Does anyone else love the early game ?

[Empiro]

Is there anyone else here who absolutely loves the early game stuff and prefers it to the late game stuff? For me, arresting cultists, shooting a bunch of zombies, and occasionally encountering that tough alien with just a handful of agents using mostly conventional firearms is really fun and intriguing. I just find it fresh and exciting to be working as a shadowy organization to uncover what's hidden. Everything also just has an air of believability to it all.

I actually would love to stay behind the scenes, and keep doing clandestine operations all the while X-Com the military organization is fighting an interstellar war against the alien threat.

Later on, you're traversing into the bottom of the ocean, going to Dimension X, dealing with the underground lizard-people, all while fighting off aliens in your advanced hybrid alien craft and wielding a multitude of sci-fi weapons and armor. That's cool and all, yet it's still not as compelling as the early stuff.

[Solarius Scorch]

I actually agree, but keeping the early game feel is difficult from the writing perspective. The idea has always been to proceed from the lowest possible level to interplanetary force, and so at some point there must be a shift.
Making a mod where you don't deal with the aliens or Cydonia at all is a possibility, but I'm not sure I could pull this off, or if I would even actually want to do so. It just wasn't the plan this time.
Still, I do my best to improve the later part of the game to make it more varied and at least somewhat stick to the XCF basics. We will see how well this turns out.

[psavola]

I personally have always liked early and mid-game best. You usually have multiple paths to progress and you need to decide what you focus on with limited resources, and the randomness aspect might also affect your choices. Your soldiers are weak and are still developing, and its nice to train them and see their progress. You can still survive some casualties if you play ironman (like I usually do), but this has a much higher cost in later game.  I think this has been very well done in XCF, in contrast to vanilla UFO or TFTD, where the early-game period is very short. The mid-game part (until some point in late 1999 I suppose) is also in my opinion quite interesting.

Late game with maxed soldiers and equipment is usually more or less grinding most of the same missions over and over again (though as you don't care about points that much at that point, you could usually just shoot down UFOs and not recover them). I quite often get bored with the game at that point, but I doubt that's really easily fixable. My main suggestion here is, however, that this period of the game should not be excessively stretched out or be depedent on RNG. After you've obtained essentially everything, the campaign should be over soon.

[Solarius Scorch]

Late game with maxed soldiers and equipment is usually more or less grinding most of the same missions over and over again (though as you don't care about points that much at that point, you could usually just shoot down UFOs and not recover them). I quite often get bored with the game at that point, but I doubt that's really easily fixable. My main suggestion here is, however, that this period of the game should not be excessively stretched out or be depedent on RNG. After you've obtained essentially everything, the campaign should be over soon.

I also think so. I've been actively going in that direction by fiddling with mission chances and making tighter arcs (like the MiB -> Arbiter chain), but I also hope to make original content to break up the routine.
Alternative endings is also a dream which might happen.

[Alex_D]

I also love the early game. Especially the 40x40 maps where suspects are to be apprehended.

The 60x60 maps for chasing monsters, I'd suggest shrinking them to 40x40 if the number of monsters is to be small (like 2 or so). This is because these monsters don't move much and take forever to just get somewhere. Often bughunt kicks in and this is like 10-15 min IRL time grinding, when I could be doing another mission.

For those fun missions in late game, I'd suggest having more of those special missions where fancy armor and equipment are not possible, like more infiltration missions and the like.

As per grinding, I finished a campaign in Piratez, I went in for six in-game years, until I started earning "bad commendations" for waiting too long!
I was essentially delaying the Cydonia mission and just playing for fun, picking the battles and training the last of my gals. The fully maxed out gals were on a special base and with a special ship. And they were only for those grindy missions where they could finish in like two turns using only melee weapons. This was my way to have fun with the long mods.

Last time I played XCF (long time ago), I sort of stopped as I was waiting forever for some special missions so I could continue with the Cydonia/Moon (?) Arc.

