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

[Psquit]

Yeah. Now that i think of it... This expansion is shit. They need to fix the end game not the early or the mid...

 

[Monkeyfinger]

endgame of EU was fine, EW gummed it all up with exalt and the fury arc

 

[Average Manatee]

End game of EU was banal shit boring, but at least it was good enough to not drag things out too long.

There is a discussion on the forum examining the benefit of sattelite rush (which requires US start) vs early SA bonus :
http://forums.2k.com/showthread.php...er-of-Scientists-Interrogations-on-Impossible

Yes, apparently if you ignore half of what satellites give you then satellites aren't useful.

Meanwhile, when you take into account continent bonuses, satellites can give you the SA bonus before month 2 and your pick of the next continent bonus.

 

[Galdred]

If you sat rush to South America, then the bonus taken is factored into it for month 2 (the comparison was between starting in SA, and getting the SA bonus through satellite rush from another continent). Sat rushing from SA is not very advisable, as you risk running into very severe money issues. It is true that you can take another bonus for month 3, but in order to sat rush more or less reliably, you had to go with NA in the first place.

MECs and SHIV are good if you get them as early as possible : early MECs can make a big difference, but they become obsolete when you get carapace armor, until you get more advanced ones (but you have little reason to go for alien power source, so you usually end up sheling the MEC until you get Titan armor and MEC lvl 3).

Once you get MECs with good aim, their firepower is awesome , though.

SHIVs remain consistently good at tanking. The problem is that developping the SHIV makes them almost immediately obsoleted by alloy SHIV :regular SHIV comes way too late online to be of any use. On the other hand, Alloy SHIV are great: 18 HP, and 30 Defence, which means the AI will NEVER shoot at any of your soldiers in full cover (or light cover with smoke or hunker down) if it can target a SHIV (unless it can flank the soldier of course), so you can survive reliably as long as the SHIV is not down + they are funny against sectoid commanders.
Once you get the drone autopsied, auto repairing SHIV are even greater. Even chrysalid seem to favor SHIV for some unknown reason.
Hover SHIV arrive pretty late, and their defence of 40 (60 if airborn) means they won't be targeted first unless your soldiers have an armor bonus on top of the full cover bonus.

SHIV don't work too well with MEC however, as they cannot take agro from MECs and their puny 10 defence, and I'd much rather lose the S.

Concerning the endgame, I like the addition of wandering sectoid commanders, as it makes enemy psykers somewhat relevant now. Progeny makes the endgame somewhat less tedious: as you are guaranteed to have some psy able troopers, you don't have to wait as long to detect and train psy able soldiers.

On second though, if you kept playing games that had a very bad start(like satellite rush strategy with first UFO intercept coming too late, or multiple squad wipes), I don't know whether the end game would be that easy. I'll try to not give up until the defeat screen in my future playthroughs (if any) to see whether the endgame is really broken or not.

 

[Brinko]

What the hell is with having Not Created Equal and Hidden Potential always creating recruits with will in the 20's. Most of them don't even have good aim either, mostly sub 50 shit but a few I get have 75 or 80 aim which helps but fuck I am glad that progeny crap gives me 4 psykers because otherwise I'd be fucked.

Also why does the Ethereal interrogation give such a shitty bonus? All it does is give research credit to everything but by the time they show up everything has already been researched for the most part.

 

[Raghar]

Also why does the Ethereal interrogation give such a shitty bonus? All it does is give research credit to everything but by the time they show up everything has already been researched for the most part.

THat's because of game design. Firaxis is made from really smart people smart so much they didn't even asked me to veto few of theirs design decisions like a lack of inventory.

Now of course, what would they do, allow a second ending? Skipping the final mission? Cause base assault because of killing that captured alien? These things are too smart for Firaxis.

 

[Galdred]

NCE allows you to have dedicated bullet sponges, soldiers whose sole role is to get into low cover so that your other valuable soldiers don't get targeted instead. That said, I like the option because it allows you to get heavies that can use their main weapon too, and make some soldiers truely special.

One of the problems with the endgame is that you research the end game plasma weapons by may, so afterwards, you are not outgunned anymore, and you have no shiny new toys to discover. The endgame of the OG was pretty easy too, but I think it was easier to rush it.

