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ProfessorBooty posted:edit: By the way, I need at least one volunteer for a pilot to come in in September. I have on my volunteer list Akratic Method, Veloxyll, Sheep-Dodger, and Endomorphic. Yeeeeessss. Stitch my exploded body back together so I can fail you in exciting new ways!
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Sep 14, 2015 19:15
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I will volunteer to help save the earth from this vile alien threat. Preference for Canadian female soldier, infantry class, but whatever works.
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Sep 15, 2015 03:15
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Ah, the rushing air game, better start swapping out available fighters from other countries to cover your bases, Commander. A-XCOM North America will look forward to taking in the sights wherever you send us. Also, looking forward to hearing back from Livingiseasy. I understand he is finding fantastic vacation spots he visited while on covert ops. As for Long War realtalk, I'm partway through my own game on Normal, where I am starting to get a better sense of strategic priorities (about 50-60% of the way in) and figuring out how best to determine who to gene mod/psi/MEC out. I appreciate the perkchat in partciular, Commander, as I enjoy learning a little more about how to build a fighting force adequate for each situation as opposed to throwing whomever is available against an alien force and hoping the dice rolls are in my favour. Keep it up!
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Sep 15, 2015 05:02
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What's the limit on fighters per continent, if there is one?
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Sep 15, 2015 05:36
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Lotish posted:What's the limit on fighters per continent, if there is one? 6, VVV: Oops, thanks. I haven't actually played Vanilla for a while now. Figured I'd "try one game of Long War" but it's just been living up to its name since... Akratic Method fucked around with this message at 07:03 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 06:38
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Akratic Method posted:6, both in Vanilla and LW. Only four in vanilla.
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Sep 15, 2015 06:55
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 Youtube Link This may be a little boring for some folks, so I'll sum up what happens in spoiler-text below: Horrible relay locations, we find a way to get Livingiseasy safely out of op, we manage to do so with no injuries (didn't finish the mission). edit: I was running late this morning and forgot to talk about new perks. Perk Talk Tactical Sense vs. Opportunist vs. Mayhem (Tech. Sergeant Rocketeer) I plan on taking Tactical sense on suppression rocketeers, because they take HEAT over Will to Survive. Opportunist is good on the overwatch rocketeers. Before suppression was buffed this was necessary if you wanted the suppression to have some teeth. Mayhem gives more damage for rockets. You can do some neat stuff with the overwatch rocketeer build, and when I took more overwatch-centric styles I was generally impressed by the overwatch rocketeer. Unfortunately it takes a long time to get them going. Without opportunist things are dicier than before and they're hard to level up. This would complete the overwatch rocketeer build. ProfessorBooty fucked around with this message at 15:52 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 14:29
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I don't think it's fair to call that a boring mission, Van Doorn is rocketing it and the rest of the squad is on point.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:39
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The phrase I've always heard for something going badly is tits up. Maybe there's another one. But at least no one died.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:47
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seaborgium posted:The phrase I've always heard for something going badly is tits up. Maybe there's another one. But at least no one died. The one I was thinking of at that particular rambly time was 'Pear-shaped' 
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Sep 15, 2015 15:48
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While the limited squad covert ops are cool in concept, they still feel really lovely in practice. They are probably my least favorite thing about LW so far, everything else we've seen works out alright and is pretty interesting. Having your squad size completely ham-strung till you can't even deal 2 exalt without blowing all your consumables is a bit silly. Then again, that may just have been Booty being overly-cautious. I do feel like that second rocket was a bit overkill on the lone operative, you did have infinite suppression after all, and could just pot shot him down. Then you might have been able to just wipe that massive pod out with the shredder + normal rocket follow up.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:12
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SaffronKit posted:I do feel like that second rocket was a bit overkill on the lone operative, you did have infinite suppression after all, and could just pot shot him down. Then you might have been able to just wipe that massive pod out with the shredder + normal rocket follow up. Yeah, we discussed ways we could have finished the mission. Part of the thing was I decided from the beginning that it was unlikely for us to complete the mission, so we made plans based around that. Having two rocketeers, a sapper engineer, and a scout would have been handy. edit: Another issue is that with the phalanx armor we don't have any staying power while carrying consumables, so our options right now are quickly finish the mission, or be safe, unfortunately. New armor is coming 'soon'!
