Εγκατάσταση Steam
Σύνδεση
|
Γλώσσα
简体中文 (Απλοποιημένα κινεζικά)
繁體中文 (Παραδοσιακά κινεζικά)
日本語 (Ιαπωνικά)
한국어 (Κορεατικά)
ไทย (Ταϊλανδικά)
Български (Βουλγαρικά)
Čeština (Τσεχικά)
Dansk (Δανικά)
Deutsch (Γερμανικά)
English (Αγγλικά)
Español – España (Ισπανικά – Ισπανία)
Español – Latinoamérica (Ισπανικά – Λατινική Αμερική)
Français (Γαλλικά)
Italiano (Ιταλικά)
Bahasa Indonesia (Ινδονησιακά)
Magyar (Ουγγρικά)
Nederlands (Ολλανδικά)
Norsk (Νορβηγικά)
Polski (Πολωνικά)
Português (Πορτογαλικά – Πορτογαλία)
Português – Brasil (Πορτογαλικά – Βραζιλία)
Română (Ρουμανικά)
Русский (Ρωσικά)
Suomi (Φινλανδικά)
Svenska (Σουηδικά)
Türkçe (Τουρκικά)
Tiếng Việt (Βιετναμικά)
Українська (Ουκρανικά)
Αναφορά προβλήματος μετάφρασης
Κανόνες συζητήσεων και οδηγίες
Αναφορά ανάρτησης
I won't spoil it for you but suffice it to say, that the ending is dramatic.
Spoiler:
Arc Thrower Research
Catch an Alien alive
Catch an Outsider alive
Invade the Alien Base
Research the Hyper Wave Beacon
Shot down and enter a Overseer UFO
send a Volunteer in the Gallop Chamber
Enter the Temple Ship
your objectives... listed in the command center.
um. Not calling you dumb per say, but the writing is on the wall.
I thought the aliens were recruiting to add to their creature army and humans would end up being enslaved once your soldiers and humanity had practiced psyonic power like the rest.
It is just that as the big cheese of the XCOM project, the when, how, and why of these being achieved is up to your discretion. But the fundamental need to achieve them is not.
Even without the story, the only hope humanity has of winning or even surviving in a long war is technological advancement. Anything else is merely buying a little bit more sand in the hourglass before the world goes dark.
And yet the game will merrily let you play for as long as you like until you actually stick an interchangeable meat puppet in the Gollop Chamber.
It`s the same thing that causes Trek to always lose to other Sci-Fi in VS threads. Sure, they COULD blow everything up with warp ships crewed by holograms. The COULD do time travel loops. They COULD do a whole lot of things.
They don`t though.
The aliens demonstrate no desire or even capability to move beyond what you respond to as XCOM until the doomticker is full, ergo they will never do so QED. Assuming one were mad enough to do it one could sandbag a campaign for as long as desired.
Or as long as you don't get trapped into a cascading situation of choose one battle to respond to and leave the other to rot, thus causing panic, thus causing pullouts and a slide towards diminishing returns and defeat. Which is what the game is slanted to eventually do if the campaign goes on for too long thanks to the way mission responses are set up. Which is especially evident on the later missions.
If you honestly think this, your analysis skills need polishing up. Badly.
They Demonstrate The Capaibility Easily. They do not have the Desire to, and for reasons that are made Increasingly Obvious as the campaign progresses.
Interstellar travel at all requires huge amounts of energy. More than enoough to render the Earth uninhabitable or worse many times over. All they would have to do is strap a few of their engines onto a large enough ship or asteroid and kamilkaze it into Earth and they would win the war effortlessly.In fact, they nearly destroy the planet *without even meaning to* at the end of the campaign.
If we are talking about launching a full scale, conventional invasion rather than their periodic raids they could Also Do That. Especially in the early days of the campaign. Mass enough ships and soldiers in enough of a location and go to town while the humans have No Effective Response. Especially if they use their ships as close support. Make up for any shortfall in numbers by hammering the human population with superior firepower and dividing them with psionics.
Like the Ethereals are clearly capable of doing by and large.
The bottom line is that the Aliens fought this war with one hand behind their back at all time, and they did it consciously until well into the Temple Ship mission. By which time it was too late. If they had ever taken that second hand out from behind their backs, they would have Won sooner or later, and done so fairly easily.
This isn't like the more braindead of my fellow Trek fans (though I am more of a SW or Halo one) insisting that this or that ST military could simply replicate complex military machines into existance and use them magically without any evidence of training or drill.
This is the aliens doing Exactly What They Have Done using the Exact Same Capabilities They're Shown To Have, after shuffling the Org Chart around a bit. That is Not saying that Sterfleet does not need Machine Guns and even if they did REPLICATORS! could make them all easily.*
Or do you Really Think an OPFOR that is capable of navigating stellar distances and spamming you with indefinite squads would be somehow incapable of massing some of those squads into-say- units of 100 or so? Squadrons of ships? Etc?