Some of the changes of the expansion are really welcome though : with portent, you are guaranteed not to have a bomb disposal mission in march (I think you can only get rescue Van Dorne, or escort the scientist now). As it was usually game over in I/I unless you had an easy map or knew the map perfectly, I find that to be a welcome change (but having to rescue the Vip and his constant bickering you cannot stop is a big issue). The other good change is the pacing : Meld gives a small incentive to proceed more aggressively, and the newly buffed SHIV or new MEC help do just that. I think it's not too bad as they made the early game a bit longer, but the reduction of frequency of horribly designed map where you trigger 3 pods at once has decreased, so the early game has become a bit more enjoyable than before once I get used to it.

 

[Brinko]

NCE allows you to have dedicated bullet sponges, soldiers whose sole role is to get into low cover so that your other valuable soldiers don't get targeted instead. That said, I like the option because it allows you to get heavies that can use their main weapon too, and make some soldiers truely special.

One of the problems with the endgame is that you research the end game plasma weapons by may, so afterwards, you are not outgunned anymore, and you have no shiny new toys to discover. The endgame of the OG was pretty easy too, but I think it was easier to rush it.

Some of the changes of the expansion are really welcome though : with portent, you are guaranteed not to have a bomb disposal mission in march (I think you can only get rescue Van Dorne, or escort the scientist now). As it was usually game over in I/I unless you had an easy map or knew the map perfectly, I find that to be a welcome change (but having to rescue the Vip and his constant bickering you cannot stop is a big issue). The other good change is the pacing : Meld gives a small incentive to proceed more aggressively, and the newly buffed SHIV or new MEC help do just that. I think it's not too bad as they made the early game a bit longer, but the reduction of frequency of horribly designed map where you trigger 3 pods at once has decreased, so the early game has become a bit more enjoyable than before once I get used to it.

That would be a good plan but because everyone but one guy has will <40 anytime someone dies half the team shits itself. Also I might've gotten super lucky or shit was glitched because I was researching plasma rifles in april because a mutons were rocking them but after that mission they went back to light plasma.

 

[Galdred]

I can feel your pain, in my current playthrough, I thought I had a crack squad and managed to assault the alien base with ballistic + carapace, then on base defence, 2 of my majors panicked every single time one of the rookie base defence guard hit the dust. I almost lost the game because of that. I guess I need neuro dampening ASAP...

 

[Brinko]

My only problems that came from the base defense was all the goddamn glitches that come from the doorways. Muton busts through the door leading to the mech bay, i blew him away with overwatch, and now for some reason the fucking door is impassable and I now have to jump out the window like a spaz and can't even use the only full cover in that room.

 

[80s Stallone]

Finished it last week. Liked it.

Tried to play the original again.

Well, not used to the interface anymore and didn't bother.

A shame that all those "remakes" are not really remakes.

For example, imagine a Warcraft 2 with an improved killer A.I.

Alpha Centauri with better graphics and interface, all the other stuff equal.

And whatever.

Even worse, when developers are paying homage (ripping off) an old game but then they decide they do not want to make the same game, start to make changes and the result sucks. Even mininal changes often result into a fundamentally different game.

 

[Likvidator]

Zomg, have you tried the addon? Did the Impossible default strategy change?

 

[Gragt]

Impossible difficulty shouldn't be completable. You could play through the game but once you get near the end, maybe at the final mission itself, your team gets vaporized and you get an automatic game over screen with a message like "This is the impossible level, boys. Impossible doesn’t mean very difficult, very difficult is winning the Nobel Prize, impossible is eating the sun …"

 

[spectre]

Yeah well, I prefer to think that impossible means 'the dev thought it's impossible to beat. Now, everytime you beat sexcum, Jake Salomon bursts a vein: hurrr are you a wizard?!

 

[whatevername]

Impossible difficulty shouldn't be completable. You could play through the game but once you get near the end, maybe at the final mission itself, your team gets vaporized and you get an automatic game over screen with a message like "This is the impossible level, boys. Impossible doesn’t mean very difficult, very difficult is winning the Nobel Prize, impossible is eating the sun …"

Winning the Nobel Prize has been severely dumbed down a few years ago...

 

[Psquit]

yeah. Obama winning the Nobel prize...

 

[Jaedar]

yeah. Obama winning the Nobel prize...

