Breaking down X-Com… or how to build a great squad based TBS game.

Role-playing survival game is willing to take risks

By  Apr 19th, 2008 4:43 am UTC

Chances are if you were a pc gamer during the early 90s then you must have heard of the game X-Com. It’s regarded as one of the best turn based strategy titles and to this day, no other TBS game has managed to take the throne away. After spending years trying to find a copy, I finally had to grab a “free copy” of the game a few months ago to see if this game holds up.

In many ways X-Coms game play holds up extremely well for a 10+ year old game, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. The interface screens for X-Com are the most archaic things in the game (next to graphics of course). There is no way to re organize squad members in the interceptor, and all those little command buttons, I can barely read them.

Still , there are plenty of examples of game play brilliance when put together, equal an excellent game. I’m still baffled that no one, not even the original creators were able to replicate the experience and tactical game play in X-com. I’m going to try to examine the game and point out the successes in X-Com.

First point is one of my favorite words, randomization which will probably become the bane of any programmers I will work with in the future. Every map in X-com is randomize from enemy placement to all those damn hedge bushes. Meaning that your always going in blind in a sense and have to react to the changes. Exploring an alien base or going on a terror mission are exercises in playing careful and knowing when to charge and when to send someone on a red shirt mission.

Next is the assortment of foes you deal with in X-Com. From those annoying grey aliens all the way to those son of a bitch ethereals, your always given an adequate challenge. All the enemies have one goal in mind, to kill everyone on your squad and will use any means to do it.

Destructibility, something that should be a prerequisite for all TBS games. Why risk going thru the front door when you can just blow a hole in the wall? Having a missed shot hit the gas station causing a huge explosion killing the enemy your aiming for is just a great moment.

Now for X-Com’s‘ game play systems which are beautifully integrated. There are 3 main systems of game play in X-com: 1. Turn based style combat. 2. Base building and economic management. 3. Aerial combat. Each system in X-Com is properly set in the game, and the experience requires all 3 to work properly. Everything feels right in X-com and there doesn’t seem to be any useless systems.

Now the big one growth. Playing X-com there is a huge difference between the beginning, middle and end game compared to other strategy titles. At the start your squad is running around with basic rifles and taking one hit before dieing. In the end game, your squad is armed with the latest in plasma and laser tech in suits of powered armor able to shrug off those once lethal shots. While early just completing the mission is cause for celebration, by the end it’s possible to have a mission go without losing one member. This amount of growth in X-Com presents a huge carrot for players to stick with the game and offers a nice gradual curve in difficulty. As the game goes on the alien forces rise to the occasion, with stronger enemies and new types of aliens to take down your squad.

Before I talk about what X-Com did wrong, or things that keep me from falling in love with the game, I want to mention the mistakes TBS makers have been making with this formula. First is adding in a real time option along with turn based. Personality I can’t stand real time when I’m trying to create tactics and just seems like a waste of time. This can also lead to a dumbing down of the turn based elements.

Speed is another factor, not during your move but what happens after. I don’t want to watch in painfully slow detail 20 enemies moving along the map, or the computer requiring over 20 seconds to get thru each turn. Also having units move in a sorta fast walk pace on the map drives me crazy, either give me an option to skip watching the movement or make it faster. Outside of planning what ever moves and tactics your going to use, everything that happens afterwards should take no more then 8 seconds to get back to your turn. It’s this slow pace that also makes fighting random battles in RPGs a snore for me.

Recently a game based off X-Com was released, everything was supposedly good except that characters could no longer die. Even after getting hit by a rocket they would only be injured, this raises a point on squad death. In games like Silent Storm or Jagged Alliance when the characters have a degree of personality it’s hard to justify permanent character death. Yet in a X-Com like environment when your dealing with random names and character generators, then death should be a possibly. It adds in a degree of challenge and requires players to play more carefully. In a story based game, having them knocked out or a bit of deux ex machina could be used to bring back story characters after a mission.

