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The first time I ever saw a sectopod in EU involved it teleporting into the middle of my team on one of the forest UFO landing maps. There was absolutely no cover from the angle it ported into and it had a flank on every single one of my guys.
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Aug 25, 2013 00:35
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Attention Horse posted:
The enemies are getting a lot of new toys too. Invisible stranglers to ruin any squadsight sniper camping shenanigans, crazy suicidal EXALT troopers with technology similar to your own that outnumber you, plus the existing enemy buffs. They're also adding a timer mechanic to collecting meld so if you want those sweet cyborgs and gene troopers you're going to need to play fast and loose and risky instead of doing the overwatch crawl across the map, which means more guys are going to die.
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Nov 4, 2013 02:38
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This sounds insane. I guess it won't be easy after all.
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Panzeh posted:The thing about the original game is that you pretty much just literally mobbed the aliens and you could give everyone rocket launchers/autocannons so there really wasn't any danger unless you wanted to have danger. I mean if you play it the way they meant for you to play it that's one thing but if you just blow up every building on the map and leave the whole thing wide open, the total dominance of x-com in explosive weapons gives them a tremendous advantage. The original X-Com also had you achieve basically total financial independence by the second or month or so so there was no incentive to keep member nations happy beyond not triggering the lose condition. You could easily respond to terror sites by simply blowing up the entire map with rockets and later blaster bombs because you didn't care if they didn't like you very much and you didn't need "Good Job" bonuses.
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Nov 4, 2013 03:24
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chiasaur11 posted:I was kind of weirded out at his stats. Those best-of-the-best spec ops you hire have coinflip chances to shoot sectoids hiding behind wooden fences with light machine guns and assault rifles. Sometimes they will burst into gibbering panic when they get winged(2 damage) by a plasma bolt and freak out to the point where they level their gun at an innocent civilian standing in the opposite direction as the shots and open fire. Occasionally you'll have them manage to shoot a rocket 20 meters wide of the intended target as though they tripped while shooting. It's best not to analyze it too much.
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Nov 6, 2013 19:49
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Depending on how EXALT is implemented I can see them being hugely debilitating depending on the timing of their attacks. Having EXALT make their entrance by resetting your Beam Weapons research right before the first terror mission lands would be a bullet-sweating moment.
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Nov 7, 2013 14:27
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I love SHIVs. Alloy Shivs are dirt cheap, do a ton of damage for the cost, can suppress and make fantastic baby sitters for less experienced squads. They also help a lot on maps with horrible cover layouts like Death Highway. I like going for them once I get lasers/carapace/arc throwers sorted out. I'll have to see how they fit into my schedule with all the new toys coming out, though.
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Nov 8, 2013 12:19
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Sloober posted:I fell for AOE suppression hard and it's now my go to build for a heavy. Not having another rocket is really just not that big of a deal compared to being able to drop 30 aim from a couple xenos at the same time. The real boon of the Shredder is the damage buff and another way to strip cover, not the raw damage it does. A shredder can lay open an entire squad of mutons for your guys to obliterate easily. Suppression is super duper good though. I like a mixture of both builds in any team that happens to get more than one heavy.
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Nov 8, 2013 14:04
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Speedball posted:Re-read Guava's X-Com LP in preparation for Enemy Within…man, that thing cracks me up every time. Especially SynthOrange's entry about being trapped alive inside a Reaper's stomach. I'm still hoping reapers come back as a surprise. I think they could actually be terrifying in XCOM instead of doofy-looking joke enemies like they were in X-Com.
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Nov 11, 2013 17:02
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Mr Dog posted:This is definitely getting installed once I've played through Normal and Classic EW, I really appreciate it! I'm all for them trying new stuff, but I still really desperately hope they decide to do an EU-styled reimagining of Terror from the Deep. TFTD was an amazing concept and setting utterly ruined by terrible gameplay and awful bugs, so I'd like to see someone do it justice.
