Maps are to small

IMHO the maps are to small, this was mentioned in comments about BB5. With the number of opposing units and movement rate of those units the maps are way to small. Starting almost each encounter usually surrounded and in the open at the mid stages of the game when your opponents are OP armored it’s simply ridiculous as the starting rifle won’t even damage them. All of this is on Rookie setting BTW.

I’m really disappointed with the current state of PP. I’m not new to the genre. Perhaps it was wrong to expect the combat to be similar to JA, the original Xcom series, etc. I won’t rehash all the comments over the past week.

By mid-stages of the game you should easily have access to things like the grenade launcher and such which can help shred off protection from the more heavily armoured targets… in fact the grenade launcher alone makes armoured targets a bit of a joke given it’s very long range of fire.

I don’t think you can really expect the game to scale everything to what you limit yourself to bring to a fight when other tools are made openly available pretty early on.

I think you miss the point, I don’t see any fun in send 6 -8 heavies with grenade launchers to challenge the opposition. Also given the previously mentioned issues with grenade launchers, weakness of scarabs and 2 -3 Sirens (as any unit in the open is mid controlled) makes your comment a bit off base. No rudeness intended.

+1 I totally agree, small maps serve a purpose of creating intense firefights, but there needs to be some larger maps too where there’s a bit more suspense around the location of enemies and where the player has the opportunity to explore before everything kicks off.

JA1&2 don’t have similar combats than original X-Com. I’m playing JA1, there’s even key differences with JA2 but it’s in same vein, not X-Com 1.

This idea that it was perfect in past is ignoring a lot of elements of reality.

Replay JA2, each soldier is more like an aircraft to control with a complex board command. But it’s to do for a team at each turn. JA1 has a more fluid gameplay but is using a ton of design that just couldn’t work anymore. For original X-com they are no match with JA2 not even JA1 for combats.

Maps in these games become small when they are filled with unusable props and buildings. When the props and building become part of your tactics the map isn’t so small anymore.

There was many a time I thought a map to small in Xcom 1 or 2 but I have yet to think this in PP.

XCOM2 maps are big with only few exception, I suspect you played only the first and ignored the 2 because of the anti hype, ignore it, the 2 is quite better. Ok it’s pure guess but then I don’t understand how you can say that for XCOM2.

But you are right, PP maps are awfully complex and then “large” because of the terrain 3D design. One combat tend cover a larger scale than one combat in XCOM2, but XCOM2 and XCOM1 large maps use the large scale to multiply combats in a same map/mission and not use respawn/reinforcement. At end I’m fine with PP design approach lowering the progression aspect.

Large maps in turn based tactical combat is a special design problem, there’s the XCOM way, and there’s the JA1&2 way, i don’t remind for original XCOM. All have positive and negative, moreover it’s closely linked to AI design and alert design. In my opinion XCOM2 Long War is showing a limit, with smarter AI and alert mechanism, it push to limit solutions to silent enough combats or hurry kill.

The turn based party progression is quite a problem and no way a real time party progression used by JA2 and extended by the user mod is a perfectly good solution. If you can move a party in enemy area without care of positions there’s a difficulty design problem.

One of the first things that set the Xcom-1 forums alight was ‘the maps are to small.’ Not so much with Xcom-2

For me no way XCOM1 maps was “too” small, party progression in XCOM1&2 is no way that fun, both had too big maps with a boredom progression. JA1 does it much better but at price of low fairness which is (alas) a part of its fun. JA2 cheats with real time party moving that doesn’t match well with turn based tactical combats.