X-COM Firaxis - XCOM: Enemy Unknown + Enemy Within Expansion

[ArchAngel]

I always give heavy a scope as well to help with aiming and plan movement around having heavy having Steady from previous round.

 

[Average Manatee]

I'd never give a heavy a scope when they could carry another rocket. Being able to shoot 3 rockets from day 1 is a godsend of LW

 

[Zetor]

XCOM vanilla is bad. With EW it's a good game. With LW it's potentially great but LW is...problematic. Worse still the more the Ruskis improve it the more flawed it seems to be. Right now the air war is utterly obnoxious and one failed mission can fuck up your entire campaign more often than not.

Hmm. So for someone who hasn't played much nuxcom at all (except for one playthrough when it originally released), is it a viable option to start with LW, or do you need crazy amounts of meta-knowledge to avoid getting fucked? And if so, does said fucking happen in the early game ala JA1.13 drassen counterattack, or does it lead to a soft fail state instead? Is it possible to tweak LW to get rid of the most obnoxious shit (whatever that may be)?

I should probably do a playthrough with EW first...

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

the only way i've been able to fix long war's late game has been enabling a "kill all the enemies by pressing this button" cheat.

 

[cvv]

XCOM vanilla is bad. With EW it's a good game. With LW it's potentially great but LW is...problematic. Worse still the more the Ruskis improve it the more flawed it seems to be. Right now the air war is utterly obnoxious and one failed mission can fuck up your entire campaign more often than not.

Hmm. So for someone who hasn't played much nuxcom at all (except for one playthrough when it originally released), is it a viable option to start with LW at all, or do you need crazy amounts of meta-knowledge to avoid getting fucked? And if so, does said fucking happen in the early game ala JA1.13 drassen counterattack, or does it lead to a soft fail state instead? Is it possible to tweak LW to get rid of the most obnoxious shit (whatever that may be)?

I should probably do a playthrough with EW first...

1. Yes you need a good chunk of meta-knowledge to have even a chance to win.
2. You can lose after dozens of hours sunk into the game. Small mistakes and setbacks simply snowball over time and suddenly you realize the mobs are too beefy for your weapons or you don't have enough experienced soldiers, you have to abort a lot, then you don't have enough money and materials for R&D, countries leave the council and you're fucked. Everything in LW is so expensive and takes very long to build/research/repair, therefore it takes very long to grasp you've hit the ultimate wall.
3. Most obnoxious is the Air War which can be "softened" in the Options but even then you're completely at the mercy of the RNG gods. Interceptors are very expensive, they get shot to shit in seconds and it takes weeks to repair them. If you get moderately unlucky in the first few months your entire squadron sits in the repair bay while the aliens rampage around the globe scot free. Ofc you don't get no materials, dough and experience which usually means GG right there, even though you don't realize that until several more months have passed.
4. More obnoxious shit - psy-op training. Super RNG based. You often ground your best troops for months without result. Hate this crap. And Exalts. They're much more obnoxious in LW because they're much tougher, plus there are a shitload of missions to do already even without Exalts. With Exalts the missions count gets too wearisome and it's basically for nothing. No good rewards. Luckily you can disable Exalts in the Options too.
4. If you haven't played EW yet you should definitely start with that. Normal XCOM with the expansion is a very good game.

 

[ArchAngel]

I noticed long war air war being a deciding factor so I did what I seen I/I players do: start in USA to get air force bonuses and have double number of planes. You keep the extra ones in a continent with no sat coverage and send damaged planes there while sending new ones to your starting continent.
The limitations and way geoscape was done in nuXcom limits LW devs from having it done properly. So you can either have poinless base game Air War or very hard like in LW.

 

[Jaedar]

XCOM vanilla is bad. With EW it's a good game. With LW it's potentially great but LW is...problematic. Worse still the more the Ruskis improve it the more flawed it seems to be. Right now the air war is utterly obnoxious and one failed mission can fuck up your entire campaign more often than not.

Hmm. So for someone who hasn't played much nuxcom at all (except for one playthrough when it originally released), is it a viable option to start with LW, or do you need crazy amounts of meta-knowledge to avoid getting fucked? And if so, does said fucking happen in the early game ala JA1.13 drassen counterattack, or does it lead to a soft fail state instead? Is it possible to tweak LW to get rid of the most obnoxious shit (whatever that may be)?

I should probably do a playthrough with EW first...

You're probably fine to head into long war immediately, although you'll likely lose a few months in, but there's a good chance that'd happen anyway. Just remember you can look stuff up on the wiki; http://ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Long_War. It's not as required now that soldier ability trees are just revealed immediately, but its still good to look up what various techs do and their requirements.

