Xcom Classic Difficulty Smells a Bit Like Bullshit. (Kinda Ranty)

[Sectan]

Spoiler: The Setting

Picture a forested area. A sniper has set up behind heavy cover. Hardened by years of military training and countless operations against human combatants. "The coast is clear, move up to the left!" A soldier hefting a machine gun is flanked by two of his supports. Their eyes constantly scanning for any sign of alien threat. "There's one over there! Get down! NOW!"

The aliens take their reaction turn and get into cover. They have line of sight, but no flanking positions.

The heavy finds the sturdiest stump he can and hunkers down to avoid enemy fire. The two support find what cover they can and prepare for incoming fire. A fizzle sounds and smoke shrouds them in safety. "Incoming!" Two bolts of plasma lash out and hit a support in what you would think was a dense fog. He's bloodied up, but still healthy enough to fight.

Mr. Injured support immediately shits himself and runs into the open. The heavy panics from seeing the minor injuries and kills the support to end his mild discomfort. The sniper follows suit and shoots the other support in the back so they don't have to see the gruesome sight. I'm down a man with one low on health and the other two having used up their turns.

The aliens hesitate and can't figure out if this is for real or some advanced human tactic. They look at the scene for a second before casually flanking and killing the squad.


The Squad is Dead. Fuck you Commander.

This has been my experience with playing Xcom on Classic. While I'm all up for improved AI and strategies, my subjective bullshit meter keeps telling me something smells. Being on only the second mission doesn't help things either.

Get into cover only to discover an alien, which moves into a perfect position? It now has you in its line of sight and you're about to watch a mind melded sectoid kill the fuck out of your soldier.

Are you in a situation where a soldier was hit, but one nearby has a perfect opportunity to flank the alien and kill him? What are you insane? He'll panic, run away and ruin any chances of salvaging the situation if you're lucky. Most likely he'll shoot someone important and kill them.

When I can set up an ambush to draw an alien in all three reaction shots will miss and leave me screwed. Aliens that are about 5 blocks away, with no cover mind you, will find themselves dodging shots left and right as I desperately try to just shoot them. That on top of their increased damage output just makes the game go from hard and fair to frustrating and now I'm foaming at the mouth ranting about it on the internet. Normal leaned too far in the player's favor and Classic leans too far in the alien's favor when it comes to stats alone. It's too early in the game to have specialized units to try and combat this so I'm stuck save scumming just to avoid losing all the time. I know there are plenty of people who have beat it Iron man Impossible without losing any units, but I haven't progressed that far up the difficulty tree.

Anybody else get that bullshit sense or have I just been putting myself into shit situations by creeping around trying to cover ambush points and draw aliens in? How would you avoid getting everyone killed?


TL;DR I get mad about Xcom and rant about it on the internet.

 

[tippy2k2]

The sturdiest stump he can find...is it full cover?

If you have answered no, you have gotten your man killed (half cover might as well be no cover in the harder difficulties). Since it's only your second mission, I presume the other members of the squad are not leveled up at all (therefore they have weak will) and they panic.

Along with that, even when you do everything right, the chance that the RNG (Random Number Generator for those of you who haven't played) will eventually come out against you. Sometimes shit happens. I've played through twice [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Tippy2k2-s-XCOM-Army-Let-s-Play] now and there are missions where you swear the RNG is just fucking with you. There have also been some amazing low-chance saves thanks to the mercy of the RNG. However, the higher your difficulty, the more likely that one tiny mistake you made is going to snowball into everyone getting killed...

I have not yet mastered the delicate balance (if you look at my group there, everyone dies before Classic mode gets finished) but there are plenty of people who have. I'm sure one of my more experienced soldiers, Bloated Guppy, shall come in here soon and enlighten you with tips and tricks that have allowed him to kick ass and chew bubble gum all day long (even AFTER he ran out of bubble gum!).

 

[Rylee Fox]

1) Full cover is key on classic. Try to always have full and only take half if you have nothing else to use.

