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MechanicalTomPetty posted:I thought they nerfed that, or was that just the ghost armor cloak?
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Dec 4, 2013 04:55
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:I thought they nerfed that, or was that just the ghost armor cloak? "invisible" is just a 30% crit bonus now, not 100%. Source doesn't matter. Even with mimetic skin I still run ghost armor. The 20% defense is huge and the +3 movement is also awesome. If you want more HP, throw on a chitin plate. The second item slot means it's not really giving up much of anything.
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Dec 4, 2013 04:57
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Deuce posted:"invisible" is just a 30% crit bonus now, not 100%. Source doesn't matter. Do you really have things getting close enough to you that they do significant melee damage? Granted, one of my soldiers got whacked recently, but it wasn't enough to kill her. She self healed, and still had her scope and Edit: I completely missed the part where you wrote more hp. Sorry, that makes sense. Edit 2: Obviously my soldier did not have a med pack, a scope and a grenade. WTF am I talking about. She had a scope and a med kit. Blargh. Pohl fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 05:03
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Deuce posted:Even with mimetic skin I still run ghost armor. The 20% defense is huge and the +3 movement is also awesome. If you want more HP, throw on a chitin plate. The second item slot means it's not really giving up much of anything. Ghost armor also grant the grapple hook ability, the main downside is the high cost.
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Dec 4, 2013 05:04
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There really needs to be a MEC-4 "Phoenix" or something with the ability to fly. Having a cheese squad of 5 soldiers with Archangel Armour is hilarious and I want the MEC to be able to join in 
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Dec 4, 2013 05:11
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Shumagorath posted:If I had my mimetic skin assault (Ricardo "Anaconda" Valdez, named so for his camo and arc thrower captures) for Newfoundland I think I could have shot Chrysalids until I got bored. I screwed that picture up because I took the screenshot while another soldier was active, so it doesn't really represent her.  She is a colonel, but she does psi attacks whenever possible! That was also my first mission using the mimetic skin, so it took me a bit of trial and error to figure out exactly how it worked.I did laugh when the game stopped spawning aliens. My team sat there for a long time waiting for something to happen, until I finally gave up and hit the launch button.
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Dec 4, 2013 05:14
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Is it just me, or do EXALT guys look kinda like Bureau fake-x-com units?
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Dec 4, 2013 05:31
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Rynoto posted:There really needs to be a MEC-4 "Phoenix" or something with the ability to fly. Having a cheese squad of 5 soldiers with Archangel Armour is hilarious and I want the MEC to be able to join in You could have a MEC leading a team of SHIVS and all of them just being sky-hopping death-bunnies. On another note, what do you guys reckon is the likelyhood of getting a Long War version for Enemy Within? And should there not be one, is it worth playing with vanilla EU and installing Long War just to experience it? It looks like a pretty sweet mod.
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Dec 4, 2013 05:36
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Eimi posted:I am either off in my previous game of Marathon or something is off since the patch. Using Implassic my first April mission had 5 Thin Men and some sectoids. My second April abduction was 9 Floaters and 3 Thin Men. This isn't right, is it? Also, after the Firaxis patch from the other day you have to re-install the Implassic mod, which basically entails re-running the mod's batch file that patches the EXE file.
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Dec 4, 2013 05:37
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Anony Mouse posted:The cloak ability of ghost armor is unavailable if the soldier has mimetic skin. However it's still probably worth it for the mobility bonuses. And, unless they've changed it, ghost armor is also +20 defense, meaning that a properly specced assault wearing it out in the open against several enemies is actually effectively in full cover, and your medal'd up low profile sniper is nigh-unhittable. I just wish there was some way to buff MEC defense above 15 
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Dec 4, 2013 06:44
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Any tips for classic? I'm getting my rear end handed to me. I guess I'm playing too much like normal; rush a bunch of satellite uplinks. I just can't handle how there's 9 sectoids on like mission 2-3 and Thin Man killing me when I'm in full cover. Any general classic tips/build orders? Normal is too easy, classic too hard!
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Dec 4, 2013 06:45
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Anatharon posted:Is it just me, or do EXALT guys look kinda like Bureau fake-x-com units?  Shumagorath posted:Would you believe I took it off my Close Combat Specialist / Rapid Fire / Close & Personal / Killer Instinct Assault nicknamed "Hotline"? She kept blowing her own cover by killing stuff that got too close, so I switched her to Bioelectric / Synthetic Heart. She has killed several Mectoids from full health by running right up to them and unloading three consecutive shots under their chins. Bioelectric Skin is hysterical, I love giving it to one person on a team and just dangling them out like a dinner roll for the squids.