 

[oldmanpaco]

I have to say that after playing 10-12 hours of LW the air war is a serious drag. I didn't start with the US air bonus and didn't bee-line to laser weapons for the interceptors so I think I'm screwed. Right now I have 6 interceptors all of which are grounded for a for 10+ days. Good times. Combat isn't to bad (only 2 months in) but it is a pain when it takes 2-3 hits to kill an alien. Also I cheat like a son-of-a-bitch and restart missions when they go bad.

Overall I like the slow pace of tech development but the aliens seem to get better so much faster than you (armor, weapon accuracy). I just don't know if I want to invest all the time and energy to finishing a game.

 

[Jaedar]

Overall I like the slow pace of tech development but the aliens seem to get better so much faster than you (armor, weapon accuracy). I just don't know if I want to invest all the time and energy to finishing a game.

Considering finishing LW probably takes at least 100 hours, its entirely reasonable to quit.

And yeah, getting laser weapons for your interceptors is pretty important.

 

[Average Manatee]

XCOM vanilla is bad. With EW it's a good game. With LW it's potentially great but LW is...problematic. Worse still the more the Ruskis improve it the more flawed it seems to be. Right now the air war is utterly obnoxious and one failed mission can fuck up your entire campaign more often than not.

Hmm. So for someone who hasn't played much nuxcom at all (except for one playthrough when it originally released), is it a viable option to start with LW, or do you need crazy amounts of meta-knowledge to avoid getting fucked? And if so, does said fucking happen in the early game ala JA1.13 drassen counterattack, or does it lead to a soft fail state instead? Is it possible to tweak LW to get rid of the most obnoxious shit (whatever that may be)?

Play with Friendly Skies on. There's basically no reason not to, even the devs gave up trying to balance the air game and basically admitted that LW air game was intended for impossible difficulty and everyone else should use the option to make it less bullshit. Commander's Choice/Red Fog/Absolutely Critical are also nice IMO, and turn on durability because repairing your own equipment is mostly just tacked on bullshit.

There's also a general mission overload when you get into the mid/late game. There's no real way to fix it unfortunately because the options to "shorten" the game by removing 50% of missions then makes the early game go way too fast. LW is problematic in that it starts you off with a pretty good number of missions/month, then a few months later your missions/month goes up by around 3-4x because your greater sat coverage detects more UFOs and EXALT needs to have its butt slapped on a semi-weekly basis. As Jaedar says, its entirely reasonable to expect to quit between september-january even if everything is going smooth just because it gets rather tedious.

I'd definitely recommend LW though.

 

[Zetor]

Thanks for the insight, all! I'll probably play a game of EW first just to see what all the new enemies / development options are about, then see how far I can go with LW.

(Simulationist vs gamist nu-xcom: which is better and why??? /troll)

 

[ArchAngel]

My last play of LW was with the option for shorter version of LW. I don't think I can force myself to play the standard version of LW.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

after jagged alliance 2 1.13 (which now is just unplayable because of showstopping bugs), after xenonauts with the codex suggested mod (which ends in systematic crashes, ruining a hours long game), after open x-com (which at least works, but it's still a 2.0 version of something i could finish blindfolded) i needed more, so i went back to long war because reasons and masochism.
well, it improved a lot since one of the latest iterations i tried. but it keeps on randomly freezing during missions, it freezes so hard it crashes steam with it too and there's no way to go back to playing without rebooting the whole computer.
the games genre i love the most is the one which hates me the most =_=

 

[agris]

after jagged alliance 2 1.13 (which now is just unplayable because of showstopping bugs), after xenonauts with the codex suggested mod (which ends in systematic crashes, ruining a hours long game), after open x-com (which at least works, but it's still a 2.0 version of something i could finish blindfolded) i needed more, so i went back to long war because reasons and masochism.
well, it improved a lot since one of the latest iterations i tried. but it keeps on randomly freezing during missions, it freezes so hard it crashes steam with it too and there's no way to go back to playing without rebooting the whole computer.
the games genre i love the most is the one which hates me the most =_=

it sounds like your computer has a hardware problem

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

then you have a serious hearing problem: they're all very known bugs.

 

[Zetor]

Okay, as someone new to EW, the Newfoundland mission was rather ~interesting~, especially since it came up as the first council task of my 4-man blind playthrough while I still had everyone armed with just the original peashooters (one dude had reaper ammo). I had to let some random squaddie scrub die for Canada, of all countries -- I assume there's no sane way of actually getting the airstrike caller out alive when only using basic weaponry and no shivs?

 

[Mozg]

In vanilla? I think a team of just assaults with basic shotguns should eat it alive. If you patiently mow down 'lids they stop spawning eventually, then you can move a guy to the button, hit it at the start of his turn and maybe only see a couple 'lids on the run out (which you may not even need to actually kill before you reach the extraction point). One notable trick is that a flashbang cripples a 'lids movement rate, so even if you get stuck in a bad spot with a whole pack of them you can flashbang and then kite them.

