I'm Amazed!

[The Veteran]

I have an all cyborg team but haven't trained any of them yet. My current plans are to get them all to level 3 Leaders because it takes them from 1500-3000 points at level 12 (or similar) The reason I started replacing the humans early on was because they just died too easily so I like the increased hitpoints.

 

As for the cultists, I did take their Egypt base in the end and it worked out well. Gave them 4 bases but only 2 that were originally mine. I lost Stockholm and New York but seeing as neither were even tracked I ddin't lose a thing and I was able to recapture them both immediately. I left the otehr 2 for now which are west coast US and east coast Asia, connected by a shipping route. In a way it's good as I now have full access to my alien tech sites (and am actually finally in positive income now!) but it also sucks that I'm going to miss out on so much good territory because of these swines...

 

Anyway it's only a little over a day till the Wargots arrive, I already beat the first mission last night as I fast-forwarded to see what happened when the ship arrived The Cyborgs tore them to pieces so I'll be fine for now. Their weapons are interesting but very easy to avoid so we'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'm going to reload now with about 26 hours to go and there are about 7 new territories all waiting to be captured so I'll do that too. Will take out another cultist base today too but not sure which.

 

I'm really baffled by why there's no much uncontrollable space on this map right now, anyone else get that? The whole northern region of Russia which is full of ports and industry is apparently lost to us and so are massive swathes of africa and South America. If I were the cultists I'd start cultivating Biomass in the Amazon or something... Game over Laputians :s

 

Also getting really P'd off with these 'capture' missions... I've captured one of every single type of enemy in the game already, why do I need more??? It's hard to deal non-fatal damage now that the team is so good as well. I only just realised that the Reticulan Blaster was a stun weapon but I don't have it researched yet so can't use it myself. The Reticulans themselves are super hard to stun as they're such weaklings in this game. Guess these guys are nothing without their armour huh

[ERISS]

I have an all cyborg team The reason I started replacing the humans early on was because they just died too easily so I like the increased hitpoints.

But later Humans have the better armours.

I have 12 soldiers: 6 Humans, 3 Cyborgs, 3 Psionics.

 

The whole northern region of Russia which is full of ports and industry is apparently lost to us and so are massive swathes of africa and South America. If I were the cultists I'd start cultivating Biomass in the Amazon or something... Game over Laputians :s

All thougher regions such as big deserts and Siberia are left. Biomass was in Aftermath, it has almost all died IIRC, and after its psychic blast only mutants, feeble reticulians and humans survived (even humans went cyborgs and psionics).

 

Also getting really P'd off with these 'capture' missions... It's hard to deal non-fatal damage

Fire shot by shot with bullets, and/or use lasers.

[The Veteran]

Fire shot by shot with bullets, and/or use lasers.

 

I'm starting to get the feeling you think I'm new to this type of game Believe me when I tell you I'm perfectly able to figure out all these quirky features, I never said I was having trouble with the capture missions, just getting sick of them as they take such a lot of luck. Even firing one shot at a time they can often bleed out before I get a medkit on them or just outright die from the attack. Had a fun cultist base mission when I had to capture their preacher who just so happened to fall unconscious from the raised walkway, into a group of psionics and scuttlebugs

[NKF]

Speaking of Reticulans, was it this game or Aftermath that you had a mission where you could recruit two of them?

 

But later Humans have the better armours.

 

The protective gear used by the humans are certainly much more versatile than the Androids, and they get some interesting gear like the anti-psi helmet and other little gadgets they can plug in.

 

With the androids, what parts you install are a life-long choice (like JC Denton's mods in Deus Ex). But in the end both races kind of even out in terms of how much damage they can take. At least, that's what I found.

 

- NKF

[silencer_pl]

Remember that humans can have 3 different specializations, while cyborgs and psis' can have only 2 + their innate. While their innate is good, overall the 3rd specialization will be far more usefull.

 

The best Assault Rifle is XM8 hands down. Though it dosen't have the stopping power of AK, geared with Gyrostabilzier, accelerator you can burst hit anything from miles. Same goes for M60E machinegun, add AP rounds and Wargots will go flying sky high. For sniper rifles I always tend to go for Barett .50cal those headshots are realllly painfull.

 

Scanners are useless in this game so froget about scout specializtion. Stalker and Commando are good (so they say) but I didn't like to go up and personal.

 

My 6 team is always looking the same. 2 leaders, 2 medics, 2snipers. With leaders I tend to one go for heavy stuff.

LAW in your face - eat it while it is hot.

 

Laser weapons are still meh in my opinion, but when you get plasma baby it will be same delicious thing as Adv.Plasma Rifle in AM.

 

Sonic Rifle what you see some Cyborgs carry is also meh.

