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1

Open Feedback / Re: How much do you rely on graphs screen?

« on: May 06, 2019, 10:28:09 pm »

Oh the glorious rookie deaths : ) The game gets alot easier when you stop being so attached to your men. ( I just sort by bravery and doom the cowards )

If you use the graph zoom hotkeys in OXCE, you can pretty much always see where the ufo is each 30min tick. After the first few ticks you can often get an idea of the ufo's trajectory and head it off. 2 interceptors + region&country data is usually enough to find it in time. I guess patrolling the "hotspot" regions would save me from being glued to the graphs screen.

I like your ideas around strategy effectiveness vs fun. I definitely found the game more fun when I stopped save-scumming; if I play again I'll probably try just sticking to radar. As it is I feel like I reached the end game too quickly anyways. Had to speed through 4 or 5 months of nothing but floaters and snakemen, so I could finally get psi (had a dearth of sectoids) and see the later races.

2

Open Feedback / How much do you rely on graphs screen?

« on: April 28, 2019, 05:53:48 pm »

Hi all. I've just started playing again after recently discovering openxcom, which has been great. After warming up a bit and exploring some of the mods, I've settled on a mostly-vanilla run on the middle difficulty, and am almost to June. I'm also doing Ironman, which I've found way more enjoyable as it adds so much suspense (which is otherwise lost as I tend to become quite abusive with save/load), and I can't get obsessed with doing everything perfectly.

Anyways, ever since I learned the mechanics of the graphs screen, I've been able to use it as a global radar (particularly with oxce graph zoom). It *is* fun doing the detective work of tracking movement this way and trying to blindly intercept, while having to balance the fuel constraints of intercepters.

However it is also tedius: once the graph gets noisy enough, I end up taking screenshots to compare and find changes (well, actually I take pictures with my phone...). Also my eyes end up glued to the clock so I can check graphs every 30 min instead of enjoying the geoscape. In fact my main motivation for building a radar network at this point is to save myself the tedium of using Graphs.

Also, it clearly is a huge advantage over normal radar alone, as I get many more missions/income earlier on, which accelerates my progress (vs. the aliens'). I'm considering disallowing myself from using it if I play through again, though I don't know if I'll want to bump the difficulty a notch easier to compensate.

I am wondering how other people usually play. For example I've seen people talk about how "easy" the vanilla game is, even on max difficulty. I wonder do they use the graphs screen, or is that considered 'cheating' or maybe just 'cheese'? (or maybe it's easy either way)


P.S. sidenote: due to back problems I can't sit at a computer normally, so the whole reason I found openxcom was to try to play xcom with a controller. I've found with proper bindings it actually plays nicely with an Xbox controller. Just wanted to say thanks to the developers for allowing me to play xcom at all! (Android version is also very cool, but I find my phone screen is a little too small to enjoy the interface.)