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Nov 11, 2013 20:23
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dumpster17 posted:^^ TFTD took a big turn into ramping up the creepy/horror factor. Several of the "aliens" in TFTD were actually the horribly hosed up and mangled remains of the people the aliens took before you could save them; Bio-Drones are wired-up human brains that literally scream their enemies to death. That sort of stuff coupled with the incredibly oppressive atmosphere of fighting on the darkness of the ocean floor through unknown ruins that shouldn't be there while armed with drastically inferior weapons(every TFTD weapon had a serious flaw, be it range, lack of autofire, ammo constraints, weight, etc) made for a very different flavor of game than X-Com. X-Com definitely feels more like a "hooah let's gently caress dem invaders up welcome ta erf" game while TFTD feels almost like a survival horror game. Also there's not enough games that attempt underwater combat or undersea settings.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:16
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, not to mention why mind control didn't continue to work underwater (all those first war psychics weren't any good anymore?), how implant-based "molecular control" affected humans, and plenty of other weirdness.
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Had a pretty promising campaign going until I slammed into what I assume is the EXALT intro mission, which threw 4 packs of Thin Men at me on classic BEFORE I activated the escort. Cue absolute massacre of bullshit Thin Man sniper crits. MECs are really cool, but they have some serious weak points. Their inability to take cover is absolutely devastating and is barely compensated for by their huge HP totals since they'll still get popped by two good floater or Thin Man shots early on and it costs a lot more to replace a dead one than it does a rookie. The minigun also feels even less accurate than the Heavy's LMG and only holds a whopping *two* shots per reload. On the flip side, with the Kinetic Strike Module they move almost as fast as Sprinter supports and Collateral Damage is an amazing ability for blowing up cover since it works like a 100% accurate rocket(though it spends your entire magazine). They feel pretty balanced, actually.
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Nov 12, 2013 11:59
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Demiurge4 posted:How scary are mechtoids? I'd like to focus primarily on genemods and keep one, at most two, MEC's around just in case but I'd consider skipping them altogether if they are as cheesy as people make them out to be. MECs are cheesy precisely up until floaters and thin men become common, at which point they're just fine. Not being able to get cover bonuses is a titanic penalty which means they can be rather easily killed unless you carefully manage line of sight. That and two-shots-then-reload is incredibly limiting.
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Nov 12, 2013 12:56
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Photosynaesthesias posted:Does anyone have any tips for dealing with Seekers? It's not that they're hard or making it hard to win missions, they just take forever to come out of Stealth mode. AoE doesn't seem to affect them while they're stealthed, so even if I know exactly where they are I often have to just sit around for several turns on Overwatch - is there any way to draw them out? +15 defense is less than half cover. I'm not meaning to imply that all MECs simultaneously explode and/or become useless the instant a thin man first drops out of the sky, but they stop being unstoppable armored kool aid men really fast when enemies can reliably do 6-8 damage per shot. They feel pretty well balanced for what they bring to the team.
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Nov 12, 2013 13:04
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Mokinokaro posted:In other words TotalBiscuit was wrong about MECS (or they received tweaks after his preview.). Either way Im glad to hear. They're extremely powerful if you manage line of sight angles. Being able to effectively support sprint into melee for a guaranteed 12 damage is pretty eye-opening, and the minigun is quite powerful for a tier one weapon. You're definitely stronger in EW than you were in EU at the same point, I just don't think they trivialize the game like TotalBiscuit was complaining about.
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Nov 12, 2013 13:09
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Zore posted:Just remember if you do get it, using it doesn't use an action but if your MEC ever fires (because you put them in overwatch, or have the auto-overwatch skill) they stop being cover. I actually find the kinetic strike module to be badly inferior early on. The flamethrower can kill entire packs of revealed enemies all the way up to chryssalids/mutons, can panic bigger enemies, hits in a gigantic arc, and destroys light cover as a bonus. It only has two shots, but I've never had a situation where I've needed more than two. The kinetic gives you better mobility and huge damage, but I almost never find myself feeling comfortable committing to running an expensive MEC into melee range with an alien who may have friends behind him in the fog. The KSM will definitely outpace it by the end of the game, but I find the flamer indispensable for the first couple months. I solved the riddle of Portent by washing an army of Thin Men in flames.
