4523

The civilization series didn’t place you in an linear overarching story line to begin with. Also, there were always scenarios added to that series.

4524

Couldn’t agree more with this. They’re taking the right approach.

4525

If they add some depth to the strategic mode above what they are already doing Id play the death out of it.

4526

Sooo… To discourage the incredibly slow and mindless tactic required at higher difficulties, they’re introducing resource containers with self-destruct timers.

[insert facepalm img here]

The teleporting spawns that get half an out-of-turn-turn when they see you or are attacked, are the primary causes of the tactic they want to discourage. Both teleport and pop mechanics require troopers stick together in a neat little clump of overwatch, total mutual coverage, and that the lot stay in full cover or hunkered down at all times. It’s the only way to defend against getting randomly wiped out by those two mechanics.

Another huge incentive to play ultra safe, is that although replacement troopers are inexpensive - far too cheap even - veteran troopers are irreplaceable. Levelled troopers are far, faaar more effective than rookies, so much so that losing then with any kind of frequency in an impossible game, is a game over.

And of course, there’s the map sizes. They’re so small that assuming you could afford to spread out your troopers, and that the craptastic spawn system didn’t instantly murder you for it, and that you could afford to lose a trooper or two per mission because replacing them was primarily a question of monies… Assuming all that, there’d simply be no reason to. The maps aren’t so large as to lend themselves to trying to operate in several areas of them at the same time.

So yeah… Self-destructing resources will totally do what they’re supposed to. No doubt about that. At all.

  • Yes I’m still buying it. Shut up :p
4527

It will be interesting to see how they balance things out, and it may also cause some people to NOT play at the higher dificulty levels.

4528

Ugh overuse of countdown timers… Just what i wanted…

4529

There’s also the problem that with only 6 squaddies, sending one guy out on a suicide mission means losing a lot of your force; meanwhile, the aliens outnumber you 2:1 all the way up to 6:1, and many of them cannot be taken out by squaddie going one-on-one with them. In the original, you could at least approach numbers parity with the aliens, and you only really got screwed when it came to the big missions, like battleships and aliens bases, where there were a lot of aliens and a lot of their “heavy backup” like sectopods.

4530

Wowsers decided to mess around with this again and am just getting smoked on IC - my skills have decayed :(

4531

Try to make sure your mans stick close enough at all times, that at least 2 will get hit if something throws a grenade your way. I know how that sounds, but grenades are totally survivable. Plasma not so much.

If you can’t bring to bear every weapon you have by doing so, don’t try to move into range. Back off instead. 90% of survival in XCOM is god-like patience.

Always move into full cover, and if you can’t fire and kill everything in range, hunker down. Hunkering down behind full cover isn’t remotely safe, but if you plan on spending a turn in something’s line of fire, nothing less has any meaningful impact on whether you eat plasma & die or not.

Try to memorise what terrain can’t be destroyed, and prioritise using it (pillars, pretty much).

When you need to kill something make sure all your mans can shoot at it, so position them behind cover & with a shooting action left, before you actually start shooting, overwatching & whatnot. Because chances are 2/3rds of your team will miss, and that you’ll need at least 1/3rd of them to kill a single alien.

Never underestimate your own grenades. Not that you should research improved ones, that’s a waste of time and resources. But your basic grenades can remove quite large areas of cover. You should always try to be careful not to kill anything with grenades unless you really have to. Killing stuff with grenades destroys the loot. Just blowing the crap out of them & then shooting them dead doesn’t destroy the loot.

As soon as you have 1 assault with… Lightning Reflexes? The thingy that denies the first hostile overwatch shot, uhm… As soon as you have that, try never to end your turn without someone in overwatch. Overwatch makes aliens stay put 99% of the time, even if it’s a sniper with a basic pistol surrounded by a mob of mutons. But it also makes them very likely to go into overwatch themselves, so do get into the habit of moving your assaults first. Because unlike XCOM solders, aliens are crack shots on overwatch.
But uhm… Point is that overwatch is how you go about flanking & ganking without having to chase down your targets and inevitably popping every last spawn on the map in the process.

If you’re ever tempted to make a trooper run, save your game, shut it down & go do something else. If you still feel the urge when you come back, ask yourself if the trooper is running towards enemies, into unrevealed map, or into revealed map and away from enemies. Unless the answers are no, no & yes, respectively, what you’re feeling is almost certainly the urge to fail hard.

