Bay 12 Games Forum

Crosspost from the dying thread!

Quote from: Iceblaster on January 18, 2014, 11:22:31 am

So a squad of five head to a crashed medium UFO. Expecting sectoids and thin men I send two recruits along to become squadies.

There were a few sectoids and then once u reached the power sources THREE mutons jump out a peg my first recruit, Gretta Karlson, she dies and then I realize 'shiiiiit' so I begin falling back to the entrance, my support 'Kazuko Smokes Ogawa drops a smoke to cover us. I have my heavy and assault 'Emilo The Tank Castillo' and 'Kojo Bishop Baloya' respectively give cover fire so my second recruit Grannis Lekas could GTFO.

Bishop gets pegged in next turn as well as Grannis, leaving me with The Tank and Smokes. They run back to the evac zone when I realize. Maaaaybe I can win this, so I have them take cover, and by next turn they were fully loaded and on over watch.

Three floaters awaken and charge us, The Tank gets off his shot, bringing one down. Smokes pegs another with her Laser Rifle and it falls. Cue one more turn of over watch and we get the last down.

Instead of doing the tactically sound choice of retreating, I send them back to the UFO over many turns and begin firing at a muton that was separated. It threw a grenade at us and Smokes panicked, taking The Tank down and soon got shot herself.

Personally, I consider it a win considering how badass it was.

XCOM EU(2012)

Opinions? Anything I could've done other than retreat that could've saved the situation?

Dunno. More data would be nice. Weapons? Armor? What was the claimed difficulty of the mission?

When you complete an abduction mission and you're rewarded with a soldier, or money, or engineers/scientists.. Where do they come from? Do you rescue them from the area? Or does the specific country give them to you as a gift?

I'm pretty sure it's a gift. It makes the most sense.

EDIT: Also, I understand why paying for upkeep of personnel makes sense, you can't just not pay these dudes just because the world's going to end.. But again, the world as we know it is, for all practical purposes, "ending." You'd think you'd get a few volunteers every once in a while. But nope. Every talented person in the world is a freaking mercenary. >.>

I think at least part of that money is going into "basic" training. Those training dummies ain't gonna pay for themselves, you know.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on January 18, 2014, 12:54:22 pm

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The local military sends soldiers and vehicles out all the time. They're just not good at it. Did you not notice all the missions with burned out husks of tanks and fighter helicopters lying everywhere?

I did not.
This brings up another question, though. If alien weapons destroy tanks in a couple shots, why don't they pulverize anyone wearing less than Titan armor? If we at least got a blurb about how there were multiple settings on captured weaponry or something that would be great, but there isn't any explanation beyond "Alright, you want all alien shots to be OHKO's? That's what I thought."

It was like that in the original. I guess the developers of this one just didn't want to put their players through the frustration of seeing their colonels equipped in the best armor in the game get one shot by a sectoid.

Well, duh. I think I covered that with the following:

...there isn't any explanation beyond "Alright, you want all alien shots to be OHKO's? That's what I thought."

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Also, the Open Door command is straightforward. Stand next to door. Press door button. Door opens.

Isn't that the left mouse button? That didn't seem to work after the tutorial.

It should be working. Can be a bit finicky at time but I use it all the time.

Good for you. Wish it worked for me.

The humans can reverse engineer what they get, but can't melt it down or re-purpose it. Dr. Valhen comments on this a few times, as we lack technology that could do that.

...Then how are chunks of spaceship hull repurposed into laser guns, armor, alloy cannons, etc?

*I suppose the big thing is that the arc thrower is basically a pistol, from what I can see.
That, and the backpack slot is a little bit silly. Why can you carry a thin nanofiber vest, a grenade, or a scope, but not all three?*

Then this game would become the Original X-COM games, where you can carry tons of things on your soldiers, and to compensate, the game will throw 30+ aliens at you in a normal mission.

I'm pretty sure there's a middle ground.

*I was listed as having saved 0 civilians.*
Okay, I dunno. Game mechanics. You lose, you lose everything.

Maybe I'm asking for too much, but a justification for these little details that don't make sense would be nice.

*How many aircraft do you know that are composed entirely of alien alloys, with elerium reactors and plasma cannons?*

The best we can do with that is the Firestorm, which holds 3 pilots at the most.

Your point?
The problem isn't that you can't easily make a second Skyranger--you can never make another Skyranger, even with low panic and satellites in every member nation and more credits than you can count.

The aliens are deployed via ship to each of their specific areas. It's definite that the ships can easily destroy armored vehicles in a couple shots. And if the ground forces had to take on a tank, maybe they couldn't one-shot it, but a combination of plasma fire from multiple aliens would surely blow it up before it could manage to get its own shot off. Even with armor on, 4-6 bursts of enemy fire from the standard Muton (who make up the largest bulk of the standard invasion force) is enough to kill just about any human. If the action were in real-time, I imagine a Muton squad could easily overwhelm a tank.