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Nov 13, 2013 10:03
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Ravenfood posted:Yeah, I'm thinking the same. A flamethrower seems far better in the early game whereas the kinetic module is better late. There's nothing the kinetic module can kill that you can't just use a point-blank fire option on, basically. The problem with running a MEC into melee is never the target you're running into melee with because that target is almost assuredly dead. It's the fact that you're flopping your big mechanical dick out on the table without necessarily knowing what's behind the alien in the fog; accidentally tripping a pack of mutons or floaters because you were trying to punch a thin man to death will usually result in a dead MEC and a lot of wasted meld for a new amputee/suit repairs. The assault MEC bonus does absolutely nothing to help with that situation and is in fact kind of worthless in general; no alien will typically be firing at you from that close unless you put yourself there in the first place without killing them(which is dumb) so the only thing it actually triggers on reliably are enemy melee attacks. I find the Heavy's Body Shield to be amazing because it seems to debuff the nearest enemy's aim even if they're not shooting at you, making it helpful for both keeping yourself and your friends alive. The Support's is okay but I tend to use my MECs as forward scouts so they're not hugging cover with my other dudes. Sniper's is great for overwatch.
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Nov 13, 2013 11:27
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One thing I've found out through experience is that there is a huge gigantic glowing bullet point against going MEC crazy. MECs seem to gain experience drastically slower than normal soldiers - I have two MECs with pushing 20 kills each and double digit successful missions. They're both still Lieutenants. If you're fielding 2 or god forbid 3 MECs with any regularity you're going to have some serious problems pushing out high rank soldiers to qualify for OTS upgrades.
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Nov 13, 2013 12:01
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EXALT managed to repeatedly sabotage my research to the point where they set back my Carapace research for over a month. I had friends watching on stream and mocking me every time it happened. I had three majors and a colonel still wearing flak and using laser rifles at the end of month three. It was kind of cool living in terror as I had to field highly veteran soldiers wearing absolutely no armor against mid-late enemies like Mechtoids and Cyberdisks that could very easily kill anyone on my team instantly. I leaned on my MECs like a pair of crutches. That said, I find EXALT kind of boring and tedious. They hit their threat-level peak really early and never go any higher, and their AI is suicidally dumb and easy to exploit. I guess that fits their MO of being untrained zealots but EXALT missions both provide lame rewards(a pittance of money and some skin-swapped weapons) and are annoyingly common so it would be nice if they were at least interesting to play.
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Nov 14, 2013 10:45
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Speedball posted:Handy, but I'm using a Mimetic Skin support gal for that. Further running around while cloaked gives me more options. I actually just use unequipped rookies for my Covert Ops because the Operative's job is really easy. All he has to do is hunker down somewhere with no line of sight angles until the normal team arrives, at which point he either scuttles over to the nearest comm tower. In the defense missions all he does is sit next to any given comm tower as a "get-out-of-bad-turn-free" card and in the hacking missions he pretty much just runs from heavy cover to heavy cover while ringed with steel. I've never even had one get shot at. That said, I did get the Max Remington achievement on my very first EXALT mission, with a normal pistol using rookie as my covert op. 
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Nov 14, 2013 16:26
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Speedball posted:Woof, once they're worth giving gene mods to, you need to give bone marrow regeneration to everyone. With all the stuff that keeps getting thrown at you now, anything that cuts their recovery time by 2/3rds and helps them regen on the battlefield is worth it. Secondary Heart makes it functionally impossible to lose anyone high value unless the entire mission goes to hell. Combine those two mods and any real risk of your elites getting killed or taken out of action for extended periods of time goes out the window.
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Nov 15, 2013 00:30
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Speedball posted:Yeah, they do. This analogy is extremely apt, right down to EXALT being staffed by a bunch of worthless faceless goons who can't accomplish anything and X-Com being staffed by a bunch of ultraspecialized super troopers.