Growth is a tricky idea, if the game changes too much your left with a completely different experience then you’ve been accustomed to. Not enough and a player’s interest can begin to wane. Silent Storm fell to the former, as the game progressed suddenly you were faced with giant mech suits which gave and received alot of damage and required you to use your own suits to stand up to them. Now all the strategy you have been using is thrown out of the window for these mech smash battles.

Moving on , it’s time to talk about what X-Com did wrong. X-com is a victim of the times it was made at, as advances in technology and AI would fix most of my gripes.

First is the interface which I talked about at the top. The solution is basically a revised interface. Also I should be able to see my squad members, their stats, and rank from any screen that I’m selecting squad members from.

The health system is where I’m torn at, on one hand I was really annoyed with having characters die from one shot from 3 screens away. Yet it adds alot of tension to the game. Perhaps if weapons had a preferred attack range making long shots do less damage could help. Or make characters starting out a pinch more durable.

The big problem with X-com and the main reason why I haven’t finished the game yet, is that while growth is a huge carrot for playing the game. There comes a point when you’ve run out of things to do but still have to slog thru to get to the end. Eventually I got sick and tired of regular UFO battles as they didn’t provide me with alot of resources, and I’ve already gotten everything I could to research. The only battles that were important were terror missions and base attacks, but I couldn’t muster up the energy to keep playing them.

My suggestions here actually come from RPGS, basically add in more randomization and incentives to fight. Having unique enemies (similar to elites in Diablo 2) is a great way to spice up normal missions. They would have to look different from normal enemies and have something different about them, such as using a weapon not normal to the alien species. Which leads to more incentives, unique equipment drops that these aliens could have on them. Such as a stronger version of a laser rifle, or new armor. These items cannot be mass produced to keep the game from becoming too easy, but can be a way to keep your better units alive longer and make random UFO battles still viable in the end game.

I’ve been thinking up my own squad based TBS game for some time now, and while it won’t be X-com 2008 edition it will have the features I mentioned here and provide an excellent TBS experience.

Josh ( Holy crap this was a huge post.)

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  • Good thoughts, Josh. It’s funny, because I’m about to start my Narrative of the Moment series focusing on XCOM’s storytelling potential. Many of my thoughts are mirrored in your post.

  • Dancing Muton

    To start off, I have to say that for someone who, in his own words, only recently got it, you managed to sum it up quite well. By the way, the game is available on Gametap. 🙂

    There is a lot that you have not noticed, but it’s those little details that most people don’t, especially given that some are not really visible to the player, and some require more time to be noticed. It shouldn’t bother you. On the other hand, you noticed some things that a lot of more experienced players don’t, which means that you look from a more objective perspective and that you paid attention to all the aspects of the game’s design.

    Before I go into more specific comments, I’d like to share a few observations I’ve made as a huge fan. Every once in awhile I take a few hours to search the internet for interesting things about X-COM. And during those times I often read other people’s thoughts on the game, and I’ve come to realize that there is a whole rainbow of people’s experience with the game. They differ a lot from one person to the next and you can always find something new and interesting that you may not have noticed yourself.
    As a small example, IGN has given the game a few “best PC game ever” awards and every time they’ll mention that they loved the ability to rename the soldiers and give them the names of their friends and relatives. For some other people this is very foreign, because they play the game in a way where their soldiers just don’t live more than a few missions. And then there’s the guys who use the names to shove in info on the soldier’s stats.
    It’s also incredible how many different strategies there are that actually work. There’s some basic things that most players will do, but there is a lot of difference from player to player, because the player will want to bend the game toward his own style and will create the strategies that suit him. And I think this is a good thing, because the game doesn’t force you to go one strict way. I think practically everyone who liked the game, liked this.

    In general, I think one of X-COM’s strong points is that it’s very free form, there’s not a lot of hoops that you have to go through. Most games lead you by the nose, there’s a set amount of levels with maybe a bit of forking here and there. But ask yourself this: How many missions do I have to take in order to beat the game? Theoretically, you could drag the game on forever. I think there is no set date, and even if there was, you could probably finish it 50 times over by then.
    Or you could finish it in just two missions. I’m serious, you only need one battleship mission to get all the prerequisites for the last mission (not to spoil it any more). Of course, beating the game like that without a lot of reloading would be next to impossible, but still, the fact that it is possible is nice.