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Sep 15, 2015 16:41
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ProfessorBooty posted:edit: By the way, I need at least one volunteer for a pilot to come in in September. I have on my volunteer list Akratic Method, Veloxyll, Sheep-Dodger, and Endomorphic.  with increased chance of catching plasma bolts with my teeth.
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Sep 15, 2015 20:00
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Endomorphic posted:I am happy to be I didn't update my roster excel file  , so I'm not sure if you volunteered as a soldier. You were on my list of 'random people who posted in the thread without explicitly asking not to not be volunteered'. Also it was easy to come up with a call sign.
ProfessorBooty fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 20:08
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ProfessorBooty posted:You were on my list of 'random people who posted in the thread without explicitly asking not to not be volunteered'.
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Sep 15, 2015 21:24
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Swarming abduction? This is gonna be good.SaffronKit posted:While the limited squad covert ops are cool in concept, they still feel really lovely in practice. They are probably my least favorite thing about LW so far, everything else we've seen works out alright and is pretty interesting. Having your squad size completely ham-strung till you can't even deal 2 exalt without blowing all your consumables is a bit silly. Might as well just come out and say it: it's stupid. There's challenging difficulty that requires you to use strategy and skill to succeed and there's stupid pain-in-the-rear end difficulty where no amount of skill can get you through the pointless no-win scenarios (a lot of games call it something like "masochist" difficulty or something to that extent) and LW relies quite a bit on both. The readme says that you will have to abort/skip missions, which translates to "we feel the need to throw deliberately unbalanced bullshit at you, because reasons" *Reason#1 probably being that if you keep winning tactical missions, you almost can't lose the game except deliberately sabotaging yourself on the strategic side. Beta15f added the "we are legion" second wave option that lets you take 6 on extraction missions, so maybe they at least recognized all the testers pointing out the difference? ProfessorBooty posted:I didn't update my roster excel file Yeah, I think my request was for "whatever amuses you most" and you mentioned something about making me an engineer because I'm a huge nerd that examines stuff like expected values of randomly generated events with randomly determined outcomes  Speaking of which, there's another new second wave option "perfect information" that shows the %chance on a lot of rolls in combat, which really makes it a lot less convoluted to evaluate game mechanics like how ridiculously dangerous Floaters are with evasion/flight+height+carbines, except they suck at overwatch (until they get upgrades) And how good suppression is. Un-spoiler: suppression is even better than ProfessorBooty makes it out to be, but I don't know whether he mentioned that the suppressor taking any damage cancels the suppression, which is probably why aliens preferentially target them. edit: one thing that should be mentioned, even though smoke/chem grenades highlight units that will be inside the cloud, it doesn't actually apply the cloud effect to that unit unless the center of the tile is enclosed in the sphere. silentsnack fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 21:48
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silentsnack posted:Might as well just come out and say it: it's stupid. There's challenging difficulty that requires you to use strategy and skill to succeed and there's stupid pain-in-the-rear end difficulty where no amount of skill can get you through the pointless no-win scenarios (a lot of games call it something like "masochist" difficulty or something to that extent) and LW relies quite a bit on both. The readme says that you will have to abort/skip missions, which translates to "we feel the need to throw deliberately unbalanced bullshit at you, because reasons" The bigger reason may be that it is very difficult to design missions that are both winnable and appropriately challenging, especially on high difficulty levels or with something like LW which advertises itself as being hard. And what does "winnable" even mean in this context - a different squad makeup may have been able to beat the mission but on any other map (or even with less crappy node placement), this squad would have done fine. One quote:edit: one thing that should be mentioned, even though smoke/chem grenades highlight units that will be inside the cloud, it doesn't actually apply the cloud effect to that unit unless the center of the tile is enclosed in the sphere.  How difficult would it have been for the "WillUnitBeCoveredByGrenade" method that the GUI calls to highlight a unit be the same method that's called when applying effects?