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Nov 15, 2013 00:41
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Eraflure posted:Won't it hurt his stats in the long run ? Doesn't a sniper colonel turned MEC get a lot more levels and stats boosts than a sniper squaddie turned MEC, or does it balance itself out once they become MEC colonels ? I'm playing with the randomized stats options from second wave if that matters. You don't get to level up twice. If you convert a colonel into a MEC, you get a colonel-ranked MEC with the same stats and just repick his skills from the MEC tree.
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Nov 15, 2013 07:06
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I use two flamer MECs and I haven't really regretted it even into endgame enemies. Advanced Servomotors gave my MECs all the mobility they ever needed to get into position and flank without horribly overextending from infantry support, so I haven't missed the movement range. Jellied Elerium pumps the flamer's damage enough that it can be used to render late-game infantry vulnerable to death by rocket or grenades(and also lets it one-shot chryssalids, which is useless in practice but fun as hell anyway. BURN THE XENOS) and the panic has saved lives/flushed enemies out of cover and to their deaths dozens of times for me. Against anything bigger/immune to it I'd honestly rather just plant my feet and put two railgun/PPC shots into it with MEC Bulletswarm instead of running up and ramming a fist into it. Both are really useful upgrades. Pick whichever one you like more, or pick one of each.
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Nov 15, 2013 19:05
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You don't need to gene mod or equip your covert operatives with anything. I played a dozen Classic EXALT missions using random rookies with ballistic pistols and never had a single problem accomplishing the objective or even getting shot at. As long as you understand that there's absolutely no reason to expose your operative to any danger, ever, it's not a concern at all to just find a hiding spot until you have him safely covered.RBA Starblade posted:It's useful to keep a more powerful sidearm on a sniper for those times where it can't just sit still on the edge of the map and take potshots all day. I usually take gunslinger over DGG if I can on at least one of them for that reason. With the buff to snap shot and the nerf to squadsight, I don't even take squadsight anymore. Move and fire sniper rifles every day, gunslinger's for chumps who don't know how to noscope. Of course not playing with Training Roulette is also for chumps( ) so the option between Gunslinger/DGG almost never comes up.
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Nov 15, 2013 21:24
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poptart_fairy posted:Sorry but Operatives who aren't proactive, even on Classic, don't deserve the job title. All my soldiers are actual soldiers. I got the Max Remington achievement on my first EXALT mission with a rookie operative using a standard pistol. Man up and learn to work with what you've got, you're a secret agent. 
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Nov 15, 2013 22:21
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With all the new urban maps I honestly find squadsight a liability. I just use snapshot snipers like more damaging assault rifle soldiers with massive crit chances now and I don't regret it.
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Nov 16, 2013 00:16
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The Cheshire Cat posted:It really does. Especially once they hit major and you can trigger mimetic skin on any cover at all. I could easily see soloing missions with a sniper colonel with mimetic skin. Hell that might be like the one time you'd want to take snap shot over squad sight! I really wish they'd buffed snap shot instead of nerfing squad sight. Squad sight is just always going to be more useful, crits or no. It was mentioned, but they did buff Snap Shot. The combination buffed Snap Shot/nerfed Squadsight plus the gigantic plethora of choked urban maps they added means I'm firmly in the snap shot camp now. Who says snipers can't flank?  They did make research times substantially longer, presumably to make getting scientists actually a thing that needs doing instead of "eh whatever give me the engineers" and to make it so there's a longer period before you enter full bore steamroller mode.