That is only correct while speaking in the meta, and it's only correct then If the results do not push your balance hard enough. Which they may or may not.
But once you start having to balance which council member to lose (which is a Very Common result in long campaigns), your ability to leisurely sandbag is ticking down. And in the end you will have to decide whether ot draw it out and likely lose or win... Which was by all accounts an intentional gameplay design by Firaxis and one.
=====================
* For what it is worth, I do think Star Trek and especially the Federation are formidable and could be signigifcantly moreso. I don't mean to dismiss the power of replicators, because depending on what episode you go off of they could make the need for conventional factories and other production facilities moot to one degree or another. That is a Very Powerful Weapon.
But the greatest weakness of every Trek faction we have seen so far is human (or Klingon, or Mortal). Lack of training, lack of drill, and lack of doctrine to fight in the most effective way. Just because the replicators Could make the greatest Machine Gun or Artillery Piece known to the galaxy doesn't mean the sentient creatures recieving it would be able to use it without drilling. Ditto just because Kirk etc. al. could use Phasers fairly competently doe snot make them a great design.
Even with all these problems Star Trek factions are relatively formidable, and if they were willing to invest a fraction of the resources and time they have in proper drill and training (even for self-defense) factions like the Federation would be Absolutely Terrifying to confront, even if they have the mindset of a snuggly dog.
This Is Not Comparable ot what the Aliens have and use.
The Aliens have highly capable futuristic equipment along with competent tactics, and Show that they know how to use them Painfully Well. The biggest ommssions we see are the lack of artillery, AFVs, stationary machine guns or other point defenses. And those are likely explainable by
A: Logistical problems (inability to actually get the damn things down on Earth with the craft we see a lot of, or lack of them at all in the fleet conducting this).
B: Obsolescence (With the air-space superiority the enemy enjoys for most of the campaign, there is not as pressing a problem to deploy artillery when they could simply fly in closer and blast. Ditto the fact that a lot of their hand held weapons are capable of dealign with heavy threats anyway).
And above all
C: *They Aren't Right For the Job.* Heavy Weapons simply wouldn't fit well with the raiding and harassment campaign the Aliens plan to do. They aren't aiming for convenitional military victory because if they wanted that they'd have gotten it near instantly, and they don't deploy artillery or other heavier equipment because it would Go Against The Point. And undermine many of their other advantages (like strategic and tactical manueverability) in the process.
That in no way means that they DON'T or CAN'T Destroy you. The technology they have means they obviously can, and even by their highly selective strategy and tactics they can If you let them they will in the long run, if only by slowly undermining council support through Devil's Choices. It would just be counterproductive for them to Nova the Earth and call it a day.
Unless the game can spawn two missions in such a way that it is actually impossible for the Skyranger to make it to one and back to base before the other disappears, no that won`t happen. Or the game would need to spawn 21 UFOs at once for the threat to be beyond your theoretical capability of dealing with it.
The mission speed would have to increase MASSIVELY before panic cascade could become an issue once the sats are all up.
Yes, they probably could. Unless you can show me them actually doing it when the sitatuion calls for it though...
XCOM does not present the aliens as having competence, there is no other source material I`m aware of, ergo from my perspective the aliens will continue to act in the manner they do ingame. This isn`t even a meta argument. At no point will the aliens change their underlying tactics until the doomticker hits 8.
If there IS other source material that changes this, Mea Culpa.
It not only can happen, it was shown off *IN. THE. TUTORIAL*
If this were old school XCOM, Xenonauts, or UFO:Alien Invasion where you can choose tofight every battle and confront every enemy, you would be right. But it isn't. There are very obvious cases where the game will railroad you to Pick One Mission and Abandon the Other, with all that entials.
Too much of that going on for too long without balancing, and you will start a downward spiral. And I think they set that up fairly intentionally.
No it doesn't. All it has to do is *limit your oppertunities to burn off the Panic.* If it does that, it doesn't matter whether the fall plays out in a couple days or over the course of years; sooner or later death by a thousand cuts will happen because of the "mission bottlenecks" that occasionally pop up, and you will slowly lose it all even with the best possible management.
If parts of the game are structured so that you cannot recover more panic than you lose, that is a structure slowly sending you into the ground.
Usually- especially in the early and mid game or on easier difficulties- you can avoid that, or at last avoid it for a long, Long time by making up for what you lose through bottlenecks elsewhre. But if it hits you with enough bottlenecks close together enough, it will make complete recovery impractical.
And that's before we even talk about the other, contributory sources of panic beyond the bottlenecks.
Let's sum up the issues here.
You assume that there will never be two mutually exclusive missions. The *Game Tutorial Itself Proves You Wrong*, and along with it the central plank of your argument against the downward panic spiral and an indefinite war playing to the aliens' strengths.
