4964

My covert op agent had mimetic skin, so i scouted their position before hand and anticipated their moves.

Also most of their units don’t use overwatch so you can be pretty agressive against them.

4965

Right, but surely 10% + 0% if I’m in full cover per my remark?

4966

There are people on twitch doing I/I runs with all second wave options enabled. Not just the starting ones, all the ones that unlock after you beat impossible already and only make things harder. You have to rush alien base just to survive as there is essentially no way to build satellites fast enough with the increased costs from the various options combining together.

Game really needs more randomness though. Way too much reliance on scripted missions and it still sucks to repeat even a single council mission. Something like Portent is brutally hard the first time, but after you fail it’s trivial because the same enemies spawn in exactly the same spots!

4967

sadly i’m shelving this until a patch arrives. I have found a very serious bug where heavies drop out of cover after shooting (or maybe only after suppression fire), than they can’t stick to cover no matter where you put them

4968

Finally figured how how to handle them (Exalt).

I was on the map that’s like a bridge/road with a building in the middle, with the nodes on either side. What I learned:

  1. Snipers with squad sight are the bomb, I used them again and again. Find the a node, set up your snipers with clear lines of sight and have at it. I had 2, 3 would have been even better.
  2. DON"T move your agent at first. He’ll just give away his position first and if Exalt sees him/her they will ignore your troops, even if you attack them, to kill your agent. Get the attention of Exalt with your troops, then the Exalt troops will move to attack and your agent will be relatively free to move. On the other hand you can’t wait forever because other Exalt troops will appear soon near your agent.
  3. Use rockets and grenades liberally and use them first. Because if you don’t, Exalt will use them. Find the their rocketeer and kill him no matter what. Same goes for their sniper.
  4. Don’t bunch up, see 3) above.
  5. I’ve only played one mission but the game blatantly “cheated” IMO. When my agent got the first node, 3 Exalt agents dropped right on top of her. Only the fact that hacking the node disabled Exalt weapons saved my agent, who promptly dashed to safety. In addition, once my agent got close to the extraction zone, again 3 Exalt troopers dropped all around the zone. I basically had one turn to kill them all or my agent was toast. Both of these seemed a bit unfair to me.
4969

I think I need a refresher on cover as I just had a round when an alien on overwatch saw me from running behind a wall of all heavy cover and shot me through it with apparently no line of sight. Besides that,one area that I’m still struggling with is knowing how to move around aliens, as it seems like characters are always being detected or being shot at from overwatch.

4970

This was my first Mimetic skin too. I then got it on my covert agent (which is just as awesome) and I’m currently moving on to get it on my support (whose increased movement usually means they are out in front).

Love the game, I didn’t get to play because it came out a few weeks before the game I was working on so I didn’t have time. But I’m having a great time with it and the expansion. Unfortunatly I’m getting a lot of hang during the AI turns in the battles. So I’m going to wait for a patch before continuing.

4971

Approaching the Node will ALWAYS spawn helicopter Exalt. So never go to it unless you have a perimeter set up on Overwatch. And never EVER sprint to one, always be able to activate the thing so you can turn off their weapons and get the Agent to cover in case the RNG completely screws you over. Most of the time your Agent can hide out and just wait for everyone else to get to them. Moving just activates Exalt and ends in tears. The only time they’re really an issue is when they’re running around trying to find cover and blunder into siad Agent, then it becomes a bit tricky.

Exalt missions are usually all about creating a kill zone/perimeter and then killing dudes as they run in/magically appear. You’d think we could deal with a helicopter, I mean I shoot down alien battleships on my day off, but apparently I can’t deal with a couple Hueys roaming around. I think once you get Firestorms you should have the option to send them in to support and Exalt can’t drop dudes from the sky anymore (or they drop from the sky on fire and in molten pieces from Plasma Cannons to the face).

4972

Finished my C/I game. Last 1/3 of the game still has the huge flaw where the only way to gain panic is from lost terror missions, so losing missions has little consequence and there’s no threat of losing the game itself even from a full squad wipe. I still thinking adding increasingly difficult base attack missions would be a simple fix, just a clock really, if they don’t want to redesign late game panic and actually fix it.

I somehow did the Portent DLC after the base attack and Exalt were gone so it didn’t make very much sense.

Mimetic skin is broken. Needs a serious nerf.

4973

Plasma pistols in normal, I believe.

4974

I’m sorry, but this new Enemy Within is quite unfair. I have beat classic on the vanilla game, but the first escort mission Enemy Within gave me, about 2 missions into the game, has about 4 squads of thin men until I get to the survivor, then about 5 or 6 squads on the way back. This is when I have rank 2 squaddies. What bullshit.

4975

When dealing with Thin Men, it helps that even just carrying a medkit makes a trooper immune to poison (so it’s a good idea to put one on your pointman). Another trick is to use overwatch while you have line of sight, which will often cause the aliens to just hold position, sometimes without even returning fire.

4976

About the chryssalid / boat mission, I’ve found the easiest thing to do is leave most of my force on the ground floor of the boat entrance on overwatch and then send one guy up to the tower via skeleton suit grappling hooks; once he’s up there everyone can beat a tactical retreat back to the shuttle.

I was completely unable to handle the base attack on Classic (it didn’t help that I’d just sent my three best troops into psychic scanning so they weren’t available). I got to the final wave, but I was still just holed up in the first room and I didn’t have the firepower to finish the remaining enemies - the second wave hadn’t even arrived at my position yet. Any tips on how to survive that? Should I be advancing towards the enemy instead of just holing up on overwatch?

4977

Yeah, once I figured that out, the EXALT missions become fairly trivial – they will always bee-line it for the next point, so you just need to get in cozy little sniper-holes and plink them off as they run into your kill-boxes.

I’m on the last mission now, and apparently there is nothing that EW adds to the final “Temple” assault. We’ll see if there is anything after that or not.

I may go back and replay it again on C/I; I had a great time with this expansion so far.

4978

Note that you can skip council missions without consequence. I always skipd a bomb disposal mission if it’s the first one I roll up.

4979

I was disappointed to find out there wasn’t. In fact they didn’t even seem to place any seekers or mechtoids on the map?

4980

Same mission, Normal, no problem for me. All you need to do is move slowly, trigger the TM one squad at a time and kill them.

4981

On Normal Thin Men are insane murder machines.

That mission is pure bullshit on Classic. The way everything is laid out pretty much guarantees death with little recourse. I ended up not even doing it on my most successful playthrough. Thin Men are just too brutal, especially when they get to sit 3 stories above you and you’re a small squad of newbies.

4982

I 100% did not play either of those missions, so it seems like there is some randomness to the scripted one-off council missions. It does sound like everyone is getting the whaler/airstrike mission, though. LOL I wouldn’t put it past Firaxis for this to be scripting bug, actually. Now I feel cheated!

And yeah, the key to dock missions is a staggered firing retreat. Fall back in tight tight groups. There’s no reason to ever go inside the ship at all.

4983

I want to say I saw some seekers in the room where the chrysalids teleport in. Did I make that up?