2) Explosives are your friend. Use them and use them often. I've had a couple of grenades being the only thing preventing my entire squad from getting wiped out. Yes if you kill aliens with them you don't get weapon fragments but classic has an increase in enemies per map so it balances out.

3) This doesn't always work but try to have the aliens discover you, instead of you discovering them. They run right into you, and can't attack since they have to run and hide right away. This leaves your whole squad close enough to flank the group and bring them down. Just be careful you don't trigger more aliens as you do that.

4) Overwatch. Move up, and overwatch. If you are lucky, you'll kill an alien the moment you see it.

Those may be obvious and I'm sure you know them already, but they are things that got me through classic with minimal losses. I find normal rather dull and greatly enjoyed my first run on classic.

Yes Classic is a drastic change from Normal mode. My friend tried classic for the first time about a week ago and he squad wiped on mission 1. For me, typically I don't see much crap going on when I play.

 

[Zhukov]

The game has a weird difficulty curve and, yes, sometimes the RNG will just up and screw you over.

Sometimes shit will happen that you can't avoid. You'll have your guy hunkered down behind heavy cover, safe as you please. Then a dastardly muton uses suppressing fire, which destroys your lovely cover, then a floater gets a critical hit on your now exposed guy, who then panics and shoots the VIP.

However, I've completed the game twice on Classic Iron Man and I've only encountered one situation that genuinely annoyed me (9 missed shots in a row at 75%+. Yes, I counted.) Oh, and thin men dropping out of the sky, but that happens on all difficulties.

 

[scorptatious]

Reminds me of this:

Spoiler

OT: I honestly can't really say much about Classic mode. I've played through the game twice on Normal. First time I save scummed a lot, and second playthrough I only reloaded my save once. I've gone through a bit of Classic Iron Man but stopped and went on to play another game.

The only advice I can really give is to keep your squad somewhat close together. If you keep them together, move slowly up with one guy being the point man, you have a far lesser chance of being caught off guard and attracting the attention of multiple alien groups. I'm sure you probably know this already, but it's ESSENTIAL to do this if you expect to survive this game on the higher difficulty settings.

Besides that, I don't know what to do about your guys panicking, or enemies dodging your shots even though you have the advantage. At that point, all I can say is, it's XCOM. Expect the unexpected.

 

[Don Incognito]

One of the most important factors on higher difficulties that few pay attention to is your soldiers Will rating. If they have low will, don't bother bringing them along, because they will panic, and you're gonna have a bad time.

 

[Sectan]

The sturdiest stump he can find...is it full cover?

If you have answered no, you have gotten your man killed (half cover might as well be no cover in the harder difficulties).

Yeah. The standing trees. I think they're full cover if I'm not mistaken. Or they could just be the tall rocks or something.

4) Overwatch. Move up, and overwatch. If you are lucky, you'll kill an alien the moment you see it.

The overwatch doesn't seem to like me . There was a map that had a narrow alleyway behind a building. I ran all four of my guys in there and had 3 them on overwatch since the 4th had to sprint there. Alien turns the corner and all 3 reaction shots missed.

Oh, and thin men dropping out of the sky, but that happens on all difficulties.

I almost (not really) popped a blood vessel in my eye when that happened. I had my squad all on overwatch near the spawn inching forward. Thin man dropped out of the sky, all 4 reaction shots missed.

Jeez, there seems to be a running theme with reaction shots...

 

[tippy2k2]

snip

This might be depressing to you. There are plenty of people who have dumped the game because of what I'm about to say. I'm going to take something that Matthew Berry (ESPN Analysis) says about Fantasy Football that I think perfectly matches the attitude you need to play XCOM:

"At it's fundamental level, Fantasy Football XCOM is all about minimizing risk and giving yourself the best odds to win"

It's unfortunate that you got unlucky so early (or maybe it's fortunate; getting a TPK later in the game, you might as well shut it down since it's all over except for the mercy killings. Not to beat a dead horse but you can see that in my group as I just shut it all down after; see April 26th 2013 entry if you care to see the unraveling). That's what XCOM comes down to; set yourself up in the best possible position to succeed.

