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Akratic Method posted:I haven't played non-WOTC in a while but I'm fairly sure that by un-checking that box for new enemies you in fact just deactivated the special mission that introduces them, and you'll still see them in the campaign. I guess time will tell if I'm remembering that correctly. This is indeed the case. Have fun with that! (If you don't want the Alien Hunters content at all, you have to disable the DLC by right clicking the game in Steam and selecting properties. You'd probably need to start a new campaign, though)
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Jan 8, 2019 05:13
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Natural 20 posted:Oh ho. Okay. I have no idea, other than saying if you get through the first two months without trouble you're probably going to be fine.
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Jan 8, 2019 19:11
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Natural 20 posted:For the record, I'm watching all of this again and basically screaming at myself. This may be one of those things, but if you're mousing over places you can move your soldier, enemies have an icon next to their hp to show whether you can shoot them from there.  Also, at one point you say something about only being able to move up and take a point blank shot with a ranger, which isn't true; melee weapons let you make a double move and then attack, you can still make a single move and then shoot even at 1 tile range (as long as it isn't a sniper rifle, anyways).
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Jan 10, 2019 01:17
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Natural 20 posted:"Thread, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong about this, but this seems ridiculous." It was a bit rough for a starting mission, but in the spirit of brutal honesty, it's mostly that you have no idea how to play and this game isn't holding your hand. An x-com veteran probably could have handled that mission fairly well. Despite what people may joke about X-Com slaughtering soldiers, actually losing soldiers should normally be fairly rare.
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Jan 12, 2019 03:26
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I know you don't want too much advice, but remember that you can move to flank an enemy and then fire. When the advent officer was up on the roof shooting down at you you had an easy flank with multiple soldiers. Also overwatch is great in certain situations but it has an accuracy penalty - you shouldn't use it as a substitute for actually shooting.
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Jan 15, 2019 03:23
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Natural 20 posted:I'm in the game right now and this option does not exist or work for me. I have no idea what's going on. It might be added in the expansion. It actually changes a lot of stuff and basically re-writes the engine. I normally use "z" to zoom out to see the icon for whether a soldier can see the enemy, but it can still sometimes be tricky to get the target and soldier on the same screen. I believe that's the default key/in the base game.
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Jan 15, 2019 04:02
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Bruceski posted:Dang, sorry we were plugging it then. It's a major QoL improvement and War of the Chosen changes so much around it's easy to forget what wasn't always there. I am saved by the fact that I mainly play Long War 2, a mod most goons hate that never got updated for the expansion.
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Jan 15, 2019 04:39
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For some reason the previous update (previously video 7) now links to video 8 as well. You mention there never being a reason to double move. That's a good assessment because it normally is a bad idea, but it's not quite true. Movement range has some rounding, so if a soldier could normally move 7.5 spaces, they can move 15 on a double move but 14 with two normal moves. Also overwatch shots against a dashing target have a (small) penalty to hit. While you only need to rescue 6 civilians to win, there is a bonus for saving more. It's not worth risking your soldiers for, IMHO. Bremen fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Jan 24, 2019 |
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Jan 24, 2019 04:09
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Affi posted:Check the cars too. You can almost always tell which will explode and which ones won’t. One trick you can do, and I consider this more interface than tactic or I'd spoil it, is to target it with a grenade (don't actually throw it!) - if the car turns red, it means it's cover that can be damaged, if it doesn't, then it's not destructible and won't explode. quote:Snipers can overwatch with their rifle if they haven’t moved you don’t have to use their pistol for that. Alternately, you can reload the rifle (which takes 1 TU) and then overwatch with the pistol. There actually is an XCOM 2 manual, but I checked it and it wouldn't really help. I think one reason you're finding things so rough is you're playing it iron man style - they probably expect that a player new to X-Com and similar games would try something and then reload if it doesn't work, until they have a better idea of the mechanics.
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Jan 24, 2019 21:33
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I'm not sure if you want an explanation of the Avatar project or not. Eh, I'll spoiler it. It's a countdown to losing, yes, but one you can manipulate. Over time, Advent will build Avatar facilities which periodically increase the counter, and you can destroy those facilities to stop them. There are a few things you can do to reduce the counter, as well. You also seem to feel that there's too much going on, which I would say is a deliberate design choice. I've always felt a lot of Tactical strategy games feel like they're "on rails" in the strategic layer - basically you go from mission to mission with maybe a few choices between them that might give you bonuses in the tactical missions but you always end up in the same place. XCom 2 tries to change that up, and has major decisions to make on both the strategic and tactical level. Like the current situation where you have a lot of choices over what to do next.
