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UberJumper posted:Alright i'll give it a shot, any tips or suggestions for starting? Yeah i also used the same kind of restart rule, i gave up on playing iron man a long long time ago. One thing that I found important is to focus on only 1-2 continents at the start of the game. There are a lot more UFOs in the sky, your Interceptors will spend a lot of time being repaired, and new ones are very expensive. Trying to defend multiple continents just becomes impractical.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:08
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Flippycunt posted:Always be bringing in fresh troops. Your guys are tired for 5 days after running a mission, and if you use them again during that time they become exhausted and you can't use them again for a month. So you'll want at least 3-4 teams worth of guys to rotate between. Ugh, really there a rest mechanic? That seems kind of silly. Darox posted:One thing that I found important is to focus on only 1-2 continents at the start of the game. There are a lot more UFOs in the sky, your Interceptors will spend a lot of time being repaired, and new ones are very expensive. Trying to defend multiple continents just becomes impractical. How exactly does the whole countries leaving the xcom project work in the long war?
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Oct 12, 2013 06:13
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UberJumper posted:Ugh, really there a rest mechanic? That seems kind of silly. Because you don't get three choices for each abduction mission, you can keep panic down by just doing every mission. You don't have to worry about countries without satellite coverage dropping out unless you ignore a terror mission or something. One country will always drop out in the first month, and any country who has left has an Alien Base in it you can raid if you fly a satellite over them. It'll bring the country back into XCOM as well.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:21
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Away all Goats posted:Can somebody give me some quick guidelines to follow when trying to do a Classic difficulty no-countries-lost playthrough? Like how soon should I have my second satellite up? When should I get a Satellite uplink? What continent should I start on? It's not possible every game, but you should be able to launch 3 or 4 sattelites at the end of the first month on classic. There's a discussion of it on the wiki here.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:52
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Away all Goats posted:Can somebody give me some quick guidelines to follow when trying to do a Classic difficulty no-countries-lost playthrough? Like how soon should I have my second satellite up? When should I get a Satellite uplink? What continent should I start on? NA or Africa start makes it the easiest. NA specifically because of more cash for the first month, and less cost/upkeep on interceptors. Aim to get a sat uplink up in the first month and 3-4 satellites deployed if you want to save all countries. It is possible to save all and not have the uplink until month two, but it requires some luck with the abduction missions. -Excavate to the right immediately. -Wait until the first batch of engineers from abduction rewards, then start building a workshop and as many satellites as possible. Make sure to buy each satellite individually so they can be cancelled individually if need be. Sell every scrap from the first ufo, and sell every corpse (I usually keep alloys unless I really need the extra few bucks, though). You should have enough after scrapping the ufo to start building the rest of your satellites. -Once the workshop finishes, start building the uplink. Uplink takes 14 days, so you need to start with 15 remaining. You can get the workshop and uplink without another power generator if you build nothing else. -If you need extra cash at some point, cancel one of the satellites. -The uplink should finish more or less at the end of the month. Note that this depends on a few random things. The ufo has to show up early enough, you have to loot enough from the ufo for cash, and the council mission has to pop up early enough to get the cash reward in time to either build the workshop or uplink. I don't usually try too hard for the satellite rush for this reason. If at any point it becomes impossible to get the uplink up, just sell off the extra satellites in progress that you can't launch for the extra cash and go for the OTS or something. It doesn't take any commitment to try, though, since you can just sell off the satellites to back out, so I almost always do the start of it. As abduction missions pop up, plan out how the panic is going to increase. In general, if you're going to cover a continent with satellites, ignore abductions on that continent. Countries won't leave until the end of the month, so if countries are red and you ignore an abduction on that continent, it has no effect. Take abductions on continents you don't plan to cover for a while. For choices between continents you're not going to cover, it depends on panic levels, and how late in the month you are (eg: how many more abductions you expect that month). This is situational, but just try and figure out what the worst case scenarios are, and guard against those. If you're not trying to save 100%, you can ignore abductions in your home continent, or on continents you don't care about. Panic goes up by two in ignored countries, and one on ignored continents. After the first month, roughly aim to cover a continent per month. Deploy satellites at the very end of every month. The alien base can help you out if its getting out of hand.
