5184

Yes, with one. It gets much harder the closer you get to a full wipe.

My problem with Ironman is the last time I played, I misclicked and sent a guy into a position that basically fucked up the entire mission, leading to a full squad wipe.

I don’t mind losing because of my decisions, but I have a hard time handling full squad wipes half way through the game because I thought I clicked on the square behind cover and inadvertently clicked a square away.

5185

Yeah, I do that now and then. Or I forget to switch away from a pistol on a Sniper or Assault. Nothing like running up to flank an Outsider with a shotgun and then plinking him with a pistol instead.

I mind losing due to my poor decisions, as well. I just wiped on game #21 because I took an early Bomb Disposal mission, and the time pressure had me pushing forward faster than was safe, and I got caught out with guys in the open and no actions left to run to cover, a total rookie mistake, and it pissed me off no end. I hate wiping. I suppose you could argue that my real mistake was accepting a bomb disposal mission at all before I had squad size 6.

When I first started playing, I wasn’t using Ironman. I’d accept soldier deaths, but I wouldn’t accept a squad wipe. So in the case above, I would have just re-started the mission from the beginning. The problem is that it meant I’d continue to do sloppy things like rushing too fast on a bomb mission, and I wouldn’t really learn not to do that ever because I’d restart the mission.

I’m trying out Training Roulette, which is proving kind of interesting. I’m running lots of skills that I don’t normally take, like Battle Scanner and Sentinel, because I’m getting them early enough that they they seem valuable, and the alternative isn’t overhwelmingly better (I never pass up Disabling Shot because it’s so important for handling Sectopods). I had an Assault take Sentinel because Suppression made even less sense, and he managed to kill a Floater with two Pistol overwatch shots, which was kind of cool. Of course, he later died because, well, I didn’t put the pistol away, as I mentioned above.

5186

I couldn’t restrain myself on non-ironman mode. I reloaded constantly. I would accept some death and always by the end had 30-40 dead squad members but I still reloaded a lot. Mainly cause I was impatient and didn’t really do the overwatch creep like I’m doing now. I think having now played Ironman mode I can go back to non-ironman and not be so worried about it. Oh yea, also because I renamed my squad members so I was pretty much very attached to them especially when I gave them my name so I couldn’t just let myself die.

I’m on my 9th Ironman try and I think I’m finally going to get it this time. I’m in late June and am debating whether to do the Base Assault now or wait another month. I have lost all of Asia except Japan which I might actually lose this month unless I do the Base Assault. I feel my team could use a little more training but I don’t want to be facing any tougher enemies than I already have to by going in a month later.

5187

Anyone stooped so low as to ctrl-alt-delete force quit in Ironman before the game auto-saves?

5188

I did it once accidently because I got angry after I put my MEC right next to a floater. I get ready to do my rocket punch and instead he punches a rock. Ticked me off especially since I was down to my last two squad members and he had 100% aim on the floater.

5189

I almost never play games in true Ironman mode because I don’t have nearly enough play time to be replaying stuff over and over (and in semi linear games like Xcom, I think I’d find the game too boring if I was forced to restart and replay the beginning as many times as people have described in this thread). Despite that, I have definitely resisted the urge to reload (in order to save fallen soldiers) in XCom:EU more times than not. Like you say, that sort of permadeath is meant to be part of the game, so I’ve tried to embrace it. I followed some advice I heard on a podcast by naming and customizing each soldier to represent an actor on my favorite TV show. The lost have been mourned, but I had trained backup soldiers from the start so I can absorb a few losses here and there.

That said, I have reloaded quite a few times too. In most strategy games I play, I try to set rules for myself on when it’s ‘fair’ to reload. In this case, I’m not really worried about losing outright in XCom, so I don’t mind losing soldiers too much so long as it was a clean death (rather than a bug or a UI error/misclick, etc.). I’ve never, for example, reloaded because I thought the RNG ‘rolls’ were unfair. I also accept that my soldiers are facing an unknown enemy, so the first time the Sectopod ambushed me with its rocket attack or a Muton ‘missed’ and destroyed a wall, opening LoS to another soldier, I took it on the chin.

I also set up special circumstances where I plan to reload in advance (e.g., for testing out some of my abilities or weapons). I don’t consider these things cheating because, as the commander, I should know how the rocket launchers perform before I have to use them in the field. I consider this a flaw in the game’s info and/or a weakness in my not having a firing range in the base.

In most cases the bugs I’ve seen didn’t kill anyone anyway, but I still reloaded because I didn’t think it was right to have the Mutons teleport into my squad.

I may have also flat-out cheated a few times simply to avoid the annoying/tedious consequences of a mistake. I can’t remember actually doing it, but I know that I’ve considered reloading when soldiers were critically wounded because I really dislike the will and ‘panic’ implementation in XCom:EU (I don’t think it’s fair that they always take the Will hit, and I find it especially obnoxious because of the way soldiers ‘panic’ and get free shots that are carefully aimed. I’d be fine with soldiers spraying fire haphazardly, but the idea that my sniper panics and decides to draw a careful bead on the trooper 10 meters to his right is just absurd).