[The Veteran]

My teams all about level 20 now but the only training I've done so far is to give them Cyborg level 2 for the better implants. Everyone has Infra-Red eye implants which has been useful on a few occassions but I've not had a proper night mission since installing them so meh! I gave them dexterity arms to help with rifles and strength legs to improve HPs. Research is now finishing on the advanced stuff so they'll all get upgrades soon, however that works...

 

As for weapons, I've been with the XM8 since the shotgun boycott but I've just oput together a batch of 7 M60Es to replace them. Everything is better but accuracy and to be honest when you're putting 700 rounds a minute into the vicinity of a target you know it's going to die soon enough Trouble with this is that I need to train the borgs to use heavy weapons and that'll fill the only remaining slot for some of them as they had useless 2nd skills when I hired them. My ultimate team would be level 3 in Cyborg, Leader and Gunman, but I'm only going to be able to do that with maybe 3 of them due to previous specialities... So I need to decide between giving them better guns or more HPs. Think I'm going to go with the weapon upgrade as I don't like my team to have different guns

 

Anyway, when I stopped playing last night I'd captured the cultist codes and researched all the spaceship stuff (how do I start building it? Is it time triggered or what?) I've conquered every province in the game except 4 in North China where I'm letting the Cult party for now. I have secret service in one of my adjoining territories and am using a worthless resource province as a buffer on the other front with them so they aren't a problem.

 

Only trouble now is that I want to speed along research but I'm being subject to base attacks every few minutes. Makes everything take a very long time! Found an exploit which has saved me a little time though. In my game at least, the attacks on main bases never actually occur, the mission just sits there for days. Also (the real exploit) when a province with a track on is attacked, I never lose it if I don't attend. It tells me I have but all that happens is the track turns red. So I rebuild the track and keep playing

 

Stupid wargots...

[Sunflash]

"Shotgun boycott"

 

Okay, that's it. I"ma hafta fire it up this afternoon and see if I can't find my old save with Beuki; just to show you what a shotgun can REALLY do...

[ERISS]

My teams all about level 20 now but the only training I've done so far is to give them Cyborg level 2

You could have more fun using other trainings too. But what is very good in this game is the many differents styles we can play (I mean playing with how many trainings or soldiers we want).

 

researched all the spaceship stuff (how do I start building it? Is it time triggered or what?)

IIRC, you must build special factories, and maybe you need other research to build them.

 

I have secret service in one of my adjoining territories and am using a worthless resource province as a buffer on the other front with them so they aren't a problem.

Secret Services are not enough if alone. You must have Knowledge buildings with, or build more SS. I think they are only usefull in the frontline bases (near Cultist regions).

[The Veteran]

It is a frontline base, that's why I built them Each one improves defence knowledge (but not building knowledge) by +6 so I have a value of 12 in that base and it's directly adjacent their only holding. I also found the space factory thingy when I booted up this morning and have now built my ship and landed at the Wargot thing.

 

My guys aren't quite as high a level as I thought, just getting the last ones up to 19 now I think, but they're awesome. All of them have Cyborg Level 3 with maxed out implants and chips so they're virtually unstoppable now. I had one of those Wargot frag grenades land right in the middle of three of them post-upgrade and it took off a total of 37 HP

 

Going to blow the first strand in this alien thing now, then the other two I guess!

[The Veteran]

I've just lost the 'token' territory to the Starghosts and it just so happens to form a major link in my global supply line. I've read somewhere that it's now impossible to regain but I also know there are pillar of death missions later. Will there ever be a chance for me to reclaim my lost territory? I can live without it for some time but it really does play a key role in my supply line. I'm going to try and reload to see if they'll take a different base next time but who knows. It just so happens that they took the territory with the cultists main temple in (which I kicked them out of ages ago) If that's scripted then a reload won't fix it but we'll see... Waiting for the rets to show up any second now too. Hopefully not too many more aliens are going to come calling before the end of this game...

[The Veteran]

WARNING - THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS!

 

WARNING - THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS!

 

WARNING - THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS!

 

It's over! I just spent 5 days of my life playing this game and I really want them back... I've never been so bored in all my life. How on earth have Altar managed to stretch out such a simple concept into this long and repetitive game? More to the point, WHY!? And please tell me who was smoking what when they wrote this plot... I already knew how the story played out but seriously it's just awful! Strip away the actual game progression and just take a moment to think about it...

 

Stupid right?

 

Honestly, there are a lot of things I commented on in my previous posts that I've changed my mind about but one thing that still ruins the game in my opinion is the un-ending monotony of repeating the same boring missions over and over again for no real logical reason! It's made even worse by the fact that the loading time for a mission is usually several times longer than the duration of it (especially on alien resource sites!) Up until the Wargot ship is destroyed there is at least some variety I guess, you'll be fighting three different enemies all trying to screw you over instead of one. Once their ship is destroyed though, and the cultists backed into a corner, it's just these freaky starghost things. Most inconsistent race in the series!

