XCOM: Enemy Unknown (2012)

[Art Blade]

 ^-^

[Art Blade]

The Civil War discussion that started here can now be found and continued there. :)

[fragger]

Good job mate :-X

[Art Blade]

ta.  ^-^

[fragger]

Well, I grew a pair and started a new game on the next difficulty level, "Normal". I'm actually doing OK so far, but there is quite a jump between this level and Easy. More bad guys and they do more damage, although I've drawn a few relatively easy missions so far. My guys did well in one mission when five Sectoids came at them all at once, from two directions, and my squad dropped three of them off the bat with Reaction fire and badly wounded a forth (suck on that, you little blighters). Even so, I nearly lost a guy on that mission, he came home critically wounded from just one hit from the last fit Sectoid (one of the weakest enemy types). I may have to re-enable Autosaves for this venture to give myself a fighting chance further on.

Should be lots of fun and games in the tougher later missions... :-\\ I'm not setting foot in the alien base until I've got a squad of Colonels in Titan armour and bristling with plasmatic weaponry :-()

I tried using a S.H.I.V. in the last game (Super Heavy Infantry Vehicle). This is an armed robotic machine which you order around just like a squad member, and which takes the place of one soldier in the squad (you could have more than one in the squad if you want, but they're pretty expensive and time-consuming to build, and they're not as versatile as a human soldier). It worked pretty well actually. S.H.I.V.s can have projectile, laser or plasma weapons mounted on them, with more research time and money required the more advanced the weaponry is, but plasma is definitely the best (for the highest weapon cost, naturally) which makes them quite hard-hitting and tough. If you build an "Alloy S.H.I.V." (even more expensive) one of your guys can use it as mobile cover. S.H.I.V.s also have the virtue of being immune to mind-controlling aliens, so they're good for sending up against psi enemies like Sectoid Commanders and Ethereals. If you research S.H.I.V. Repair in your Foundry, a soldier can repair a damaged S.H.I.V. in the field, but only if the soldier is equipped with an Arc Thrower, which uses up his/her Inventory slot (unless the soldier is a Support class ranked Major or above, in which case they have two inventory slots). S.H.I.V.s can't climb things, being mounted on caterpillar treads, but you can research and build Hover S.H.I.V.s which can float over things (for even more research time and expense).

Pity they can't fire rockets though...

I love all the tactical choices you can make in this game :-X

[Art Blade]

oh yes, indeed :-D I never used the robots because my tactical decisions were based on my soldiers' classes and with them I was more agile. Plus, they can wear ghost armour.. priceless.

I relied on two snipers who were my favourite toys for far away oncoming enemies as well as counter measure for flanking enemies. And two assaults at the same time for the middle part or CQC. One heavy for mopping up or breaking through. One support for extra range and therefore my preferred scout.

Whenever possible, I trained rookies until they were high-ranking and their classes were meant to create a different couple, say another support and another heavy. I remember I once had three assaults and two heavies and one support, or two supports and three snipers and one heavy.. stuff like that.

Very cool if you can use several soldiers of the same class.. I bet my tactics made the aliens go, "what a clusterfuck," more than once.  >:D

[fragger]

 :-D hehehe

I too like to have at least two of each class on hand, so I can put together teams suited to particular missions types. Occasionally I've found it helpful to accept an abduction mission where the reward has been a partially ranked-up soldier of a particular class, to boost that class' numbers. Occasionally - other times I'll go for the money, or extra base personnel, or to reduce the offered county's panic level, depending on the overall status at the time.

I meant to ask you, Art: Did you play on Normal or Classic? Because I found when I started on Normal there was still an Officer Training School pre-built in my base. I was under the impression that you started without the OTS on Normal level. Consulting the Wiki, it claims that the OTS is not pre-built in Classic difficulty, but doesn't mention the status of the OTS in Normal.

Just curious :)

[Art Blade]

Easy and Normal. I'm not sure what the reason was for the absence of the OTS. I believe it had to do with skipping the tutorial and starting the game without it. But there may be options to choose from; I recall several decisions that could be made before starting out anew.

What I meant to ask you, how come you had 16 funding countries? I only had 13 or 14 without losing any (see the screenshots of the final results in this post. There you can also see that I finished on Easy and Normal.