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Nov 16, 2013 14:20
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oswald ownenstein posted:MECs are a new class and add a whole new dynamic to your missions. Gene mods just buff your soldiers with really useful mechanics (bioelectric skin is really really cool for how it detects nearby enemies through walls and stuff, the high jump thing is ultra useful on a lot of missions, the aim perks are good etc etc). This is also exacerbated even more by the fact that gene modding squaddies in flak using ballistics is potentially a tremendous waste of money and meld. It's substantially easier to protect your meld/cash investment when it's in a huge armored robot with a powerfist that can move nearly as fast as your infantry can sprint than it's in a squaddie who is going to panic and hunker down next to a burning car after another squaddie gets killed by a thin man. Gene mods are definitely better saved until you have troops worth investing in and the technology to keep them alive long enough to take advantage. BenRGamer posted:Why do people keep saying it's hard to get Meld? I'm at the start of Month 3 in my first classic game, and I haven't missed a Meld Cannister yet. It's not particularly hard to collect canisters, but high tier MECs and heavy gene modding consume so much of it that even if you've got a perfect streak you will never have enough to do everything you want without farming. In particular, a tier 3 MEC will run you over 200 meld all told assuming you never need to replace the pilot, and fully gene modding a single guy can run you ~100-200 depending on which mods you prefer. At 20 meld per mission average(sometimes you get less because of a dick canister, sometimes you get more because of mechtoids), that's a lot of missions invested into one guy. Kanos fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Nov 16, 2013 |
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Nov 16, 2013 18:52
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Mechtoids would be pretty underwhelming if they couldn't potentially shoot twice. That would mean that even some rookie in carapace could survive getting dinged by one. It's not like they really show up in numbers; I think the most I've ever seen active at once was 4, and that was during the base defense.
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Nov 16, 2013 19:23
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Geight posted:I just did the Newfoundland mission with no MECs, but three heavies, two assaults, and a sniper. Don't think we really needed any backup. There's no reward besides a panic reduction in Canada and the satisfaction of winning the mission. You don't even get any of the corpses for sweet sweet chitin plating. It's an awesome mission but from a pure risk/reward standpoint you should just let it go unless you want to do it for fun.
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Nov 16, 2013 19:47
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Torrannor posted:I just discovered my MEC soldier... using the treadmill. Why would he do that? Train his robotic legs? Getting more stamina for his robotic torso? It could be to practice using his prosthesis. It's really awkward to learn to move with limbs that don't have natural muscles and feeling in them, even if they are advanced cyber-limbs, and most of his battle training is probably done with the big hulking power armor instead of the off-duty ones. MECs are sad. 
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Nov 17, 2013 16:57
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Fangz posted:The skill element is not in never missing. The skill element is in *what you do when this situation arises*. You can still walk out of this situation with 1 or even 0 losses, assuming you've been smart and the two rookies have their full action allotment. You are acting as if this is a game over. Pretty much this. You're meant to have losses in XCOM. Soldiers get wounded/killed, sometimes the RNG hates you and you lose a country/countries, sometimes a stray shot blows up that power core you wanted, sometimes the VIP panics and hunkers down while flanked by a thin man, and sometimes a squaddie heavy whiffs a 90% rocket by shooting it into the back of the colonel assault 20 feet to his right and blows up his cover in front of the aliens you were intending to kill.  It honestly sounds like Woozy is expecting a flawless run and cursing the RNG when it doesn't happen, which is missing the point of the game. The game would be really loving boring if guys didn't die and poo poo didn't go south, and incidentally I feel like the weakest part of the game is when your guys are all kitted up in endgame gear/psionics because nothing short of multiple sectopods triggering at once will really even cause casualties anymore.
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Nov 18, 2013 16:09
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Vengarr posted:They're not a niche organization at all, they're very much comparable to XCOM in terms of resources. They don't have access to the best of the world's militaries, so they compensate by recruiting hordes of investment bankers and throwing them en masse at any and all problems. I get the impression that after every covert op, there is a law firm that is extremely confused at the number of no-call/no-shows the next day. I was actually expecting the logical step up from the EXALT elites was going to be packs of protean freaks barely recognizable as human anymore. Huge hulking roided-out monstrosities that work like Muton Berserkers that regenerate, spindly little stick-snipers that can leap buildings and move like chryssalids but have rifles, mutated supports that have big puffy glands that vomit out gas clouds that work like dense smoke/combat drugs for EXALT while poisoning your guys, etc. They make a point of how EXALT is all about transhumanist apotheosis and Vahlen comments distastefully about how their gene mods are getting too extreme for her (already lax) ethical tastes, so it only makes sense that they'd finally just cross the line and abandon their humanity for power. It would also cement them as the evil opposite to XCOM they're supposed to be; the running theme is that the stuff XCOM is learning and discovering could lead to really bad places if misused, so use EXALT to show where that rabbit hole goes. As it is, they feel unfinished.
