271
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 08, 2016, 05:28:03 pm »
I got a black market related effect in Asia. I think they buy stuff from you at a 50% higher price, or something like that.
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272
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 08, 2016, 11:43:12 am »
Got Vulture from the Guerrilla Tactics School (more loot from those who drop). I'm not impressed. Only about 10% of the enemies in any given mission seem to drop anything, and I'm not even sure the ability's working in the first place. Just killed a Viper, and she only dropped an Elerium Core: wouldn't Vulture increase drops to a minimum of two items per event?
Also, it seems engineers need some sort of protection when excavating around exposed power coils, according to Shen's off-hand comment. Is that true or is it just fluff?
Also, it seems engineers need some sort of protection when excavating around exposed power coils, according to Shen's off-hand comment. Is that true or is it just fluff?
273
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 08, 2016, 10:58:15 am »I'm having this weird graphical thing when the game runs at 60 FPS for most of the time, but whenever I promote a soldier after a mission, the FPS just tanks in the promotion screen. Otherwise it works just fine.
I've also noticed framerate drops on the soldier screens, and the "get ready" phases, before and after missions.
274
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 08, 2016, 10:53:38 am »You get unlimited guns because then they can just upgrade all of your customized guns in the background instead of needing to rebuild all of them with new bits. You only get unlimited medium armor though. If you wait spider/wraith suits or EXO/WAR suits you have to build each one in the proving grounds.
Yeah, that's one of the things the game should really tell you about. It's not always evident which items you produce in a limited fashion and which constitute an unlimited supply.
Everyone is complaining about needing a monster pc to run this game on max settings, meanwhile I'm having barely any problems running it on the highest settings? It stutters sometimes when moving from base view to geoscape view, but apart from that there aren't really any fps drops. You can see when enemies come into view, as the game noticeably loads them
Either you don't mind sub-60 framerates, or don't have MSAA on. The highest MSAA setting (8x) is the most taxing form of anti-aliasing in existence, and can bring most any PC to its knees, as it essentially renders every single frame eight times to downsample them and provide a frankly brutally excessive degree of smoothness.
275
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 07, 2016, 03:19:09 pm »Theres also a new mod that might interest you guys: True Concealment. Its supposed to halt the timers until you get revealed, but also shortens them for some reason.
Now that's an interesting way to tinker with timers. Not the shortening, but it's true it doesn't make much sense for (at least some) timers to start ticking down when the enemy doesn't even know you're there.
However, I'm skeptical about using any timer mods, given it's such a fundamental feature and I fear that diminishing it might just make things too easy.
276
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 06, 2016, 12:38:47 pm »I said at least one guy. If there wasn't any 'dive to cover' thing then it would be like that every time you encountered an enemy patrol.Once again, if they didn't have a free move they'd just get utterly massacred.You ever think thats because the devs are doing something wrong? I mean, if you're just gonna have the enemies spawn when you see them, then why not just have them spawn in cover? Boom, no more need for a free movement turn.
As per the ambush thing, isn't that kind of the point? You only get one ambush, shouldn't it be more powerful than killing ONE enemy? I mean, they pit you against 15-20 guys on a mission, killing one of them is actually less effective than most normal turns.
And I prefer this system to 'spawn in cover' because 1) The difference isn't existent, really. The difference is literally 'do you see them dive to cover?' and 2) I'm pretty sure people don't sit there permanently in cover in real life, so it'd seem a bit silly.
Cover is also strictly directional, which means it'd be complete BS if you were advancing and stumbled upon enemies automagically in cover relative to your position.
You can't change this without scrapping the whole cover system and flanking bonuses. As I mentioned earlier, then the incentive for maneuvering would be lost and we'd go back to turkey shooting.
277
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 06, 2016, 10:33:16 am »Also, to those who say "Well, you'll just roflstomp them otherwise", there are two points to consider.
1: That's a balance issue which isn't our problem.