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Dec 4, 2013 06:46
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Rent posted:Any tips for classic? I'm getting my rear end handed to me. I guess I'm playing too much like normal; rush a bunch of satellite uplinks. I just can't handle how there's 9 sectoids on like mission 2-3 and Thin Man killing me when I'm in full cover. In general, the most basic tip when going from normal to classic or impossible is "slow down". In normal you usually play by running guys up, throwing everyone in overwatch, then getting into firefights with aliens where being in full cover is enough to make you safe enough to takes pot shots. On classic/impossible, you don't have the luxury of taking low (below ~70%) accuracy shots and hoping they connect, because chances are they won't, and then your guy who's in full cover will get hit with a crit and die. Other general stuff: -Remember that unless you're on a bomb run, there is no shot clock. Feel free to take a turn after an engagement just to make sure you've got all your poo poo together and everyone's reloaded. -NEVER engage/activate multiple groups of enemies if you can help it. Use your first move of the turn to scout, and then don't move anyone else farther/wider than that scout. -Hunker down replaces Overwatch as your standard end-of-round action when you're in an engagement. Again, you can't afford to take pot shots because you're going to miss and the enemy isn't. -Full cover isn't enough. Try to either have guys in full cover hunker down, or simply have them retreat out of sight range. Basically, try to hide/hunker down/run away until the computer overextends or makes a bad move. And when you go for a risk like taking a low % shot to try and kill a sectoid or something, make sure you have a backup plan for when the shot misses. If you have no backup plan than you're probably not in a position to take that shot to begin with and should really back up or hunker down.
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Dec 4, 2013 07:04
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Rent posted:Any tips for classic? I'm getting my rear end handed to me. I guess I'm playing too much like normal; rush a bunch of satellite uplinks. I just can't handle how there's 9 sectoids on like mission 2-3 and Thin Man killing me when I'm in full cover. Normal difficulty taught you the terrible habit of trading fire with the enemy and waiting until they all fall down. On normal, this works out fine because the enemy is statistically weaker than you are and the RNG secretly cheats in your favor. Also, the AI is shackled to only attack you in small numbers and occasionally just make the alien do something dumb for no reason. The main bits for coming up in difficulty: - Low cover isn't good enough. Don't let the enemy shoot at your troops in low cover. Instead of taking that 30% shot, hunker down. Turn the low cover into high cover, and remove the oneshot crit. (unless they can flank, then they can murder you anyway) However, even hunkered down, if you're being shot at in low cover, you should punch yourself. Low cover is an act of desperation. - Don't take those low probability shots. Normal difficulty secretly made these hit more than they should. It hosed up your perception of how terrible an idea it is to take a shot at 30%. Hunker down. - Destroy cover. Then shoot. Works great for thin men, a grenade blows the cover and brings them to one health. Now it's an easy pistol shot instead of a hard rifle shot that might not even kill the target. - By the way, explosives rule the day. Vahlen is wrong. Use explosives. All the time. They are a 100% kill against sectoids. MECs are amazing at this, and keep an eye out for aliens taking cover on any sort of vehicle. Vehicles explode for six damage, plus at least two for the collateral damage shot. Grenadier means you can oneshot thin men with a grenade! - lovely situation where you can't reliably wipe out every active alien in one turn? Poor cover and the enemy is in high cover or elevated? Back the gently caress away. Break line of sight, set overwatch traps or hunker down. - You will lose troops and you will lose countries. That's ok. If you lost only one soldier on a mission, consider that normal. Even a full wipe isn't necessarily game over. Rookies with lasers still oneshot thin men. And they can still carry grenades. Push through. - Hunker down. Seriously. In high cover, that means you get 80% defense. Even thin man can't hit through that. Of course, their poison spit still works fine. But slow damage from poison beats a plasma shot to the face. Sometimes they'll just overwatch instead. Overwatch isn't great, but at least they get an aim penalty and lightning reflexes can solve that entirely. Wait for a good shot. - Flashbangs are hilariously good. - Ghost grenades are straight broken. - Don't leave things to chance. Those 100% kill grenades against sectoids mean your troops don't take fire. Weapon fragments basically are never a bottleneck until late-game, and by then you've already won anyway. Vahlen is wrong. Deuce fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 07:16
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Thanks for the advice. I noticed myself resorting to using grenades like there is no tomorrow. One other question that may be dumb: hotkey for Overwatch is Y, but I haven't found the hotkey for hunker down and I didnt see an option to set it? Is there a hotkey for it?