    Now, let’s get a bit more specific, shall we? 😀

    Randomization is definitely a huge part of the game. And although you’ll soon start noticing that it’s actually less random than you originally thought, there’s quite a bit of it, and more importantly there’s enough of it for every mission to be different. I think this is something that could prove to be very difficult to make in 3D, but I could be (and hope I am) wrong. Implementation of this feature aside, i think it could be improved a bit, too. You probably noticed that the map is divided into 16 quadrants (4×4). Every quadrant has a “theme”, one will contain the corn field, one the cabbage field, one will have a house and so on. And they’re always facing the same direction. The door on the medium scout will always point SW (if we assume that north points straight up). The same goes for other things, like the barn, the houses etc. You could improve the randomization a lot just by allowing them to face the other three directions, not to mention the placement of the hay in the barn or the trees in the forest map. And if you could selectively make hills and holes (within certain constraints)…
    That would be a lot more difficult, you’d have to check that you haven’t accidentally sealed of something… well, it’s not like it’s going to prevent your weapons from making short work of it. 😉
    A lot of people have noted that it’s not very realistic that you don’t have an immediate picture of the whole map and it definitely stands, but personally, I think it’s worth sacrificing for the sake of gameplay. Much like the map limits are. While we’re at it, it was interesting to see that in Fallout enemies could run off from the edge of the map and return later. Too bad you couldn’t shoot them. I recently figured out a very simple yet effective way to solve this, and that is to have some sort of an indicator, arrow if you will, that would be on the edge of the screen. It would serve as a placeholder for the enemy that you could use to manipulate the enemy (read: shoot him :D).

    Oh aliens, how we love ye. And hate, hehe.
    It’s nice that they differ from race to race, although I think this could be improved a lot, too. not only have different stats, but also more unique abilities than they had in UFO. I remember that in Genesis some aliens would be able to transform into normal objects and thus hide from you. Also, why would they all have to have visual contact with you? Why not have some detect heat, or a different color scale, or sounds, or your soldier’s thoughts (as in Psi) etc. etc. And the ranks they have should also be meaningful and perhaps even be a bit more recognizable visually (maybe different uniforms). Ever noticed how the Medics never carried any sort of healing equipment? 😉 It would be nice if their weaponry also depended more on a species as well as rank basis. Can you honestly picture a Sectoid carrying let alone shooting a heavy plasma?
    They’re also a bit inconsistent design wise, they looks somewhat different in UFOPaedia than in the battlescape. I have to say I don’t really like the UFOPaedia look of the Chryssalid for example. The battlescape one I like a whole lot more, looks sort of Alien-esque which just seems to fit it more, at least to me. On the other hand I liked the intro version of the Mutons, they looked quite menacing.

    Destructible terrain, maps etc. is slowly becoming a real possibility in 3D with the advance of physics. It’s interesting to note that the creators of X-COM (the Gollop brothers) would have had destructible environments in Dreamland Chronicles back in 2001-2002. I think that in general physics is not used enough yet, it’s often mostly make-up, just to be able to say: “Oh look we have physics.” Well that’s all fine and dandy, but why don’t you use it to improve the gameplay? What’s the point of having good graphics if it does nothing to make the game better? Same goes for physics. Though it seems to me that it’s getting better in that respect.
    The only problem is that it would drive the budget up somewhat, unless you’re making your own physics engine.
    There’s a lot of people who say: “Just remake the first game in 3D and we’ll be happy.” but when you think about it, it’s not exactly cheap. Graphics engine, physics engine, randomizer engine… Lots of work and money.
    The destructibility was nice in the game, as you noted correctly. It allowed for different tactics, and I think the image of the gas station blowing up is burned into everyone’s mind. Or crack opening a UFO with the Blaster Launcher and descending into it from the top in Flying Suits.
    Then again, you couldn’t do the same to the Skyranger. 😛 Would have been nice if it could have been destroyed and then despite having a successful mission, you’d have to buy a new one.

