5604

And you can lose a number of countries w/o the wheels completely coming off, haven’t played in awhile but pretty sure you don’t get completely shut down till you lose 8 countries. Things of course will get a bit hairy by the time you lose 4 or 5 as money starts to dry up on you.

So, as Gigglemoo suggested, just press on. A big part of the charm of Xcom is pushing on as things unravel on you and seeing how and if you can hold it all together.

5605

You can pull off a win as long as you can assault the alien base before you lose all 7 countries. After that’s it’s pretty much smooth sailing even if you are at 6 (a design flaw, IMO).

5606

Or perhaps they just wanted to put some pyschological pressure on the player w/o it ending the game (unlike the 1st one where if you ran out of money the game just unceremoniously stopped). And given the nature of many gamers who dislike “losing” at any aspect of a game my guess is most felt this pressure and sought as much as possible to avoid losing any countries and a tension was in fact introduced that didn’t necessitate ending the game as a result.

For me, I liked the mechanism of introducing this pressure w/o terminating the game, they would have gotten a lot of complaints about that, especially when you consider 3/4’s of the gamers who played this never completed the campaign.

What I really didn’t like about it was the fact that the strategy level of the game as a result was one dimensional, basically throw sats into space as fast as you can. That’s not a choice among a series of options, it’s just one path, and once you’d played the game once you knew it.

5607

Realize everyone at this point who wants this has it, but hey, no harm in calling out that it’s a free weekend, so you can try it for nothing right now.

And if you like it, it’s currently 75% off, one hell of a game for $7.49, and you can pick up the whole package (which would be what I’d suggest to anyone who doesn’t currently own it and still wants it) for a mere 10 bucks!

5608

Ok, that’s pure crazy talk. EW was one of the best expansions I’ve ever played.

5609

Yeah, not sure what he’s talking about, I thought it was a good expansion as well, it gave me a lot of new options to consider.

5610

Be sure to try Long War. It’s very stable and finished, they just haven’t put a 1.0 on it because they are in no particular rush, but there are no more changes planned except for rather obscure bug fixes.

5611

Someone is recreating Xcom, inside excelof all things. Perfect for a long day at work, anyone? ;-)

An XCOM fan on Reddit has created a rather robust version of XCOM that is played using the spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel. Dubbed EXLCOM, this reimagining of the science fiction turn-based strategy game is far from complete, but that doesn’t mean you can’t sink a few hours enjoying the fact that the program you use to budget your weekly spending allowance can be used to build a fully functional video game. I spoke to its creator about the hows and whys.

5612

I’m thinking of finally doing an Enemy Within run since it’s been sitting in my library untouched for so long. Enough time has passed since I played Enemy Unknown that it should feel fairly fresh.

Is it worth adding Slingshot to the mix?
Are there any options / recommendations people have - like difficulty level, that make the game better in their opinion? I played the base game at release and haven’t looked at it since.

5613

Doing something similar to you, I fired up Enemy Within a few months back and found it to be a lot of fun–it greatly improved the base game IMHO. I think I played on normal difficulty, certainly nothing too demanding, and may have played with some of the startup options that were unlocked after beating the base game so long ago. The slingshot missions are okay, but if you don’t have them I don’t think you’re missing much. The only thing you absolutely must do is unlock and field one or two MECs at the earliest opportunity. They totally changed things around for me.

5614

Slingshot is kind of “meh” - not bad, but not worth full price. On sale like it is, I’d grab it. As for difficulty, that totally depends on your preferred play style. Many XCOM players relish the “hardcore” aspects available to the game, but I’m not one of those. I just play on normal difficulty, although I often play with the random skills setting (I forget the name of that) where the soldiers of various classes are not cookie-cutter versions. That helps me care a little bit more about the individuals, and also makes recruiting new soldiers something of a crapshoot.

5615

Random skills does sound more interesting. I’ll keep my eye out for unlocking some mechs.

5616

If you’ve played before and want a fresh expererience, definitely try the Long War mod. Be forewarned, though, that it is very difficult even on the easiest difficulty level, and “long” is certainly an apt descriptive.

5617

I think there is a Long War “Lite” version out there. It adds something something to make it not quite as long, and tamps down the difficultly to sane levels so you get all the mod improvements without the insanity. Unless you like the insanity, of course.

EDIT:
http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/518/?
http://www.nexusmods.com/xcom/mods/566/?
Enable ‘Dynamic War’ in the Second Wave options, and possibly Cinematic mode as well.

5618

Try Long War, but follow these instructions for the developer designed easy mode: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/3w9tdk/making_long_war_as_easy_as_possible/cxvdznw

Then turn on Dynamic War (used to be called not-so-long-war).

5619

Wow - all those nexus mods and such to tone things down, and there is a built-in mode? They really need to document that better - I’ve never even seen hint of that before! Time to maybe go check out Long War…

5620

Yeah it’s silly. There are basically 8 Long War difficulties, it just defaults you to the top 4 unless you switch that file. Purely a technical limitation, too bad it’s not more obvious.

5621

To be fair, it looks like it is documented now. It is a “recent” feature (added in August I think) and I don’t think I had looked into Long War since that time. This is great news though, as people claim Long War is ‘the’ thing to play, but I’m much too baby mode.

5622

The file itself is well documented if you want to just give all your soldiers +x aim or whatever.

5623

I think for the first time I play with Enemy Within I’ll stick to vanilla and save the Long War for if I play again after that. I kinda like to play things the first time as the designer intends.