You are going to get unlucky; I guarantee it. Do you have the skill, knowledge, and yes, luck, to get past it? That's what separates commanders like me from people who are good at the game

 

[Rylee Fox]

Jeez, there seems to be a running theme with reaction shots...

Well reaction shots do have lower accuracy than normal shots. What annoys me about them sometimes is all of my guys will shoot the same alien. The first shot may kill the alien but everyone on overwatch will shoot its corpse anyway, wasting their reaction shot and letting other aliens move in.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Yeah. The standing trees. I think they're full cover if I'm not mistaken. Or they could just be the tall rocks or something.

Even Full Cover is only -40 to hit. If the enemy has, say, a 95% chance to hit, that is reduced to 55%. Cover is not a magic shield. You can and will get shot, even in full cover.

Jeez, there seems to be a running theme with reaction shots...

Reaction shots are, I believe, a -20 to accuracy. Especially with rookie soldiers, this can reduce their accuracy to 20-30 depending on where they're shooting from and what they are shooting at. Naturally, this is going to result in a hilarious number of over watch misses. Frankly, too much is made of over watch. Particularly on classic, where you are already working at a -10 accuracy penalty compared to the enemy. If you spend every turn setting up over watch shots instead of playing aggressively (but intelligently) and cultivating high percentage opportunities, you are going to lose in a war of attrition. Fortunately, the game favors the human player, and the AI will always take that worthless "scurry into cover" turn upon discovery, which means the player ALWAYS gets to start on the offensive.

It's unfortunate that you got unlucky so early (or maybe it's fortunate; getting a TPK later in the game, you might as well shut it down since it's all over except for the mercy killings. Not to beat a dead horse but you can see that in my group as I just shut it all down after; see April 26th 2013 entry if you care to see the unraveling). That's what XCOM comes down to; set yourself up in the best possible position to succeed.

Pretty much this. It's like advanced stats in sports. Having a high shooting percentage or on-base percentage doesn't mean you succeed every time, but over a long enough sample it means you succeed more often than you fail. Your job as a commander is to generate high percentage chances for, and low percentage chances against. You accomplish the former through strong positioning and flanking, and the latter through cover, smoke, and intelligent initiation.

And the first month or two of XCOM is when the difficulty is at its peak, most particularly during the first appearances of Thin Men. You're still dealing with low level and thus largely useless recruits. Their will is low, so they panic often. Your armor sucks, so you die easily. Your snipers are probably level 1 or level 2, and don't have squad sight yet, so they're by a good long shot the worst class in the game instead of the OP killing machines they become later. And Thin Men have extremely high accuracy and are cheap as fuck the way they drop out of the sky behind your positions. Many a Classic Iron Man game ends during the first few Thin Man missions.

The difficulty curve settles down remarkably after that. Indeed, one of XCOM's greatest failings is that the game becomes so easy once you have a high level squad at your disposal. It virtually requires bad luck or stupidity at that point to experience a team wipe, and even single deaths become incredibly rare.

 

[Exterminas]

Quite frankly, the higher difficulties on the latest XCom are not something worth bothering with.
The only people who have been able to play them succefully did so by applying cheesy tactics, like hugging the invisible wall at the edge of the map.

In my opinion, the central problem is that XCOM has a lot of random elements, like the hit and crit-chance, which can make or break a mission, depending on sheer luck.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Quite frankly, the higher difficulties on the latest XCom are not something worth bothering with.

The only people who have been able to play them succefully did so by applying cheesy tactics, like hugging the invisible wall at the edge of the map.

You are thinking of Impossible. Which was quite playable, albeit using very conservative tactics, prior to the teleporting bug getting out of control and rendering hunker down worthless.

Classic is not particularly difficult once you get a handle on the game's mechanics. Normal is so ludicrously pants-on-head easy as to be insulting. I assume on Easy you just get a victory screen upon starting the game.