 

Really, did you read some of the stuff that was said about them? How they can psionically project or teleport these creatures from their vessel in high orbit? An orbit so high that our spacecraft can't reach it, even though it can reach the moon... And then later it's said that their 'pets' are in fact living creatures... Well how did they get to earth then? DO they have the ability to teleport or not? Come on science woman tell us! And besides they aren't living creatures are they? Or at least if they are, the job of designing them must have been given to a robot who'd never seen a living creature before... And how is it they 'don't leave any corpses' yet we can still knock them out and take them home with us anyway? The one that really got me was when the science officer told us the StarGhosts themselves are 'most likely bipedal and very much like humans'. Wait a minute what? Why would she possibly theorise that??? None of the creatures they use are even remotely human, only one of them even walks and it's a 4 legged spider thing! I can't think of a single possible reason why she would think they were bipedal let alone humanoid. You never see them, hear them, get a vague impression of who or what they are. Right love, course they are...

 

It gets even worse later when this woman tells you that there are starbase-sized aliens out there trying to get it on with the moon because the biomass whistled at them seductively and we STILL BELIEVE HER! I'd have called it Laputa-fever after the StarGhost episode and blown her out of the nearest airlock personally...

 

Ridiculous game... The story is just plain bad, clearly milking the success of the first. The tech trees are seriously over complicated with way too many specialisations and branch requires a whole myriad of buildings to make any kind of progress with anyway. Base building is virging on sim-like with a worldwide network of bases replacing Aftermath's excellently implemented and very simple base function selection. Tracks, well where do we start... They're well implemented but pointless. The cultists don't need tracks and they can apparently 'conquer new territories without resorting to violence'. Coupled with their 'infinite source of reinforcements' I'd much rather play this game as these guys! Mines and resources did turn out to be fairly well implemented (if you ignore the fact that I hated bases and tracks) but the alien resource shouldn't be necessary for making trains run on time. Especially if they make it so rare! Difficulty at the very beginning is too high with unarmoured, untrained soldiers going up against all sorts of nasty buggers. That said, the difficulty disappears completely with some new armour and decent weapons. Add training and cyborgs and suddenly the whole game is a cakewalk, way too easy even on the harder difficulties. The tactical segment seems unchanged from Aftermath which is a good thing, there is the unavoidable fact that these missions happen way too often though, especially compared to the speed at which research and manufacture can be accomplished.

 

This is dubbed a strategy game but both the Geosphere and tactical elements are completely strategy free. The player is forced to spent literally hours micromanaging tracks, bases, research, manufacturing and soldiers, yet every few hours another mission pops up to interrupt the kind of flow which is needed when juggling so many things. There is no tactical element in the worldmap at all with the player being literally forced to play every single mission that pops up (especially later in the game) Gone is the global defence force of Aftermath in preference of 35 troopers and only one way to deliver them to a mission... The repetition of these missions is only exaggerated by the frequency at which they occur and this makes the game inordinately long to play through in comparison to similar titles. If there was more content then that would be a good thing but alas, tis not the case here! The Tactical segment is similarly skill-free once the player obtains a decent squad with above average weapons. There is little to no noticeable increase in difficulty as new races are introduced and what there is can be quickly eliminated with the right squad adjustment. With missions containing between 3 and 14 enemies (usually between 3 and 9!) they're over very quickly and pose no challenge at all to anyone who's ever played a real strategy game.

 

Basically after playing through the rollercoaster of a storyline that is Aftershock I think I can sum the experience up pretty well... In Aftermath there was a point at which the player could choose to join with the Reticulans, leave the world to die, and watch their Biomass experiment reach it's successful conclusion. This is the path that has been taken in the run-up to Aftershock and it is also considered to be losing the game in Aftermath... After five days of playing this game just to end up playing a near identical final mission to that of the previous title it's fairly obvious why only losers would accept the Reticulan offer.

 

So please, if you're playing Aftermath right now, ignore their offer, whoop their space butts and wipe out that Biomass ASAP! The good-guy reticulans will arrive in 50 years and want to be your friends, you'll never meet StarGhosts or Wargots (not hostile ones anyway) and the Cultists will never have a reason to exist! Plus no freaky cyborgs or psionics making the planet look untidy! Sure there'll still be these Myrmecol things terrorising the universe but they'll be doing it somewhere else!

 

Anyhow, it's time for this title to hit the recycle bin. Thankyou and goodnight!

[ERISS]

It's over! I just spent 5 days of my life playing this game

5 days? Lol, it takes me more than 5 months. Sure! I can't imagine how much the game could be boring if you play it alone straight to the end..