I saw people talking about a "tank depot" map and mentioning that the tanks would get destroyed with two or three (I don't remember which) hits from alien weapons. Like, the light plasma rifles.

Curing cancer means cancer is cured in Canada and will probably spread, though I imagine proper eradication of the disease wouldn't be able to start until the aliens are dealt with.

What, Canada's hoarding the secret to curing cancer? Jerks.

While normal soldiers getting armor and alien weaponry is nice, you still have to realize that every at X-COM starts out as an amazing super soldier. The "Rookies" you get are seasoned, top-of-the-class special forces veterans, with incredible accuracy, speed, discipline, toughness, etc. Thus, when your Rookie has a 45% chance to hit an alien with their assault rifle, the standard soldier making the same shot probably has a >10% chance at hitting, and this percentage would be much lower for police or civilians.

And what about giving carapace armor and plasma rifles to Navy SEALS or other special forces?

Nations are pretty finicky and self-centered, like actual people. Hey, what can you do about that? X-COM is a military group, so it's much better at killing things than convincing governments to fund them more.

I dunno, "We need that money to stop the aliens from killing us!" sounds pretty convincing to me.

Standard X-COM Procedure: Rule of Cool.

Once or twice, maybe, and when the noise isn't going to alert aliens.

You are the commander of X-COM, thus everyone in the organization assumes that you're smart enough to assume these things on your own. Like this very statement.

1. By that logic, those research blurbs are completely wasteful too. After all, the Commander should know that stuff!
2. That's lazy work. If things seem off, I expect some kind of explanation or at least acknowledgement.

Um, what?

Did you notice the part where the Firestorm I made just sat in the hangar, gathering rust?

Logic = Most people like them, so they're going to stay around. If you want, you could turn off the Action Cam.

I meant the logic of the people who really liked their game being interrupted to show the same frikkin' snippets a zillion times.
And I highly doubt you'd find people who would argue with the Action Cam results being more varied.

I know they're big and scary, but they're really not that bad.

Scary is enough. Especially before you read TV Tropes/the wiki and realize that their high-health disk forms can't deal any damage.
Think about it. You've been playing through the game, getting more and more dangerous foes. With the exceptions of the inversion of thin men and sectopods, and the weakness of the floaters, the less human the aliens are the more terrifying they tend to be. And you see this featureless disk floating around with 16 health, way more than anything you've faced.
You run, not wanting to test its offensive capabilities. It unfolds into guns and one-shots a soldier. I think it's a bit forgiveable that I didn't notice the change in health.

Is it from a Let's Play? I don't believe it is.

Originally, yes. Or so I've heard.

No matter how many laser guns and armor suits you give a country, it won't make their soldiers any more efficient, just possibly more deadly. That would require some sort of mass training regime, which would be impossible in the current circumstances.

Just like X-Com can't train its soldiers with these weapons that function almost identically to slug weapons on the user end.
Oh wait...

Hey GWG, is there any chance you could upload some footage of you playing a mission of X-COM onto a public video sharing site like Youtube? If we saw what you were actually doing, you could get a lot of really useful advice.

Maybe if I figured out how to do that with FRAPS or something. Which I haven't even opened since I did that Spore LP.

I think he just got it from a free weekend, or I got confused.

Who, me? Nope. Also, free weekend? I could have gotten XCOM without paying $20?

On a side note, while we can't disassemble weaponry, it's kinda silly that we can't blow them up either. In my  current game I have a shortage of weapon fragments, but abundant alien alloys and elerium...

How the heck did that happen?

That makes no sense, seeing as humans are literally creating a copy of the plasma guns. IIRC, it says they have no idea how they work, they just know that they do.

That's why they need certain bits from the aliens' plasma rifles. Things that let them avoid causing horrific collateral damage, for instance.

...Really? If you're going to pull that on me again, I demand you make it one actually worth solving. This is too easy. It's not even a riddle, it's a complicated word problem.

Thaegan exists. (1)
So do her children. (13)
Same with the toads. (13*1)
Why do the toads have grubs on them? (13*1*2)
And why are fleas wasting their time on grubs? (13*1*2*2)
And of course there's no way to estimate mice, pets, or other such critters, but eh.

Barring some kind of system-specific screwery about how sorceresses aren't alive or something, the answer is 105.

((Abraxas conversation delayed until Elf stops being a teasing jerk.))

Quote from: kj1225 on January 18, 2014, 06:28:32 pm

"Sup. You're sad, what's wrong."