 

[Souplex]

Normal can be done with a reasonable amount of skill.
Classic is doable with some effort.
Impossible is named very literally.
I angrily gave up on my impossible playthrough when I had four soldiers shoot a Sectoid with chances ranging from 70-85%. They all missed.
The sectoid used his turn to scamper back into cover, shoot at one of my soldiers in full cover, kill him with a critical, and make the rest of my squad panic and kill each other.
I'm pretty sure the RNG simply hates me.

 

[Fat Hippo]

One of the most important factors on higher difficulties that few pay attention to is your soldiers Will rating. If they have low will, don't bother bringing them along, because they will panic, and you're gonna have a bad time.

I've always fucking hated this mechanic. In the original Xcom, out of all the soldiers you bought, loads were gonna start with such terrible will stats, so bringing them along was more trouble than it was worth. Now, in Enemy Unknown, if the dice screw you over and their will stat doesn't increase much as they level, you'll end up with a soldier with a bad will stat who is actively dangerous to bring along.

There's no strategy to it, and nothing you can do to counteract it until you have the iron will buff, the positive effects of which your early soldiers won't benefit from anyway, so if you get unlucky, some of those bastards are just worse than useless now. I just don't consider that very fun.

 

[lacktheknack]

PROTIP: Less overwatch, more hunker down.

And then pray the teleportation glitch doesn't get you.

Beyond that, there have been multiple people on the internet who have tested the RNG (myself included), and they've all turned up with "What a fair RNG with good distribution!"

If you get TKO'd, it's either a string of truly bad luck, or your tactics are poor. To this day, I've seen no evidence for (and much against) the idea that the game is inherently broken.

 

[zerragonoss]

1) Full cover is key on classic. Try to always have full and only take half if you have nothing else to use.

2) Explosives are your friend. Use them and use them often. I've had a couple of grenades being the only thing preventing my entire squad from getting wiped out. Yes if you kill aliens with them you don't get weapon fragments but classic has an increase in enemies per map so it balances out.

3) This doesn't always work but try to have the aliens discover you, instead of you discovering them. They run right into you, and can't attack since they have to run and hide right away. This leaves your whole squad close enough to flank the group and bring them down. Just be careful you don't trigger more aliens as you do that.

4) Overwatch. Move up, and overwatch. If you are lucky, you'll kill an alien the moment you see it.

Those may be obvious and I'm sure you know them already, but they are things that got me through classic with minimal losses. I find normal rather dull and greatly enjoyed my first run on classic.

Yes Classic is a drastic change from Normal mode. My friend tried classic for the first time about a week ago and he squad wiped on mission 1. For me, typically I don't see much crap going on when I play.

This pretty much covers it. A side note though I would almost never use the explosives to kill an enemy, as I hate lost loot, but they are still very useful for blowing up cover and weakening biger mobs.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

http://i.qkme.me/3qwyvl.jpg

Seriously though people have tested the RNG and it pretty much turned out as expected. More likely you just had really bad luck. Frankly I rarely have trouble with panicking on Classic, maybe I just have good Will rolls when I hire.

1) Full cover is key on classic. Try to always have full and only take half if you have nothing else to use.

2) Explosives are your friend. Use them and use them often. I've had a couple of grenades being the only thing preventing my entire squad from getting wiped out. Yes if you kill aliens with them you don't get weapon fragments but classic has an increase in enemies per map so it balances out.

3) This doesn't always work but try to have the aliens discover you, instead of you discovering them. They run right into you, and can't attack since they have to run and hide right away. This leaves your whole squad close enough to flank the group and bring them down. Just be careful you don't trigger more aliens as you do that.

4) Overwatch. Move up, and overwatch. If you are lucky, you'll kill an alien the moment you see it.

.
This is a good guide. Normal breeds a ton of bad habits like relying on half-cover and engaging in long drawn out gun-battles. I'd only add that hunkering down is a very useful skill that nobody ever seems to use (doubled defense turns half-cover into full and full into "haha you can't hit me").