    Now for the systems. I’ll skip the battlescape combat system almost entriely, that could have a few pages of analysis on its own. In theory, it’s very good, although there are some problems (Psi, last alien syndrome etc.). It’s interesting that the Gollops were aware of them, and stomped them out in Apocalypse (and introduced some new ones). Although good, there’s still a lot of room for improvement in the combat system.
    The fact that the game seamlessly integrated the Geoscape and the Battlescape is what made it innovative. Still innovation is worth nothing if it’s of poor quality or going in the wrong direction. It was not originally supposed to do this. It was supposed to be basically Laser Squad 2. When they showed it to Microprose, the people there said something that is almost unthikable these days. “It’s nice, but make it more complex.” So they added the Geoscape. And surprisingly enough, it worked. It seems to me that a lot developers would cut off their own hand these days to get their publisher to do that.
    The Geoscape was divided into several groups, those being: base management, research and interception. I separated research from the rest of the base management here because it is essential to beat the game.
    Research is another significant part of the game’s design. It’s not only used to get you new technology, it’s also THE method of storytelling in X-COM. Although it does its job as far as storytelling goes, I find it barely decent. Apocalypse already showed some improvement, as it went on you slowly figured out how all the things fit together. And this was important – everything suddenly made sense, you knew why the aliens attacked you, why they used the methods they did and what their goal was. This was not done as well in UFO. Furthermore I would have liked it if it sounded more buyable. UFO: Alien Invasion does this very nice, in the form of e-mails from certain staff. For example, you get a new weapon on a mission, and your chief military officer will send you a formal e-mail asking that you research the artifact and presenting reasonable assumptions of what you would get. When it gets researched your chief scientist would send you an e-mail describing it, often grounded to some degree in actual physics.
    It would also be nice if the aliens could respond to your own technological improvements, at least to some degree. Say you make the lasers, then they kill everyone on your transport on the next mission and recover the lasers. Then they improve that and you can again take it from them. Obviously you’d have to have a limit, but it would keep it interesting.
    I think both the research and the base management can be pushed up a few notches. The organizations in Apocalypse were a very good idea, they were meant to be meaningful to the gameplay. Should you alienate one, you would lose something. It wasn’t implemented fully, but it’s a very good idea to explore choices and meaningful consequences in a strategy game. Don’t lose Marsec too early though, I did and boy does it make it hard.
    Interception was definitely the weakest point. It was a fun little mini-game, but not a whole lot of options there. Apocalypse improved that, too. However, I believe it can be improved further. Still can’t think of a good design there, though. I honestly can’t imagine a TB system there that would give you enough of tactical options there and at the same time not look slow. Compared to the Battlescape, there’s just not many obstacles there that you could use. Perhaps it’s better this way, though. Maybe there are other ways to make it better. For example, did you ever notice that while you respond to alien UFOs, the aliens will never respond to yours. Justifications aside, it would be nice if the aliens could start hunting your interceptors while you’re hunting theirs or intercept your transports going to recovery missions. Then you’d be forced to send interceptors with them for protection, but at the same time, it would diminish your ability to respond to other threats. A few months ago I started playing the latest build of UFO: Alien invasion and I sent a transport on a terror mission. It was already close, when suddenly a UFO popped up and shot it down. While it wasn’t a response to me sending the transport there, it was nice to see that they at least responded to your craft being within their range.

    You note well about the growth. Here’s something interesting. If you play it in a different way, you won’t feel it much. 😀
    Once you’re done with the game and get in the mood for it again, you should try playing it on Superhuman and play it without reloading when you make mistakes. Yes, it’s possible to beat it, but it will show you that you have to make a huge leap in the way you play it. I strongly suggest that you abuse every bit that http://www.ufopaedia.org has to offer as well as ask for help on forums. You’ll soon realize that even Flying Suits aren’t all that reliable and it won’t be rare that your soldier dies from one shot. It will give you a whole different perspective of how it would work in reality. The death toll is huge in the beginning, though later on you’ll get it under some control. Ranks will be meaningless and will go from one soldier to the next every mission or two. They won’t improve a whole lot, which will make it all the more challenging. For more masochism don’t use Psi-amps. 😉 They were not balanced well anyway, once you have them, you’ve practically beaten the game. And remember, if it looks too difficult, you can always comfort yourself with the knowledge that Terror From the Deep is even worse. Ah the Lobster Men… 😀 Did I mention that this is after they made it easier some time during hte development process? You can still see a trace or two left in the game, but not used. Then there’s the infamous research bugs and shipping routes.

