Misotu

I like your trailers Hobbes. I strongly favour the Valkyrie approach myself

You are right and this is the only time it has happened so hopefully just a blip. I've saddled up and ridden back in. Classic Ironman from now on

So I decided that I would play ironman, since what I remember most about traditional XCOM games is the tension. And it was going really well on the whole - but then I fired it up this morning, went to load my game and noticed that it was an autosave game This is definitely not right as I saved and exited normally when I finished playing last. With sinking heart I tried to load the game only to be told that it could not be loaded and was perhaps corrupted. Aaarghhh! Tried again a few times and then tried to kick off a new game and the whole thing crashed, so it was really, really messed up. This is sad. For I had become fond of my people with their carefully selected hair cuts and snazzy colour-coded armour and felt a kinship with them. But, on the upside, it gave me an opportunity to ditch the normal setting and go for ironman classic. Which is not going quite so well but I am not dead yet and at least I get plenty of weapon fragments and an adequate supply of corpses. So I was just wondering whether veteran ironman players have a way to combat this? I don't want to cheat ironman and I know having a back-up means that you might as well just play without ironman set and rely on self-discipline. But it's really sad when your only save is corrupted and unplayable So although I know the only way is probably to play ironman and cross my fingers, I thought I would ask. Is there something that can be done to protect a bit against this without ruining ironman? Or do I just have to man up and get back out there?

Yup. I'm totally into all-over colour coding Now I'm playing a Classic game voluntary Iron Man. It's only my second classic game and I need to get used to losing the odd soldier before I do Iron Man for real. But so far, no re-loads. I'm a bit ashamed of this but .... I have, as you know, been able to fix my Elite Soldier Pack problem thanks to the kind assistance of folks here. But I did raise a ticket with Steam at the beginning of January and my ticket is still in progress. A desperately honest person would of course close the ticket. But I am not that person and this is not that day. I want to know if Steam will answer my totally straightforward support request in my lifetime. Because, after all, lots of games developers are looking to use Steam and I really, really want to know what to expect. So here's the latest response: Hello Ann, In order to investigate this issue, we must verify your ownership of the CD Key. Please handwrite your Support Ticket Number 9632-***-6034 directly on the quick reference card or sticker above the CD Key (the number should not be written on a separate piece of paper or inserted with an image editor) and reply with a digital photo or scan of the CD Key in .jpg format. Please ensure that you submit a full-color image, rather than a photocopy. I read this more in sorrow than in anger. And more in disbelief than either. So I reply: Hello Unfortunately I own neither a scanner nor a digital camera! Look, really, I don't see what your problem is. I can assure you that I have the elite soldier pack bundled with the game in the form of a printed flyer. What I am asking you to do is tell me where on Steam I can enter the key number to access this DLC. That procedure will automatically verify that I have a valid key number. I should not have to jump through hoops for this! The Steam installation is faulty - it does not work the way it says it should. I cannot be the only person with this problem and someone in your organisation, I'm sure, has the answer. I don't need you to give me product - I need you to tell me how to use the product key I have paid for. I am not prepared to incur additional trouble and expense for this - why should I?! It seems to me that you are overwhelmed with support requests post-Christmas and you are just throwing out holding replies. I've had the same "try Firaxis" reply twice, and now you are sending me yet another canned response which seems to apply to people saying their key doesn't work. That is not my problem. My key probably does work - I just need somewhere to enter it! This is a really awful level of support. I haven't had a single reply so far that was any use at all. You are just trying anything to "close" tickets or at least send a reply within a given time-frame, regardless of whether what you send is any use or even relevant to the original question. Please could someone give me the correct answer? Thank you. I know its not nice of me to play with Steam but, in all honesty, a month and still no answer? I bothered you guys and got the correct answer same day. So I am going to pursue this to find out exactly how long it's going to take for them to come up with the totally straightforward answer to the ticket I've raised. Because I'm like that :shuffle footed thing: And also because they are like that. And they should be better ...

Hello, thanks very much for the replies. I knew you guys would know what to do My situation is the one described by Thorondor and Bomb Bloke - physical product, physical keycode. I followed the steps suggested by Thorondor and it worked perfectly, first time, in seconds. I can colour my armour and I have a whole set of new head gear. Hoorah! Undying gratitude etc - I would never have worked this out on my own and Steam still haven't been able to give me this solution, which is a bit desperate really. I know the ELP doesn't give you anything really exciting but, like Hobbes, I really, really want the ability to colour my armour. I've been doing the same job with hair colour up to now - but I think my guys will be relieved to ditch the bright pink and green in favour of something quieter and :ahem: less girly. Thanks again, really appreciate the help.