 

[Battenberg]

You clearly haven't played impossible, classic is a walk in the park in comparison. On any difficulty the first few missions are always going to be tough because you have little to no power in your troops or options in how you play (in fact a lot of XCOM guides suggest immediately restarting if you get certain maps/ missions at the beginning of your game). Basically persistence is key, keep trying until you get to a point where you're actually able to start refining your soldiers/ hq. Also if its any consolation the 'game over' cutscene is pretty good (if you haven't already seen it), arguably better than the victory cutscene.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Spoiler: The Setting

Picture a forested area. A sniper has set up behind heavy cover. Hardened by years of military training and countless operations against human combatants. "The coast is clear, move up to the left!" A soldier hefting a machine gun is flanked by two of his supports. Their eyes constantly scanning for any sign of alien threat. "There's one over there! Get down! NOW!"

The aliens take their reaction turn and get into cover. They have line of sight, but no flanking positions.

The heavy finds the sturdiest stump he can and hunkers down to avoid enemy fire. The two support find what cover they can and prepare for incoming fire. A fizzle sounds and smoke shrouds them in safety. "Incoming!" Two bolts of plasma lash out and hit a support in what you would think was a dense fog. He's bloodied up, but still healthy enough to fight.

Mr. Injured support immediately shits himself and runs into the open. The heavy panics from seeing the minor injuries and kills the support to end his mild discomfort. The sniper follows suit and shoots the other support in the back so they don't have to see the gruesome sight. I'm down a man with one low on health and the other two having used up their turns.

The aliens hesitate and can't figure out if this is for real or some advanced human tactic. They look at the scene for a second before casually flanking and killing the squad.


The Squad is Dead. Fuck you Commander.

This has been my experience with playing Xcom on Classic. While I'm all up for improved AI and strategies, my subjective bullshit meter keeps telling me something smells. Being on only the second mission doesn't help things either.

Get into cover only to discover an alien, which moves into a perfect position? It now has you in its line of sight and you're about to watch a mind melded sectoid kill the fuck out of your soldier.

Are you in a situation where a soldier was hit, but one nearby has a perfect opportunity to flank the alien and kill him? What are you insane? He'll panic, run away and ruin any chances of salvaging the situation if you're lucky. Most likely he'll shoot someone important and kill them.

When I can set up an ambush to draw an alien in all three reaction shots will miss and leave me screwed. Aliens that are about 5 blocks away, with no cover mind you, will find themselves dodging shots left and right as I desperately try to just shoot them. That on top of their increased damage output just makes the game go from hard and fair to frustrating and now I'm foaming at the mouth ranting about it on the internet. Normal leaned too far in the player's favor and Classic leans too far in the alien's favor when it comes to stats alone. It's too early in the game to have specialized units to try and combat this so I'm stuck save scumming just to avoid losing all the time. I know there are plenty of people who have beat it Iron man Impossible without losing any units, but I haven't progressed that far up the difficulty tree.

Anybody else get that bullshit sense or have I just been putting myself into shit situations by creeping around trying to cover ambush points and draw aliens in? How would you avoid getting everyone killed?


TL;DR I get mad about Xcom and rant about it on the internet.

I will admit that the "panic" thing is one of the few things I didn't like about X-Com: EU. To me, it really killed the idea that these guys are supposed to be the most elite soldiers in the world when they suddenly panic and start shooting each other.

That being said, it didn't happen THAT often when I played through on classic, and you just need to be cognizant of your Soldier's will ratings, which I'll admit that the first time I played through the game on a lower difficulty level was something I didn't even really think about.

Also, stick with it, the hardest part about classic (for me) was definitely the beginning 1/3rd or so of the game, when all your Soldiers are rookies and you have no decent equipment. Once you find your groove, you'll find that the mid-game and end-game aren't quite as bad.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

I don't like how the aliens get the "We have been discovered!" move, then get another move right in the middle of my turn.

I don't use Heavies, at all. Even with a scope they have crappy accuracy. I always go 3 Support (which seem to have the best accuracy, except for snipers), 1 (perhaps 2) snipers and either one or two assault.