RPS: Talking about squad sizes generally, I know this is one of the things that people have complained about on the internet, but I havent actually got a full sense of it myself. Is it four or something you field per mission?
Jake Solomon: Its four when the game begins, and then theres a facility called the Officer Training School which gives you a number of different benefits that are related to your soldiers, and then that also is how you increase your squad size up to six at the end. You start with four, and then you can go up to six. And I totally, totally, totally understand people who are experienced with the original game. Therere some guys who would get excited when they got the Avenger because they could field forty people, they could just be like Thats it, the entire brigade, everyone cram in.
RPS: I just squeezed in as many tanks as I could generally.
Jake Solomon: Right, I know, they take up like four spots. But the thing is that with six soldiers I understand that the peoples experience is with the original game and not with this game, so its perfectly fair, I understand the worry about that. But I will say that after playing through at this late stage, six was plenty. Because they have the classes and they slot into these roles, and because they can do many ,many things, by the end when your guys get to Major, Colonel, they have a lot of things that they can do, so it would not be fun to manage more than that group of six. So Im really happy with how that turned out. You get a group of six and you can sort of play with, youve got four classes, so then its like a personal choice of do you like running with assaults? And a big part of XCOM is playing with the hand youre dealt, thats a big thing in strategy games in general. A lot of the fun comes not from being able to carry out exactly the strategy you want but rather having these sort of setbacks occur and you coming up with a new tactic.
Part of it is guys die
I had a mission where four out of my six soldiers died, and it was a big mission and so I wasnt going to freeload. It was the sort of thing where, and it was about halfway through the game, where youre just sort of like well, I guess we start over, and there are two people who survived through that and then one of them died on the next mission. But then you look at your B team and youre like Ive got two heavies and an assault so you just change the squad make up and you just start playing a different way. Thats the way that it plays out.