[silencer_pl]

Obviously you weren't playing this game 25/7 (yes 25h)

[Sgt. Strike]

Or 60/16 like my schedule.

[The Veteran]

I carried on with my normal day to day stuff but obviously not working makes it easier Either way, not many games take me 5 days to complete! I just wish there had been 5 days of content

[ERISS]

, not many games take me 5 days to complete! I just wish there had been 5 days of content

All games can be finished under 5 days, most even 2 hours.

It's up to the game style of players. I understand that you don't like that AS can be played wirthout style, and that you want a game where style is necessary, where rushing the game is not easy. I can understand you and I somewhat agree.

But I'm sort of player who like making some challenge by playing with a style, and Aftershock can be easily played with any style we want. That's the beauty of the game for me.

[The Veteran]

5 days? Lol, it takes me more than 5 months.

 

All games can be finished under 5 days, most even 2 hours.

 

Umm... What now? Make your mind up mate. Besides, you and I and everyone else in the world knows Aftershock can't possibly be completed in 2 hours. In fact I have a stack of 40 odd games next to me that I'm yet to complete and frankly if it was possible to complete any of them in less than 2 hours they'd already be on the legendary completed pile...

 

I recently finished Dungeon Siege after 40 hours of playtime and that left me just as bored as AS, probably more so as the only thing to do is point, click, heal. At least Aftershock had some depth, even if it wasn't enough to keep it interesting from start to finish. The shortest game I played recently took me 6 hours and I think you'll find between 6-8 hours is a pretty widely accepted length for a 'short' game. This is the kind of playtime you can expect to get from a title which is aimed primarily at online gamers, the singleplayer campaigns don't need to be as full of content to keep players interested in such a situation.

 

So I don't know where you're shopping for games but if you can find me a retail title with a campaign that lasts less than 2 hours I'll give you a cookie...

[NKF]

With games like Dungeon Siege and Diablo and what have you, it's not so much the main story that grips you, rather it's the collector's mania of going beyond it (game+, missions after the main story, the multiplayer section, etc) and gathering better stuff and just being able to best stronger and stronger enemies. So while games like this seem simple and can be completed quite quickly, game time is artificially lengthened. I guess if you go to such lengths, you must enjoy the game, or you're just obsessed.

 

With Aftershock, I was playing on a way under-spec computer. Took several minutes just to load the missions (and less than that to complete). So I tried playing it as diversely as I could as I didn't want to slog through it another time. Tried various ways to approach the battles. From the stabbity stab stealthy samurai chap, the thrown projectile weapon master, the psi sniper, the pistol guy, etc, etc. They never really seemed to last very long and some of the professions were a bit pathetic by the time the Wargots showed up. I had high hopes for the shurikens. Or perhaps I set the bar way too high as I was throwing them at the mechs.

 

The game had potential to be more than it was.

 

- NKF

[The Veteran]

Personally I think it would have been a better game if they'd made it a little less than it was. As you say, it had great potential but they dragged it out way too much. If you want to make a game with a long-arse story you need to ensure that story is actually fun and content rich. The same 3 aliens over the same 5 maps 4 times a game day is NOT fun.

 

As for Dungeon siege I essentially pigeonholed my characters by making them archers first and warriors second. It took a very long time for me to realise that their strength wasn't going up at all, probably only spotted it when noone could equip the new armour I got from the dead monsters. With Dungeon siege though there were only a handful of side-missions (all of which you had to complete to have a decent levelled team) and the story ended with the final boss. Again, my team choice rather tripped me up but it was fine for most of the game, they only struggled when they were unable to skirmish with their foes (the undead general and end boss walked all over them!)

[Sgt. Strike]

The game is a tad tedious, and repetitious, in that the various "missions" end up being about 90% the same. The only difference with some of them is the fact that you have to complete them in order to get the territory, to gain the resources there. It was kinda like that in Aftermath, but not quite as bad. Anyway, I think with a ton of rework, and some better scriptwriting, it could be a better game. I have more, which I will add later.

[drake88]

I guess I have been living in a cave; but when I heard just a week ago that Firaxis is coming out with a new XCOM, it totally got me jazzed. Which led me to the Aftershock forum and then to this post.

 

While Aftershock had/has its issues, when you couple it with a mod it can be so much fun. The Weapon Rebalance Mod and the Heroic Assualt mod make this game so much fun. I love attacking the cultists and you get attacked by 35+ guys and it is a struggle not to get anyone killed. I modded the crap out of this game and created 50 cal assualt rifles, automatic shotguns that shoot grenades, tons of different armors... it made the game a blast. Love Aftershock.

 

The original X-Com was my favorite and Aftershock is a close second just because you can do so much with the mods.

[Space Voyager]

Welcome back from the cave, drake88! We're all still in shock - a good kind that is.