PsyCoil said:
Yeap, already played Bastion and Limbo when they were out. Great games.
I couldn't enjoy Trine 2 and FTL.
Just out of curiosity, you're playing XCOM on your linux distribution?
What do you mean you couldn't enjoy Trine and FTL? You didn't like the concept, controls or gameplay style?
And no, sadly. I hear it may run OK with Wine but I'm running it natively on a DRM'ed overweight system used only for games. Aka Windows.
PsyCoil said:
So far (on two playthroughs; normal and classic difficulty) I haven't been able to keep all countries, the simultaneous alien abductions in several countries/continents just raise panic too fast. Therefore I try to cover the big spenders first with satellites, as soon as you have satellites over all (remaining) countries, you'll not lose another one.
Regarding the square grid: for XCOM I'm fine with it, but I would have loved hex-fields for Wasteland 2.
I've been spreading satellites over different continents and balancing out the abduction missions. For example, rescue mission in Canada and satellite for Brazil. After infiltrating the alien base (which happened to be in Colombia) panic levels went down worldwide. My problem now is I don't have enough money. I've been selling spare corpses and damaged tech but I don't think that's such a good idea.
For such a large scale defense operation we're really on a tight budget it seems. Also, in a real world scenario I would imagine we would have massive amounts of recruits and it would be ideal to dispatch multiple teams in various locations simultaneously. A group of 6 cannot take care of the entire world.
About the grid, it simply is useful to approximate direction and proximity. I don't think it makes such a big difference whether it is hexagonal or square. Hex grids look awesome, but functionally they don't have to be inherently superior to squares. Squares only have 4 directly adjacent tiles, but you can include the corners for a total of 8, which means even more directions than an hexagonal grid.
It is said an advantage of the hex grid is that all tiles are equally distant from each other (center to center), where as squares have corners and the distance varies. I don't think this even matters for most of these games, since the unit for movement and distance is tiles. In Wasteland 2 they said a diagonal move would cost 1.5 AP, which is still cheaper than 2 AP for going around the corner. In a scenario like:
Code:
1 2 3
1 [ ] [ ] [ ]
2 [X] [O] [ ]
3 [ ] [ ] [ ]
where you are the X and the enemy is the O. You can move to (1,2) directly and spend 1.5 AP. Or you could move to (1,1) and spend 1 AP. Regardless of your choice, you will be one square away from O. Perhaps there will be a critical damage multiplier for being directly behind O in (1,2), but if so there may be a way to expand your flanking area to include (1,1) and (1,3).
