Wow, 330 pages, ostensibly, about XCom! And a few about remakes but whatever.
I only read the first 20 and last 10 though but there was some interesting discussion at the begining (five years ago, hehe).
I recently downloaded copies of Enemy Unknown, TFTD and XCom3 (they are easy to find if you ask the new god, Google.) and then DLed a dos version of XCom1. Turns out the XP version doesn't work on Vista.
I first got XCom 2 or 3 years ago and played it all night! Good to not have a job sometimes. But i didn't havee the trouble that some people seemes to have with getting their guys killed an stuff. I played for a month (gametime) or two before i started saving every round to keep my guys alive. It kinda feels like cheating but it sucks to lose all that experience they get.
It never occured to me to hire heaps of marines then sack the ones with poor stats though. I never seemed to have enough trouble with any of them but that's probably because of the turn by turn saves. I never quite got to the point of developing the psi training though either.
I also never realised you could change the marines names! I thought they were fixed and i really liked the character it gave, especially when you knew Kenji Ishi was your bad arse. In my new game i seem to have a couple of russian brothers and a husband and wife team. It is handy to append info to the end of their names though, like strength stats so you can see who'll be ok with heavy weapons.
I would always fan my squad out from the dropship as i covered the map. I check averywhere outside before moving inside to finish the mission. I make sure i have plenty of cover too though. I found it worked well to have marines leapfrog each other, with one a half move in front of the next, then move the back guy infront to clear more 'fog of war' and if he spotted an alien the second guy would have enough TUs to take it out.
I didn't use tanks all that often as i thought they were pretty expensive (which is contrary to a lot of people) and they don't benefit from kill XP while they do deny it from the marines. I do like to use them for clearing fog of war though, unkless they get destroyed.
A couple of strange things happened in that first play through too. I haven't played enough yet, this time to see if they repeat. The most distressing was when my base was attacked, which was fine, but none of my marines had any of their regular weapons! It's like the Skyranger dropped them off and left with their gear. I had to use the stuff in my stores, after crossing dangerous ground, unarmed to get it. The tanks helped here though.
The other thing was after i was using a Lightning. When i was on the battle scape i could make my marines walk out of any wall of the ship, as though they weren't there. This has to be a glitch, right?
Anyway, i'm really looking forward to playing again and hopefully finishing this time, it might take some time though. Anyone else playing again now?
I also tried out TFTD and XCom3 for a little while to see what they are like. TFTD seems pretty good (but it's the same style as XCom) with a nice twist. XCom3 seems like it should be good but i don't really like the interface. It seems to be a lot more difficult to use and the armour looks butt ugly too.
That XCom:TTS looks like it could be awesome too.
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