Easy level too hard?

[Roundpixel]

I have played all the previous Xcom games as well as most strategy games, but it seems to me that even the easy level is too difficult for newbies. I am no newby, but if one does not bujild enough satellites and loses too many soldiers early on, on manage research and engineering just right, one falls behind the curve and finds himself fighting Mutons with peashooters.

It would be a lot better if either the "easy" level were easy, or if there were easier levels to learn the game, or if there were options for example to slow down alien progress, or to give the player more money, or to make progress less costly.

This game was clearly designed for consoles and to be short fast and intense, and the only true objective is to avoid being overwhelmed by the aliens, by finding exactly the right strategy. I don't like it, I prefer a game where I can learn the ropes by playing easy, and ramp up the difficulty as I please.

[Stubot]

No way its too hard. Im playing on standard ironman and have been shocked how easy it is, think im most the way through the game with no countries lost and had a 2 month period without a death, so on the first level it must be pretty lol easy.

[Roundpixel]

Just to give an example, on my last mission (on easy), my laser-rifle equipped squad was attacked on 3 sides by mostly pairs of plasma-equipped Mutons (a total of maybe 10 aliens), my SHIV was killed and every soldier was wounded more or less seriously by the end of the battle, Almost every kill I made required two hits. I don't have much trouble keeping my soldiers alive, but keeping them healthy is another story.

[Wulf]

For you to be attacked on 3 sides at once shows that you've made some very serious tactical errors. The fact that you survived it at all shows that Easy is Easy.

Feel free to fall back to a more defensible area next time.

[A-Z]

I play on normal nd my guys tend to miss 70% of shots. Even when they have chance to hit about 70-80 percent, I find it ridiculous when five people can not hit muton at point blank range and getting killed one by one. I find RNG wy worst and most cruel enemy in this game. Other aspects are easy

[Geckonator]

YES! I was forced to turn the difficulty down from normal after my first mission with Mutons, and I still have trouble with the pink faced apes. And I've already had South Africa and China pull out of the project because there's no way to decrease panic quickly. However, I'm still new to X-COM in general (never played any of the originals) so I may disagree in a few months time.

[XLjedi]

Not trying to flex epeen here...

I started out on Classic and was doing pretty well in the battles but getting irritated with the low funding and inability to effectively counter the terror levels. So I restarted and dialed it back to Normal and now it feels like I'm commanding deities at the tactical level!

So now playing Normal, I'm researching lasers and I've only had one, ONE? casualty so far??? (damn Israeli Assault trooper! ...just kickin doors open like he's bursting into a room full of Palestinians)

Threat levels are more manageable at Normal, I've only lost one country so far... (Hey, screw you India! ...and you're alien lovin population!)

I guess if I were to recommend they tweak the difficulty (but I'm not, it's s'posed to play this way) then maybe I'd say give me the Classic tactical with Normal strategic gameplay.

[Taikei no Yuurei]

One thing I noticed during my second playthrough is that the difficulty of missions seems to be directly linked to how far you are in the storyline. If the game is getting crazy hard, try and avoid researching things that have priority next to them, they'll only make it worse. That said, I have to agree with the others that if you were getting attacked on three sides, you messed up somewhere in the first place, which may admittedly be why you're playing on easy. Remember, you aren't pressed for time in 90% of missions, so just move slow and don't rush in like you have melee units or something.

[General Plastro]

Origineel geplaatst door system1016:

One thing I noticed during my second playthrough is that the difficulty of missions seems to be directly linked to how far you are in the storyline. If the game is getting crazy hard, try and avoid researching things that have priority next to them, they'll only make it worse. That said, I have to agree with the others that if you were getting attacked on three sides, you messed up somewhere in the first place, which may admittedly be why you're playing on easy. Remember, you aren't pressed for time in 90% of missions, so just move slow and don't rush in like you have melee units or something.

^This, unlike the original, which was based on time passed, this one seems to "up the dificulty tier" as you research priority stuff, so if things are too hard, maybe you should slow down and research other stuff.

