The easy way of doing that mission is to immediately move right and hug the right wall and move slowly up it. The lids come to you but they’re strung out enough so they’re easy to kill, then when you get to the wooden ramp up to the ship, park the team there, and send the fastest (scout, assault) up the middle row of tiles on the deck of the ship (so as to be not visible from down inside the ship or down outside the ship) to do the clickie, soon as you hit the clickie, scoot everyone double-move back to the exit hugging the same wall.
There’s a possible danger point when the clickie is done, you have to be careful to not be caught in a major firefight at that point (neither the team nor the solo scooter), but there are enough turns for a few fighting single moves on the way back, you just have to play it by ear. Usually you don’t see any of the lids that burst out of the ship until maybe you’re on the exit marker, and you might get one coming at you along the main road, but by that time usually pretty much the whole team is ready to exit.
I hate when that happens, when there is a spike in difficulty and the solution is basically cheat your way to success, exploiting prior knowledge you shouldn’t have of that mission of whatever. :/
An anecdote I remember sometimes was how many years ago I was playing for the first time Baldur’s Gate 1, and after the first few hours, I started having problems with the combat, it was a bit too hard for me, I was losing each time more and more life and resources and finally dying. I searched for tips of how to do it better, and instead of what I expected, actual squad tactics and synergies, I found cheese and more cheese, usually exploiting the really lacking AI. It turned me off and I left the game.
In fact I wonder if when people remember the “high” difficulty of the olde rpg games, the rose-colored glasses makes them not remember how you were supposed to go above that difficulty, by almost breaking the systems.
I don’t remember cheesing too much in BG1. At some point (an expansion, or maybe it was even BG2, or just some stage in the game) pulling enemies one-by-one no longer worked. The main cheese I remember was in the final battle, kiting the main baddie with a character with boots of speed while everyone else plinked away with arrows. That and using the wand of monster/skeleton summoning to hold him down as well. I rationalize that as, you know, just being agile against a big slow fighter. That’s tactics, right? And in BG2 there was the Cloak of Mirrors vs Beholders cheese. But beholders are pure cheese anyway.
I think part of the problem was the AD&D 2e rules. High-level spellcasters were basically pure cheese by the rules. “Oh hey, here’s this spell that makes me immune to weapons. And another one that makes me immune to magic. And let’s stop time while we’re at it.”
All that said, I definitely agree that ye olde RPGs with “high difficulty” were cheesier than a Wisconsin state fair. People are better at game design these days, but I still think there’s something lost now that we’ve moved away from “linear fighter, quadratic mage”. (And to be fair, there’s more to an RPG like BG than the combat.)
By “the right wall” I presume you mean not the extreme right edge of the map, but the boardwalk type thing above the docks, which ends in the makeshift ramp up to the deck of the ship. I pretty much did that, but I didn’t park everyone but the assault guy at the ramp, rather, a bit further onto the deck nearest the dock (in order to protect the runner). That unfortunately ends up triggering the two chrisalyds on the dock.
I don’t see how the whale chrysalids can fail to be triggered by going up the middle set of deck tiles, but maybe I need to look at the map again.
RichVR
5588
Don’t forget to destroy the hanging sharks on the way in. They will spawn chrysalids on the way back.
The Newfoundland mission is terrible any way you look at it. I understand the thought of the designers to create something that was not slow and methodical (i.e. the rest of the game), but a gotcha-rush mission was not it.
RichVR
5590
Totally agree. The first time I encountered it I felt kinda betrayed. It was like they decided to throw in an impossible challenge. My feeling is that if I’m a veteran turn based gamer, then my normal skill set should be enough. If, up until now I have had one, maybe two KIAs and some injuries, I shouldn’t suddenly expect a team wipe. It was an outlier.
