimented, artificial and linear experience. It feels less organic, as if there are fewer systems at work; fewer moving parts, fewer surprises, less granularity and a lesser sense of time and impending doom. You can feel the game waiting for you in Enemy Unknown whereas in UFO Defense there was this terrifying sense that there were far greater forces at work just outside the scope of your radars or the sight of your squad; forces that weren’t going to stop for you.
And I think that’s it: XCOM: Enemy Unknown isn’t an alien invasion simulator in the same way X-COM: UFO Defense was — or still is. Is that a problem? On its own, I don’t think it is, but coupled with the issues above — particularly because of the issues above — I find it both fascinating and hugely disappointing that in the 20 intervening years since UFO Defense’s release, Enemy Unknown is the best crack at a proper X-COM we’ve had. To me, Enemy Unknown is very much an XCOM; the hyphen absolutely matters. I can only hope that the success of this reboot will go towards making a sequel that follows in the original’s footsteps more closely — as steep a climb as that may be. And if not, there’s always Xenonauts or OpenXCOM.
Now if you’ll excuse my I’m just going to go and recondition myself into saying UFO: Enemy Unknown and spelling ‘defence’ correctly. It’s not easy being British around here you know.
To contact the author of this alien tongue email greggb@tap-repeatedly.com
Oh man it is on! 🙂
Great rant Gregg. I was afraid that after reading this I may agree with you to the point that whatever joy the game had given me would be sucked out and callously tossed away. OK, that’s more than a bit of hyperbole, but there is truth to it. I do agree with you on most every point, it’s just that not enough of the negative things mattered enough to ruin the experience.
Still, it gets me thinking. I don’t think the difficulty was a problem for you, right? It is very possible to fail enough such that the game becomes un-winnable. I think your most crucial point is in discussing whether or not the game is really a simulator, in the sense that the original was. I don’t think it is either. It’s clearly missing many systems, such as a working economy. And the systems that exist are often seriously simplified, such as inventory.
My main gripe remains the inability to surprise the enemy. It seems a minor point in the grand design, but it points to the root of what is lacking. The game wants to be played in a particular way, and it constrains things to ensure that. That’s not a recipe for a good simulation. How long was this game in development? Five years? Makes you wonder what they did with all that time. It certainly wasn’t spent creating a complex simulation with many interlocking systems.
Ultimately, I enjoyed the game. While recognizing its faults, there was enough good stuff to keep me engaged. That’s why I like to think of this game as a proof of concept. Could the designers create a game like UFO Defense in 2012 and have it be successful? If so, could they create follow-ons which increased the strategic and tactical depth? That’s the best-case scenario for me. I’m still hopeful that is indeed their plan.
I’ll leave you with a mini-rant of my own. I remember such a big deal made of the base and its visual presentation. It enrages me to think they spent a great deal of time on such a useless feature. It was interesting for all of five minutes. Then it just became annoying and got in the way. Give me base invasions and keep your stupid ant farm.
XCOM – Enemy RANTS BY GREGG ARE THE BEST
XCOM – Enemy THAT WAS AWESOME
XCOM – Enemy GREGG’S RILED, HE MUST HAVE HAD SOME MOUNTAIN DEW
I really liked XCOM, though like Botch I agree with everything you said here. Generally speaking I feel like the efforts to streamline and simplify went too far. Not WAY too far, or ruinously too far… but too far. Many of my greatest memories from the original X-Com were predicated on stuff that you can’t do in the remake, stuff that, in many cases, you called out specifically. Entire squad but one down, that lone survivor sprints over to his brother’s corpse (they had the same last name), takes a stun blaster off the broken body, hits the ground Max Payne style and blasts the approaching Ethereal commander. Squad pinned down in the Skyranger, one heroic Blaster Launcher operator races out, takes a knee by the landing gear, fires a hastily aimed Blaster Bomb that levels an alien-infested building across the way and hut-huts back onto the plane, plasma splashing around her.
Stuff like that.
This XCOM introduced XCOM to a new generation, and it did many things very well. What your article does is show us the internal differences between gamers, and why we don’t all like or dislike the same things, but when we can rationally discuss them we make the game itself better for the differing observations.