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Sep 15, 2015 22:43
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monster on a stick posted:
I think the 'highlight' effect was an Enemy Within addition, and it looks for something else. My guess is because the game depends on a physics engine it can't properly predict AOE effects. The AOE is casted, then afterward the physics engine tells the game whether a unit is covered. I don't know if this makes sense at all and I might be overthinking it. It would probably slow the engine to a crawl if the highlight effect had to model based on what the physics engine would return. I may have said this before, but take what I have to say with a grain of salt, I literally have no idea how these things work, and I just make guesses based on (non-game) physics modeling I've done in the past and what I see on screen.
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Sep 15, 2015 23:02
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Throwables in XCOM are hosed up anyway. They appear to be mostly modelled by the game engine calculating a trajectory and checking for intersections with objects before you even throw them which lets the physics system skip doing any collision detection while in flight (so you end up with things like rockets flying through walls). But then for some reason the physics engine takes over when they settle and you get stupid glitches like battle scanners falling through seams.
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Sep 16, 2015 01:48
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It would be really cool if in XCOM 2 there's a separate type of smoke grenade that doesn't provide defense but acts as a Line of Sight blocker (to hide troop movements), like how they're used in modern combat. I just figured I'd share that with you guys 
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Sep 16, 2015 01:56
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ProfessorBooty posted:It would be really cool if in XCOM 2 there's a separate type of smoke grenade that doesn't provide defense but acts as a Line of Sight blocker (to hide troop movements), like how they're used in modern combat. I just figured I'd share that with you guys When I first started Xcom smoke confused me because I thought it did work that way. Until I actually used it, of course.
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Sep 16, 2015 02:29
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Lotish posted:When I first started Xcom smoke confused me because I thought it did work that way. Until I actually used it, of course. Same. I always thought they would block my sight for a long time. Then I used one thinking it would do that and it didn't. Any mission where no one dies is a good mission in my mind.
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Sep 16, 2015 05:10
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I will say one thing I forgot too earlier: it warmed the cockles of my heart when Kidneyman was all "Dammit why can't you be here Saffron!" I missed not being able to murderize that tasty set-up too, Kidneyman.
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Sep 16, 2015 05:17
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Man, I'm missing Van Doorn's slightly mismatched combat quotes for firing missiles. I mean he sounded so pumped on firing missiles otherwise. He just won't go down without a fight.
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Sep 16, 2015 10:05
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In no way would I call that a boring mission. A lost battle, sure, but everyone made it back alive and relatively unscathed, which is a success in my book. Plus quite a few shots and rockets with a nice entertainment/excitement payoff! Pulling off a win with that particular start and setup seems like it'd have to be by the skin of your teeth - and you'd still have to know it was coming to be prepared for it. Ah well. Better luck next time, "Summertime."
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Sep 16, 2015 12:10
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My mangled remains are ready to take flight if you call them up Captain. (Or stuff them in an unsuspecting Rookie, or do whatever you feel is appropriate with them, it's not like I have much choice in the matter anymore  )
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Sep 16, 2015 14:42
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Cybersix posted:Better luck next time, "Summertime." Speaking of, we're looking at 100 MELD at the moment. Shouldn't we look at genemodding our single infiltrator operative? Not sure what research we lack for the high jump legs, but that really would aid in his mobility.
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Sep 16, 2015 18:36
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That was an amusing mission. I do suspect it could have been won with more frugal consumable use, but wouldn't have been nearly as safe, so I don't think cutting and running was unreasonable, especially when MEGAFUCKDEATHSQUAD rolled up and almost immediately got reinforced on the far side of the map. Four dudes just isn't enough to kill Exalts fast enough for that kind of thing without silly In The Zone chains or great explosives luck.
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Sep 16, 2015 19:07
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GunnerJ posted:What? Like, what? The hell is the design philosophy behind this? I modded this back in btw. E: I also can't believe I haven't volunteered yet so put me in as some female soldier and/or pirate. E2: also Booty if you play MGSV I think I've supported your FOB a few times now. The Iron Rose fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Sep 17, 2015 |
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Sep 17, 2015 00:48
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Cat Army 
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So this took only a little bit of searching, but was worth it given my new role: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asRDsyQjnMI&t=8m11s
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Sep 17, 2015 22:23
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Endomorphic posted:So this took only a little bit of searching, but was worth it given my new role: I guess no one told you you'd actually have to fly the plane, huh?