I know that I had satellites up on every country but one so the one that didn't have any would keep on giving me abduction missions which were good for both training rookies and collecting artefacts.

[Art Blade]

Oh, I think there is a third option -- I may have removed the OTS and later rebuilt it.

[fragger]

I just found it on the Wiki, it is because I started in Asia that the OTS was already there. So that's it.

It never occurred to me to leave a country without satellite coverage for the purpose of training rookies and harvesting goodies. That's a good tactic, cheers :-X I've always tried to get every country covered so that none will leave the Project and take their funding with them. But knowing now as I do that I'll inevitably end up with more money than I know what to do with, I'll leave a country uncovered.

[Art Blade]

welcome. :) Be careful with your decision though, you'll not get the continent bonus for the continent your defenceless
country belongs to.

Hehe, with your newly acquired level of experience and understanding, maybe it's time that you read the whole topic (not just the captions) from the beginning again because you may have missed out on more than you thought -- I had already mentioned the satellite tactics before  :-D

Speaking of reading again, can you shed some light on this?

What I meant to ask you, how come you had 16 funding countries? I only had 13 or 14 without losing any

[fragger]

I was thinking of leaving a South American country uncovered, since their continental bonus is faster autopsies and interrogations, which to me seems the least valuable of the four continental bonuses.

What I meant to ask you, how come you had 16 funding countries?

Not quite sure what you're getting at with this mate, I thought I answered the question already:

...I've always tried to get every country covered so that none will leave the Project and take their funding with them.

Do you mean why am I going for all 16, or how am I ending up with 16? There are 16 countries in the game and I wanted to make sure I got the funding from all of them. Like I said, the idea of leaving one country uncovered for training and material harvesting didn't occur to me and I'd forgotten about reading it in your topic. I tend to go for everything in games :-D

Regarding the OTS:

I just found it on the Wiki, it is because I started in Asia that the OTS was already there. So that's it.

Actually, that wasn't it. I tried a test start in North America and I still got the OTS. So you must have sold yours and rebuilt it somewhere else, I guess.

[Art Blade]

haha, thanks man, I didn't get you said that in reply. I meant ending up with 16 in your final stats. I think I now know what confused me: when I started playing, I had all 16 countries covered but never took a screenie of the final stats, only after I applied the "-1 satellite" tactics. :-D

And yes, I think I deleted the OTS in order to get a better layout. :-()

[fragger]

 :-D No worries!

I'm not doing too badly on Normal. The alien base mission is now available and I haven't lost any troops, although South Africa dropped out of the project - once again, just 1 turn before I could get a satellite up over it :D All other countries are covered except Egypt, which I'm leaving for resource collection and training. With South Africa gone I miss out on the African continental bonus anyway, so Egypt may as well be aliensville for this game :-D

I've learned to position my guys at the start of a mission and let the aliens come to me, which they eventually seem to do, so I can fight on ground of my choosing (except for the bomb disposal and VIP escort missions, where I can't afford that luxury). Often I don't have much choice on this difficulty level - the aliens are all over me as soon as I get off the plane :-() Even with the civilian rescue missions, I focus on getting a good defensive possie first instead of chasing around after civilians. You don't seem to get penalised if you don't rescue very many (unless you lose all civvies, I'm not sure what happens then - maybe it's a mission fail). It seems that as long as you rescue at least one civvy you pass the mission, even if you get a mission rating of "poor" at the end of it. My squad members are more valuable, so bugger the civvies, they can fend for themselves >:D

I'm wondering what happens if you just never do the alien base mission. Will the game just go on ad infinitum from that point, throwing up various missions after missions well past the point where you've maxed out your ranks and researched and built everything? I might do an additional save, try it and and see what happens.

I must admit, I find playing on Easy to be more fun, and fun is the point of the exercise after all. And Easy still isn't terribly easy, it remains a fairly tough game even then. I hate to think what "Impossible" level must be like :-\\ Maybe I'll try it sometimes and see how far I get (probably not very).

This is such a cool game, I'm still hooked on it :-X With so many things you can try, it doesn't get old very quickly at all.