2: If the AI were dynamic enough to move around in the FoW (And this is more geared towards EU) than just stand around like retards until you discover them, then it would be quite possible to get ambushed by THEM instead of the other way around.
I suggest that people who don't mind this garbage feature play X-Com, Jagged Alliance, or Silent Storm to see how to properly make a game in this genre. The meta-dynamic of turn based strategy really changes when you implement a free turn for anyone (I mean, interrupts totally change tactical decisions in the games I've mentioned), and with how wiz XCOM 2 is in a lot of other ways, I think this feature could have been nuked.
TL;DR - Free movement is shit, XCOM 2 is a good game, I'm going to go play it now.
It's not a balance issue. It's a conscious design decision to accommodate for an entirely different game system. If you're going to implement cover and bonuses for flanking (i.e. encourage tactical maneuvering instead of turkey shooting), you need to make compromises. As I said, the original games had harsher interrupts: often you had to tough it out, as throwing smoke grenades everywhere also obscured your own vision.
I have extensive experience with UFO Defense, Terror from the Deep and Jagged Alliance 2. They're great games, but you seem to have trouble accepting new approaches. I'm not saying XCOM and XCOM 2's system is necessarily better: it's just different, and that doesn't make it unworthy.
As for your ambush example, it's flawed as you're describing a botched/ineffective/RNG-fucked ambush, if a) there's surviving aliens in the pod, and b) you've opened fire with them close enough to flank and ruin your day. I might as well say advancing in the OGs consisted of moving three soldiers and losing two to reaction fire, that the first turn consisted in the rocket launcher guy being mind-controlled and blowing up the entire squad in the Skyranger, or simply say blaster bomb squad wipes are frequent.
-----
Anyway, I'm still adapting my tactics, gauging just how much loss is acceptable and trying to suck it up and remain on Commander level. I'm losing a lot of rookies and more, and just had my first encounter with stun lancers in the Blacksite mission. Managed to activate five enemies, and three of them were lancers. I thought I could hold out with my sharpshooters from high-ground, but it was a terrible mistake. There was a lot of stun-banging, panicking and death. It was a massacre.
A different, Retaliation mission had me lose one of my pet characters to panic and a thoroughly unexpected Faceless. Not to mention two other rookies. I had the Corporal in charge bail out. Brutal. My income from the region was halved after Mr. Shady Baldy Man chastised me. Please, do make some sacrifice and tolerate some losses! You're not the only ones bleeding for the Good Fight!
And well, the Guerrilla Tactics School can train a rookie to a squaddie class of my choosing every 5 days, for free. That's something, I guess.
Also, I keep forgetting you can save the equipment of fallen comrades if you carry their bodies to the evac site. Presumably. But to be honest, my exfiltrations have been too chaotic to allow that without endangering the fleeing survivors.
278
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 06, 2016, 07:08:38 am »Even if you're tactically perfect, eventually some jerk AI is gonna hit you for half your health or more despite your full cover. Or the suicidal melee units will just run in and whack you. I got out with two gravely wounded soldiers out of the 4 I started with and even that was heavily due to luck and a ranger that danced through bullets and explosions like she was the RNG's main squeeze. She killed a mech, 4 soldiers and a Sectoid just in melee. Didn't get her a promotion though, somehow.Dunno, all that sounds pretty true to oldcom's spirit to me. You can be tactically perfect, doing the slow tactical movement thing, covering your approaches and laying down smoke grenades. But eventually a guy is going to run up and not trigger reaction shots and then murder your goddamn commander whom you've spent bloody ages training up. Or a chryssalid is going to appear out of nowhere, run up to your firing line and just fuck your shit up.
Yeah. The original games had plenty of ways to fuck you up without you having any agency. Reaction shots from the dark, psionic attacks on turn 1 from unseen aliens, BLASTER BOMBS out of nowhere.