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Dec 4, 2013 07:27
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Too the above, I would add... SHIVs! Get a Foundry, research and build SHIVs. Remember that advice listed above about sending out a scout to explore a bit, then making sure no one goes further out than that scout? That scout should be a SHIV. It's fast, you don't need to worry about finding cover, and you don't care much if it dies. Later in the game you'll find that Alloy and Hover SHIVs actually age better than MECs. A fully upgraded SHIV has 22 health, self-repairs 2 points a round, carries a Heavy Plasma that can Suppress AND gets the free shot if someone gets within four squares the way an Assault can. Oh and it doesn't run out of ammo as fast as a MEC. True, it will never get to punch a Mechtoid into orbit, but it is also much MUCH cheaper to buy. jng2058 fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 07:28
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Spiteski posted:On another note, what do you guys reckon is the likelyhood of getting a Long War version for Enemy Within? They are working on getting it running with the expansion and new patches, so hopefully sometime soon. If you want to try it though, you will need to a backup of the game from a pre-EW installation (patch 4). The current version of EU won't work with it.
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Dec 4, 2013 07:28
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Best abduction mission end ever: MEC punching an invisible seeker through TWO cars a turn before I lost a MELD. A (cheesy) tactic against Seekers is to pay attention to where you can and can't move. If a seeker's on a tile and not flying, you can't move a soldier there (the only time you can get two units on one space is putting a soldier on a space that an enemy will air-drop into). Drop explosives or a kinetic strike on that tile to to reveal/kill the little bugger. It's a bit cheap, but I like to imagine that the seeker cloak isn't entirely perfect and my dudes can see a shimmer sometime. jng2058 posted:Too the above, I would add... Also, backing this up. Yes, SHIVs aren't quite the murder-machines that MECs are in some ways, but they're still awesome in many, many ways. Mainly the fact that they're cheap, don't cost MELD and come ready to kick-rear end out of the door. Also, in addition to upgrading the weapon strapped on them, SHIV weapon upgrades give bonus aim (+10 for laser, +15 for plasma (+25 total)) and those SHIV guns hit loving hard. Alkydere fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Dec 4, 2013 |
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Dec 4, 2013 08:02
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EW makes this game so much easier. Having Slingshot makes the campaign financing a doddle, and Exalts Panic reduction has saved my rear end on no less than 3 occasions.
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Dec 4, 2013 10:40
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Decided to do one more mission as a way of saying goodbye to this campaign and holy cow, it was a massacre. The MEC got hit by a Floater, panicked (35 will!) and ran forward, triggering a pack of Thin Men and Mutons. So, uh, yeah...Terror Mission in March, Mutons in April. I may have used all my luck up on the first run of EW. There I had about six casualties, with 300 kills on one unit.
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Dec 4, 2013 11:09
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Can Mec's miss with Electro-pulse? I set one off point blank on a Sectopod and the fucker still shot me the next round!
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Dec 4, 2013 12:34
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Rent posted:Any tips for classic? I'm getting my rear end handed to me. I guess I'm playing too much like normal; rush a bunch of satellite uplinks. I just can't handle how there's 9 sectoids on like mission 2-3 and Thin Man killing me when I'm in full cover. Apart from all the good tips you've already been given: You gotta just break your head on it a few times before it clicks, playing and losing is the only real way to get a feel for how a difficulty plays. Hit up Classic/Ironman and see how far you get, don't get frustrated and restart when you think you're losing too badly. I was in the same boat for the Classic-Impossible jump untill a few days ago when things started clicking, took me at least 12+ terrible wipes. Gotta emphasize explosives: check your grenades at the start of the turn, every sectoid you can put a 'nade on is a sectoid you control. If you can put 'nades on every remaining sectoid you can try potshots with other troops to conserve those grenades. Check some of beaglerush's I/I videos, they're nice and short and though they're for EU they contain a lot of solid info for the tactical game (his strategic game is rather weak): http://www.youtube.com/user/Beaglerush/videos?view=1&flow=grid And no, there's no hotkey for hunkering down faik, I really miss it too,
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Dec 4, 2013 13:34
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This sectoid I shot with disabling shot powered up and got a reaction shot on every single person (5!) I moved up. At least I didn't move the VIP. 
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Dec 4, 2013 13:41
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Delacroix posted:This sectoid I shot with disabling shot powered up and got a reaction shot on every single person (5!) I moved up. At least I didn't move the VIP. Yeah, I avoid Disabling Shot because of the bugs. I just have people carry flashbangs and ghost grenades for covering the rookie with the Arc Thrower. Alkydere posted:Also, backing this up. Yes, SHIVs aren't quite the murder-machines that MECs are in some ways, but they're still awesome in many, many ways. Mainly the fact that they're cheap, don't cost MELD and come ready to kick-rear end out of the door. Also, in addition to upgrading the weapon strapped on them, SHIV weapon upgrades give bonus aim (+10 for laser, +15 for plasma (+25 total)) and those SHIV guns hit loving hard. SHIVs are amazing. My classic/Marathon campaign is intentionally no-MEC (my next campaign will be no-genemod just to spice things up) and SHIVs basically fill the role of the tank, expendable scout, and heavy firepower all in one. They self-repair, aliens love targeting them over the rookie cowering behind full cover, and best of all they're cheap and cost no MELD. The only thing I'm not looking forward to is not having them for the base invasion, but I'm slowly building up a stable of genemodded colonels and rotating my squads so that I don't have more than one of them possibly injured in one mission.