Despite naming XCOM one of my games of 2012 (which I still stand by), I doubt I’ll pick up the add-on until a sale rolls around, and I don’t find myself thinking of the game much. To a great degree, Jake Solomon and his team did the best they could’ve with a hot-potato property. While I (and, I’m guessing, you) don’t fully buy in to many of the decisions they made, those decisions represent valid if disputed solutions to problems in any XCOM reboot discussion.
Botch: right on. That they were so proud of the ant farm bewilders me. The King of Top-Down Strategy’s company uses this to denote a strategic view? And makes it largely uninteractive and pointless to boot?
XCOM – Enemy AT LEAST YOU DIDN’T SHOW THE VIDEO OF OUR ONE GAME OF FROZEN SYNAPSE
XCOM – Enemy IT IS TOO EASY TO BE BRITISH AROUND HERE, WE’RE PRACTICALLY MADE OF TEA
XCOM – Enemy I MEAN SERIOUSLY, I’VE STARTED SPELLING “ANALYZE” WITH AN S WHICH REALLY MAKES MICROSOFT WORD MAD
🙂
I agree with your comments although I still love the game and am glad base assaults are coming back. Not being able to pick things up in combat has been by far my greatest annoyance, especially alien weapons when you have the tech but not the inventory to outfit all your soldiers with top of the line gear. I also really miss having more bases with different groups of soldiers. High hopes for the expansion but leery of the body-alteration aspects.
2 action turns – This is pretty much a standard these days, from video games (the new Shadowrun uses it) to tabletop tactics games such as Decent. It doesn’t simplify combat, just streamlines it. In the original Xcom, you were lucky if you could even move and shoot in the same turn unless you inched your troops a few spaces per turn. With the two action turn system, everyone gets two solid acts, which is faster and still balanced tactically. Frozen Synapse’ system is far less tactical. I can’t imagine even trying to play this game with that system. It was kind of gimmicky imo, based to much on luck. 😛
I think you’re putting more weight into that initial “aliens spotted” animation than it warrants. You can basically assume the aliens were already in cover when you spot them, and the animation is just a bit of fluff to make it more exciting. They wouldn’t all just be hanging around twiddling their thumbs. They just got shot down, and saw your troops land a 100 meters from their position. They’re going to be ready for you. Even if they weren’t shot down, a FUCKING JET JUST FLEW DOWN FROM THE SKY! How can they miss that?
The to-hit calculator in this game cheats like a motherfucker. Seriously, fuck that thing.
I’m not so sure that panic fire was so random in the original Xcom as it was just poorly aimed. I for one like that panic forces the characters to actually shoot at something tangible though. Otherwise, what’s the point of a penalty if it doesn’t actually hurt you. Random fire is just a waste of time.
Overall, I think the streamlining worked for the game. What it lacks is more features and options outside of combat. Play the game on normal difficulty Gregg, and I think you’d enjoy it more. 😉
XCOM – Enemy THAT VIDEO IS RIGHT HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIoMc7ULJFk) BUT THAT HAS TO BE A FORGERY NO ONE COULD BE THAT… I MEAN IT’S HARD EVEN TO GET IT TO FULL SCREEN BEFORE IT’S OVER.
Thanks for the comments folks. I haven’t got time for a proper reply just yet but I’ll be back!
Here’s the other video, of Steerpike killing himself:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0RzkwPMTs4
GOD DAMMIT
You make me sound like some sort of vampire that feeds on joy Botch! 😉
I was going to go off on one about the base setup but by that point I was happy to wrap it all up! I absolutely agree with you both though, Botch and Steerpike. It served no real function other than to look pretty, which is just a total waste and quite insulting given the way the original cleverly tied base building into base invasion and the combat system. When I first started playing X-COM: UFO Defense I remember thinking “Hang on, these connecting rooms are arranged on a discreet grid system and look like they could translate to the isometric combat view… I wonder if… man, that would be cool” and sure enough they did. I looked at the ant farm base and my first thought was “Nyeah but… what about base invasions? How do they work with… this? Do they work? Don’t tell me they were cut?” and yep, they were.