Sorry to trouble you guys with this but I've been trying unsuccessfully to obtain a response that makes sense from Steam for ages now. They are overwhelmed and keep sending me canned responses that only vaguely relate to the issue I have. I really hope someone here has seen something similar and solved it. My son bought me the physical game for Christmas and it included the Elite Soldier Pack. I've installed the game fine and am happily playing with no problems, but when I installed it I wasn't given any opportunity to enter the keycode for the Elite Soldier Pack, although it said on the flyer that this would happen once I had installed the full game. I've hunted around the menus but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to enter this code! I contacted Steam and after 2 weeks they replied to say "the pre-order bonuses are automatically incorporated into your account" and the elite stuff can be accessed when you complete the tutorial. Well, I checked my Steam Library - there's no DLC associated with this game. I've completed the tutorial and there's definitely no ability to change the colour of my armour, which I understand is what you get? I raised this ticket on 1 January and am no nearer a solution - their latest reply is another holding response. So I'd be really happy if someone can offer any suggestions! It's not a big deal, I can still play the game, but I'd like the extra features.

Ah ok. Well that sounds all right actually, better than I thought. I might try it, because the reality is that in this hypothetical situation I'd lose the sniper rather than replaying three hours anyway ...

Wait. How does that work? I thought Ironman meant save only on exit? I didn't think you got to save any other time? Does it actually mean huge numbers of sensible, regular saves but you have to exit to desktop and go back in to load? That sounds like a lot better option than my standard "oh damn I've sent my best sniper to certain death thanks to the cat leaping onto the keyboard at a critical moment, definitely time to reload oh no I haven't saved since the terror mission I did three hours ago" routine. Terrible choice that. Replay three hours or lose your best sniper to a purring predator with a brain the size of a walnut.

Yes, I saw some info on that after I'd posted, so that explains why I didn't get the problem with the roof. I loaded the game again today and had a really close look at it. It's not user error - it genuinely wouldn't let me move around properly but I found through trial and error (and a bit of desperation) that, as you've mentioned, rotating the view fixed the problem. Not exactly ideal but I'm also trying to remember not to mentally screen out the little blue line that traces the path the unit will take. It's a good indicator as to whether it will end up on the right floor Yes, me too. I find it very difficult to see how to move a unit to get line of sight sometimes, especially over distance. Even with careful sizing up, I am a square out way too often. I think someone suggested some kind of line of sight indicator in the suggestions thread. I would quite like this - I'm not sure it adds to the fun if you really can't see whether you'll have line of sight or not when you've expended the first of your precious two moves ... No problem with that - actually, I play very slowly indeed. I'm one of those people who like the tension but can't bear losing soldiers. Well ok, maybe the occasional rookie. But no-one else. Ever. Well, ok. Almost never ever. Probably never going to make Impossible Super-Hard Level Yes, I can see that view and actually I don't have a problem with the way they paradrop in from time to time. But the event I'm talking about is clearly a bug because it doesn't make sense in the terms of reference and feel of the game as I understand it so far. In the sense that you get a big fanfare all the time when they rush in - so suddenly seeing one muton appear from nowhere in order to stand plonk in front of your best gunslinger, doing nothing very threatening and then getting mown down, is a bit daft! I'd say that was a bug. The rest of it ... well, I don't know if I've played enough to know yet whether having groups of aliens drop in the middle of my carefully positioned squad adds to the excitement or makes me want to throw my mouse out of the window. Time will tell ... I know about the aliens ganging up. Going through the spaceships is beginning to feel a bit like endless walking into bottleneck ambushes at the moment, so I'm trying various tactics to see how to sort it out. My latest involved a combination of scouting ahead from a side vantage point combined with nipping in and out down the centre to try to draw them out. Ha ha. Worked a treat for a bit and then suddenly they came at me with a sectopod, 2 drones, 3 particularly sprinty and bad-tempered chryssalids, 2 sectoids and an elite muton sharpshooter all at once. This was the turn after I had taken out a particularly sly and hunky muton backed up by an ethereal. It wasn't looking pretty, but I did land a rocket bang slap in the middle of the worst of them; the badly-damaged chryssalids took to the roof (er, they seemed to teleport through the roof to do it but hey, probably my rubbish eyesight) and then started jumping down on my troops looking ultra menacing in that determined way they have, reaction fire everywhere, balanced on a knife edge and ... ... the game crashed. Ho hum. Now I'll never know exactly *how* bad that particular strategy was