You assume that just because a game does not feature enemy forces acting in a certain way means that they logically could not outside the constraints of their scripting. That the Aliens only send 8 or so Sectoids down at the most and that means they cannot send down 80 sectoids in one go.
You equate the argument of a downward spiral with the behavior and arguments of some of the more delusional Trekkies out there, equating the Fact that the Aliens would send far larger surface units, employ heavier firepower from their ships, etc with "Sure, they COULD blow everything up with warp ships crewed by holograms."
This is logically shot on multiple levels.
1. Again, it indicates you have not played the game tutorial or dealt with any of the bottleneck missions, adn thus do not know what you are saying.
2. The fact that the Alien AI/spawner is only programmed to spam you with half dozen or a dozen X-Rays at a time does not mean the Alienns would be logically incapable of lumping a few of those squads together and hitting you with a hundred aliens in a single battle (or more).
Considering modders were tweaking Alien numbers since before this game was released, it doesn't even hold up well as a meta argument. Much less one for in-universe logic or game balance that has nothing to do with how many aliens are in a mission (if they create panic anyway).
3. A Trekkie headcase arguing that would be claiming Trek technology can do something *well outside of any capabilities it has ever been shown to do.* Or at the very least beyond anything that has appeared in an even remotely major way in the Trek Canon. That
A: That it'd be plausible and desireable to crew a ship entirely with holograms.
B: That these Holograms would be capable of preforming all of the mission-relevant tasks- including many We Have No Proof Whatsoever that they are physically or mentally capable of- well enough to preform at or beyond the abilities of flesh and blood (or metal and wire) sapients.
C: That Holograms would not be disadvantaged- and if disadvantaged that they would not have an enemy that could take advantage of it- against flesh and blood enemy forces that aren't potholed in the same way Holograms are (even in Trek).
D: That all of this could somehow be sustained and supplied long enough to acccomplish the goal (blow everything up with warp ships). Even though the Doctor of Voyager was a possibly decisive drain on the ship's power even though he was the only one.
At minimum, Four premises. Four assumptions. Most of which deal with things that have never been evidenced before in the Trek canon.
In contrast, the assumption that the aliens could be more conventionally devastating is:
A: That they could mass more of the materials, people, and resources they throw around the campaign for more dedicated efforts.
B: That they Preform In Accord With Their Previously Seen Conduct.
Both of which are safe Yeses going off of the game itself.
The Trekkie hypothesis assumes that people and holograms in its' canon could do things, including things we have no reason to believe they have the power to do so.
The Alien hypothesis assumes the aliens can shuffle around the reosurces we know they have.
Conflating the two is a straw man. And definitely not a good argument.
*Headdesk.*
How far into the game have you gotten?
The bottom line is that if anything, the Alien Leadership achieved pretty much everything it set out to do right until the Temple Ship mission.
It was notably Not to crush humanity as quickly or as efficiently as they could. They knew they could and it would have been child's play. It was not to blow the Earth up beause that too would have been counterproductive.
Instead they resorted to the sort of limited, surgical pressure war we saw in the game for a very definitive reason. One where they did not want to press too hard and smash Earth, and one where they did not want to press too softly and let the pressure ease. They do that much rather well. If you reach the end you have succeeded; if you do no tit is because you were found wanting. Which is precisely what they were aiming for.
As the main enemy outright states to you when you have no reason to believe they are engaging in deception.
Again, panic cascade does not happen once all countires are satted. The aliens will continue to send UFOs allowing you to bleed panic, the sats prevent abductions from happening and council and terror missions allow you to bleed panic further. The only way for panic to increase at that point is a failed mission - which is simply the player failing.
Since you harp on it so much I`ll concede that there are, often even, mutually exclusive abduction missions. THOSE NO LONGER OCCUR ONCE EVERYTHING IS SATTED. They are entirely irrelevant once every council member has a satelite and a Fusion Lance Firestorm sitting around to respond to any UFOs. No bottleneck such as you describe exists anymore.
Now then...
Yes, logic dictates that they are probably more than capable of swarming Mutons at you until you die. They never do so in an unmodded game, so their ability to do this doesn`t matter since they lack the desire to do it. Sandbags ho. All available evidence indicates that the Ethereals will keep sending three or four ships a month in perpetuity and XCom starts to seel Sectoid brainburgers with PSISPICE, only 1.99 at your local "Vahlens Interrogation Cell".
I don`t actually care about wether hologram crewed warp shipmissiles are doable. It`s simply an argument I`ve heard and used to make a point easier to understand. There`s literally dozens of Trek things one could use instead to demonstrate why Trek lacks competence.
I know all about the whole "violently uplift" thing. But they don`t actually put a timer on it anywhere and all the evidence indicates that the game will run in perpetuity until you bother to use the Gollop chamber.
Now go back to your console.