That mission is memetic mostly because it really punishes just using your standard squad, but if you know it's just an all-'lid mission it's not too bad even in Long War (which is why they put non-lids in the map in LW...)

 

[Zetor]

Ah, didn't know they stopped spawning eventually. Thing is, though, I only had two assaults (a veteran and a squaddie), but like 3 snipers, two of them being squaddies (-> useless). Even then the normal shotgun leaves the fuckers with at least 1-2 hp, which is fine when only dealing with 1-2 at a time. Problem is that eventually 3 of them started to spawn, and my army-of-four team could only deal with that with explosives. When my heavy's rockets and 2 grenades were up, it was pretty much gg.

So in the end useless_squaddie_sniper_03 had to rush in there and eat it while everyone else was sipping tea at the extraction point. Tough luck bud, roll assault or heavy next time.

edit regarding kiting (below post): I did notice that my sacrificial lamb was able to make it from the entrance to the transponder without getting chomped. Problem is, though, that after that there is like a kazillion of the things out there at various locations within the ship's decks, and no matter where he tried to go, he'd get jumped from the side and die in the next turn. I imagine that dashing with one character while the rest tried to pick off the things one by one would probably fail at one point when the soldier has to make a turn. Not to mention that the other soldiers can't kite when they're shooting, since 1 move is way too little, even for a support with sprinter. Maybe a squadsight sniper would work, but my only one was busy getting the thinman-legs genemod...

 

[Average Manatee]

As long as you double move away a lid won't be fast enough to single move to you and then attack. They'll double move to you but unless their speed is double yours you can always run away. Ignoring end game LW bullshit where they eventually get run and gun.

 

[Jasede]

So I finally won Ironman Impossible (no Long War.)

My strategy was to rush Alloy Shivs and have 2 Snipers kill everything and praying to Ganesha. Shivs are incredibly OP.

However-!

The base defense mission was ridiculously hard because of my strategy. I survived with a single Sniper at the end, and even then it came down to a few HP. Everyone else died.
But after that it's 6 Plasma Hover Shivs all the way; nothing can touch them.

Didn't lose any countries, either.

 

[oldmanpaco]

As long as you double move away a lid won't be fast enough to single move to you and then attack. They'll double move to you but unless their speed is double yours you can always run away. Ignoring end game LW bullshit where they eventually get run and gun.

Seriously? Run and Gun? I just dd this mission in LW and this was the first time they had Lightning Reflexives so that was fun. Fighting these bastards with RandG is going to suck.

 

[Average Manatee]

The base defense mission was ridiculously hard because of my strategy. I survived with a single Sniper at the end, and even then it came down to a few HP. Everyone else died.
But after that it's 6 Plasma Hover Shivs all the way; nothing can touch them.

In LW I once ran teams of 7 SHIVs + one Engineer who carried 6+ dense smoke grenades per mission. Give them the item that removes the penalty for overwatch and the one that lets them take two overwatch shots. Horror is the only thing to describe what the aliens must feel when there is a stack of 7 SHIVs w/ 60+ defense shooting multiple times a turn.

As long as you double move away a lid won't be fast enough to single move to you and then attack. They'll double move to you but unless their speed is double yours you can always run away. Ignoring end game LW bullshit where they eventually get run and gun.

Seriously? Run and Gun? I just dd this mission in LW and this was the first time they had Lightning Reflexives so that was fun. Fighting these bastards with RandG is going to suck.

It's the lategame "boss" monsters, you won't see it for a long time. Although apparently they can't get run and gun anymore if UFOpaedia is to be believed. You've seen the screenshots of Chryssalids with a health bar half as tall as the screen, yes?

 

[Mozg]

Last time I heard about it they couldn't get it to work - the idea was that they'd get a run and gun attack but instead of being a full blown melee whack it would just acid the unit it hit, which would have helped 'lids be relevant enemies for a little while, outside of the boss versions being megaberserker-sized HP bags you have to deal with.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i've never taken shivs because they're bloody expensive and get obsolete fast without being upgradable. even in x-com i only ever take 1-2 rocket tanks as soon as possible (when soldiers are still crap) and then wait for the blaster launcher tanks. when do xcom's shivs start becoming worth their enormous pricetags?

 

[Average Manatee]

SHIVs:

- Always have an amazing weapon. Ballistic SHIV's weapon is in between light plasma rifles and plasma rifle in damage. SHIVs naturally one-shot a huge amount of enemies even without crits.
- You can play way more offensively and flank with them when you don't have to worry about cover at all.
- Enough health + very unlikely to be crit lets them tank a few shots reliably
- They never panic and will never cause a panic chain, the bane of all XCOM runs.
- Can hide behind high cover since they don't attach and 'peek out'

Normal SHIVs are immediately pretty good but alloy/hover are even better.