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Nov 18, 2013 17:13
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Ravenfood posted:Floaters. I don't think EXALT is actually working with the aliens. I believe their gimmick is wanting to rule the world/achieve transhumanist apotheosis and the arrival of hyperadvanced alien technology means that goal is suddenly really possible so they're throwing themselves into it whole hog. They come into conflict with XCOM because XCOM is the only other faction with the knowledge and means to understand/exploit alien technology. EXALT gets their lasers and carapace and gene mods the same way you do; by pulling apart dead alien parts to see what makes them tick.
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Nov 19, 2013 05:17
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Speedball posted:Well then just put 'em in shotguns! They actually double any existing range penalties, so reaper rounds in a shotgun turn it into a literal melee weapon instead of a weapon with 20 feet of range.
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Nov 19, 2013 06:50
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Nail Rat posted:Also if they acted on the turn they show up. It's kind of dumb how they run in and stand there, but on the other hand it would be intensely frustrating and terribly not fun if some EXALT guys popped in from an edge-of-the-map reinforcement point you didn't know was there and proceeded to unload a rocket/barrage of lasers from the free flanking position they just moved into. Maybe they should pop in and overwatch like Thin Men. immortal flow posted:Tossing an idea out here, but would Squad Sight become more balanced if squadsighted enemies had an innate -%25 / -%50 or something to be hit, with a +5% / +10% to hit bonus per member of your squad to see the targeted enemy? Reward triangulation, get rid of a single scout zipping off ahead and marking enemies to be blown away by your gods of war. It's been talked about a lot in the thread so far, but Squadsight is no longer The One True Way. The crit nerf to it coupled with the big buff to snap shot and the addition of urban maps means that both squadsight and snapshot are viable builds with different advantages and disadvantages. They both are really good options which favor different tactics and builds, which actually makes them one of the best designed perk tiers in the game.
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Nov 19, 2013 19:13
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immortal flow posted:Snapshot isn't a huge steaming turd any more? Well now. I would actually go so far to say that snap shot is superior in a great majority of situations. Suddenly your sniper can flank, can shift his overwatch position freely, and can utilize In The Zone pretty much any time you want. Squadsight is powerful but forces a rigid immobility that snapshot does not.
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Nov 19, 2013 19:28
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Zudrag posted:Or am I missing some good things that TFTD innovated on well from the original? TFTD's setting was pretty unsettling and it did some cool things like introducing melee combat(besides stun rods) to X-Com and actually attempting to place limitations on how and where you could use your hardware to force you to plan for different mission restrictions. Some weapons didn't work on land. You also had to pay a lot of attention to what enemies resisted what types of damage. Lobstermen and you have no melee/stun bombs? Grab your ankles, because if you think Enemy Within Sectopods are durable you haven't seen 10 guys splash sonic blaster shots off a single lobsterman and have him keep coming. Think the Newfoundland mission is scary? Imagine if the chryssalids could fly.  The main thing people liked was that TFTD had sort of an omnipresent "ohfuckohfuckohfuck" sense that never goes away. Also there's not enough games about scary things from the bottom of the ocean.
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Nov 19, 2013 20:28
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Mortabis posted:Snapshot will never be superior when there remains the cloaked soldier spotting for squadsight sniper combination, which is now even better because you can cloak indefinitely. Snapshot guy can crit without headshot, can flank for even more crit, and doesn't have to give a poo poo about line of sight lanes because he can just move if he needs to. Archangel Squadsight guy is the king of the world on big open maps, but not every map is a big open map.
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Nov 19, 2013 21:15
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Brainamp posted:Fairly sure they can as long the target isn't in squadsight range. Yeah, but we're talking about Squadsight as a skill versus Snap Shot as a skill. If the target is in direct LOS so you can crit, you don't need squadsight in the first place.
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Nov 19, 2013 21:35
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