[fragger]

I just read up a bit about Terror Site missions (civilian rescue) on the Wiki. The number of civvies rescued influences the amount of panic reduction for both the country and the continent:

Civvies rescued: 1-8 = panic reduction 2 (country) / 0 (continent)
Civvies rescued: 9-13 = panic reduction 3 (country) / 1 (continent)
Civvies rescued: 14-18 = panic reduction 5 (country) / 2 (continent)

So there is a penalty of sorts if you don't rescue very many.

If you fail to rescue any civvies, or you ignore or abort a Terror Site mission, or all your troops in the mission are KIA, that country will leave the Project, so you really do need to rescue at least one civvy.

[Art Blade]

nice read. :-D

Heh, I loved the appraisal far too much when they said, "excellent job, commander" so I usually rescued all or all but one civvies.  :)

That's an interesting tactic you came up with, to dig in and let the bugs come at you.  :-X :)

I went just the opposite way: bloody waltz in and hunt them down; the faster, the better. But I wasn't that fast as I always put my first one or two guys on overwatch so that when I moved my remaining units and by that scared up any enemies, the reaction shots from the overwatching guys would already stop anything that moved (other than me) in their tracks and sometimes even finish off whatever it was. :-()

[fragger]

Yeah, I use Overwatch a lot. If possible I always try to end each turn with at least a couple of guys overwatching.

The "wait for them to come" method doesn't always w@&k, sometimes I have to go looking for them :) Usually works best in the landed/crashed UFO missions, where the aliens will be roaming around the landscape. Then it's just a matter of sitting tight until they stumble across you. Once one lot of them finds you, the others will often then home in. Even so, there might still be a few who stay in or around the ship, especially the big Supply ones.

The aliens in the Abduction Site missions usually just hang wherever they are until you move into their visual range. Very occasionally, a quirk in the programming will allow me to see them before they see me (I'm sure you've had that happen) and if I keep my distance, they'll stay where they are, still visible but not reacting, allowing me to plan a move. I also like using a Sniper with a Battle Scanner for finding the enemies. The scanner has about the same range as a rocket, so sometimes you can reveal them and use a Heavy to put a rocket up their kazoos them before they even know you're around >:D

[Art Blade]

hehehe :-()

yes, I know that quirk but it rarely occurred when I was playing. You'll be wishing for all this here when you start playing Enemy Within.. because there you'll meet an invisible type of enemy that will seek out your lone guys and start to strangle them until they either die or you kill that enemy.. and that's just one of the new things you're going to see.. not literally, as you won't see those invisible flying squids until you bump into them.. ;)

[fragger]

Dunno about that invisible strangler thing, it sounds like it would actually annoy the dickens out of me :-\\ I hate invisible enemies in games. In Sid's Starships (another Firaxis TBS game which I'm still enjoying despite not having posted about it for a while) you occasionally encounter enemy ships which have cloaking devices and can go invisible, but they can only do that while stationary and you can equip some or all of your ships with scanners to detect any cloaked ships within scanning range (this uses up an action for that ship's turn), so at least you have some counter-measures to combat the invisibles. In XCOM I like being able to leave a sniper with the Squad Sight ability well back to cover the field, that's one of my favourite tactics. The invisible squid creature sounds like it could totally trash that technique, requiring me to keep a valuable squad member back from the action to guard the sniper, which kind of defeats the purpose of having Squad Sight.

I don't know if I'll be getting EW actually. I've been totally wrapped up in EU for weeks, but a few things about it are starting to grate on me a bit. I still think XCOM is tremendous fun, but I have to admit that my interest starts to wane once I get past the alien base mission. The most fun part for me is in the early to middle stages of the game - getting the base set up, levelling up the squad, etc. I love that part of the process.

But I'm currently up to the part where I have a Psi soldier, built the Hyperwave Relay and am waiting for the Overseer ship to show up, when it suddenly occurred to me that I didn't much feel like continuing. I love the game up to the alien base mission, or a bit beyond it, but I'm not crazy about the direction it takes after that. It gets a bit too linear in terms of mission sequence and layouts, and how you proceed from then on. Battleships, Abductor Ships and Supply Ships always have the exact same layout (granted you won't know for sure what types of enemies you'll find inside, nor where they'll be), and there are only the two alien base layouts. However, not only does the final Temple ship mission always have the same layout, but it has the same enemies in the same places every time (which enemies, how many and where will depend on skill level, I'll assume, but in all my Easy games it's been the same). I found a way to take down the Uber-Ethereal at the end, in the turn right after he appears, and it works every single time, so even the big finale has ceased to be a challenge.