I finally got the game for Christmas and have played (ahem) a few hours now. Love it. But have hit a few problems. The most upsetting is the problem already described with multiple levels where it displays one floor but sends the soldier to the floor below. Just had to quit a mission when my top assault girl ended up on the wrong floor, out of cover and in the middle of three mutons, with pretty disastrous consequences. But then it got weirder when I hurled the entire squad in after her. One of the mutons standing on a ramp between floors could not be seen by the squad unless they ran past him down the ramp and onto the floor below. Total nightmare. They all survived - just - but then I found I couldn't get the movement thing to work properly at all because, like The Veteran, the game kept sending my soldiers to a ground floor tile underneath the first floor tile I had selected.This was an abductor mission too. I didn't have the problem with the roof displaying so I couldn't see my soldiers though - it just sent my soldiers to the ground floor when I selected first floor tiles to move to. Or just did nothing (presumably when there was no tile to move to under the first floor tile I selected). Very frustrating indeed so I had to stop. I'll try it again tomorrow, but it's a very tedious problem and I'm not sure I can get round it for this mission. Also it stops me from playing iron man, which would be my preferred once I've learnt the game. Losing soldiers as a consequence of my own mistakes is bad enough, but losing them because of an interface problem really sucks I've also had a muton soldier appear from nowhere right next to my troops that definitely wasn't there before, as described by The Veteran. No cut scene or group of three just pouf! I also periodically have a mission where a killed enemy continues to show up as a red icon for one of the squad. Not a big deal that one. I'm not very comfortable generally with the way the multi-levels are handled at the moment. I can't quite put my finger on the problem except that the interface feels vague somehow. It's pretty but I seem to spend quite a lot of time fiddling around trying to get the view I want and I often mess up when trying to send my soldier up a ladder and find they've run inside the building instead I'm sure that's user error (unlike the multi-level ufo problem which definitely isn't.)

I just have one quick question and I am sorry if this has been covered somewhere but I can't find it. Is there still the reaction fire tactic in the new X-Com? I loved that part of the game and I'd be really sorry if it was no longer there in some form. I know they have simplified the time unit mechanic and actually it sounds like the change is an improvement the way Jake Solomon describes it. But the specific area of reaction fire doesn't seem to come up anywhere? I have to upgrade my computer to play the new game so haven't looked at the demo, which I suppose would answer my question. If anyone knows the answer or can point me at the information I'd be really grateful. There are so many articles to read and interviews to watch, my head's spinning ...

Heh, yeah well I figured you guys would be kind of interested And me too. Christmas is looking all sorted from over here ...

This ... isn't quite what I expected when I popped back here looking for hardcore reaction to the Firaxis remake, heh. Although I like the ponies. I would like a pink one. Have I missed a huge, animated discussion thread somewhere? Or is the remake not sounding great? I heard some comments regarding time units ("improved" they say. the game doesn't need them apparently, because it's got so much other great stuff. hmm.) so thought I'd nip over here and see what people were thinking ... Edited 10 seconds later to say ... Ah, ok. Yes of course. Sorry, sorry. This is what happens when you bookmark one forum. You completely miss the entire parallel forum totally dedicated to the question you've just asked. Ahem.

I'm not sure why, but when I first started playing X-Com years ago I thought that you couldn't save during missions, only on the world view. So my very first game was played semi-ironman, in the sense that I never played the same mission (or the same turn of the mission) twice. I was quite surprised to find I could save during missions recently - I have no idea how I missed it before - and actually I rather wish I hadn't found that out as it's very tempting to do a quick save "in case". I must admit that a lot of the pleasure for me is in developing my troops' skills - I tend not to use explosives all that much but I really like sniping and reaction fire. So after a truly disastrous mission, I would probably reload rather than start training a whole new batch all over again. On the other hand, on tough missions or terror sites, I'd consider myself lucky to get away with just a few losses (as long as one of them wasn't my favourite sniper, natch). By the end of that very first game I was consistently playing missions with no losses at all - but that was only on beginner level and of course it gets easier as your tech improves. I am trying now to play using rookies as cannon-fodder, but it's a hard adjustment. I think I should probably stop giving them names ...

I want proper restroom facilities. Also, I have a feeling that I come equipped with extremely good accuracy making me the obvious choice for a position well behind enemy lines, sniping the miserable aliens located by our bold, fearless (and often short-lived) scouts. In due course, no doubt, I will become a feted national hero sniper person of no gender. But for now, I humbly lay my talents at your feet. Do with them as you will. But NOT, and I would like to emphasise this, in the Front Line as I have an allergy to Blood and Gore since I was very very small. Ask my mother.