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Dec 4, 2013 13:51
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Delacroix posted:This sectoid I shot with disabling shot powered up and got a reaction shot on every single person (5!) I moved up. At least I didn't move the VIP. 
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Dec 4, 2013 13:51
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I can't think up a response to that more apt than "lmao."
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Dec 4, 2013 13:56
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I've just been playing safe and only using Disabling shot on any alien as my last action in a turn.
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Dec 4, 2013 13:57
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After a SHIV one-shot a sectoid commander that was buffing a mechtoid, I learned to love them unconditionally. Plus they seem to get whatever evasion bonus for flying that cyberdiscs do, so aliens miss a fair number of shots.
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Dec 4, 2013 14:23
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Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:Wait so the sectopod disabling shot bug just moved targets? As hilariously painful as that would be, it wasn't that bad. It was a sectoid with a puny plasma peashooter. They went on overwatch, took 2 damage from disabling shot and decided to hulk up, making 5 reactions shots in one turn. I promptly changed plans from stunning them to bouncing them off a car via right hook. What was really unfortunate is that training roulette wouldn't give more than one of my soldiers lightning reflexes. 17 days in medical.
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Dec 4, 2013 14:55
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Delacroix posted:As hilariously painful as that would be, it wasn't that bad. It was a sectoid with a puny plasma peashooter. They went on overwatch, took 2 damage from disabling shot and decided to hulk up, making 5 reactions shots in one turn. I promptly changed plans from stunning them to bouncing them off a car via right hook.
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Dec 4, 2013 15:32
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Aiko "Breakdown" Tanaka. I don't know how I got a Support Colonel with no useful healing abilities and a will of 38, but I did. Her aim was high 80s, so she had that going for her. Anyway, she got gravely wounded and I figured if I chopped her limbs off and shoved the rest of her into a giant robot, she'd stop panicking all the time. She didn't. She can hit just about anything with that railgun, so long as a muton isn't burping on the other side of the map, in which case I have a robot voice calmly telling me that it's losing control of the situation.
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Dec 4, 2013 16:00
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This would be pretty hard to set up, but... now that there are enemies that use disabling shot (EXALT snap shot snipers, pfffffffft) I wonder if you could get this bug to happen with an XCOM soldier. Bonus points for having it happen with a covering fire + opportunist sniper.
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Dec 4, 2013 16:02
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The best advice I got here was to only have one unit scout new ground. If he finds enemies, judge whether you can kill them all in a single turn. If you can't, move accordingly in a defensive manner.
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Dec 4, 2013 16:07
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So the game crashed during the base invasion when Vahlen started talking about seeing an Ethereal for the first time. I hope that's not something that is repeatable or this save is hosed.
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Dec 4, 2013 16:32
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current Ironman Classic status: clenching in anticipation of the base invasion it's kind of the worst thing  that and constantly playing out how the first move is going to go down depending on the distribution of my four initial guys such that I can murder the loving Sectoid Commander before his 100% guaranteed mind control hits, but still not get disembowelled by the Chrysallids that drop down right above him.Why the gently caress did I take Flush on my star assault. Somebody said that they fixed it so it doesn't just make the enemy run to a new piece of cover (spoiler alert: it isn't, it's still utterly worthless)
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Dec 4, 2013 17:02
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I think I've had Flush work to my advantage exactly once over something like 150 hours of total X-COM (EU and EW) playtime
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Dec 4, 2013 17:03
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I'm thinking of running a stress-free gimmick run on Normal when I finish this classic achievement run. A few ideas I've got: - One For All MEC + Snap Shot ITZ Mimetic Skin Sniper. - Four healing flame throwing MECs - Solo Assault gene modded to the nines (Solo Assault on Normal was extremely hard in EW - I was never able to get a win) - 6 gunslinger snipers
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Dec 4, 2013 17:12
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Zigmidge posted:I'm thinking of running a stress-free gimmick run on Normal when I finish this classic achievement run. I think this would be pretty stress free on Classic.
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Dec 4, 2013 17:13
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The only real use I ever found for Flush was as a high-accuracy low-damage shot handy for finishing off weak or weakened enemies. And even then, that was on Normal difficulty and would probably be useless against the higher-health enemies of Classic or Impossible.
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Dec 4, 2013 17:15
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The only way that Flush works is if you have a bunch of people go to Overwatch BEFORE you Flush someone. Of course you're then eating the Overwatch accuracy penalty, so it's generally not worth it unless you're getting them out of Hard Cover and even then Collateral Damage or a Grenade is a better deal for eliminating cover. So yeah, Flush still sucks.
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Dec 4, 2013 17:17
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