The difficulty wasn’t really a problem for me. I fucked up early on a few times; firstly underestimating mutons, and secondly, misunderstanding how to deploy satellites and losing a country or two’s funding due to lack of time to finish construction. I recovered though. I played on standard classic with a more ironman kind of mindset. Running real ironman just seemed too risky to me, not just because of bugs, but because of potential misclicks or silly/unfair occurances (like freak spawning, bonkers to-hit percentages, bullshit panicking). It was those latter occurances that ultimately made me put the game down in addition to being unable to get the jump on aliens and the creep-crawl approach that that necessitated. As you say Botch, it constrains the way you play.
The thing is Armand, most of the time the aliens aren’t in cover, they literally are just hanging around, playing alien tiddlywinks or something (hence why they do that dramatic turn-on-the-spot-and-stare-at-the-camera-as-if-they-were-interrupted thing). I totally agree that they’d notice the Skyranger landing, but if we’re going to assume they were in cover all along then I’d rather the game show them in cover to begin with (going as far as replacing the existing cinematics with ones showing them hunkered down and ready for you — perhaps checking their guns or clearing their airways or something). No assuming, no bonus moves, no interruptions. As it’s currently presented though, they’re literally getting a bonus move to take cover when I caught them with their alien pants down and their tiddlywinks out. I wouldn’t mind if ‘scattering’ during your turn was a special ability for certain aliens, like floaters or sectoids or something, but every enemy you come across? Without that bonus move you wouldn’t have to overwatch your entire squad across the map on every combat drop to stand a chance of catching them out. On normal difficulty this might not be so much of an issue but that’s beside the point: if classic requires you to play in a very particular and tedious way then I think that’s a problem.
As for your comments on Frozen Synapse: you need to play it longer than 30 minutes! If you’re ever in the mood, give me a shout, I’ll show you the ropes (I know I keep saying this but I will!). I don’t think the two move limit is a problem on its own, I just remember being able to do a lot more with time units in the original, as Steerpike describes above. Coupled with having an inventory, being able to pick stuff up, throw them, free-aiming etc. there were just a lot more possibilites. I didn’t want to get into the top-level strategic layer stuff, with the base and funding and deciding on terror sites etc. because at 29 hours I don’t think I was in a good position to take a crack at it.
Regarding panicked soldiers: they already are a penalty because you don’t have control over them. Those one or two moves where you’re effectively a soldier down can be devastating, especially when said soldier turns round and empties a clip into her squad who are further away than the nearest alien.
For what it’s worth, I did enjoy a good chunk of the 29 hours I put into XCOM but ultimately I couldn’t tolerate the issues and limitations above any longer, not when the original and OpenXcom is a few clicks away. Having said this, I do occasionally feel the urge to fire it up again. I’ve kept my saves and everything.
Oh god, that was long.
Yes it was long, Gregg, as befits a joy-sucking vampire. I could accept it when it was just Dear Esther and Journey. Now I realize that you won’t be happy until everyone else is sad, and I must make it my mission to destroy you.
Seriously though, I also can’t agree with the claim that Frozen Synapse is gimmicky or non-tactical. The ability to map out a strategy with such precision – and then be forced to change it – is really complex, in fact. Not only does it underline the whole “no plan survives an encounter with
Greggthe enemy” concept, it shows you the depth of options available.Let’s also pause here and silently appreciate the UFO: After(whatever) series. Seriously flawed, to be sure, but the timeshifted tactical combat was genius and I’d have loved to see it in XCOM. UFO: Aftershock in particular – advance tactical planning, on the fly changes, start/stop combat; not to mention much more robust soldier advancement and customization.
As to the alien-spotted animation. I see Armand’s point, yeah, it’s more a flavor thing than a tactical cheat. Though if it’s flavor, give me a little more of it, not the same animation every single time. Have the aliens bolt for cover sometimes, really be surprised sometimes, get delayed picking up their tiddlywinks sometimes, fire off a “holy shit! humans!” shot sometimes, whatever. Otherwise it’s like recording one version of a combat bark that the player will hear 10,000 times over the course of a game.