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Oct 12, 2013 06:58
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Drifter posted:Firaxis has never designed their games to be mod friendly like that, have they? I'd imagine none of them will work. Civ IV is very mod-friendly.
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Oct 12, 2013 07:05
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Away all Goats posted:Can somebody give me some quick guidelines to follow when trying to do a Classic difficulty no-countries-lost playthrough? Like how soon should I have my second satellite up? When should I get a Satellite uplink? What continent should I start on?
The bolded one is what really did it for me. I'm a hoarder, but I realized you really don't need the power cores or navigation computers early on so you can sell any undamaged ones for lots of fast and early money. After that, the big issue is having enough engineers to build the next satellite facility.
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Oct 12, 2013 07:25
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Mortabis posted:Civ IV is very mod-friendly. The problem with Xcom isn't Firaxis, it's that UE games are not mod friendly. People ask for an SDK, which is dumb because it exists already, it's called the UDK. But devs who make games with UE can never make them easily moddable because as far as I can tell there's no middle ground between closed and "so open that corporate & legal freak out". Xcom actually has the most mods available of any recent UE game I've seen, save possibly for Mass Effect 3 (but almost all ME3 mods are texture mods or simple asset swaps).
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Oct 12, 2013 08:47
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I'm kinda baffled how the ability to mod the unreal engine went from UT to this. Did Epic just decide somewhere along the way to deliberately screw over modding?
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Oct 12, 2013 08:58
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Slashrat posted:I'm kinda baffled how the ability to mod the unreal engine went from UT to this. Did Epic just decide somewhere along the way to deliberately screw over modding? OTOH I think it used to be even worse -- Mass Effect 1 was so hard to modify the developers themselves had a hard time making DLC for it. VVVVV e: I don't think it's directly about DLC either. It started having this problem before DLC became A Thing. The locked ini type deal is dumb yes, but it does make sense for multiplayer games. If you know what you're doing you can munge unreal into basic wallhacks with just inis (and it's undetectable since the program isn't being hacked). The smart thing would be to alter the ini loading so that it ignores any engine variables you aren't using yourself, but locking the whole thing is easier. Klyith fucked around with this message at 10:17 on Oct 12, 2013 |
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Oct 12, 2013 09:21
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Slashrat posted:I'm kinda baffled how the ability to mod the unreal engine went from UT to this. Did Epic just decide somewhere along the way to deliberately screw over modding? They had to sell their engine to executives who don't want modders ruining their DLC plans. There have been quite a few PC releases of unreal engine games that are so locked down you couldn't even turn off mouse smoothing in the .ini file.
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Oct 12, 2013 09:57
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Flippycunt posted:If you're bored with vanilla its worth a shot, but there is quite a few of bullshit moments where like two cyberdisks and 12 thin men roll up on your team all at once or whatever. Are you playing the latest version? They mostly fixed the zerg rush problem where every pack becomes active on turn three and it's made LW a fair bit easier as a result. Overall I like the mod but the implementation is really rough around the edges due to the lack of proper modding tools. The best two things about it are the increased variety of enemy types on missions and the increased length of the campaign. One of my hopes for EW is that the Classic and Impossible campaigns are longer. I think Ananda Gupta mentioned in an interview that they've made research times longer on those settings but I hope the same applies more generally to the rest of the game. I want Xcom to last longer and have a difficulty curve weighted more to the late-game than the early-game. The Marathon setting for vanilla doesn't really satisfy my first wish because as Long War shows, it takes a lot of fine-grained tweaking to deliver a good experience when it comes to lengthening the campaign; you can't just increase all costs by X and be done with it (Civ5's Marathon setting kinda does this and it suffers for it, though it mostly works).