I'm playing again XCF and it's going to be a re-discovering. I also enjoy base optimization and selecting which gun is to be used as mainstream weapon and so.

[Vakrug]

Such a polite way to say that late game needs more improvement...  What a gentlemen!

One major suggestion: prevent the situation where player is out of research topics and have no idea what and where to do next!

[Mrvex]

I actually love it too over the late game, for the following reasons

• Less rocket tag gameplay, once aliens show up with their plasma weapons, combat gets alot shittier for XCOM because for overwhelming majority of the game you cant do shit to protect your dudes from being instantly killed from full HP in like 1 hit (Best you can do is spam smoke and hope for the best) i find game more interesting if both sides can actually take hits from each other instead of dying instantly, if the aliens would also use laser weapons way more it would be better, there seems no escalation time and instantly enemies are walking around with heavy plasma rifles that one shot XCOM soldiers or 2 tap a tank

Like look at this, before you can make an armor that actually works and stops most attacks from killing instantly, then you are looking at the Juggernaut armor, which is THE end game armor. Before that if you are lucky you can get power armor from MAGMA, which is actually more vulnerable to plasma weapons so the actually scary shit like heavy plasma will melt them anyway.

The best you have before that is the Personal Armor, which has massive plasma resistance, better than the heavy Tritanium armor, but is otherwise meh, this is the thing you would be using for most the game when facing aliens.

• Armor and weapon progression in early game is the real shit, actually you feel it when you switch from kevlar vests to armoured vests, from kalasnikovs to black ops rifles

XCOM files might be the only XCOM in the entire franchise where armor is actually satisfying to see in action, when you see bullets bouncing off your dudes as they run through gunfire, you can feel it, but you still are not safe to make the game a complete breeze, given armor is directional, one sneaky enemy could put a bullet through your soldiers backside and armor wont help in that case.
And game has plenty of anti-armor attacks you need to watch for, melee attacks tend to hit as hard as truck when they connect, chemical attacks will corrode its protection value, fire bypasses armor, explosives will go through the under armor which is generally low.

• Economy and financing is actually a problem

Shit is expensive, you get some pocket change from council, but otherwise its scavenging operation and selling loot from enemies and corpses. Money feels more as a threat as it should when a single haul from UFO doesnt give XCOM enough money for the entire month and half. Plus if you look at plasma weapons you get from enemies, those are things you absolutely sell because for 98% of the game you wont be able to use them and they sell for alot of money, i dont know what will the Council nations do with these if not even XCOM can know what to do with it. In the early game, managing budget and actually having to cut corners like a real life organisation would, it simply adds realism to the game that not every base and squad will have top gear all the time, some will have to do with what you have looted.

• Probably the biggest thing - combat against fellow humans that use all features of the game to its full capacity, all gear is usable and tactics are most open to the player

When enemies dont see you through walls
When enemies dont see you on the other side of the map through darkness
When enemies can lose their shit and break ranks faster than aliens
When enemies can surrender so you dont have to hunt down 1 dude hiding in a corner of the map
When enemies use weapons you can use and whatever you kill, you can loot and use it. Dont have a minigun ? nail that EXALT liquidator and just pick it up
When armor is actually relevant and its progression is actually visible
When combat is really open and you have so many options for weapons. There isnt like 1-2 laser rifles in mid to late game, there are like 6-7 different assault rifles, each being slightly better against different enemies or in hands of different soldiers, you have access to both generalist weapons  AND more focused weapons and its up to you which weapons you prefer (I personally prefer generalists like BlackOps weapons)
When the progression is open to you and there are multiple ways to get to Promotion III, paths that will wary between campaigns.


It makes an experience that is simply impossible to get in any other XCOM game to date, the early to mid game is perfection. Late game needs smoother tech progression (less massive leaps of tech, also the RNG roulette of commanders/engineers locking all the actually good stuff is imho more damaging to the late game progression than its helping) smoother enemy weapon progression and maybe some mission redesigns to be less RNG dependant on spawning.