I’ll play through XCOM again sooner or later, I really applaud what Firaxis did. The flaws are more points of potential improvement for Sid Meier’s XCOM 2: Judgment Day than dealbreakers. At least for me.
Almost forgot. Gregg there was one thing I disagree with you on. I wouldn’t like to see a hybrid real-time combat system. I had enough of that in X-COM Apocalypse. It was OK in that game, but I prefer true turn-based. The smaller maps in XCOM helped remove the boring parts of turn-based where you’re wandering around for several turns with nothing to do (although smaller maps brings its own set of shortcomings).
Do you like Silent Storm? I’m tempted to pick it up on Steam for $10. Good games in this genre are hard to come by. Aside from the fact that almost no one makes them anymore, even the ones that have been made in the past are, on average, sub-par.
Did you play Frozen Synapse Botch? If you haven’t, you totally should. Give me a shout if you ever need an opponent 😉 Anyway, it’s an extremely elegant and tight hybrid real-time turn-based combat game. I say ‘hybrid real-time’ because it’s not turn-based in the traditional sense although you very much take turns.
You basically plan each one of your vatforms’ moves for the next 5 seconds (that’s your turn), as does your enemy. During that planning phase you can position, posture and move enemies around to ‘test’ your plan to maximise the effectiveness of it before committing it. Once you’re happy, you commit the plan and you’re done until the enemy has committed theirs. Once both sides’ plans are committed, they’re ran together in real-time and all sorts of calculations (factoring in movement, facing direction, cover, weapon type, range etc.) are made to determine the victor of any engagements. What’s great is that you’re never entirely sure what the enemy is going to do so the game is pretty much in the metaplay and being ready for the unexpected.
I can imagine it working well with something like X-COM, especially with all the different types of equipment and verticality to the maps. Seriously, there’s nothing more gratifying/horrifying than watching your carefully laid plan cleanly dispatch a bunch of enemies in less than 5 seconds or alternatively unfurl in the blink of an eye because you overlooked something or misjudged an enemy’s intention. I played Apocalpyse briefly when I was younger and if I remember rightly it had a real-time mode and a turn-based mode. Was it hybrid at all?
I haven’t played S2: Silent Storm but Armand above was enjoying the heck out of it while I was playing XCOM. The stuff he was telling me sounded way more exciting than what was happening to me in XCOM! It was on sale around then so I picked up, but I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet.
I find the aliens taking cover to be tactical, and so does xcom since your snipers can take a skill letting them toss out a fake eye to spot aliens without triggering them (I never got the hang of it and disabling shot was too useful to forego). In the Enemy Within expansion, there is a gene mod that gives your soldiers a field which lets them spot aliens without triggering them to run for cover. I haven’t tested it yet but at least it’s an option.
Gregg I haven’t tried Frozen Synapse. Even so I’m stubbornly standing by my preference for turn-based (I’m crossing my arms and harrumph-ing here). I guess I just prefer this system to what I perceive as managed chaos in hybrid systems.
I’ve been playing some more XCOM and while I still like it, I feel even more strongly the sense of what this game could have been, or could be. Just one example: the whole notion of flanking is ruined by the fact that if you don’t slowly reveal the map you can get quickly overwhelmed.
You ought to check it out Botch because it’s a beautifully designed game with a fantastic multiplayer component and a full single player campaign (which I never got round to touching).
Yeah, you had to be very careful how far you moved in XCOM just in case you triggered too many enemies. Short of coming up behind an enemy focused on another soldier (very rare!) it never felt like I had any sort of advantage with my positioning, whether it was super close and behind cover or on top of a nearby building. If anything, being higher up seemed more dangerous due to the increased visibility to more aliens who were much better shots. I’m not sure how UFO Defense handled the height differences but knowing you could traverse a map without mass triggering aliens and knowing you could catch strays on their own was part of the tactical appeal for me. I’ll never forget those missions that ended tensely hunting a lone sectoid in a farm building.
@Botch: I didn’t realise but Julian Gollop who created the original X-COM was also the lead designer on Laser Squad Nemesis, the game which directly inspired the turn-based nature of Frozen Synapse. I’m telling you man, X-COM would be awesome with that system! 😉
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Squad_Nemesis#Gameplay