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Uh, that's not how X-Com works, and AFAICT it's mostly not how its bastard remake works either. Actually, one of the reasons the original X-Com winds up on so many "best of all time" lists is precisely that it does allow you to continue from losing battles, and thus has a more realistic war feel because you are not (artificially forced to be) some magic plot-armoured force that wins literally every battle.
Eh, there's definitely points in the campaign of both the original and remake where a squad wipe is game over. If you can't get a B-team up, armed, and (in og) psi-resist tested before you wipe, you'll end up trying to fight ethereals with a truck full of laser rifle rookies who get mind-controlled into killing each other every turn.
The remake made it even worse with the 4 soldier limit. Very easy to not get any backup team trained, because how are you gonna take a dead weight rookie as 1/4th of your squad? Long War raising that to 6-10 and adding a fatigue system to make you rotate troops was a huge improvement.
About the only truly-irrecoverable squad wipe in the original (besides Cydonia, of course) is if your main base gets raided early on. This is how I lost my first attempt at TFTD's Superhuman difficulty: a 1 January FBA proc wiped my base while my Triton and main squad were out (because I might be good, but I'm not good enough to beat an Aquatoid Dreadnought crew with three guys), and while I didn't lose immediately from last-base-killed (because I'd placed another at game start) there wasn't enough time to get my second base operational before I lost from poor score.
While you do need substantial amounts of equipment/training to fight Ethereals, by the time they show up you should have a worldwide interception grid, which means that if you're stuck without an Ethereal-ready squad, you can just stop fighting Ethereal missions until you have one (with perhaps an exception for an Ethereal Small/Medium Scout, if you haven't gotten a psionic capture yet; they aren't too bad). You won't lose from poor score, because shootdowns themselves give bucketloads of points and if you're shooting down incoming UFOs the aliens won't score from succeeding at their missions (in particular, because you're shooting down the Terror Ships, they won't be able to create Terror Sites, which means no massive penalty for ignoring/fleeing from them). Quite recoverable, if tedious.
I haven't actually played the remake, to be clear, and that "mostly" was doing some work because I did know about soldiers being less expendable and there being more hardcoded-game-over missions.
EDIT: "Craft is lost" is painful enough that it's usually not worth risking one, but there are cases where I think optimum play is to take substantial chances of one. The most notable is the first Sectoid terror site in UFO, which will be an absolute ball-buster of a mission (this is the only mission in most games of UFO that approaches Cydonia in relative difficulty; early base defences can be worse but are rare) but which is your first chance to get a Sectoid Leader capture. It's worth taking a substantial chance of failure, including craft loss, to get that capture; you don't know when you'll get another chance and you really want psi to at least be in the works when the Ethereals show up in July. In TFTD there aren't many cases where it's both an incredibly hard mission and a chance to get something rare. The first Terror Site is quite hard, and is technically the only guaranteed appearance of Deep Ones, but there's an 80% chance to get Deep Ones in both the February and March Terror Sites so it's probably not worth risking a wipeout; the first Aquatoid land mission (and thus Calcinite corpse chance) isn't quite the horror show of the first Sectoid terror site in UFO (due to Calcinites being a hell of a lot weaker than Cyberdiscs, and due to a lack of need for rank identification/live capture) so while I think it's probably worth risking a craft loss if you have to (to get drills for cracking open Lobster Men), and I have thus risked it, you usually aren't in dire enough straits that it's necessary (at least, not if you're as good at the game as I am, and if you're not playing some kind of challenge run). There are, of course, plenty of hard missions in TFTD, but most of them can be aborted without missing out on anything irreplaceable.
I guess you're a lot better at the actual "UFO defense" part of UFO defense than I ever was lol. I always struggled with the air war, and couldn't have pulled off dominance like that with interceptors.
Basically, just drop bases in Germany, North Dakota, Beijing, South Africa, Argentina and Tasmania, and give them all Hyper-Wave Decoders (I beeline HWDs immediately after the no-brainer Laser Rifle; I usually deploy the first three bases with Large Radars but wait until HWDs for the last three). This is cash-hungry, but because it lets you recover more UFOs it pays off very fast. Normally I only keep three Interceptors and wait until Avengers to have interception everywhere (because I don't do much interception, preferring ground assaults when possible, and because you need advanced craft to shoot down Battleships anyway), but if I were on the back foot like that and I didn't have Avengers I would spam them (they arrive in four days and Plasma Beams build fast). And yeah, there's a bit of micro with sending Interceptors to where the UFO is going rather than directly at the UFO to avoid long tail chases.
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The remake has an ironman mode that only allows auto-saving, no manual.
The original X-Com was also rather infamous for it's odd, weighted chances of ally fire missing all 99% shots, while aliens were able to snipe characters from across the map. In the original, you could replay missions, but said missions could also be rather lengthy, and could be difficult to tell where your potential screwup was, meaning you needed to play very conservatively and tactically in the early and mid-game, while you game up your economy and tech-level.
And this still didn't stop aliens from sniping your guys as they came down the ramp, as sheer random chance could still fuck you over hard.
So his comparison is a little loose, but I get the overall gist of his argument.
I wasn't talking about loading saves; my point was that you can continue from a lost battle without having to just load a save.
Have you actually played it? This meme is just from people whining about missing, not a real thing. (Actually, the remake has a worse case of "you missed an alien standing right next to you"; the original makes rolled misses fire randomly within a cone, which will probably still hit if the alien's close enough, whereas the remake forces rolled misses to actually miss.)
That's not random chance; that's you not knowing how to negate it. Smoke grenades give you concealment and thus block reaction fire. In TFTD dye grenades don't work, but in TFTD there's much less of a problem with this anyway (because the Triton has a door and is flush with the seafloor, and because you can open doors without stepping through them in TFTD).
Certainly. This doesn't stop bad luck from potentially slaughtering your front-runner team, however.
X-com: UFO defense was one of the first games where I was introduced to the concept of 'pirating' and 'cheats' by someone in charge of the computer lab at a school I was helping out at. And while I don't have it installed right now, it's currently sitting nice and neat in my steam library.
Yes, I've played it. I've played it alot, thank you. You trying to brush off it as 'just a meme' makes me wonder if you've played it.
Yes. And that's part of the difficulty curve - negating random change as much as possible. The original X-com has a surprising amount of tactical depth that can make even normally terrifying circumstances(such as night missions or breaching buildings/landed space ships) trivial, but even experienced gamers likely aren't going to get that out of the box and will experience a learning curve.
I've beaten it on Superhuman without active psi and with Cydonia on June 1, and I literally wrote a non-negligible chunk of the wiki.
The hit chances are accurate, at least for "hit" rolls vs. "miss" rolls (rolled misses can still hit at close range, and I think it's possible for rolled hits to miss at extreme range or where there's cover involved, both of these symmetrical between X-Com and aliens). Aliens hit a lot on higher difficulties because their accuracy stats are pretty high. If you think there's "weighting" going on that makes X-Com rolls systematically worse and alien rolls systematically better than the normal formula, you're seeing a pattern that's not actually there, presumably due to negativity bias letting you recall "bad" results better than "good" ones. I guess you're one of the (many) sources of that meme.
There are three ways that the AI "cheats"; it can perform Auto mode reaction shots (you can only use Snap), it "remembers" the position of your units after they leave LoS (most notably allowing psi-attacks on them), and it gets omniscience after turn 20. This isn't one of them.
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