I could have done without the psi aspects of the game too, I'm not a huge fan of that.

I still love the rest of the game. If there'd somehow been more variety towards the end, I'd love all of it, but as it is, it sort of runs out of strategy once you've researched and built everything. From then on it feels to me like a bit of a chore. Games like Civ and Starships will keep the strategy choices coming right up until the end. In all the years I've played Civ V, I have still yet to research and build everything possible before the end of a game. I may reach the end of one branch of the tech tree, and on a couple of occasions I've researched all of it, but even then there will still be a number of unit and building types that I either don't need to build due to my situation, or simply just don't get around to building before the end. The options never run dry.

So I'm thinking that since I've finished XCOM a number of times already, I might just play up to the alien base mission from now on and leave it at that. There's no law that says I have to finish every single game :-() Or I might try what I thought about before and ignore the alien base mission altogether, and see what happens. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a huge fan - but only of the first half.

I know EW introduces swags of new things (I've been reading up about it on the Wiki) but I'm not sure if I like the sound of a lot of the things I've read about. Plus it'll set me back about $70 AUD, which I think is a bit of an ask for an add-on to a three-year-old game. If it comes down substantially in price I'll consider it :)

[Art Blade]

About the same here, fragger, regarding all of the above that deals with XCOM, except I got EW and converting a soldier into a Mech is really cool. :-D Plus the colours.. man :) You should get the Slingshot DLC for EU though. Cool missions and stuff that merges with EU.

[Art Blade]

fragger, I've been thinking about you giving up on this game without having tried the big DLC EW which is actually a standalone (when installed, you can choose to play this or that, so either EU or EW). There are so many more tactical decisions to be made and every mission includes a hunt for weld, a material (or just as well a currency) for new upgrades with a twist: you only have so many turns, say 8 or some such, to find and reclaim those canisters or they'll be gone. So not only do you have to fight those aliens but to fight for that weld and against time -- in a manner of speaking, actually against a given number of turns. I recommend watching the first vid of Zemalf's 50-hour playthrough which I mentioned in my very first post so you get an idea of what EW looks like. I think you're missing out on a great experience if you don't try it. Never mind invisible aliens, I didn't like them either, and indeed they force you to come up with different tactics which, in a way, isn't so bad. I managed, so you can, too.  :-D

[fragger]

 :) Well mate, I haven't given up on it, I still love the game and will certainly be playing more of it when I finally get back to it. I've been swallowed up by Beyond Earth lately but that doesn't mean I've lost interest in XCOM, far from it. With the updated version of BE finally turning that game into an actual enjoyable experience, I've been sort of making up for lost time with it.

SM's Starships was also updated and they fixed some issues with that as well. So I've been kind of spoiled for choice lately in the strategy game department with XCOM, Starships, Beyond Earth and Ultimate Generals Gettysburg, along with my abiding love for Civ V. Too many games and not enough of me to go around :-()

Look, I will give EW a go once Christmas is over and I won't have to be so tight with the wallet. By then I should be over my current BE infatuation too :-D

I really do appreciate your interest and advice Art, cheers :)

[Art Blade]

welcome mate :)

I'm not a fan of strategy games but hey, XCOM is just so cool that even I got hooked pretty good which is why I believed that you just had to give it a go and that included both titles (EU and EW) -- you should definitely give that DLC called Operation Slingshot a go, too :-D There's another DLC included with EW (called Operation Progeny) that never made it to the shelves as a separate add-on but you can en- and disable any of those DLCs when starting a new game. ;)

[Art Blade]

Dang, it only just now occurred to me to mention this: you should "make your own" game by trying to manipulate the outcome of the rookie skills. I made sure they had a bloody high will (anything around 100 makes them immune to alien mind control) ... so much you can play around with, hehe  :-D

[fragger]

Good thought :-X

By manipulating, I assume you mean to save before the last shot is fired, see the results, and if the rookie's new Will rating stinks, reload and try again? I mean, there's no other way to do it that I'm missing, is there?