And there's a fundamental reason "alien free move" detractors seem to forget/ignore: there's a functional cover system in place since XCOM:EU, with heavy penalties for being caught out in the open. The player generally has a chance to move their people into cover before the enemy gets a chance to fire, so the "free move" is merely an attempt to even the odds. It'd be an absolute walk in the park if you could routinely walk in on unaware aliens and consistently get flanking shots at them.
The original games had only a very rudimentary cover system and it was largely a turkey shoot between the aliens and your squaddies, with crouching the only tool to improve your odds. Reaction fire was as much of an interrupt as the new "free move", and even harsher as your men could drop all of a sudden as they advanced. Reacting like that wasn't free for the aliens, but they did do a lot of standing around, which means it wasn't uncommon for them to have TUs saved.
There's a great deal of thought put into this, but some people just aren't interested in thinking about the big picture and how the systems actually compare when they criticise the new mechanics.
279
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 05, 2016, 11:07:37 pm »
The following .ini configuration appears to work pretty well as far as performance improvements are concerned:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/200510/discussions/0/846960628563773260
http://steamcommunity.com/app/200510/discussions/0/846960628563773260
280
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 05, 2016, 08:52:52 pm »
Well, fuck. Mainly (sorta) due to a bug, my team failed to reach the evac point during my first VIP rescue mission. The VIP made it, at least, so it wasn't a total loss.
The bug which had me waste a turn had to do with the damn locked door of the VIP's cell. I figured I had no time and grenaded the whole wall, which blasted everything around the door. The door itself exploded as well, but the squares remained impassable until the next turn (door still appeared hackable, but I had no available men, what with a zombie and a Sectoid around*). In hindsight, I could've tried to grenade the outer wall, but I guess my ingrained UFO Defense instincts told me the outer walls of alien constructions wouldn't succumb to the average frag.
So once the game recognized the wall's collapse, I had the VIP bolt past the Sectoid and onto the street. The other soldiers were running around, trying to stay in cover while still approaching the evac zone. Perhaps I was just playing it too safe. So two operatives ended up just one or two tiles away from the exfiltration point, while another two remained further behind. My original intention was to sacrifice a rookie to distract the Sectoid, but I blew that and soon reinforcements arrived perpendicular to the route to the evac point: they shot down my then-star (squaddie) sharpshooter and most everyone panicked. But this happened after the end of the final turn, so it was just ADVENT taunting me.
I wonder if soldiers flagged as Captured can be rescued in any way... Would be interesting.
*Another possible bug: the Sectoid left the building and climbed up to the roof, but could still revive the aforementioned would-be zombie and psi-fuck with my men.
The bug which had me waste a turn had to do with the damn locked door of the VIP's cell. I figured I had no time and grenaded the whole wall, which blasted everything around the door. The door itself exploded as well, but the squares remained impassable until the next turn (door still appeared hackable, but I had no available men, what with a zombie and a Sectoid around*). In hindsight, I could've tried to grenade the outer wall, but I guess my ingrained UFO Defense instincts told me the outer walls of alien constructions wouldn't succumb to the average frag.
So once the game recognized the wall's collapse, I had the VIP bolt past the Sectoid and onto the street. The other soldiers were running around, trying to stay in cover while still approaching the evac zone. Perhaps I was just playing it too safe. So two operatives ended up just one or two tiles away from the exfiltration point, while another two remained further behind. My original intention was to sacrifice a rookie to distract the Sectoid, but I blew that and soon reinforcements arrived perpendicular to the route to the evac point: they shot down my then-star (squaddie) sharpshooter and most everyone panicked. But this happened after the end of the final turn, so it was just ADVENT taunting me.
I wonder if soldiers flagged as Captured can be rescued in any way... Would be interesting.
*Another possible bug: the Sectoid left the building and climbed up to the roof, but could still revive the aforementioned would-be zombie and psi-fuck with my men.
281
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 05, 2016, 06:42:37 pm »
There's probably more to it than anti-alias, but I found this interesting bit on XCOM 2's AA settings...