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Jan 26, 2019 01:18
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GeneX posted:That, however, is why well-designed games open up over time, instead of giving players a shitload of options (and importantly: dangers) asap. It normally wouldn't all be happening at once, this is a result of a combination of (bad) luck and them skipping one of the first missions. Also having the DLC on.
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Jan 26, 2019 05:36
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Paingod556 posted:While we're talking XCOM:EU/EW, the game also assumes you know about the mechanical genius and black comedian Marcus Shen, that games chief engineer.  Raymond. His name was Raymond Shen.
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Jan 29, 2019 04:14
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Having height advantage makes your shots more accurate, but there's no defense bonus; the enemies can still shoot back just fine. Combined with half cover and the officer having marked Early, the shots were probably very likely to hit. On the plus side, you shouldn't have lost the equipment; on any mission you don't have to evac out of, it's assumed you grab the bodies (on a mission you have to evac out of, you can have a soldier carry the body out to keep the equipment). You also got a lot more than just supplies out of that mission:  I got a good laugh out of their discussion of how the game's going to trick them with an alien that negates melee combat. We all know what's coming.
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Feb 2, 2019 01:53
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Nordick posted:"What's this icon? I think it's a supply cache!" Yes, surely a thing you are expressly supposed to NOT destroy would turn up in your list of available targets. You remember when that Advent trooper shot the truck and killed your soldier when it exploded? Picture that Advent soldier having a screen with that icon on it :P (Actually it wouldn't, since cars take time to explode and don't give that icon, but the principle is the same)
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Feb 2, 2019 07:45
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Natural 20 posted:In our defense this game has a lot of really unintuitive parts of its UI that we'd reasonably suspect that we might be being trolled. Cars, when damaged by bullets, still take a turn or a second shot before they explode, so there wouldn't be nearly as much point to shooting at them deliberately. If you recall, that mission where you lost a soldier to a car explosion it's because they panicked and couldn't move away from the car as it was on fire. Grenades can sometimes do enough damage to make a car explode instantly. Those icons are things like barrels full of explosives in an FPS; you shoot them and boom. Edit: To be fair to you, explosives on supply raids is usually placed in such a way that blowing them up will destroy some of the supply crates, making it a tradeoff - an easier fight for fewer rewards. So you weren't entirely wrong that blowing it up probably would have taken some supplies out too. Bremen fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Feb 2, 2019 |
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Feb 2, 2019 17:57
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Half cover is worlds better than no cover, but yeah. The AI takes the best shot it can and will try to execute a wounded soldier, so if you have a soldier in half cover and there's three or more enemies able to shoot at them, it's quite possible you're going to lose that soldier. Basically, if you think of a soldier in full cover taking half as much damage as a soldier in half cover, you won't be far wrong. And a soldier in no cover takes 4x as much as one in half cover. Abilities that ignore cover are of course exceptions. Bremen fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Feb 3, 2019 |
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Feb 2, 2019 21:06
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I'll note that blowing up walls with grenades was actually part of the tutorial. It's very much a tactic the game wants you to use.
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Feb 7, 2019 03:27
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GeneX posted:Is there secretly a window there or did the snake actually spit poison through a wall I believe the snake venom arcs like a grenade, so I think the game logic was "it went through the second story window and then down near the cells". The graphics for it look like a straight line, though, so it appears to phase through the walls. If you'd had a soldier there with a grenade they might have been able to do something similar if you hunted down exactly the right pixel to aim at, and the AI is great at pixel hunting.
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Feb 7, 2019 05:54
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Affi posted:What happened with them not seeing you is buggy but you just activated it by tempting it later with your sniper. You were thinking of placing your sniper further back and that might've been the correct call. Alternately, close the door, move the sniper into position, and wait and open the door again next turn.
