3761

I’ve encountered that Cover bug quite a few times, that someone mentioned a page or two back. It’s annoying as all hell when you just can’t flank them, but they can flank you.

As for snipers, the squaddie rank replacement snipers, are pretty terrible if you just try adding them in after the bigger HP aliens come out. They don’t start with that great of accuracy, and don’t crit that often, and only can shoot once. But Squad Sight/ Double Tap sniper is awesome, and two of them can take out everything. The pistol skill, along with some of the foundry upgrades and Plasma Pistols are also nice. Though even without the foundry upgrades, my best sniper would often get pistol kills.

Assault guys are nice, Run N Gun and Rapid Fire and that auto-overwatch on 4 tiles skill is awesome. At least one required, an entire squad of them can be fun. Though they do tend to get themselves in more trouble than any other class.

Heavies, are meh. Their accuracy blows, their range sucks, and I wish their rockets shot farther. HEAT is their saving grace late game, but my snipers can usually whack the robots from farther away, and Rapid Fire on assaults will work better on most things and are more mobile. Early game, they are the first class that can shoot twice, which is nice, but they also waste ammo like crazy and have to reload.

Supports are great, I like them because of Sprint. Sprint + Ghost Armor has them move so friggin’ far. Makes for great Arc throwers, or to get that medic to the right spot fast. The three use medkit is pretty much a required skill. Smoke is meh, even upgraded I still seem to get hit more than I like, but it’s better than nothing. They also have decent accuracy and make good use of Plasma rifles. The rest of their skills aren’t noteworthy, the overwatch stuff is interesting, but rarely useful.

So, the TLDR version:
2 x Snipers
1-2 x Assault
1 Heavy, and those times where I didn’t take one, I didn’t miss them much.
1-2 Support

3762

Thanks for the info guys. I guess I’ll just have to do manual saving since if a bug screwed me over half way through a tactical battle and I had to restart the whole blasted thing I’d probably just stop playing the game entirely.

3763

Disagree.

  1. Holo Targeting is worth its weight in gold.

  2. Heavies + Heavy Plasma become murder machines, and will absolutely flatten targets that my Assaults and Support will only wound.

  3. Being able to fire then move can be incredibly useful (my party is three Heavies, 2 with Holo Targeting, 1 with Bullet Swarm).

  4. Being able to do heavy damage to multiple tough targets in one shot with the rockets is fantastic, and the accuracy of the rockets is very high throughout the game.

  5. Again with the rockets, being able to do damage to targets out of LOS, or targets in the Fog of War is also worth it’s weight in gold.

3764
  1. BLASTER LAUNCHER
3765

Good lord, none of the classes are “meh” once you level them!

  • Snipers: one-man fingers of God, especially once they get double-tap. For fun, bring along one with squadsight, and the other with the move-and-shoot perk. Two snipers will trivialize the end “boss”.

  • Support: three medkits? Sometimes you wish you had six. But three is enough. And that smoke comes in handy when you had to bunch your dudes up to maximize firepower and the incoming shit is about to hit the fan.

  • Assaults: with run-and-gun… when something (like a sectoid commander mindcontrolling your nastiest heavy) has to be absolutely dead like right now, incoming fire be damned.

And an assault with decent psi is just fuckin scary.

  • Heavies. Plasma cannons. Three rockets (if you choose the right perks). Pull the trigger, and stuff goes away. And they can take an assult-like beating.

My usual team, all else being equal (i.e. not a small scout rookie training mission) always includes 1 sniper and 1 support. I also like 2 heavies, if I can get them.

3766

I got into a bit of a catch-22 where I wasn’t enthusiastic about heavies, so I didn’t prioritize weapon upgrades for them, so I was even less enthuiastic about them. On normal it was fairly rare that I’d want to destroy the weapon salvage and corpse, so the explosives side of things felt like a big showpiece ability sitting around unused.

When I upgraded a few heavies with Bulletswarm rather than holotargeting - and, at about the same time, got around to getting them new weapons - that changed. I don’t doubt that some people get great use out of holotargeting, but for me it’s hard to beat a low level “shoot twice” ability. If you’re on one side of a doorway pre-breach range often isn’t an issue - and even at range bulletswarm has a good chance to hit considered cumulatively, and also two chances to destroy cover even on misses, which is sort of “free holotargeting.”

