X-COM, XCOM and their derivatives - Including: Xenonauts, Phoenix Point, and assorted tactical turn-based alien shoot-a-thons

[longtimelurkerfirsttimepo]

I headached about where to get Laser Squad until I realized it was available on Abandonia:
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/632/Laser+Squad.html
You'll still need DOSBox to run it but otherwise it works fine.

The game is certainly primitive and I wish the interface icons had tooltips like UFO Defense does. (Sadly this fucking problem STILL EXISTS with all kinds of modern software. If any of you people reading this are software developers, PLEASE add fucking tooltips to the subhuman alien hieroglyphics you use as menu icons.) Abandonia also doesn't have the manual so I had to track that down separately on Archive.org. I found this much more user-friendly text-based one here:

http://www.lasersquad.org.uk/LaserSquadManual.html

Short review is, you can't rename your troops, and there's only five missions each with like three or four pages of backstory in the manual. Its extremely easy to lose troops to enemy fire, but some of the missions are also stupidly easy to complete. For instance, the first mission, The Assassins, only requires you to kill one enemy within 20 turns who's in like the third room of the building you're assaulting, and he goes down like any other enemy. Choosing to fire your weapon takes you to a different "line of sight" mode that's unintuitive and just a giant interruption of the flow of the battle.

There's some things XCOM inherited such as the Aimed Shot/Snapshot/Autofire system. I'll admit I grinned a little when I got stuck in front of a door and realized that all I had to do was right click behind it to open it up without walking through it, just like UFO Defense. Autofire is hilariously broken though. You can add as many shots as you want past the first three, at the cost of only one Action Point per extra shot! Your accuracy doesn't seem to suffer much beyond the modifier you get for choosing to do an autoshot in the first place, so you can basically mag dump on any enemy you want.

Its an entertaining little game and its free abandonware. I say go play it yourself, you'll probably beat it in an hour or two.

I took a look at the wikipedia page for it, and there is a remake made in javascript that you can play in your browser.
>http://lasersquad.org.uk/

 

[L50LasPak]

I took a look at the wikipedia page for it, and there is a remake made in javascript that you can play in your browser.
>http://lasersquad.org.uk/

I was talking about the 1992 DOS version released after this one. I edited my post accordingly, but this is still neat to know.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I headached about where to get Laser Squad until I realized it was available on Abandonia:
http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/632/Laser+Squad.html
You'll still need DOSBox to run it but otherwise it works fine.

The game is certainly primitive and I wish the interface icons had tooltips like UFO Defense does. (Sadly this fucking problem STILL EXISTS with all kinds of modern software. If any of you people reading this are software developers, PLEASE add fucking tooltips to the subhuman alien hieroglyphics you use as menu icons.) Abandonia also doesn't have the manual so I had to track that down separately on Archive.org. I found this much more user-friendly text-based one here:

http://www.lasersquad.org.uk/LaserSquadManual.html

Edit: I was wrong, that manual is for the old as fuck Commodore one, here's the DOS Manual:

https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Microsoft_DOS/manual/Formated/Laser_Squad.pdf

Short review is, you can't rename your troops, and there's only five missions each with like three or four pages of backstory in the manual. Its extremely easy to lose troops to enemy fire, but some of the missions are also stupidly easy to complete. For instance, the first mission, The Assassins, only requires you to kill one enemy within 20 turns who's in like the third room of the building you're assaulting, and he goes down like any other enemy. Choosing to fire your weapon takes you to a different "line of sight" mode that's unintuitive and just a giant interruption of the flow of the battle.

There's some things XCOM inherited such as the Aimed Shot/Snapshot/Autofire system. I'll admit I grinned a little when I got stuck in front of a door and realized that all I had to do was right click behind it to open it up without walking through it, just like UFO Defense. Autofire is hilariously broken though. You can add as many shots as you want past the first three, at the cost of only one Action Point per extra shot! Your accuracy doesn't seem to suffer much beyond the modifier you get for choosing to do an autoshot in the first place, so you can basically mag dump on any enemy you want.

Its an entertaining little game and its free abandonware. I say go play it yourself, you'll probably beat it in an hour or two.

There was a sequel in 2002, called Laser Squad Nemesis. That one had a really interesting simultaneous turn-based gameplay similar to Frozen Synapse (which came out 9 years later). I remember the interface was still rather obtuse, though. And the business model was ridiculous. You had to pay a subscription to play online. In 2002.