No, I mean the extreme right edge of the map (from the start point, facing where the ship is in the distance). Turn immediately right, go to that right wall, hug it all the way up to where the ship is, then move left a little bit against the edge of the dock to where there’s a kind of large wooden ramp up to the deck, that’s when you send your scout onto the ship.
IIRC 3 waves of lids will attack as you move up that edge of the map, but there’ll be plenty of time inbetween to reload, etc., and none of them will be able to reach you, and they’ll be easy to deal with.
The middle row of tiles on the deck will not alert anything.
I loved Newfoundland. I did it on normal with zero casualties going in blind, but it was close. MECs with Kinetic Strike really helped. Is that mission much worse on harder?
If everyone has to dash every turn in order to make it, how can they defend themselves against attacks on the aliens’ turns?
There’s just enough time to retreat while leaving some of the group on overwatch/using abilities after moving. Don’t bother killing unless necessary. You won’t get their corpses at the end. The mission is very unrewarding so you could just skip it if you keep having trouble.
Thongsy
5593
I think I hit Newfoundland mid-late gameish on hard or one above that. I think it was late August/ early September and it was a cakewalk for me. I only sent one person into the ship with some kind of cloaking if I remember correctly. So they were the only one that really had to dash all the way back. Everybody else did a leapfrog method.
I need to build a new PC, in anticipation of XCOM 2 and all the other pc games I been missing out on lately.
Thanks for all the replies and strategies. I ended up going with KiloOhm’s suggestion to put almost all my people but one on top of the small building off the side of the ship: that way they could cover my main assault guy as he was retreating from the ship after turning on the transponder.
Razgon
5595
First time I did it, I had no mechs, and just lasers. That mission is no fun then, not even on Normal.
Yeah, I didn’t have anything fancy, just carapace armor and a couple of laser rifles. I really suck at the strategic overlay of the game, since it seems like I never have enough money. I already lost two council members in the second month.
Scotten
5597
I did it on highest difficulty armed solely with pistols. You guys suck!
XCOM is probably one of my favorite games to come out in a long while, but it definitely has some bits that subvert the core gameplay in ways I found really distasteful.
My biggest beef was always with the missions that would start spawning in baddies randomly on overwatch. I didn’t have so much of a problem with the enemies spawning in, but the fact they got to go immediately into overwatch – often times flanking my entire team – really broke it for me. It’s almost impossible from a story perspective to explain why the aliens don’t just do this all the time, you’re only ever given one tool to fight overwatch (The shotgun troops “auto miss” talent), and the entire system of carefully positioning troops to maximize survivability goes totally out the window when a hidden die roll could mean you made all the wrong moves.
Honestly, I don’t think Enemy Within was a good expansion for the game. It didn’t do a great job of building on the core systems. Some stuff, like the cloaked squid guys, was spectacular. You couldn’t just camp a sniper in the perfect perch anymore because the squids would get him without any support, and you could research an item that turned them off if you really wanted to keep camping.
But the teleporting overwatchers and missions like the air strike mentioned before were too ham-fisted in trying to change up the gameplay, where I felt just powerless in the face of a bad run on where aliens spawned.
Chris Woods
RichVR
5601
Sniper’s battle scanner uncloaks squid.
Hey, so I need some more advice on Enemy Within (vanilla, no Long War installed). I just got my second month’s council report, and it’s not looking good–two countries, Japan and France, have already withdrawn from XCOM. I only have two uplinks and 4 satellites up–one on the way, but it seems like I never have enough money, and almost no alien alloys, so I’m thinking I’ve somehow borked my game with bad decisions. Should I just start over and consult an advice wiki to have a chance of winning? Playing on Normal and save scumming too (not using the save scumming second wave option, though).
It’d be an easier game if you restarted, but it’s not necessary.
If I was you I’d just continue on with that one until something turns sour. This game is more fun to learn the hard way than reading rush guides IMO. You’ll want to launch sats near the end of the month if you aren’t already doing that. They can reduce panic right before a country withdraws at the council report.