Popped aliens who can’t see you, generally don’t really do much. The sniper’s radar thingy conveniently lasts two turns, meaning you can spot a gaggle and if they’re not the teleporting kind, you can shoot one of then the next turn to pop the spawn. After which they’ll sit around where you found them, doing nothing. Until you wander into their line of sight.

Beware, if you pop a teleporting spawn without neither of you having conventional LoS, it won’t necessarily stop teleporting. Ever. Usually they do stop at some point, but chances are you’ll manage to kill them or get killed by them before they stop zipping about. If this happens, try to set up around one of the teleport points. The points are fixed, so if you see a spawn materialise somewhere, they’ll eventually come back to that point. Also be aware that if, whether by map glitch or sniper, your first kill is from a teleporting spawn that has not been popped, then every teleporting spawn on that map will materialise somewhere within 20’ish tiles of one of your troopers over the next 1-2 turns (except the one you got your first kill from, that spawn will keep teleporting around as described above). Usually just 1 turn. If you know it’s going to happen, it can be a very quick and safe way to get through most the enemies (bring heavies). If you don’t, you’ll probably get the entire team killed in a single turn. I’m not sure whether this is a bug or not (I played a month or two ago and it wasn’t fixed then), but it’s actually kind of practical once you know about it.

4532

I picked up the Slingshot pack during the last Steam sale, so I finally got around to firing this up again. The Slingshot missions themselves are okay, but only because I haven’t seen them before. However, the overall mission arc is unchanged and is still fairly uninteresting. I’m definitely not looking forward to storming the temple ship again. At least it has been long enough that I’ve forgot the exact map layouts, so I guess that’s a good thing, so this replay isn’t as tedious as it might have been otherwise.

I’m using most of the non-funding-related Second Wave options. I don’t think I’d be satisfied with the vanilla ruleset anymore, although I can see how it would be useful during an Impossible-level game.

I’m pretty sure that my next playthrough will be a “pistols only” run. This has the side effects of making heavies useless and laser pistols useful. I haven’t decided if I’ll allow SHIVs or not.

4533

Not playing with SHIV’s would probably reduce my overall enjoyment of the game by a solid 40%. :)

4534

I can’t see doing a “pistols only” run since the class-specific weapons are a big part of the game.

4535

So finally got around to starting my pistols-only run. Equipment and rockets allowed because they’re limited-use. SHIVs and psi allowed but only in a defensive capacity. The main rationale is to encourage me to explore otherwise ignored skills and research options. Laser pistols suddenly become a priority. Snipers become pistoliers (and yes, you can get squad sight overwatch fire with pistols). Heavies become grenadiers.

So far, things are going okay, but it’s only really been Sectoids up to now. The real hazard is that it takes a LOT longer to kills things, which means the aliens get more chances to throw plasma in my face. I find I’m also prioritizing scientists over engineers, because I need lasers sooner rather than later. What a weird game.

4536

You think the game is weird when you’re the one going with pistols only?

4537

I think he meant what a weird playthrough. playthrough/game.

4538

I don’t think i’ve seen anyone mention this, but steam is listing xcom: enemy within at an insane $29.99!!!.

What the hell are they thinking here. Everything i’ve seen describing the changes does not sound like a large DLC, much less an expansion. With their recent failures in making crap DLC that is also overpriced, i expected this wouldn’t be a great value, but even my greatest fears were it would be $20.

Assuming the descriptions of what this pack contains are accurate, I might have paid $10 for it, but for $29.99 they can shove this DLC in to their enemy within.

4539

I don’t see anything wrong with $30 - they are adding a ton of new content, upgrades and weaponry, new classes, new enemies, a LOT more maps, and a bunch of much needed changes and hopefully some polish. If it bothers you just wait for a sale.

4540

Inclined to agree. If it added randomized maps and removed/rejiggered the council missions I would’ve hopped on $30 easily enough, but a few new tech branches that I may not really use anyway, a new resource that promotes running into the game’s broken blob spawning system, and then 40 new maps in rotation with the ones you’ve played 50 times in a single campaign before just isn’t doing it for me.

Bums me out because I liked Nuxcom overall, it’s just not very replayable for me.

4541

I agree with Mr. Squee,
XCOM is not replayable for me.
Even at a bargain price,
This won’t make me play through twice.

4542

Great, more small, simple, boring maps that all look the same.

We’re talking about DLC to a game that made Dragon age 2 look like it had good maps. They don’t exactly get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to maps.

Although maybe now their bullshit claim about not seeing the same map twice in a single game will actually be true.