You missed the part where you can apparently call in your evac to a chosen spot? That should make for some nice changes, and certainly opens up the opportunity to have more (and more flexible) missions like the extremely well-done Chryssalid investigation mission from EW.

I think I also like carrying badly wounded troops back, if for no other reason than if your medic takes a hit and was the last person with a medkit charge, you still maybe have a way to get badly injured troops out alive instead of either bugging back to the evac zone or waiting sad-faced as they bleed out.

Obviously I can't know how they'll implement the new stuff but I'm cautiously hopeful about the new stuff - and it's not like they screwed up the first game.

The graphics look extremely well, but I really wonder if this is more of a shooter than a strategy game. Problematic for those who only like strategy without action.

Well... There is no manual aiming, just percentage based to hit chance based on skill and equipment of your troops, so I can safely say that it's not a shooter ;-) It's a great tactics game, with a decent strategic layer on top of it. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is anyway.

Well, XCOM has always been about shooting aliens, so if you want an action-free strategy it is almost certainly not the franchise for you. But "shooting things" as a mechanic for problem resolution is fundamentally little different than taking a piece in chess, which is pretty strategy-centric. Addition of hitpoints, armor, different weapons, flanking...all that does is toss in a dash of tactical consideration. I wonder, why would you call it a shooter? Have you played any other XCOMs, and if so, would you call them shooters as well?

There is a very good reason to carry the bodies back, and that is to recover their gear. If a soldier dies in the field, their gear will be lost. Not sure if killing all aliens will allow you to recover the items, though I guess it will.

In the original game yes, but I'm pretty sure you always get it back in the new XCOM. Unless you have Long War mod installed that is.

Sure, but I've never reloaded a game because of lost gear. I have reloaded from lost troops. The inherent time-value of a unit in a game with experience points is compelling. I can always make another rifle...or, if I'm playing the real original X-Com, rip it from the cooling hands of whatever alien I just turned into a lab specimen. ^_^

I'm talking about XCOM 2. If you leave a dead soldier on the field while you make your escape, the items will be lost. Not sure where exactly I heard Garth say it, it was in one of the interviews during E3. Tell me if you want me to take a second look to see if I can find it again.

Ooooh I see. Linking interview would probably be for the best. Actually, this one or this one?

I think that after researching the appropriate weapon type, you get weapons off dead alien bodies in the new XCOM as well. And don't you always get the guns off captured aliens?

No, if the alien dies, the weapon explodes. They handwave it out, but you get weapon fragments from dead aliens, even if you knew what they were.

And I meant it more as a tactical thing anyway; in the original XCOM, it was perfectly acceptable to load up a soldier with, say, a rocket launcher and four rockets, and no backup weapon, knowing that by the time you fired off four rounds there was going to be *plenty* of weapons to pick up and use on whatever was left. That was in fact a core assumption in my "I'm bored, let's give myself a nonsensically stupid challenge and see if I can still win" play-through a couple years ago XD

Heh, reminds me of playing X-Com Apocalypse. Yes, I really liked that one a lot - especially due to real-time with pause mode which I always preferred to turn-based. Anyway, remember the insanely large maps in Apocalypse, which were all fully destructible, with rudimentary physics backing it up? (as in, when you levelled enough of a building, it came down, or something like that.) Yeah, so I've always kept a small squad with light weapons whose only goal was to place explosives under an area and bring down an entire building (or entire spaceship when in docks, hehe) if it was too infected. City hated me, but it was damn effective at keeping my dudes alive :-P

Could have been Angry Joe's, though I don't recall having watched the 4 players one. Could also have been IGN or Gamespot, since Garth appears to have made the rounds during E3.

I liked to set the (What the hell was their name again, the sect which was friendly to the aliens?) buildings of them in flames and teared them down.....was so much fun...

Using the Big gun either with HE or Inc. Ammunition and going berserk!!!! You just had to collect the goodies first to make it worthwhile ;) Or using one of the alien weapons to go in the cellar and digging through the mud just to destroy the structure above!!!!!

But blowing up other buildings???? IIRC that was a bad idea, as it resulted in lower income....

If XCOM 2 doesn't have Chryssalids, I'm not buying.


In the first game, Chryssalids made me feel like I was fighting a deadly and terrifying enemy that could possibly take over Earth.