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Oct 12, 2013 10:13
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The main issue I found for the Long War is that its just so drat long.  You can slowly fall behind the tech curve (which is interesting) but you won't know it until way too late. There are so many more missions/month and research takes so much longer that by the time you realize you should have improved your air units so you can catch UFOs, you've had to have two months of UFOs slip past you as you try to fix it. Since alien tech-up rate is partially limited by you actually stopping all the UFOs, you won't realize you're screwed until elite muton packs of 5 start showing up against your laser/carapace dudes (and the Elites are significantly buffed and throw grenades at the first chance they get), at which point you're probably 30 missions past when you made the mistake. To be honest, I think my mistake was not getting Labs in my very first month. Which I found out about 15 hours of playtime later. Its not bad, it could just do with a little more feedback re: alien progress so you have a better idea of where you are relative to the respective alien threats. The fact that both level up slightly (Thin Men get accuracy and crit bonuses, for instance, and UFO guns upgrading was a huge shock for me) in addition to getting replaced by better options compounds this. Its not a bad mod, and I certainly enjoyed most of their changes to the tactical layer. Enemies need to have fewer grenade options or you need a "flak armor" accessory because 100% damage options on a game when the majority of enemies have them is...not fun. Also, a rocketeer with shredder rockets is utterly essential. I'm looking forward to see what they do with some of the changes put in by EW. With some updates, it could be an excellent mod.
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Oct 12, 2013 11:17
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The worst enemy in terror missions: civilians. They all ran to take cover behind the car after it was set on fire.
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Oct 12, 2013 11:47
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Yeah it is just a bit too long. I abandoned my latest game a while ago because I was basically at the endgame (was about to shoot down the Overseer UFO) and didn't care to finish it. The weakest part of the mod is the UFO battle changes, but you're right in that if you don't build labs straight away you fall behind very easily. The Europe bonus is by far the best in LW because you can rush build a couple of labs very early. Unfortunately due to lab expansion being restricted to the number of scientists you have, if you don't get a random event or council mission in the first month that rewards scientists you're basically screwed; the game is incredibly more difficult if you have to accrue scientists and engineers via countries in the first few months. It's one of the inconsistencies in the game that I don't mind save-scumming.
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Oct 12, 2013 11:52
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bitterandtwisted posted:The worst enemy in terror missions: civilians. someone's not getting a good panic reduction from that mission
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Oct 12, 2013 11:52
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bitterandtwisted posted:The worst enemy in terror missions: civilians.
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Oct 12, 2013 14:31
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Away all Goats posted:Can somebody give me some quick guidelines to follow when trying to do a Classic difficulty no-countries-lost playthrough? Like how soon should I have my second satellite up? When should I get a Satellite uplink? What continent should I start on? I've done it on Ironman Classic a couple of times, but there's a strong element of luck involved, so the RNG can still really dick you. One failed interception is all it takes to doom a country, and the cost of having two interceptors on each continent is rather prohibitive when so many other things make a demand on your non-budget. Again, I had the first interception of the game end in failure once; up until that point I assumed it was a scripted cutscene. The sat rush build order is a must, and I guess try to manouver things so that you concentrate panic into and then lock down entire continents at a time. Direct panic increase on uncovered countries is much better than AoE panic increase on countries that already have a satellite, since there is nothing you can do if the latter causes a country to max out, short of launching the alien base assault before you would otherwise be ready for it.
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Oct 12, 2013 15:27
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Is it my imagination, or is that the Uber Ethereal in the Alien Containment chamber in the Security Breach trailer? :50 seconds. http://youtu.be/fd9CmpLZVMI?t=50s
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Oct 12, 2013 22:38
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Vengarr posted:Is it my imagination, or is that the Uber Ethereal in the Alien Containment chamber in the Security Breach trailer? Nah that's just a regular one. The Uber Ethereal has a really distinctive helmet.
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Oct 12, 2013 22:45
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Alchenar posted:Nah that's just a regular one. The Uber Ethereal has a really distinctive helmet. Darn. I thought there had to be a special reason why they included that shot, since we've always been able to bag regular ethereals. Ah well.
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Oct 12, 2013 22:57
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It always seemed weird to me how XCOM somehow managed to build a chamber that could neutralize psychic powers before really encountering them in the field. You'd think some trial and error would be necessary for that kind of thing.
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Oct 12, 2013 23:50
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SlothfulCobra posted:It always seemed weird to me how XCOM somehow managed to build a chamber that could neutralize psychic powers before really encountering them in the field. You'd think some trial and error would be necessary for that kind of thing. Ehh, if you run with the idea that psychic powers travel similarly to radiation or something you just have to have a thing that prevents that. It doesn't matter what it is so much as how it travels through the aether. Or maybe  .
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Oct 12, 2013 23:53
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SlothfulCobra posted:It always seemed weird to me how XCOM somehow managed to build a chamber that could neutralize psychic powers before really encountering them in the field. You'd think some trial and error would be necessary for that kind of thing. Psychic powers are just micro-bullets generated by the mind. Being small particles, they lack the mass to even scratch the thick bulletproof glass of the test chamber.