"Like, according to the Bible homosexuality is wrong, you know? And I like met this guy but he turned out to be a girl and I'm like, not really looking to be a relationship, you know? So I like, am just kind a down because I don't want to like hurt them and they were like, kinda cute."

"Look at it this way. God is a lesbian. Or maybe bisexual. Either way, she's in a relationship with Selina. I don't think your immortal soul is in any particular danger from that."

"You're thinking of the bit from Leviticus aren't you? The verse there is actually referring to how men should put men below."

"It's pretty specific. If a man lies with a man as he does with a woman, it's an abomination punishable by--well, it's probably different in this world, but still."

Quote from: kj1225 on January 18, 2014, 07:04:19 pm

Keith puts an arm around her waist.
"That's nice."

"L-Like, yeah."
Bethany snuggles up against Keith.

Will leaves them to it, heading for the refreshments. He investigates an orangish drink.
"...Peculiar." He tries it, frowning.
"Something's...off..."

"...Huh?"

"For example, Carl, would you like me to walk in and tell you how to repair things?"

"Hm? Oh, you're arguing. No, not unless you wanted to finish the job."

"I wasn't speaking for skills, I was speaking for us as a paramilitary organization. I'm not going to get involved in your administrative duties, that's your game. But when you decide to induct a whole batch of new blood, or I want to launch a cover operation in gangland, we're going to get the approval of the others, alright?"

Victoriea turns to the others,

"What do you all think?"

"Fair."

"Thats exactly my problem, if I have to ask your permission every time I want to recruit somebody then wait for you all to discuss it and vote on it then it's going to take far to long to get anything done.

For instance right now I'm working on 10 people as well as meeting with 3 others, now I have to have all my meetings with 13 people which is going to take most of the day then come back and give you all a full report on every individual meeting which take hours more then wait for you all to discuss everything then vote on it before I can do anything about it.

Which will take days.

"If you can't handle the bureaucracy, get out of the government."

"Ok then let me prove my point, I have 10 full files on those 10 people, I looked at the files and in 10 minutes decided I want them because I looked for specific things. For you to do the same will take half the day or more at least because you have no idea what information to look for in those files and if I was to tell you then it would remove the entire purpose of needing your permission."

"Son, I'm not particularly pleased when people claim that they are so much smarter than anyone else that they can get a job done a zillion times faster and that anyone else would need their help 'nyways. Let me rephrase your claims: You can read through a person's entire file and decide if you want to hire him or not in a single minute. This is already putting you in my bad books. You then claim that it would take half a day for us to get through ten, implying that anyone else would take half an hour or close to it to do what you can do in a mere minute. You further imply that our work would be faulty, because we don't have the knowledge you do. And while my area of expertise ain't people, I think I know enough about our mission to know what makes a good soldier--I don't need you holding my hand. And if you did help me, it would be by explaining the traits you think are most pertinent, not telling us who to hire--summaries, not decisions. Finally, giving you unlimited hiring power would be like giving me unlimited requisitionary power--an idiotic choice just begging to be exploited to the detriment of the rest of the organization."

"Where I having hand selected people to join S.W.A.T and hand selected people from agencies and law enforcement to form teams for operations know exactly what to look for, why do I need permission from all of you on a job that you are not qualified to do? It would be like me demanding that I be given a minute by minute breakdown of a surgical procedure before allowing it to begin. I have no right to take the choice away from the person who knows how to do it."

"It would, however, be perfectly acceptable of you to ask to be consulted before performing said surgical procedure, in this analogy at least. After all, our resources are scarce, and we can't have you directing them all."

"Oh great way to build trust, so we're all going to sit and second guess every decision somebody else makes. That can't possibly go wrong. And even better if one of us gets caught they have all the information they need to destroy the entire organization."

"So, you are instead suggesting we discard any pretense of checks and balances among our members while also making sure no one has enough knowledge? If any of us get captured, knowing our names and faces is enough to doom us. Besides, I can't help but notice how you're asking for power for yourself, but not leaving a lot of room open for others to expand their powers."

"Theres a reason that terrorists work in cells and thats what we are, terrorists. Each cell has it's own role and if it gets caught or infiltrated it can't bring down the rest. Having all of us know every detail about everything is just begging for everything to go wrong."

Carl smacks him.
"In what way are we terrorists?"


"And do we have an actual, long-term plan?"

((Saw Afro Samurai somewhere. Glowing King made me thing of a) The Yellow King and b) radioactivity.))

((Almost exactly my thoughts. Creepy.))

((Elf is offline.))

I know, but what else am I gonna do? Cado is offline, too.

Where do you get these things?

And you guys can turn anytime you want. There's still a lot left to go.

I'm not sure what to do. Lore's furious. Alex would probably try to stay quiet.