Source
Quote
So you’ve got your shiny new GTX 970 or your Radeon R9 390, and you’ve booted up a simple turn-based tactical strategy game and found you can’t max it with a decent frame rate. Disappoint right? But not the end of the world. It’s exclusively because the Maximum preset in XCOM 2 is set at 8x MSAA. This is the most demanding form of antialiasing in existence, and you’ll see frame rates drop into single digits even on a GTX 970 at 1080p.
The reason for this is that MSAA 8x is literally rendering at 8x 1080p resolution, before downsampling. That’s basically equal to rendering at 6K resolution, which is going to crumble all but the mightiest graphics cards.
Just because you think you have a decent graphics card, doesn’t mean you can max the settings. It doesn’t mean XCOM 2 is unoptimised, and it doesn’t mean your graphics card isn’t any good. MSAA 8x is just a theoretical maximum that at least somewhat future-proofs XCOM 2. Turn this off and you'll see your frame rate jump 8x. Your best bet is FXAA.
Source
282
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 05, 2016, 05:23:23 pm »Does anyone know how to restrict your custom soldiers from appearing as scientists or engineers, by any chance? I want the dudes I spend time customizing to take the field so that I can watch them grow powerful (or die), not get a static portrait before they disappear into the lab never to be seen again.
You supposedly set the character's role when you create them (at least in the main menu's character pool), no? But I've heard that's not entirely bug-free, and some stuff is still randomized sometimes.
As for the ADVENT soldiers' humanity, Neonivek does have a point. They've gone to extensive lengths to dehumanize and demonize the soldiers and remove any possible doubt around the fact each one is unashamedly evil. Not only the gene-modding, but the obscuring armour and the alien language. I believe that's largely unnecessary, and a missed opportunity when you could've had more human soldiers fighting for ADVENT, genuinely believing they're doing the right thing, that humanity's in better hands now, and that XCOM's just terrorists (i.e. like the average German soldier believed they were just fighting for their country in WW2). It could've led to greater narrative depth and interesting situations, but they chose to make a caricature. You're fighting absolute evil, don't think about it: all other humans are just too dumb to realize how patently evil everything around them is without your divine enlightenment.
Now, that's only that, a missed opportunity. I need to play more.
283
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 05, 2016, 02:07:49 pm »
I suppose it comes down to your definition of human. Their head at least is barely human and they have yellow blood.
I'd sooner call them hybrid than human.
I'd sooner call them hybrid than human.
284
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 05, 2016, 01:52:20 pm »285
Other Games / Re: X-Com 2: Welcome Back, Commander.
« on: February 05, 2016, 09:12:06 am »
I've played a bit this morning, before work. Did two of the tutorial missions. The only bad thing so far is the apparently widespread performance issues. Dialled back on the graphics settings a bit, playing at 1920x1080 on High but with Simple depth of field and no AA nor AO (not to mention VSync off), and my framerate oscillates between 30 and 60fps. The soldier customization screen sends me down to low thirties, which I found particularly odd.
It also chugs considerably in certain occasions, generally those dealing with quick camera pans and sudden changes of scenery, which is odd considering 8 gigs of RAM and SSD.
I feel my rig could do better, with its i7 4970k and GeForce GTX 760. The latter's slightly below the surprisingly high recommended system requirements, but still. I suppose I can keep tinkering with the settings to try and find out which ones are disproportionately taxing. AA and AO are two, at least.
Also, I felt brave/reckless and picked Commander difficulty. I might very well fail horribly.
It also chugs considerably in certain occasions, generally those dealing with quick camera pans and sudden changes of scenery, which is odd considering 8 gigs of RAM and SSD.
I feel my rig could do better, with its i7 4970k and GeForce GTX 760. The latter's slightly below the surprisingly high recommended system requirements, but still. I suppose I can keep tinkering with the settings to try and find out which ones are disproportionately taxing. AA and AO are two, at least.
Also, I felt brave/reckless and picked Commander difficulty. I might very well fail horribly.