Quoting uberlicker, reply 3
Mutants and Mechs don't seem exciting???
Ok then...
Mechs and hybrids were in Apocolypse so it's a been there done that reaction.
No, you didn't have access to hybrids, you had psi, and you could hire borgs or robots or whatever they were, but the mechanics of your borg were entirely different than they will be in EW. Still, whether it's been done before or not doesn't really change that it should be exciting to have new options.
X-com: alien opponents were half as numerous, three times stronger and the X-com team twice as big versus now. You "zerg" your opponent to gain an advantage with surgical strategy so it won't end up a suicide mission. Losses during the mission is painful but still very doable.
Xcom: the team is half as big, three times as strong and aliens are at least two times as many depending on the mission. Here the aliens "zerg" you but are easier to pick off. On mission there are no minor losses and still achieve victory without highly experienced backup.
X-com: map sizes in addition to reduced enemy numbers encourage players to recon, ambush and widely flank opponents.
Xcom: "teleporting" alien patrol spawn points, one free turn cutscene move on first contact, constricted map sizes and increased enemy patrol numbers discourage all tactical gameplay listed above. It also slows down to a crawl what is already a slow game especially on the highest difficulty settings for the same reasons.
I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make with these comparisons, but you seem to contradict yourself when you say that you should both zerg and recon/ambush/flank at the same time. Beyond which the prime cheese in the OG (old game) was to just blaster bomb the map and then have some guys with plasma rifles shoot across the entire map killing anything which didn't die in the bomb barrage.
As for the NG (new game), I'm not sure what difficulty/2nd wave/mods you have tried, but there are combinations of those 3 which make for rather exciting and highly tactical missions. Not every mission turns out that way of course, but enough do to keep you on your toes. Or if you just want to overwatch camp for an hour that's your call, but meh, it's really not that different than some of the less interesting, though still effective tactics in the OG. Anyway, there are bomb missions and escort missions, along with the base invasion and battle ships where the 'normal' tactics simply don't apply. Maybe there should be more of these missions, but at least they are there. OG missions were barely varied at all, and the 'random maps' were not nearly as 'random' as people want to make them out. Throw in the last alien hiding tediousness and I can't even be bothered to play the OG (or it's brethren) anymore. But, to each their own. If the NG isn't for you that's fine, stick with the OG if you prefer it.
In UFO:EU it wasn't always possible to have radar to detect UFOs where you needed it. If you felt lucky you could send an interceptor from a nearby base to make a sweep of an area. Now it's a case of cranking out satellites and having uplinks to run them and interceptors to shoot UFOs down. And yet, I barely see any benefit to this strategy in XCOM:EU, apart from it shutting down abduction missions.
I should be squeezing in a dozen missions a month with the whole world covered. Instead I'm sitting here waiting for the enemy ships with their slow-ass hyperdrives to show up at all. Instead I would like to build myself an Avenger or two, make a little jump to where they're massing their fleet, and pop some battleships with my Fusion Lances before they get to Atlantis... I mean Earth. >.>
And if that gambit doesn't pay off we could always phase cloak the planet and watch them try to figure out where we went. Maybe some Sectoid will ask a Muton, "Where's the Earth?" and the Muton will reply, "That's what I'm trying to tell you kid, it's gone, it's not there any more."
Yeah I would love to see XCOM: Atlantis Under Siege, but I might need a pause mode to get me through the 72-hour mini-campaign.
I get that the games have different mechanics, but my point was that the actual gameplay in both is still fairly forced. Of course anyone is free to prefer whichever game play they prefer, there is no 'right' answer there.
However, wishing the NG were just an updated OG misses the point that the creators wanted to make something different. The story is completely different from the OG, the alien motivation, the reason for why they do what they do. Like it or not doesn't change the fact that trying to criticize it because it's not the same as the OG is going to just sound foolish because it was never intended to be that.
In any case, if you want a dozen missions a month get the Long War mod and play with that. It does make the NG play very very differently than its vanilla version, and it may give you a few more areas which are more similar to the OG. Ups the max sqaud size to 8 as well, but also ups the numbers of aliens, and upgrades the aliens giving them some of the same perks your soldiers get to make certain 'easy' scenarios suddenly become much much more difficult. Especially when you pop 2 pods of 5-8 mutons/floaters/thin men and realize you can't just level them all at once with a couple rockets. It's stated goal is to not have every mission winnable. Meaning you better realize this and sound the retreat before you just get squad wiped.