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Oct 12, 2013 23:55
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Fluff indicates that even the holding chamber doesn't do very well - Sectoids commanders and Ethereals made the science team poo poo themselves. My guess is they fixed up the chamber after the first live sectoid tried to roid rage past the glass.
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Oct 13, 2013 00:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:It always seemed weird to me how XCOM somehow managed to build a chamber that could neutralize psychic powers before really encountering them in the field. You'd think some trial and error would be necessary for that kind of thing. They just used a rookie strapped to the other side of the room as a psychic rod.
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Oct 13, 2013 00:12
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Vengarr posted:Is it my imagination, or is that the Uber Ethereal in the Alien Containment chamber in the Security Breach trailer? I think that's actually from the Ethereal Interrogation scene, if I recall correctly. Edit: Yep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6YQJWi0b30
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Oct 13, 2013 03:21
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Actually, all they seem to have done is remove line of sight so he can't target anyone anyway. I guess he could randomly cast vortex around him, but I think that still requires LoS too. A lot of the technology in the containment chamber seems to be stuff to keep scientists from directly interacting with live aliens due to the inherent danger.
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Oct 13, 2013 18:52
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So....is a room full of 9 chrysalids in the UFO base normal on classic? My poor squad of captains didn't stand a chance. EDIT: no mods installed at all
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Oct 13, 2013 18:56
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Mokinokaro posted:So....is a room full of 9 chrysalids in the UFO base normal on classic? My poor squad of captains didn't stand a chance. Yup, definitely can happen. Just have to creep carefully and try not to over-reveal (though the sight lines in the bases can make that tough)...But if you have enough rockets/grenades, maybe manageable?
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Oct 13, 2013 20:42
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Chrysalids are much easier to take care of when you realize that they're the only aliens stupid enough to run into reaction fire, even if they saw the soldier go into reaction mode. Failing that, just use a bunch of explosives.
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Oct 13, 2013 21:29
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Drifter posted:Ehh, if you run with the idea that psychic powers travel similarly to radiation or something you just have to have a thing that prevents that. It doesn't matter what it is so much as how it travels through the aether. You are thinking this too hard. You just give the captive a small electric shock every time it attempts to do something funny. Repeat this process until the subject is "pacified". A lot of options become available with Dr. Vahlen's ethical code and a liberal reinterpretation of the word "interrogation"
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Oct 13, 2013 22:20
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For reference what we do know of XCOM's "interrogation" is that it involves metal objects probing the subject's brain while it is still alive. Or at least something along those lines!
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Oct 13, 2013 22:22
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Geight posted:For reference what we do know of XCOM's "interrogation" is that it involves metal objects probing the subject's brain while it is still alive. Or at least something along those lines! Berserkers get put through obstacle courses apparently.
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Oct 13, 2013 23:13
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Alchenar posted:Berserkers get put through obstacle courses apparently. Not for interrrogation purposes, the laboratory staff just thought they needed to lose some weight.
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Oct 13, 2013 23:21
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Alchenar posted:Berserkers get put through obstacle courses apparently. To oberseve the effects of slowing down time
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Oct 13, 2013 23:29
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Apparently they needed to be massively sedated, obviously. Although not so much that they couldn't run the obstacle course... 420 Hotbox the containment chamber err day
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Oct 13, 2013 23:32
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WarpedNaba posted:Apparently they needed to be massively sedated, obviously. Although not so much that they couldn't run the obstacle course... Team, this is Central. We need you to bring back a live one this time. The scientists need to find out if the Sectoids will still want to abduct people if they are all high as gently caress.
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Oct 13, 2013 23:41
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I'm pretty sure Thin Men interrogations are actually verbal, and apparently very easy. I like to imagine that, given how Thin Men are supposed to be very passive and cooperative off of the battlefield, it just consists of asking them questions three times.
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Oct 13, 2013 23:44
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Veyrall posted:I'm pretty sure Thin Men interrogations are actually verbal, and apparently very easy. And how everyone is absolutely terrified of having a live Ethereal anywhere near them. The writing for XCOM really is very good all over.
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Oct 13, 2013 23:56
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