5190

I agree with both those things. Frankly, the Will penalty for a critical wound is so serious that it really destroys the point of having a mechanic where you can save badly wounded soldiers. In Enemy Unknown, I almost always dismissed a crippled soldier after a mission if I didn’t let them die outright, and I didn’t bother making an effort to save them unless I’d eliminated all visible hostiles first. Enemy Within addresses this with the Secondary Heart gene mod, which makes it worthwhile to save injured soldiers. Also, arguably the Lead By Example upgrade in the OTS takes a lot of the sting out of the Will loss, since PTSD soldiers will do OK as long as they’re fairly close to a high Will squad leader.

Similarly, panic is awfully crippling when it results in a soldier losing their action. Having them take out a friendly results in cases where you can have a squad wipe just because of a particularly bad Panic die roll. I’d be much happier if Panic never resulted in a fire action for either friendlies or aliens. Running away or cowering are much more reasonable models of how panic works, and far less unbalancing.

5191

In an unrelated note, I’ve been playing with a few Second Wave options. I think Not Created Equally and Hidden Potential both make the game easier, period. Sure, you get a few rookies that suck, but you don’t have to use them. Some soldiers will end up with much better stats than average - so far I’ve seen a fair number of Aim 75 rookies and one Aim 80. There are enough of these that you just use the exceptional troops, and you get some soldiers with stats that are normally impossible, like a high-accuracy Heavy. The upshot is a substantial across-the-board improvement to your soldiers at the slight cost of having to hire more soldiers to get the good ones.

For the people who would like to see a difficulty between Classic and Normal, you might try Classic with those two options.

5192

I haven’t found Will loss or panic to be an issue in EW at all. The new medal and OTS project can make it irrelevant.

When a soldier panics and decides to shoot, they’ll always shoot at an enemy target if one is available. Thus how dangerous panic-shooting can be depends on your playstyle.

5193

Now I understand why my guys panic so darn much. I was just looking at their stats and they’re all below 50.

Well I’m on the Base Defense and I’m not sure how I’m going to get through this. First time, it glitched on me and no aliens spawned at all. But now that I’m actually going through it, all the guys it gives me for it are in basic armor and equipment. I was trying level up my other squad members taking them out on a downed UFO so I never changed equipment back to my main squad. I’m either going have to be very very lucky or this is where I will rage-quit.

5194

The other part that bugs me a bit is when I discover they’ve “changed the rules” and I lose a number of guys because of it.

Just for example, I just went through my first Exalt covert op pick up mission.

I did my ordinary guys on either side of the door. But little did I know, the Exalt guy in the middle of the building suddenly has the same rocket as the heavy.

I’ve never seen it before, and it basically killed 3 of my 6 guys. That mission was pretty much a disaster, and on Classic, losing 3 out of 6 guys is pretty much the end. Do I deserve that if I knew about the Exalt capabilities and stupidly bunched up? Sure. Do I want to waste about 3-4 hours of gameplay up to that point because, “Oh hey, you didn’t know this, but these guys have rockets and your ordinary tactics don’t work in fact they got you killed?” No, not really.

5195

I had this happen to me in my ironman game, where I was leveling my B-team and had used the “unequip all” shortly beforehand. Unfortunately, it takes your highest-promoted soldiers and puts them into the defense without letting you equip them first. I lucked out and my fully-equipped medic arrived during a reinforcement wave, letting me stabilize the Colonels who were bleeding out and squeak by with a win, but everybody was stuck in the infirmary for weeks afterward, all having been reduced to 1-2 health by the end of the battle.

The bad news is that losing the base defense is an instant loss. The good news is that the game then lets you replay the mission, because the Firaxis design team make a conscious decision that no single mission should be a game-ender. The “problem” with ironman is that without advance knowledge, stuff like that is a complete surprise as compared to regular missions where you initiate the combat.

5196

It is a bit of my own fault, I knew it was coming the month after the Alien Base Assault. I guess I just didn’t expect it this early and was think I had another week or so. I had 3 of my A team members getting gene mods, another 2 or 3 were injured from the previous mission which was like one or two days before. So it basically gave me my B+ team without armor. I think I can make it through this but it’s not going to be pretty…

Edit: After trying it a couple of more times I think it’s a no win situation for me. My B-/C+ team just isn’t hacking it. There is not enough firepower for me to make it through this. Maybe if I just hold up in the Command Center and have everything come to me. But I’ll probably still lose just due to only doing 3 or so damage per shot when everything has like 15-20 health.

5197

Lots of interesting reactions on my Ironman question! I’m honestly impressed that so many people are capable of letting their decorated, customized colonel die, as long as his/her dead doesn’t involve bugs (in which case, a reload is warranted IMO). I really don’t think I could do it, but the fact that several deads in my playthroughs have been caused by my own ‘less then perfect’ strategy may have something to do with that. If I know I made a stupid mistake, I’m just too tempted to correct it, if I can. Playing on Ironman prevents that, and at the same time forces me to think harder and be more carefull.