 

[Judge Dredd]

There was a sequel in 2002, called Laser Squad Nemesis. That one had a really interesting simultaneous turn-based gameplay similar to Frozen Synapse (which came out 9 years later). I remember the interface was still rather obtuse, though. And the business model was ridiculous. You had to pay a subscription to play online. In 2002.

I still have a sealed copy of that somewhere. I think there was no single player either.

 

[RadicalCentrist]

Short review is, you can't rename your troops, and there's only five missions each with like three or four pages of backstory in the manual. Its extremely easy to lose troops to enemy fire, but some of the missions are also stupidly easy to complete. For instance, the first mission, The Assassins, only requires you to kill one enemy within 20 turns who's in like the third room of the building you're assaulting, and he goes down like any other enemy. Choosing to fire your weapon takes you to a different "line of sight" mode that's unintuitive and just a giant interruption of the flow of the battle.

Gollop wanted XCOM to be the same kind of game (the same as all his games lmao) but, in what may be one of the few good cases of executive meddling ever, the publisher asked if there could be something in between missions so that there could be more consequences/effects of missions rather than just "win/lose." A relic of this is that, in OG Xcom, the battlescape and geoscape are two different programs that interface with an abomination of a batch script.

 

[L50LasPak]

Gollop wanted XCOM to be the same kind of game (the same as all his games lmao) but, in what may be one of the few good cases of executive meddling ever, the publisher asked if there could be something in between missions so that there could be more consequences/effects of missions rather than just "win/lose." A relic of this is that, in OG Xcom, the battlescape and geoscape are two different programs that interface with an abomination of a batch script.

In this case I think it worked to XCOM's advantage, however difficult it may have been to program at the time. Then again I say that having long since forgotten the loading time of the DOS version.

 

[Allakazam223]

Laser Pistol > Rifle? I remember playing one as a kid, but I didn't get far before getting the fear of ayylmao's ingraned. I think it may have been Apoc though, UFO Defense feels new to me, idk. Interceptor was a ton of fun with an old MS flight yolk and pedals, didnt know other people didnt like it until we got good internet.

 

[Catgirls are Love]

Interceptor was a ton of fun with an old MS flight yolk and pedals, didnt know other people didnt like it until we got good internet.

All I know about Interceptor is from an old LP that's combined with Apocalypse where highlights included things such as discovering that due to how Interceptor was programmed you can do silly things like fire missiles backwards into your own ship.

 

[Deepthoughts]

Anyone ever play the open source version
https://ufoai.org/

Its fun, but the UI is a bit clunky.

 

[L50LasPak]

For that matter do we have any oldfags here who played UFO2000 and stuff before it went the way of the dinosaur with OpenXcom?

 

[OJ Simpson]

I really want to love XCOM2 but it feels squarely like a step back from Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. Even with all the DLC and extra content the game is less. And it really sucks because a lot of the quality of life improvements in XCOM2 are great and the animations are super smooth. I wish there was a way to bring the improved fluidity into nuCOM. The destruction was a lot better in 2 as well.

Are there any mods that make XCOM2 more like its predecessor? I have to admit I was not a fan of the global game in XCOM2 and was really only interested in the tactical combat.

This is basically my conundrum as well. XCOM 2 had all the potential in the world but just falls flat. A nuCOM remaster with 2's usage of the Unreal 3.5 engine/customization is basically all I want at this point. I've tried so damn hard to make it work. Bought WotC, disabled timers to get rid of the retarded design of timers in way too many missions, downloaded Long War 2. And I've never done that in any game ever, I never download mods that fundamentally change what the devs intended the gameplay be like. Don't download mods period for that matter. I don't even download graphic mods in a game like Skyrim because I'm such a stickler for vanilla versions of games. I've tried so hard to get into it and love it but when I do, my mind tends to drift back to how the game stacks up to XCOM, and it just doesn't.

 

[Considered HARMful]

Laser Pistol > Rifle?

Heavy Laser < Laser Rifle > Laser Pistol

Laser Rifle was so good for me that I used it up to the endgame. That said, I was playing a in a very cautious style and tended to burn to the ground any obstacles to line of sight (except for the UFO walls of course) that might impede my firing squad.