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Sep 17, 2015 22:51
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 Youtube Link Let's talk about GUNS The Alloy Cannon, Alloy Strike Rifles, and the Heavy Gauss Rifle are similar to their ballistic counterparts but come with an extra +2 (average) damage. The Recoilless Rifle is rocket launcher that does +2 damage over the conventional rocket launcher (it also retains the DR-cutting abilities of Gauss weapons). The Gauss Long Rifle is an amazing gun. +2 damage over ballistic, it halves the effect of the 'hardened' perk, meaning that a sniper equipping this gun has a base 25% chance to crit an exposed hardened target (Berserkers, mechtoids, landed and closed cyberdiscs, other enemies later), and it comes with HEAT ammo. This is at the cost of only having 1 base ammo. The good news is that things like ammo conservation, extended mags, and lock 'n load improve how many rounds it carries (I think the theoretical max is 4 shots). I may have been wrong in my discussion of how the Quenchguns foundry project might work. If a target has 1 DR, then it is true you have a 1/3 chance of ignoring that DR, or a 2/3 chance with Quenchguns. What I'm not certain of, is if low cover (2/3 chance of having 1 DR) is absolutely ignored, or if a target with, say 1.33 DR is reduced to 0.66 DR, which would be a good improvement, as it 'effectively' reduces such a target from 1-2 DR to 0-1 DR. That said I still think the foundry project isn't worth it, based on cost. I forget how much it costs, but I know it costs 2 alien plasma carbines, which turns into a rare-ish weapon as you move toward the midgame. In most my games I find myself short on Alien Rifles, and to a larger extent, Alien Carbines.
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Sep 18, 2015 14:49
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To my best understanding: I believe that the Gauss DR test is made after any DR tests the target makes to "set" their DR. So a target in low cover tests a 2/3 chance to see if they get +1 DR, and then the Gauss weapon tests a 1/3 chance [or 2/3 with quenchguns] to reduce their DR by 1. So the 1.33 DR guy has a 1/3 chance of having DR 2, and a 2/3 of DR 1. Then the gauss weapon has a 1/3 chance of reducing it by 1 [2/3 with Quenchguns]. So in essence, vs a normal Gauss weapon, he's got a 2/9 chance of having DR 0, a 5/9 chance of having DR 1, and a 2/9 chance of having DR 2. Quenchguns flips around some of the math: Now he has a 4/9 chance of DR 0, a 4/9 chance of DR 1, and only a 1/9 chance of maintaining DR 2.
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Sep 18, 2015 14:59
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Roadway maps and sniper duos? Yes please, I want to see that more often. I love how the aliens had no idea what the hell was going on till it was too late. And while the Alloy Strike Rifles sounds like the better choice in the long run... who cares, dat Alloy Cannon. Can't wait to see the numbers it puts out!
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Sep 18, 2015 16:00
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ProfessorBooty posted:1-2-3-4-5. Done? Thank you. Oh poo poo, we Umgah now.  Source.
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Sep 18, 2015 20:22
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Standard mission, sucks about the crazy high sectoid shot. Dual snipers did WORK today, hilarious that Lotish has YET to figure out how to be a sergeant. Anytime I hear new rookies I get so excited because I keep hoping it'll be me and I don't die in a pile of death.
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Sep 18, 2015 20:38
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Step right up Sectoids. please ignore the corpses, I'm sure nothing can possibly go wrong if you take that cover that seemingly no one is flanking. Anyway, that mission went insanely well outside the random 7 damage shot Fister took, hope to see what the Alloy Cannon can do in Saffronkit's hands
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Sep 18, 2015 20:42
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Clearly I became a medic to SAVE lives, not take them.
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Sep 18, 2015 20:49
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Lotish posted:Clearly I became a medic to SAVE lives, not take them. Soldiers are the safest when there's no hostiles to shoot them!
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Sep 18, 2015 20:58
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Yami Fenrir posted:Soldiers are the safest when there's no hostiles to shoot them! on the other hand, our soldiers can't die if they're already dead
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Sep 18, 2015 21:22
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