[Taikei no Yuurei]

Yeah, I found the normal difficulty quite hard with respect to keeping countries in line thanks to the fact that I was Europe and had a crazy research branch and was always getting priority research. I finally realized what was happening about 3/4th of the way through the game. Beat it in right around 200 days, not sure if that is particularly fast or not. I'd have gotten it alot sooner, but I didn't have the elerium to build the stuff I needed near the end to win and had to wait for a downed craft.

[Xiane]

Yeah I started on normal, I didn't lose a country til the Alien base assault. Hell I think my memorial wall has three names on it. I can't even picture easy mode, I could probably kill cyberdisks witha team full of pistol gunslingers.

[nrs9000]

Origineel geplaatst door Team Rocket:

Origineel geplaatst door system1016:

One thing I noticed during my second playthrough is that the difficulty of missions seems to be directly linked to how far you are in the storyline. If the game is getting crazy hard, try and avoid researching things that have priority next to them, they'll only make it worse. That said, I have to agree with the others that if you were getting attacked on three sides, you messed up somewhere in the first place, which may admittedly be why you're playing on easy. Remember, you aren't pressed for time in 90% of missions, so just move slow and don't rush in like you have melee units or something.

^This, unlike the original, which was based on time passed, this one seems to "up the dificulty tier" as you research priority stuff, so if things are too hard, maybe you should slow down and research other stuff.

Not the case at all for me. I just recently researched the Arc thrower and have not built the alien containment yet and am in month September playing classic difficulty. I have been facing progressively harder enemy types and larger ships so it has in fact been upping the difficulty based on time passed and not research/story missions. I thought those Muton Elites were bad until a encountered a landed supply ship that had 2 Sectopods on it......

[Taikei no Yuurei]

I'm thinking it has multiple factors for upping the difficulty. The storyline seems to be the fastest advancer, but I think time and # of research projects also factor in as well.

[Segovax]

Origineel geplaatst door Wulf:

For you to be attacked on 3 sides at once shows that you've made some very serious tactical errors. The fact that you survived it at all shows that Easy is Easy.

Feel free to fall back to a more defensible area next time.

Some maps start you at the bottom of a gulley with cyberdiscs and nade tossing mutons coming from each side while thin men puke poison bombs at you from the front as you try to advance, and the two fallen logs that you started with for cover got set on fire and charred to nothing in round one. That's not a tactical error so much as getting stuck in a crap position from the start.

Any game becomes easy once you hit the peak of the bell curve. Any game. If you want to argue the original Xcom didn't get easy at some point then you weren't farming base invasions and generating infinite cash. My favorite F-YOU pc game is the original Icewind Dales with everything set to tabletop rules. You will get wiped out by goblins in the first 5 minutes of the game if you don't do everything just right and get lucky with dice rolls. Later in the game you're hosing everything down with fireballs and reloading your last quicksave anyway because you blew all your spells and got stuck with a random encounter full of lizard men and salamanders.

[XLjedi]

Origineel geplaatst door HerrComrade:

You will get wiped out by goblins in the first 5 minutes of the game if you don't do everything just right and get lucky with dice rolls. Later in the game you're hosing everything down with fireballs and reloading your last quicksave anyway because you blew all your spells and got stuck with a random encounter full of lizard men and salamanders.

/popcorn

Cool... munch, munch...

[Altonu]

From my observations, the locations for abduction missions (and possibly other missions too) is randomized, so if you had really bad luck, you could get in a bad spot on panic even on easy settings. My first game I played on normal and that happened to me with abductions/panic (started loosing countries the begingin of month 3 before I even had enough engineers to built an uplink), and because I didn't know the importance of engineers and satelites (I knew they were useful and important, but did not understand that they were a "build these or fail" thing even on normal - and from the sounds of it, on easy too if lyour luck is bad).

What I'd like is an classic or impossible combat mission setting with easier panic escalation settings so I don't feel forced into one research/build path.