    I completely agree with your point about having both TB and RT. Make one or the other, but don’t make both. Apocalypse did this and it ended up poorly balanced. I look at it this way: you’re designing the game for two very different systems that are supposed to effectively do the same thing. And on top of that you have to balance them with each other so one wouldn’t be better, easier and what not. So effectively you’re doing 2-2.5 amount of work you would have to do if you only did one. Personally, I think that in the case of X-COM turn based works better, but that has a lot to do with how the game works. Too much to write here in order to give a well thought out explanation. So I won’t. 😉 Not that I would expect everyone to agree with me either.
    By the way, your comment on the sluggishness of TB (and some RT) systems is very true. Even when you push the speed controls all the way up, some games are too slow. I don’t mind taking my time to play the game, but I don’t like it when it’s because I have to watch a pointless animation. UFO cut a lot of corners and managed to avoid almost all these problems and is generally pretty fast. If your soldier doesn’t see an alien during his turn, the game won’t waste time on animations, which reduces the turns drastically. Another thing that made it faster was that it didn’t animate your soldiers until they were in your view. Apocalypse unfortunately didn’t do either, so it dragged more. This was due to a design decision, which on the other hand allowed you to simultaneously manipulate more soldiers, you didn’t have to move them one by one. Still, I’d rather have the first, it didn’t seem all that useful in Apocalypse in TB mode. There are a few other things, too, namely that you have a computer that can do all the calculations a lot quicker than the ones the game was made for could. Also, you’ll note that it doesn’t animate when you switch between guns, or when you kneel or prime grenades. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people would whine if you didn’t have them properly animated, yet if you did, it would slow up the game drastically. Lose-lose? Perhaps not. You could have the animations on by default to please the graphics crowd, but tell people how to turn them off.
    I noticed a lot of people mentioned that Fallout was slow, and to some degree it’s true. Even if you pulled every slider to the fastest setting, those grandpas still moved pretty slowly and the Regulators fight was a unnecessarily slow. Then again, Fallout wasn’t really meant for large scale battles, and in fact this is the only one that I remember in the first one. Still if it had cut corners the way UFO did it would have been faster. Not that I really care either way. 😛

    The interface is bad by even the worst standards today. The problem is we all got accustomed to it, so we rarely notice it. Still, hotkeys would have done a lot for it. Apocalypse had this, and the game would remember the equipment placement. Presets would have been nice, too. And yes, I hated the fact that I couldn’t change their order in the transports. As for stats, you probably noticed that 4 stats will be visible for every soldier (health, energy, morale and TUs), though perhaps it should have been done with a pop-up or something, not to clog up the interface too much. On the other hand that’s not better than the one click needed to get you to the stat screen. it was nice that in Apocalypse the equipment screen was merged with the stat screen, and also that you could equip them in the base itself.

    The health system I like. It adds a lot of tension. The attack ranges was not done all that well. Remember the “to hit %”? It is not very dependent on distance. If it says that your to hit is 16%, it means that you will hit once every 6 shots on average even if you’re shooting from one corner of the screen diagonally to the other (provided you have line of sight of course). The to hit will increase somewhat if you’re very close (1-2 squares) to your target, but mid to long distances you won’t notice a difference. Fallout did this better, for various reasons, which I’m too lazy to go into.

    I completely understand your sentiment when it comes to the game getting monotone later on. Luckily it is relatively short. Also, here’s a useful tip. If you’re doing a good enough job, you don’t have to play every mission. Just land on the crash site, landing site or the terror mission and abort. In the first two cases you’ll get a rating of 0, but at least you won’t lose, and if you abort the terror mission you’ll get negative points for civilians. Still, if you’re shooting down enough UFOs and feel you can clean bases, then that’s all you need to do. That will leave you a lot of time for research and you’ll be over in a jiffy.

