this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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I want to say the devs admitted that they increased the reported chance to hit in the first nu xcom because people refused to take a sixty or seventy percent shot.
End result? No 95 will ever hit.
Made worse in nu xcom because shooting generally ends your turn and leaves you open to retaliation - sixty percent shot implies forty percent chance of death, and death of an experienced trooper is extremely bad. Old xcom, you could duck out of cover, take a shot, and duck back in, so "bad" chances to hit aren't such a problem.
Which leads to my other part of the problem with nu xcom. The original, you could load fourteen dipshits into the skyranger and they could all take their 14% shots; if half of them came back alive, then it's promotions all round. A meat grinder for sure, but the loss of a couple of soldiers isn't a disaster - your fault for sending your most experienced guys first through the door if it is. The new one requires exceedingly cautious play and luck. Nothing like as bad as Phoenix Point, of course, but spoiled it a bit for me.
Tactics is choosing who to send in first. Strategy is being able to recover if that goes wrong. Nu Xcom is all tactics and not enough strategy.
I kind of like the nu XCOM approach though and I get the reason for the change. It's way less accessible when every turn around and step deducts time units and you have to do the math in your head before moving so you don't end up stuck in the open with no time to shoot. (Forgetting the cost of turning a guy or crouching leaving me unable to shoot has cost me a fair number of chumps). There are a lot of skills in WotC and LWotC that still let you move shoot move too.
That said Xenonauts 2 is a good split of the difference for both of them
I go back and forth on it, but the main difference was that nu xcom was made in a way that learned from the mistakes of olde. Like you said, we all just sacrificed hundreds of newbies to the RNG gods until we had enough veterans for the important missions. Same with only ever attacking when we were more or less safe from consequences. It led to a very weird approach where it was increasingly obvious xcom (the org) only cared about the "named units" and screw everyone else. And any relation between that and real world militaries is purely coincidental.
Nu xcom was made with that in mind. There was a focused effort on making each individual soldier "matter". It was less "Oh no, we got lit up like a landing boat on D-Day. Ah well, grab their gear" and more "Shit. That sniper has 1 HP left. I need to protect her so that I have her later". Which... turned basically anything that wasn't a terror mission into a giant mess of overwatch hell. And that is why nu-2 had the god awful turn counts (and 1's DLC added the resource that expires).
And I would very much argue the opposite regarding your tactics/strategy distinction. nu is all about thinking about the long game. Because that Assaulter that just got got? That might mean you are sending rookies in a desperate attempt to not lose a nation. Which means it becomes all about how you play "on the ground" to survive.
I forget what game it was, but I remember a REALLY good interview with a developer for one of the modern squad games who talked about this (I want to say it was on 3 Moves Ahead?). He was completely aware of how so many games in the genre were about fielding five snipers and one sacrificial grunt. And that is what led to various special abilities and so forth to make every single class viable outside of the scripted missions where you are fighting a god damned panzerklein in a single room with no cover.
All that said: Fuck nu xcom for its cover system. It is so fricking annoying to figure out if the angle to an enemy means I want to have west or north cover...