However, the idea that you can see certain situations as training, and therefor are allowed to reload, is interesting too. This might just be a way for me to get into Classic a bit further then I have managed sofar. Up till now, I always run into a wipe after a few Classic missions, due to me using mostly Normal strategies in Classic. I might try a non-Ironmangame where I allow myself to reload as much as I like, just to learn the correct strategies…

5198

Both playing Ironman, and doing this, help you learn the game better, I think. Ironman makes you slow down and consider each move more carefully, and playing with saves and tapping F10 just before any move you have a feeling will be dicey, enables you to go back to the same position and vary tactics to discover an optimum tactic (since, because of the seed system, if you do exactly the same moves you’ll get exactly the same result, then on each reload you can try different moves and see what varies in exactly that setup).

On a side-note for me, I’ve been having a few weird XCOM-ey dreams. The other night I had a sort of James Bond-themed dream where, during some sort of gala event in London, I was hunting snipers to save the Queen (bizarrely, Trafalgar Square was a swampy island :) ). Last night I had a dream with Vampires taking over the world, so Vampires vs. Humans. Both dreams had a top-down view, and a sense of cover, and of LOS and avoiding it, although thankfully they weren’t turn-based :)

5199

Thats what I find most difficult about playing Ironman. That and accidentally firing my pistol instead of the sniper rifle because I forgot to switch back. Part of the reason I play turn based games is because I don’t want manual dexterity or time pressure to enter into it, I just want my intentions to manifest on the battlefield, for better or worse.

When not in ironman mode, I’ve discovered that you can turn on auto-save, and the random number generator will generate the same numbers after reloading a save. Reload a game and then execute your actions in the same order, and you can recreate the conditions that existed before your misclick. It does mean that you have to watch your assault guy miss that same easy close range shot a second time, so it requires a certain amount of discipline to play “fake ironman”.

Tony

5200

I just had one of those XCom moments. My first Council mission, and I’m doing pretty well. Then a Heavy takes an overwatch shot at a running Thin Man, and destroys the tall crate protecting my Assault instead. Naturally the Thin Man then nails her for an instant death critical hit - that’s virtually assured when you’re in the open and only have basic armor. One soldier panics, and another is out of ammo, but my Heavy can take a shot at the Thin Man with his rocket for a virtually assured kill. Except I get one of those rare rocket misses, and the Thin Man nails the Heavy as well.

I still managed the rest of the mission with the remaining 2 soldiers, but there’s a reason why squad 6 is such an important upgrade.

5201

I lost the base defense mission for the first time. For whatever reason, the first two times I got that far, I managed it fine - no casualties. This time it was a wipe. It feels like this was my weakest team, and they threw a lot more stuff at me this time. The initial three waves weren’t so bad, but the next three waves didn’t want to come into the command center, and wiped me out when I tried assaulting the MEC bay. Eventually I was reduced to a couple of squaddies vs. a Sectoid Commander, and when they tried to attack him he mind controlled one and the remaining soldier couldn’t kill the Commander before her partner killed her.

Ironman does indeed let you restart the mission after losing, but after playing Ironman for a while, restarting from a save game even though the Ironman mode allows it feels like cheating. I’m tempted to abandon the game even though if I win the base defense mission, I’m pretty much set, since I have 12/16 satellite coverage. Wiping just pisses me off a lot.

In hindsight, I think I just played the last half of the mission badly. Yeah, they had three Mechtoids, a Cyberdisc, a couple of berserkers, and 3 Sectoid Commanders, but I never seemed to face all of that at once, though I did have three Mechtoids shooting at my guys at one point, which is bad news when you don’t have heavy armor yet.

5202

I’ve only played the base defense once, but once I cleared the Command Centre I set up camp on the balcony overlooking the MEC bay, threw out a couple of sniper scanners. Then used height advantage and snipers/support to do some damage, with Assaults run-and-gunning to finish them off. I also used the “free” staff as suicidal scouts, although from memory I’d already killed them all off before the MEC bay was invaded.

5203

I replayed the mission this morning after cooling off, and pulled it off without taking more than minor wounds, though of course the security rookies took a lot of casualties. I happened to be mostly in the MEC bay at the end of the arial wave, and yeah, it helps a lot to be on the MEC bay balcony as they come in from the ceiling. It’s a lot easier to kill a Sectoid Commmander that is still in the open than behind cover.

I don’t really quite understand the AI. While the mission seems to randomize what you get, I once again had a bunch of Mechtoids spawn first, and a Cyberdisc come in last, but the Mechtoids didn’t advance until long after the Cyberdisc had attacked and died. The aliens are all activated in this mission, so there’s no “first turn surprise” as with most missions, but it seems like the individual aliens do a lot of aimless wandering around anyway.