That happens more in reality than you may realize. Adrenaline makes a person’s dexterity based skills null or useless. One either has to control adrenaline or train to compensate for its effects.

“There are five bases spread out across the globe, so why is my base the only one sending troops out to fight? It would seem a waste of resources to create the other four outposts and not use them. ”

user design interface issue. At the end game in XCOm, managing 2+ bases, plus alien assault defenses, got to be quite a big chunk of time investment. Firaxis put a lot of work modeling the one base, and just put everything there. They already said this in an interview that making more bases to clone the base UI, would just mean more clicks to do the exact same thing. Those who played XCOM for 5+ in game years can pretty much understand how a lot of the fun is in the tactical combat, not the base micromanagement. The base micro is for realistic atmospheric value, certainly.

This was a relatively simpler, easier to play game than XCOM Enemy unknown. I liked the actual story line and personalities involved. I sort of already knew the technological path I needed to go on from Enemy Unknown and they faithfully reproduced the strategic consequences of not being able to capture enemies to unlock new tech. Without new tech at a certain point, your interceptors do not have the capability to shoot down battleship class enemies, thus those enemies start taking over your allied nations funding you, sending you on a death spiral basically that could last 1-3 years depending. It just reminded me a lot of the old XCOm, but with a newer, more efficient UI. I think I find the new one more fun to play, if only because I didn’t have to do all the load ups and setups every time I wanted to play a combat mission. But that also means some of the depth and difficulty is lost. The lower we go emotionally, the higher we climb in victory.

* As was mentioned, the alien AI is pitiful. Like most games nowadays it relies solely on extensive cheating and absurd handicaps on your soldiers to provide a “challenge”. Limiting you to a single grenade, for example, is laughably bad game design.
* A Captain in an elite military unit shouldn’t even have the world panic in his vocabulary, let alone succumb to it. This by itself was nearly enough to make me quit playing.
* The bugs..my God, the bugs! And I”m not talking about the crysalids (although they are ridiculous in every respect). The multi-level viewing bug, the cannot-give-orders bug, the UI window bugs, and on and on..and Firaxis either doesn’t care or doesn’t even acknowledge them.

Then there are the reviews themselves. Its obvious that 90% of players, probably including the reviewer, have only played on easy mode. On higher difficulties there is precisely one path to victory. Yes, you can change the order of the steps you take slightly, but there’s still only one team mix and loadout that works and everyone knows it. And that brings up perhaps the single biggest failing of X:EU – you play one campaign and you’ve played them all. I really, really wanted to like this game, but Firaxis dropped the ball completely.

Kudos , but then i shouldnt be THAT surprised, It was made by Firaxis after all.

Its called random number generator and, in this case, you just happen to roll several misses in a row.

Contrast that with the times that you probably, or at least I have, have cleaned out a supposed “difficult” UFO crash site with first shot from each solider on each alien. Overall it does balance out.

Typically you will take maybe two solider’s attacked on most aliens which seems fair from a strategy planning aspect.