ShivaX
5164
And can easily jump on top of anything and get elevation on you as well.
All of which makes it hard to kill them quickly and reliably.
I’m including that - base stats are 75 aim / 10% crit, with the light plasma rifle it’s 85 / 20%. Shiva’s point about elevation is relevant, though. That’s +20, which means they’re 105 base if they’re above you, 85 if you’re in low cover, 65 in high cover. They are going to hit you.
In my current game I’m on a mission where a ship landed. The aliens are inside. I went inside, triggered them, killed a couple, and then retreated. They rolled out that big bad robotic thing that can move, shoot, and still be on overwatch. I lost one man to it trying to move him and it nailed him with his overwatch. So now I have all my guys around the entry point of the ship on overwatch. The problem is the aliens are not coming out and the big bad tin can is there on overwatch. If I try to go back in I’ll lose a guy just to get in. I’ve run off about 30 turns and the aliens are not coming out. Will they ever come out or are they waiting for me to trigger them again? I’m guessing the latter. Any ideas?
Alan_Au
5167
There are a couple of ways to approach this, depending on what you’ve got in your squad. If you have a way of cloaking (e.g. ghost armor) then you can try that. If you have an Assault with the “Lightning Reflexes” skill, you can also use that to protect you from overwatch fire while scouting. And of course, perhaps the simplest solution is to use grenades and/or rockets to create an opening and enable line of sight.
To invisibility and lightning reflexes, I’d add the fact that moving into line of sight does not trigger overwatch. Only moving out of a square in line of sight triggers it. So you can move into squares that are on the edges safely, provided you move to that square and you don’t have to cross open space to do it. There are side entrances to the big ships, so you can do this along the sides and main entrance simultaneously.
About Sectopods: it gets a free overwatch provided it fires its main cannon. If it doesn’t, and doesn’t go onto overwatch manually, it’s not on overwatch. If it doesn’t move, it can fire the main cannon twice. If you’re playing Enemy Unknown rather than Enemy Within, that cannon has a narrow area effect attack - don’t bunch up, you’ll all get hit.
Explosives can be a good idea when dealing with Sectopods. As is suppression and disabling shot. You might want to consider popping smoke as well.
Jinsai
5169
On Classic difficulty in the early missions, make sure to use your explosives. Yeah, you lose some fragments. Better than losing soldiers. Throw those grenades like crazy. If you get a Heavy, use that rocket. It makes a difference.
Also remember those same explosives can destroy cover in addition to inflicting damage, which can change a “probably going to miss that guy” to “kill him dead”.
When you first start, check your squad. If you see low will or low aim, take ONE of those squaddies with you. Make them the lead runner. If they bite it, well, they weren’t much use anyhow.
Sectopods are just brutal - there’s no two ways about it. If you can’t disable them for a turn, there’s a good chance somebody’s going to die. They are reason enough to make sure at least one of your team has “lightning reflexes”, to run past them and make their one overwatch shot miss. I found 1-2 snipers and a shotgunner with the “get within 4 squares and get a free shot” PLUS the “Double shot” perk were essential.
…and they may have lost their wide-beam cannon, but they still have that rocket area-of-effect attack, and it can be devastating.
Probably one of the most satisfying XCOM experiences ever is being in dangerous situation with a Sectopod and having your ballsy Assault guy with his freshly-minted Alloy Cannon get right in its face and destroy it with 2 critting Rapid Fire shots, and then do the reload animation - Ka-CHUNK :) It’s sublime, a “tipping point” where one loses that extreme fear of Sectopods one has when one first encounters them.
It’s interesting because Assaults are a great exception to the generally cautious style of gameplay that’s basic to the game - you get that leeway to do something crazy and if it pulls off, it’s brilliant. I love my Assaults.
Thongsy
5171
I lied, I went back and played again. I tried Normal IM just for the hell of it and it’s really incredible how much easier it is than Classic. Enemies just have slightly less health and hit for slightly less and even get hit more often than not when it says have I have 55% aim. While on Classic at 55% aim I miss 7-8 out of 10 of those shots.
I’m starting to think overwatch is a bit foolish on Classic Ironman since those seem to always miss too. I’m starting to think more smoke and hunker down is better. Though even with smoke my guys still get hit critically and die.
thither
5172
I really wish there was a setting between Classic and Normal on this game.
It really depends on your Aim and the target. Overwatch isn’t great early in the game, but Snipers and Sniper MECs killed a lot of aliens via Overwatch in my Classic Ironman game #20, which I just completed successfully. Assaults are pretty much a sure hit with reaction fire if they’re toting a shotgun-class weapon and the target is close, though it’s usually Close Combat Specialist that triggers that, since an Assault’s main purpose in life is to run up with Run And Gun blast an alien from the side at point-blank range, and hence they don’t have a lot of actions left over for overwatch.
