With the base game you don't really need to rush anything, it flows pretty straight forward. You go for laser weapons while working to expand your satellite coverage. Build laser weapons while researching armor and miscellaneous shit. It's possible to beat the game without ever losing a single country to the aliens, although that requires a little bit of luck on impossible.I never did finish the base game I think. I got too annoyed at how artificially hard the early mission were (because your troops can't hit the arse end of a barn while standing right in front of it).
What's the best build order? Rush to Laser Rifle or something? Plus do you focus on extending satellite cover or just let a part of the world burn?
I bet console sales for Xcom were abysmal. They wouldn't exclude the console market if it was lucrative. I was really surprised to see that they'd ported EU and EW because strategy games like this have never been popular on consoles. I picked EW up on sale for 5$ 360 a while back to see how it compares to the PC version but haven't had a chance to check it out. The only other Strategy game I played on 360 was Civilization Revolutions and it was really watered down version of Civilization.
What, has the earth just flipped on its axis? That article is nuts. (in a good way)!
I probably read the article a bit differently, but that was sort of what I got out of it. They didn't have a huge team, so devoting people to make stuff work on consoles would cut into the PC development (and depending on how the console sales were, they might not be interested in adding to the team "just" for consoles), and I do think they honestly wanted modding support even before the success of Long War. They talked a lot about getting mod support in there before the launch of Enemy Unknown. It just never materialized, which could be due to any number of factors, but some could be from being stretched thin by console development which Firaxis isn't the most veteran company at.Eh, having worked inside the industry, I have a suspicion what the real motivation behind PC exclusive is, and that article is a big smoke screen.
Basically, I'm betting that they weren't really prepared for simultaneous pc and console development on a primarily PC title for Enemy Unknown, having never done it before. They probably decided it would be less trouble to just cut console development entirely, and focus on PC, given that console sales weren't huge, and that most of the real longevity came from the Long War mod. I don't believe any of their shit about 'we needed to work on PC to be able to make X work for the sequel'. They realized that all the people still playing their game a couple months after EW had launched were people playing Long War, so they decided to go all in on PC and mod support.
So yeah, this is one more thing I think we can largely thank the LW devs for.