3767

Yeah, Bullet Swarm is much more useful than holotargeting, a measly +10 is usually unneeded by the end game, especially when snipers pretty much hit whatever they are aiming at by the mid game.

I just find that the accuracy of a fully leveled Heavy is anemic. Maybe they work better in concert with holotargeting with each other, but the other classes don’t need the holotargeting, and get either Sprint, Run n Gun, or Squad Site. This makes it hard for the Heavy to use either Rockets or Bullet Swarm effectively in concert with other squad members.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the rockets, but I just think having more than one on the team is overkill, as they don’t really bring much to the table other than Rockets and HEAT. And PSI powers tend to eclipse the Rockets, as the psi storm can be fired on the move.

Granted I haven’t got a chance to play with a Blaster Launcher yet either, the battleship hasn’t shown itself in my Classic game yet, and I never shot it down during my Normal game.

Exampe: Accuracy cribbed from here:
http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Soldiers_(EU2012)#Ranks

A fully leveled Heavy has a overall accuracy bonus of… +20. A fully leveled Assault has +48, Support: +50, and the sniper, holy hell: +80

3768

Think about what a heavy would be like if it had the same +aim increases from promotions, though. It’d be a damage monster.

As-is, if you have to move and fire it’s a tough, hard-hitting, somewhat less accurate soldier. On the occasions when you get two shots off with reasonable accuracy it’s accurate and hard-hitting (with a chance of two hard hits.) On the not-insignificant number of occasions when you don’t have to move and have a short range engagement it’s up there with a double-tap sniper.

I usually ran with just one because I was used to having two assaults and two supports by the time I started appreciating heavies. But I can totally understand people who are into two-three of them.

3769

Yeah, but now in the late game heavies can’t hit the broad side of a barn. I feel like they lose a lot of utility in the late game, blaster launchers aside, simply because they have a 50% chance of hitting while my snipers and supports have 80%+.

3770

I didn’t generally have odds that bad - was that normal or classic?

3771

I mainly used heavies for those random engagements in the field before you’ve taken up an ideal position with odds around 40-60%. Then the holotargeting actually does something. And for the occasional omigod rocket, made even more useful in gas stations and places like that.

3772

Normal I think, but Classic is at least as bad with my two colonels in my current playthrough.

3773

Yup, the Heavies only get a measly +1 accuracy for most of their levels (they get a +10 on their final level), and the range on the heavy weapons is also short. So for me, they tend to be frustrating to use. The double shot of Bullet Swarm is cool, but Rapid Fire is pretty much the same thing, but on a faster moving (with Run n Gun), more accurate soldier. It’s particularly frustrating against Sectopods, since they have armor that makes them hard to hit.

They can be really handy when the enemy is clustered and in heavy cover, as even if they don’t die from the rocket, putting them all out in the open can let them be shot like fish in a barrel.

3774

I know they’ve got the least +aim as well as a short ranged weapon, but I didn’t find it hard to keep them <50%.

Course, I also armed my Assaults with ARs, which meant there was “room” closer in for the heavy where someone else might have stuck their Assault with an Alloy Cannon in that same piece of cover.

3775

I ran into a strange bug yesterday: my assault guy kept getting an “enemy in sight” icon during his turn when there was none. I think it might have happened because first there were two Muton Elites and then somehow one of them got shot dead by my sniper on overwatch, but the game didn’t take account of his death.

3776

I’ve had a lot of similar sighting issues, especially when terrain is destroyed. Sometimes it takes several seconds of just switching between characters before it recalculates the LOS for the character I guess.

3777

In this case it lasted over several turns while outside, and didn’t get fixed until the same guy entered the UFO that the squad was assaulting.

Also, during a different mission, I had an experience reminiscent of the bad old X-Com days where you had to hunt down the last alien hidden away somewhere and it takes forever. This was on the big ship with the long raised walkways along the sides and the low walkway down the middle. I’d killed the sectoid commander in the last room, but the mission wouldn’t end, and my guys kept hearing noises coming from all kinds of different directions. Turns out that there was a Thin Man running back and forth on the roof of the UFO, d’oh!

3778

There’s a bug in the game where if an enemy is killed by overwatch fire during their “reveal” animation, they’ll occasionally register as a “ghost” sighted enemy, at the location they would have taken up if they hadn’t died while moving.

3779

Actually, that’s pretty awesome.

3780

It seems fairly common to have someone on the roof of the larger UFO types. Not sure if they’ve deployed there or if they just pathed oddly.