That said, I almost never go into Overwatch if I have a visible alien unless he’s in high cover and I am concerned about him moving forward to flank another soldier. Overwatch is primarily for cases where my guys haven’t advanced enough to see the enemy, so they can get a shot at them as the enemy advances. Nor do I really want to want to park my soldiers where they’re trading shots - even better than hunker down is pulling out of line of sight entirely if the aliens have local superiority.
As for missing 7-8 shots out of 10 when the odds say 55%, that’s not my experience. My experience is that the odds are what the game says they are. It just feels a lot worse if you fall in the 45% miss if you’re counting on that attack to land, so there’s a tendency to double-count misses.
I think I’m a little bored now. I ran through a second Classic Ironman victory to prove to myself that the first one wasn’t a fluke, that I’d actually learned how to play again. In hindsight I think my frustration with games 1-17 was largely that I’d forgotten how to play, rather than the changes that came with Enemy Within.
There sure is a lot of new content in Enemy Within, but I’ve seen all the new maps, and I’ve seen the Exalt missions. I don’t really want to bump the difficulty in any way. I’m not sure there are a lot of ways I’d play the strategic game differently than I did. Either get a MEC early or don’t. Maybe push for the Gene Lab early instead, I guess, to get a Mimetic Skin soldier once you autopsy the Seekers. Maybe I’ll try a few of the Second Wave options provided they don’t increase the difficulty by much - the Training Roulette option seems like it would change the game the most, though it could potentially results in some weird nonsense mixes.
Thongsy
5176
It was probably just me being unlucky with the percentage shot but I’m not kidding when I was missing that much. Yet I was hitting much more on normal.
I went back to CI. I’m in month two on I think game 8 or 9 now. So far so good. I have a healthy number of scientists and engineers. I have laser weapons though I’m lacking in alloy to make a full set. I’m about 5 days out from carapace. My problem in this game is thus far I haven’t had an mission to grant me a free soldier yet so I can built the OTS and upgrade my squad size. I’m having to be very very careful with four people right now.
I’m playing the original on N/N, so not much to brag about, but I had one of those encounters where I faced of with two Sectopods in an open area in front of a downed UFO. Got the first one through a massive focused fire from the whole squad cover using rockets, grenades, everything. But the second one got way to close. It finally got down to my assault risking everything to run up out of cover (all nearby was blown up) close range, scatter laser rapid fire; last shot killed it. Intense!
I’m curious: can people playing non-Ironman restrain themselves when they loose soldiers? I find I really get attached to my squad. I customize them, rename them sometimes, and when they die it feels like a big loss. I hate it when it happens. But: it’s that permadeath that makes the game so intense: you know you will not be able to get them back if it goes wrong, or if you miss that shot. However, in a non-ironman game, that tension isn’t there, because I know I can always load a savegame. I shóuldn’t, but I just know I wouldn’t be able to resist the urge.
So, people playing non-ironman? Can you resist the urge to load an old save and save that soldier? If not, doesn’t that take a lot of tension out of the game for you? Mind you:I’m not judging, like I said I know I would reload, so I play Ironman to make sure I can’t. Just curious.
robc04
5179
I did my play through when the game first came out and the game was still buggy, so I didn’t even think about doing iron man. I think I reloaded a couple times, but not every time. I think I only lost a total of 5 guys. Once I got beyond the beginning, I don’t think death was a problem on normal difficulty. I bought the expansion when it was heavily discounted but I haven’t played it yet. I’m not sure if I can play iron man, because I could only get myself to play through the game once. If I play iron man and lose the campaign, I don’t think I can get myself to try again.
I do agree that playing iron man would make the game better, but I didn’t like the content enough so I would want to have to do it a 2nd time.
My second playthrough now I’m on normal. I’m playing like ironman though. I haven’t reloaded once and I’ve lost a lot of key soldiers.
BTW, are there plans to release DLC for the iOS version? I like playing it on my iPad. I’d buy the DLC for the iOS version.
So far, all I’ve read on the subject is ambiguity. They don’t know if Enemy Within will make it to the iPad.
Nah, I can’t resist it personally. But I see Ironman and play with saves as two different kinds of play. Ironman is definitely more intense and brings out the immersive element in the game very strongly, but playing with saves is also fun, in a slightly different way. It’s not as immersive but you do get to sort of “shape” your game, and nurture your little guys, in as elegant a way as possible, which has its own kind of fun factor.