    Adding more incentives to keep playing is definitely a good idea. it goes hand in hand with some things that you haven’t noticed. I wouldn’t go for bosses though, and definitely not for special equipment from them. It’s a nice idea, but I just don’t think it fits X-COM. Here’s how I would have done that. More mission types. That’s what you didn’t mention. All the missions in UFO are basically kill all aliens. How about something more like this:
    1.) intercept an alien convoy
    2.) retrieve a valuable prototype of alien technology and destroy all their work effectively nullifying their progress.
    3.) Protect certain key research centers and other facilities.
    4.) Spy missions.
    And last but not least optional story missions. These would again work with the idea of choice and meaningful consequence. You can approach a certain number of ways, or not approach them at all. Each would have its consequences. You’d need to be careful not to push them onto the player too much, but they could be an interesting way to give some background story flavor.
    Actually, I could probably think of a few other types of missions, but I’m too lazy.

    A few things that I would like to point out that you couldn’t have noticed from UFO alone.
    While the gameplay is fun, the setting and the story are somewhat lacking, even if it’s a strategy game. Perhaps it should be a bit more character oriented, perhaps through your chief scientist and engineer, through some humans that are not in the organization itself (politicians, heads of important organizations and such), and even important aliens. The setting is also loose. Too loose. In fact, the second and the third game’s stories don’t have much to do with the first. And it has more plot holes than a swiss cheese.
    One other thing that you haven’t noticed is how the atmosphere ties in with the gameplay. But while UFO was tense, Terror From the Deep increased it further, the music was much creepier which just added to the tension and could sometimes even scare you, which is rare for strategy.

    Well, I probably forgot half of what I wanted to write, but oh well. I didn’t mention how I would imagine X-COM in reality. This story is a close enough match:
    http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3631062/1/XSGCOM_Mirror_Image
    I’m still on chapter 3, but it’s interesting. Sadly, I didn’t watch Stargate much, so I’m probably missing some things.

    Ohh, looky, it’s dark already. My my, how time flies. Oh and look at the post, it’s sooo small. 😉 And this is the tip of the iceberg. I really couldn’t blame you if you got bored after the first or second paragraph.
    Nevermind, I think I’m going to do something productive now, like play the Armageddon Empires demo for the n-th time. Heh, another game that could use a bit better interface. Not that it’s stopping me. 😉

  • First off it’s good to read someone else wrote a huge essay based on X-Com 🙂 This one took me a good week of stopping and starting and from reading your post I forgot about the amount of work that goes into base management, and how that figures into alien attacks. I remember reading numerous exploits and glitches with the base building system. Something about if you put something in the corners it could crash I believe.

    Looking at the game, I think one of the reasons that buildings are kept faced in the same direction is to show the player where doors are. I doubt they had a graphics engine back then that could render the enviroments in multiple directions. About story, looking at the game and the direction they went, I think they kept the story minimial to allow players to create their own. Similar to the AAR reports I’ve seen on Galciv2. Then again I haven’t played the other 2 games in the X-Com series.

    I do agree that the combat system isn’t as fine tuned as I would like. The accuracy ratings always seemed to screw me over when it mattered, although hiting an alien thru 2 windows on the other side of a building is always awesome 🙂

    More mission types would be cool, although I think using the original combat system in an escort mission wouldn’t be ideal. As I can just imagine the protectee taking one turn and getting sniped and failing the mission. Perhaps instead of having a win/fail system, it could be different degrees, from complete success to just getting the job done. The only issue I see with your list is that 1 and 2 still fall into the same gameplay, which is of course turn based combat. Defending different points would be cool, I could also see improved alien base attacks. That have you assaulting different parts to take it down, such as attacking a power core , or destroying a weapons armory.

    Ah Armageddgon Empires, another game that has great gameplay, I find the interface is bad, but compared to Dominions2 it’s wonderful 🙂 I love the whole CCG aspect of the game and I’m planning an entry on the CCG genre.