The peace prize isn't a real Nobel prize

 

[Psquit]

Oh, it was a peace prize?... Sorry my bad. Anyways... a peace prize? Didnt he send more troops to middle east and shit?.

 

[Yaar Podshipnik]

You need to look up the definition of "peace" in a _AMERICAN_ dictionary...

 

[Brinko]

So I just realized where I got my early Plasma rifles while Mutons were still rocking LPRs. That slingshot DLC dumps Mutons on you with the rifles so now having stunned 5 out of the 7 I fought across the 2 missions they show up in in addition to getting a few floaters and thin men I can now pretty much coast off of throwing damage out like crazy. My only complaint to the retard progression I am given is that now Muton Elites also spawn with Sectopods so I can't put down the super heavy fire these fuckers require now. And I can only hope to god they stop glitching out and rocket striking my ass without setting up at all.

 

[Galdred]

Concerning the SHIV efficiency point, I was able to clear a small UFO on Impossible with a single hover SHIV (against 2 mechtoids, 1 cyberdisk, 5 sectoid commanders and 2 drones). The ability you get to regenerate SHIVs (2HP/turn) after drone autopsy makes them really über, as they have enough mobility to get out of harm's way when heavily damaged (+ 30 base def for normal SHIV, and 40 for hover SHIV is really strong). There is no way any of my soldier would be able to take this kind of punishment.

 

[Infinitron]

Cut enemy: http://www.2kgames.com/blog/dev-blog-entry-ldquo-what-might-have-been-rdquo

During the early design stages of Enemy Within, I knew I wanted to incorporate covert operations somehow. So we created a character, the Infiltrator, who would collaborate with the aliens and use a new alien type, the Venomorph, to sow terror and discontent among the Council countries supporting the XCOM project. The Venomorph was a scary alien design – it converted civilians into pod people, but could then burst out of them into its combat form. We designed a new mission type in which XCOM soldiers had to extract a double agent while neutralizing disguised Venomorphs… but once the extraction occurred, the Venomorphs would all burst, and it would become a combat mission where the double agent had to be escorted to safety.

But this ran into a host of creative and production problems. The AI work to get civilians to behave as if nothing were wrong was daunting, especially since we were committed to the Seeker and Mechtoid. The narrative problems were strong too – why would the aliens care about helping the Infiltrator? How would she protect herself in the final mission to take her out? If she’s got so much alien assistance, where are these double agents coming from? It didn’t make any sense. The Venomorph itself was artistically very challenging; it had to look like it could pose a real threat, yet also plausibly originate in an embryonic, parasitic form inside human bodies.

And so, in one of those rare occurrences in game development, we made a change that solved creative and production problems. The Infiltrator and the Venomorph were cut; in their place, EXALT was born.

 

[sser]

The expansion can be had for about $13 here:

http://www.greenmangaming.com/s/us/en/pc/games/strategy/xcom-enemy-within-na/#item-s3

using this code: GMG20-ZB5D1-93X49



Haven't really bought it yet, but I figured some folks on the fence might jump at that.

 

[KoolNoodles]

I got the whole set off Amazon for $20. Gift cards will make those purchases easier on the mind. I figure it has another expansion or two in it, and if they fix/improve it as much as Firaxis has fixed/improved Civ5, then I'll be happy. Not sure about what settings to use, so just checked classic difficulty, ironman, reduced VO, no tutorials, operation progeny, and all second wave stuff. I assume this is the closest I can get to original X-Com difficulty(maybe I'll try "Impossible" later).

 

[Galdred]

I don't think using all second wave stuff is necessarily a good thing. Making the geoscape harsher when there is little strategy involved in the geoscape will only make the game less recoverable if you get mauled in a tactical mission, or if the RNG hates you.

I just picked Training Roulette (it makes the game harder, as you have weaker skill combos most of the time), Not Created Equal (easier, as your high aim soldiers make early missions easier. Recovery from failure is much harder though, as it makes your B squad much much worse), and hidden Potential, mostly to have some variety in squad.

I don't like damage roulette, as it lowers the average damage : I would like it if the upper and lower bounds were extended, but currently, it looks like you do 1-Max damage instead of MinDamage-Max damage. Haven't tried absolutely critical and aiming angles (but the idea behind aiming angle seems wrong, as the battlefield geometry only allows for 90° angles in cover).