this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Strategy Games
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To your point, it seems the idea is fewer deployed troops to make the game decisions for consequential. From the way you describe it, the change was to prevent sending waves of rookies so that immersion and role playing a team had more weight. Guess the devs aren't a fan of Zap Brannigan tactics.
I think Firaxis also had a goal to streamline the missions. Outside of the major campaign set pieces, you can finish a typical mission relatively quickly.
The original XCOM missions could be time consuming. Even getting your 12 soldiers out of the dropship could take a while (that's probably why you start outside the dropship in the remakes).
Yeah. The OpenXCom makes troop movement incredibly fast, by colouring every square you can move to with whether you'll still be able to do an aimed shot / snap shot / auto shot. It makes most missions quick, a mystery why it wasn't implemented that way in the first place. Very similar in effect to XCOM's move-and-shoot or dash highlighting.
I think @ChicoSuave@lemmy.world has a very good point - the Firaxis changes do make the decisions a lot more consequential. In UFO, you'd still want to have your highly-ranked, psionic and sniper troops out on missions - just those guys get decent armour and they stay at the back, since they're too valuable to take point. Certainly too valuable to go prowling the corridors with a cattle prod in hand, and that's essential for overall victory. I do very much like the Firaxis games in general - I finished XCOM1 on classic+ironman - but the decisions are borderline 'too consequential'. It's difficult to get a decent stock of high-ranking troops, so losing any of them hurts a lot. And PP just goes much too far.
Even a 'good' mission in UFO can have as many troop casualties as an entire XCOM campaign. Good tactics help, but it's a brutal war against a terrible foe.