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Feb 7, 2019 18:39
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You think "Blood Point" is bad, I once had to defend the resistance haven of "Humanity Falls". Like, did you guys let the Faceless name the town or something? Twenty eight minutes in, you run an overwatch shot. Your logic about the soldier already being injured and healed was sound, but you also could have used combat protocol to zap the Viper for 2 damage and force it out of overwatch. Haywire and Revival Protocol are both really good. Haywire is also tons of fun, though, so I'm glad you took it. LPers don't read this one: Them musing about what could happen with the skulljack is hilarious. Bremen fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Feb 12, 2019 |
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Feb 12, 2019 03:02
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Experimental grenades and ammo are kind of weird, or rather they make sense with how the game mechanics work but not so much as far as common sense. They're not permanently used up, so if you have 1 acid grenade you can equip it to a single soldier, throw the grenade once during the mission, and then still have it to give to a different soldier and use once on the next mission. Two acid grenades mean you can have two soldiers with them at once (more of a concern once you have larger squads) or one soldier with two uses. Similarly if you give a soldier a special ammo all of their bullet based attacks benefit from that ammo. There's a third type of experimental consumable later that works the same way.
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Feb 14, 2019 03:11
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It was a bit of a pileup of things going wrong, to be honest. When you kill the last enemy on the map, faceless reveal themselves (so you don't have the tedious job of hunting them down), and in this case skulljacking the last enemy did that *and* spawned a codex. Then, as you found out, the Codex clones itself when damaged - normally if you spawned it with your last soldier, you'd only have to deal with one (which would normally use the weapons disabling ability), and if you spawned it with multiple soldiers left, you could probably kill at least one clone before they acted. So basically spawning the codex with one action left was the worst of all possibilities. The end result was that instead of facing a single codex like most players would, you ended up against two codex and two faceless due to bad luck. As far as difficulty, I will note that despite being fairly behind due to some early mistakes, and that whole pileup of bad luck, it still only cost you one soldier (with the second being due to what amounts to a misclick). So it's not quite as bullshit impossible as it probably felt at the time.
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Feb 16, 2019 05:17
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GeneX posted:that was stupid, and no manner of "that's xcom!" cackling can compensate for that kind of actively bad game design To be fair, even our blind LPers were pretty sure something was going to happen. The Codex's clone trick, now that's a nasty surprise for new players.
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Feb 16, 2019 07:09
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GeneX posted:"kinda dickish" is bad game design in a game like this Eh, it's not really any different than a new kind of enemy having abilities that surprise you, and that will happen a lot in this sort of game.
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Feb 16, 2019 08:24
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Affi posted:Sorry but we’ve been telling you not to do things with the last move of the turn for all of the LP! I think this is a bit unfair. They cleared the rest of the enemies first thinking (with reason) that if something happened they wouldn't want other enemies around, and with a four person squad and no real way to keep the officer helpless for a turn there was no good way to start the fight with a bunch of actions. Probably the game is expecting larger squad sizes at this point, though. GeneX posted:E: I will say that if the intent is actually to teach the player that the game will do this in the future, then scrap all of my words because it's a drat good lesson. I believe the Codex is hard coded to use the weapon disabling ability as its first action, which does no immediate damage (note that it didn't fire despite having an easy flank shot to take), so pretty much a way to teach the player, yeah. Even if you activate it as your last action it normally wouldn't do anything but leave you in a more difficult spot on the next turn.
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Feb 16, 2019 09:45
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GeneX posted:Okay I guess I, uh, gave the devs less credit than they deserved. Well, I mean, if you hate surprises ruining your day there's plenty more ahead of us that would meet your criteria. Some enemy types have pretty nasty tricks that you'll generally only find out about from getting burned by them (or reading a guide). This last mission just ended up going much worse than it (usually) does.
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Feb 16, 2019 09:51
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Natural 20 posted:No, it's horrible design. There's near nothing to warn you what's going to happen when you hack the guy. Imagine if we'd done it on the first advent officer we'd seen in the previous mission, we'd have activated a codex and activated another pack alongside it. That's absolutely ludicrous and basically just encourages a player to brutally save scum, which strongly takes away from the intensity of the game itself. If the XCOM experience is actually losing soldiers then the game wants you to within reason, at least attempt to iron man, but if absolutely out of nowhere RNG bullshit just owns you then you're less likely to accept it. That's basically what you did end up with, since you got the two faceless too, and that plus a bunch of other unfortunate luck only cost you the one soldier. It's also worth noting that your squad is much, much weaker than the game expects you to be at this point - you needed the proving ground building to even build the skulljack, and that's unlocked through research, while the building that gives you larger squad sizes was available from the start. I'm not trying to turn this into "this is your fault" or anything - just pointing out that your situation was so much worse than the one most players end up facing, and you still were able to handle it.