 

[Allakazam223]

Heavy Laser < Laser Rifle > Laser Pistol

Laser Rifle was so good for me that I used it up to the endgame. That said, I was playing a in a very cautious style and tended to burn to the ground any obstacles to line of sight (except for the UFO walls of course) that might impede my firing squad.

Should have clarified, Starter rifle or laser pistol better for early game? I got a Floater and Reaper Terror mission before any UFO's popped, so I'm pouring into plasma research already, but only have 25 scientists atm.

 

[L50LasPak]

Should have clarified, Starter rifle or laser pistol better for early game? I got a Floater and Reaper Terror mission before any UFO's popped, so I'm pouring into plasma research already, but only have 25 scientists atm.

The laser pistol does more damage than the Rifle and is "faster" (takes less time units than other weapons) on autofire. Really though, if you're having that much trouble on the battlefield against starting monsters, I reccomend just stocking up on grenades and rushing Laser Rifle research.

Also, back in the days of old XCOM before mods and stuff, you would lose a magazine of ammunition if you so much as fired the weapon once, meaning you would have to buy/manufacture more after almost every single mission. The Laser Pistol not having any kind of ammunition was seen as a pretty sizeable advantage in this circumstance, but OpenXcom now rounds up all of your used magazines to determine if any of them were actually exhausted, so you at worst only lose like two or three on a mission unless you see a lot of combat.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Should have clarified, Starter rifle or laser pistol better for early game? I got a Floater and Reaper Terror mission before any UFO's popped, so I'm pouring into plasma research already, but only have 25 scientists atm.

IIRC, the laser pistol is just better than the starter rifle. It has worse accuracy in general, but you can fire more often and it deals 50% additional damage. So for most close and mid-range fights you just spam autofire. And at long range your noobs wouldn't hit a thing with a rifle anyway. And even if they hit it wouldn't kill it.

@L50LasPak is right, though. Spamming 'nades and rushing to the Laser Rifle is just more reliable overall.

 

[Snekposter]

And you can sell laser rifles for a massive profit, IIRC. Much like Skyrim and its economy based on iron daggers post-Dragonborn, laser rifles should be the de facto Earth currency post-invasion if you're doing it right.

 

[Corn Flakes]

And you can sell laser rifles for a massive profit, IIRC. Much like Skyrim and its economy based on iron daggers post-Dragonborn, laser rifles should be the de facto Earth currency post-invasion if you're doing it right.

I had to look that one up. It's not the Laser Rifles that give you massive profits (although they can be profitable), it's the aircraft-mounted Laser Cannons.

Same deal as before, though. If you haven't flooded the market so hard even preschoolers are mounting Laser Cannons to their paper planes by the time your crew is coming back from Cydonia, you missed out on a ton of money.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

If you've got XCOM2 and it disappoints you in terms of its overarching management, supposedly the Long War of the Chosen mod does spice it up, slow it down, and hearken back to some aspects of the previous titles while retaining the obvious graphical polish that is nu2's niche. It's a bitch to set up if you have other mods, but if you've got a fresh install unworked altogether, it's pretty straightfoward. Better than letting the game rot, right?

I can't personally vouch for it as a result (many mods do not play nice with LWOTC and the Alternative Mod Launcher doesn't always catch them), but a friend of mine suggests that the game is breaking his balls and making him actually feel like he's playing the underdog-who-can-lose.

 

[TerribleIdeas™]

If you've got XCOM2 and it disappoints you in terms of its overarching management, supposedly the Long War of the Chosen mod does spice it up, slow it down, and hearken back to some aspects of the previous titles while retaining the obvious graphical polish that is nu2's niche. It's a bitch to set up if you have other mods, but if you've got a fresh install unworked altogether, it's pretty straightfoward. Better than letting the game rot, right?

I can't personally vouch for it as a result (many mods do not play nice with LWOTC and the Alternative Mod Launcher doesn't always catch them), but a friend of mine suggests that the game is breaking his balls and making him actually feel like he's playing the underdog-who-can-lose.

WotC was alright. I'd have to replay it to see if it was as good as I remember, or not.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

WotC was alright. I'd have to replay it to see if it was as good as I remember, or not.

I wouldn't personally recommend it without the mods, because of how night and day it is with. I couldn't imagine playing with the base classes/campaigns.

I've recently started fucking around with some of the music mods to add in soundtracks from other games. The base game's soundtrack is solid, but there's nothing like the classic Deus Ex score when a fight breaks out coming on after some MGS3 sneaking music while you're in concealment.