Man, the last mission kicked my ass last night. In the mission brief, it mentions 25 enemies, which is almost double the number on very difficult missions.
My guys got through those aliens fine, though, but they exhausted their supply of proximity grenades.
Once past that last 2 Sectopods I thought we were in the clear, but that’s just when the fun really starts. Really wish I had saved some prox mines. Oh, and I shoulda packed mind shields.
Attempt #2 is tonight. Gonna ditch my stealth ranger and gonna load up on another long-range sniper. Get the feeling they’re gonna be alternating Serial all night.
I used rupture to deal with that part at the end you are referring to.
But yeah, the final mission feels appropriately epic. Much better than XCOM.
ShivaX
1564
A Psi-Trooper with the AoE mindshield is pretty damned handy for that last mission.
It even cancels if he walks in range, so if someone gets MC’d as long as he can run over to them in a turn, he can bring them back.
Wolff
1565
Furthermore if the enemy has 20% crit, if you get hit (non dodge), it will be a crit. Reddit has theorized this has led to an increase of TXB (that’s xcom baby) crit in full cover.
So Reddit doesn’t understand how it works then?
Wolff
1567
Not sure what you mean do you have evidence to the contrary?
Quaro
1568
MikeJ
1569
Finally finished my first campaign. Found it kind of poetic that the soldier in position to get the final shot in (shotgun to the head!) was the very first soldier I got, the survivor of the tutorial mission.
Man, that list mission is ridiculous. Take the hardest mission in the game prior to that and multiply by 3 or 4. It’s such a striking escalation from everything else in the game.
MikeJ
1572
The last mission is definitely a big escalation. On the other hand, I was finding the regular missions before it getting far too easy. Powered armor and plasma weapons, combined with better medics just seems to up survivability so much. Maybe they need to increase the enemy count on the regular missions near the end-game.
Well, that’s discouraging. Does that mean I’ll just have to drop the difficulty just for it?
If you take it slow and steady, conserving your consumables, it only gets extremely difficult at the very end. I did it on Veteran and lost just one soldier. I don’t know how it would be on Commander or Legendary. There is no mission timer, so you can be very cautious. And the game gives you an extra “weapon” that you can use judiciously to divide and conquer.
Also, in this thread above is a good tip about mindshields. I didn’t have any equipped but they would have made things easier at the very end.
Is there a point where hacking those radar towers becomes not stupid?
Right now I can hack one with almost zero chance to get a small dodge bonus for two turns and if I fail, all enemies get boosted or enemy reinforcements pop up on me. Every so often i’ll get intel as a reward.
None the less, the risk vs reward for hacking in this game is TERRIBLE.
meeper
1576
Increasing your specialist’s rank and upgrading your gremins will both upgrade your hacking skill. The skulljack is another 25% boost while equipped. Plus, any hacking bonuses gained while hacking are permanent (e.g., like when a tower offers a +20 to hacking skill).
I usually have about a 70-80% chance to get the small bonus, and a 50-60% or so chance for something big like “refresh everyone’s action points” which can be a huge game-changer. Some of them I would never try for (stuff like a bonus dodge chance with the risk of bringing in another entire squad of enemy reinforcements seems like a terrible chance to take) so I hope they do something more with them in the future, but it costs nothing to check out what they provide for hacking (some even offer a perm. +20 hacking skill) and if you don’t like your chances, cancel the hack and you won’t have lost an action point.
JFrazer
1578
Finally managed to take out Mr Purpleface last night, thanks to a mimic beacon. Had never used a beacon until reading this thread. It was invaluable, luring him in to position where one of my rangers was able to get a flanking kill shot. Next mission I ran in to my first Sectopod. Glad ‘Doc’, my inaccurately named hacking specialist, was having a good night. Kept it locked down long enough to destroy it before it could get a second shot off.
I am continuing to love this game. It very much has a “just one more mission” hold on me right now
This happened early game for me but I thought it was funny. I hacked a tower with the reward being to mind-control an enemy for 2 turns. I was still in concealment and had not even spotted an enemy yet. The hack was successful and I got a mind control on an enemy across the map behind a large building. The enemies just treat the mind-controlled alien as part of your team so I lost concealment and the aliens just magically knew where my team was but did focus on taking down the mind-controlled Advent officer before turning their attention to me. That hack probably works better when you are out of concealment and already engaged with aliens in firefights, lol.
-Todd
meeper
1580
Except a frustratingly long animation :(
Telefrog
1581
Jake Solomon talked to RPS about the tech issues.
“I can honestly say that we didn’t know it would be this way at launch.”
While he did not name an exact cause for the performance issues, he did reveal that “maybe it was our optimism about our new deferred renderer and MSAA – a lot of little things like that.”
One of the reasons the problems were not known about prior to launch was that “it’s not across the board, the issues are kind of myriad… sporadic.” This is indeed the case – again, our reviewer had no serious performance problems, and quite a few of our readers say the game’s been fine for them too.
“Maybe this is damning on me, but I’m sitting here talking to you now on the laptop I use to play it on,” explained Solomon, “and I didn’t see these issues. We didn’t catch this stuff in compatibility testing. We’re fully, fully accountable for the product in people’s hands, so we certainly take responsibility for it.”To people who are suffering them, if they’re frustrated, I’m as frustrated and more. We will continue to update the game, and we do have some workarounds – heck, you guys even posted some workarounds – but we definitely have fixes coming soon.”
“I can’t say dates, but I would say that we’re working very furiously. We already have a lot of those issues in our sights.”