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Feb 16, 2019 19:15
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Mordja posted:I'd say XCOM2 was probably designed with the assumption that people have played XCOM1, considering its more complicated classes and enemies. What this means is that while their tactical game is solid, Nat and Tea are prioritizing different items, skills and researches than most people who've played the prior game, for example their lack of healing and the fact that they haven't even started teching for armor and weapons that'll improve survivablity. It definitely makes things interesting to watch! This brings up a fair point. XCOM has a lot of strategy around how to use your resources; you have limited scientists/supplies/etc, and have to choose between various priorities: 1) Increasing income. This would be things like contacting more regions, and gives you more resources in the future. 2) Strengthening your tactical game. This would be larger squads, better weapons, etc. 3) Progressing the plot. You can't wait forever on this, but it doesn't necessarily help with 1 or 2 either. So far they seem to be prioritizing 3, which is making the game more challenging, and that's probably less obvious to someone who's never played an X-Com game before. Bremen fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Feb 16, 2019 |
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Feb 16, 2019 20:44
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Natural 20 posted:I mean this leads to even more problems with the design of the game overall. If squad size is so important why is the tactics school even an option to begin with at all? I don't think it's any dirty secret that it's possible make sub-optimal strategic decisions, just like one can make poor tactical decisions - consider how much better you're doing in the combat missions now. That's why there are difficulty levels; a player who already knows all the tech, buildings, etc, would play at a higher difficulty level because they can make more insightful strategic choices. It's not even as simple as "x is better than y" - even a veteran player might decide to go for psionics over lasers if they're confident in their current abilities and want something with a more distant payoff, for instance. It's a meaningful decision, not an automatic one. Squad size is important, but it's also not secret - the description of the building said larger squads, you noted it said larger squads in commentary, and you don't need to know the gritty details of x-com to know that having 5 soldiers instead of 4 would mean 25% more firepower. When planning a second building you even talked about that in the commentary, admitted that it was a big benefit, but decided you were doing well enough you didn't need more soldiers - it was a strategic choice, and not a blind one. Going psionics instead of another research path isn't a horrible choice either, it just hasn't paid off for you yet. For what it's worth, I was happy to see you go psionics, I think they're a lot of fun and not a bad choice. Similarly, I don't feel larger squads are a "must have" choice either, though they definitely make things easier. It's kind of a pileup of three things - bad luck, prioritizing plot development over power increases, and the fact that one of the staples of X-Com games is "advancing the plot can make the game harder" (sort of like going to a higher level area in WoW, to use the same terminology). You didn't have that last bit, but someone who'd played the first game would have, and since you're on the "I've played the first game" difficulty the game was probably balanced around it. Bremen fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Feb 16, 2019 |
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Feb 16, 2019 21:49
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Bifauxnen posted:Getting sentimental over your soldiers even when you know you shouldn't is one of the best things about XCOM. There's a mod that lets you keep the NPCs from that mission if they get enough experience to promote :P
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Feb 16, 2019 23:49
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Gothsheep posted:I agree here. I feel like the Sharpshooter class more than any, requires you to specialize in one side or the other. A properly played sniper will rarely be close enough to take those pistol shots, but will have accuracy to spare against most targets, especially the ones with the giant health pools. Yeah. To me Sharpshooter is basically two classes, depending on which side of the perk tree you go down. They're both good classes, though.
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Feb 18, 2019 07:27
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Yeah, there are optimal and somewhat less than optimal choices but nothing's really a trap choice. Take the upgrade on the power generator; it's +2 as you note, and most things takes multiples of 3, but staffing an engineer at the power generator is +5, and the upgrade allows for two engineers, so 5+5+2 = 12, a multiple of 3. There's also a few buildings that cost 1, 2, or 5 power.
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Feb 19, 2019 19:20
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Akratic Method posted:Yeah, the belief in the trap choice of the power relay upgrade is just straight up not reading the entire description. That power +2 is the less important aspect of the upgrade by far: it is less than a third of the total increase you get once you build the upgrade and use the extra engineer slot. Actually, a lot of the traps Nat and Tea describe are basically down to things fitting together usefully, but in a way that either is not obvious to the blind player, or in a way that involves stuff they haven't hit yet. Or, in the case of psionics, the payoff is really good so the time and money (and hence trade-off if you want it early) is set at a level that seems daunting when you're entering the mid-game. I mean, I get where they're coming from, since some choices are better than others and they feel like they've been burned by the "wrong" ones. But a lot of it comes down to being situational - like taking the proving grounds before the larger squads, and then rushing to skulljack an officer. Yeah, it made the game harder for them, but as they noted it also reduced the avatar countdown - a pro player might have done the same thing if they desperately needed a way to lower the doom clock, so it's not a trap choice, just a situational one.
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Feb 20, 2019 00:07
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Notty posted:As someone who’s never played XCOM either and is following the LP along blindly, I’m curious what the more expert players think of Nat and Tea’s current overall situation. My opinion: Avatar progress isn't a problem. Basically, it's there to keep you moving through the plot, which in turn makes the game harder; you'd normally work on better weapons and stuff until you had to progress, and things like skulljacking and taking out the blacksite will reduce the progress while also sometimes unlocking things like tougher enemies. For instance, if they hadn't skulljacked yet, they wouldn't have run into the Codex this mission. The problem is they're behind on everything else. They should have higher level soldiers by now, but theirs keep dying and they've been spreading out the XP a lot. They're behind on economics because they missed a mission (which would have given them a scientist) and have generally been making sub-optimal strategic choices. None of that's unrecoverable, but they're going to be in a position where the game is getting much harder and it'll be a race whether their improving tactical skills can keep pace, because their soldiers will be getting much weaker relative to the enemies they're fighting. Also sooner or later they're going to run into the first alien ruler, and with their current power level that could easily wipe out their squad. Even veteran players often consider the rulers bullshit, and Long War 2, a mod disliked by many goons for being too grognardy-difficult, actually nerfed them. If they survive until they start getting psionics and better equipment going they'll be looking much better, and if they keep soldiers alive longer the higher level skills can be massive gamechangers. So they're not doomed, but they're basically one more horrible unlucky moment away from it, IMHO. Bremen fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 21:06
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Usually when watching your videos I constantly find myself yelling at the screen about what you should do. This episode you actually did it, so I just wanted to say your tactical game is really improving. I think they're really going to regret not noticing haywire is on cooldown, though
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Feb 21, 2019 00:52
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tarbrush posted:I really like the timers, as the overwatch crawl was incredibly boring and repetitive. I will admit I also like WotC's addition of variation to the timers. I also side with liking the timers. I played the first game heavily though and without timers it literally makes the most sense to just crawl across the map a tile or two at a time and then overwatch the whole squad. In the world of game design, if you give players the ability to perform 1% better by abandoning everything fun, they will do it and then complain about how boring the game is. At the same time, I totally understand why others don't like them and how they greatly limit the strategies you can employ, even beyond the overwatch creep.
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Feb 21, 2019 10:58
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Both Demolition and Suppression are pretty good, IMHO, but suppression can be a bit trickier to use well. So Demolition gets my vote, it might be best to experiment with more complicated tactics on a non-blind/ironman run.
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Feb 23, 2019 05:18
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jng2058 posted:I grant there's a lot of good to Suppression, but most of the time I'd rather kill an enemy than slow it's shooting. That said, there's a lot of ways to nuke or bypass cover, while Suppression is pretty close to unique, sharing a spot with what, Aid Protocol and Smoke Grenades? Both of which protect a defender rather than nerf an attacker the way Suppression does. And when you need Suppression, you really need it. Sectopods, ho! So in balance I agree with the majority for once. Take Supression. Flashbangs. Though admittedly their penalty to aim is smaller. Every time I've tried to suppress a sectopod they just ran the suppression, though?
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Feb 24, 2019 00:08
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That Italian Guy posted:They still get the aiming penalty. I'm like 95% sure this isn't true. Edit: Google says it isn't. If you suppress an enemy and they move as their first action, you get the shot but if they survive their attack doesn't suffer the -50 aim. Bremen fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Feb 24, 2019 |
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Feb 24, 2019 03:30
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Once you get over the initial hump, accidentally activating pods when you're not ready is the cause of probably 90% of soldier deaths. So welcome to being a veteran player.
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Feb 26, 2019 02:28
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