Gormongous

No, you have the ending right. I'm surprised everyone's talking about how hard that mission was, though. Like I said before, I shredded it. Of course, this was on Normal and my team was six colonels, four of them psychic. The biggest hardship was having an alien grenade knock my Heavy's unconscious body on top of a railing, from which he couldn't move once revived. At least it was near the end, but still.

I thought Bruce was a little more adversarial than usual this episode, but nothing really incongruous. Like someone else said, the nadir of the episode was really the brief excursion into bug-hunt territory. Nothing as bad as the Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion episode, but still somewhat vexing. There's a line between "this hilarious weird thing happened to me while playing, it must have been a bug" and "here is my laundry list of ways to improve your game's balance and stability" that is easy to cross in casual conversation, but that sticks out like a sore thumb when listening.

Also, and this is just me, but I would commit murder most foul for an "invite all willing conspirators to my plot" button. I've done so much repetitive clicking towards that end that my fingers are like cigars, fat and stiff.

I'm kind of lukewarm on the whole factions system. If you have a large realm, the factions icon is always there at the top of the screen, with no actual warning when the "independence" faction jumps from 5% to 118%. At least when they do revolt, it's still the same two dozen little armies pissing around the map, getting very little accomplished. Although it has some serious glitches, I really like how civil wars are handled in the CK2Plus mod right now. When a vassal revolts, it sends out a decision to all vassals on whether to join the revolt. Those that do are organized under a titular title with equivalent rank to their liege, with the revolt leader at its head. When the civil war ends, the victor gains/keeps the liege title, while the titles of the loser and their supporters stripped and given to the victor to reward supporters. The AI seems to understand it better than the current revolt system and it tends to make for a more dynamic game. Realms are capable of tearing themselves apart, and not in the piecemeal way of vanilla. But then, I haven't played much with the new patch. Maybe Paradox's milder solution is just as potent.

There are a couple of blindingly stupid interface oversights like that, sadly. Foremost for me is that abduction missions only show terror for the region where the mission is located, even though ignoring or failing them affects the entire continent. I lost a few regions before I realized I need to quit out of the mission select, go to the "situation room", check the terror levels for all regions affected, then go back to make my decision. It's shockingly inelegant, and a real statement to the game's quality that I don't quit in frustration over stuff like that.

Agreed. Never double move. If your first move puts you in range of an enemy squad that cannot be easily annihilated, fall back. That's been my toughest lesson, honestly. The urge to stand and fight, or at least to hunker down and wait things out, is almost irresistible for me. It's so hard to get past that mental block and retreat to a good position for the enemy to walk into.

I've felt like a couple Assault squaddies are the real sine qua non. I wouldn't be half as far in my Classic Ironman campaign without their ability to get easy flank shots with Run-and-Gun.

Also, why wouldn't you post something from Dourif on Deadwood, a much more seasoned and period-appropriate performance?

The exact differences are listed in one of the game's ini files. It's mentioned somewhere in the link for the mod greydan posted on page five of this thread.

Yeah, that's right. My mistake, sorry.

The crazy thing is that on Classic and Impossible difficulties, spotted enemies can "call" other packs to their position. The AI is capable of being responsive and coordinating between groups, but it's disabled in Normal, probably because that difficulty level has a hard cap of five onscreen enemies. It reminds me a lot of the difficulty levels in the Total War games. You either get a handicapped AI and player bonuses, or the full AI and enemy bonuses. There's no middle ground. I can't be the only person who wants the former without the latter.

The amount of vitriol on that mod's forum thread, specifically of the "you're a video game baby" type, is disgusting. It makes me never want to play XCOM again, if only because it's the same game these chest-thumping idiots enjoy.

Okay, having played at least three Classic-level Ironman games that self-destructed because of squad meltdowns, I have to say I'm particularly frustrated with this chain of events: 1) I carefully comb the map from one side to the other, in order to avoid alerting too many groups of enemies. 2) I kill all the aliens except one, which retreats and does its "calling allies" animation on its turn. 3) Four aliens kick down the door behind me, use their free move from getting "spotted" to flank my squad, then kill one of my soldiers. 4) The rookie I brought along panics and kills one of his teammates. 5) The rest of the squad panics, moving out of cover or hunkering down in a flanked position. 6) TPK. Seriously, this has happened in three consecutive campaigns and I have no idea how to prevent it. I even started leaving a guy behind specifically to watch the door, but that just means he dies when the party crashers roll in rather than someone else from my squad.

They're probably tied into the engine somehow, since they're not stored in a simple config file like the soldier names. And yeah, I was raving about this exact thing a few pages back. My first two upper-level casualties in my hardcore game were Assault Lieutenant Diane "Wednesday" Thomas and Sniper Sergeant Lin "Lockdown" Gao. I miss them both already. Also noticed while combing the config files: references in \XCom-Enemy-Unknown\XComGame\Config\DefaultDLC to "DLC_Day060" and "DLC_Day090". Looks like we have a while to wait.

It's a gross combination of the "Wachowski Brothers" being their moniker for so long, at the height of their popularity, and the "Wachowski Siblings" feeling somehow clumsier, which my brain at least will subconsciously avoid if I'm in free-talking mode.

Satellites are so important. They provide a massive influx of scientists, engineers, and money, which will break the game's difficulty curve at some point. I've found the real key in the metagame is getting up satellites as fast as possible without outdistancing your interceptor program, not that I have any advice on how to do so.

Agreed. It's a huge mistake to hide the actual mathematical nuts and bolts of the combat in an out-of-the-way and poorly-formatted stats screen, as well as making line of sight a hidden factor and not an overlay that can be toggled like the movement grid. Let's hope Firaxis is willing to put some muscle behind its new darling. I mean, I'm sure there's some argument to be made of the magic and mystery inherent in not knowing if you can hit this guy from that position, but I feel the same way about it as I did about hiding diplomacy calculations in the early versions of Civilization V, which was not great.

Just got my two best dudes smoked in easily avoidable firefights. I think I need to keep a pad of paper by my computer that I can write "Overwatch!" on every time an enemy goes into overwatch, because I always forget. I really keep coming back to it, though. This game has such a satisfying, impactful combat system. I can only imagine how much more satisfying and impactful it would be if my guys weren't sometimes randomly unable to see enemies on the other side of doorways and weren't sometimes shot from offscreen while in full cover by enemies I never even knew were there.

According to a few places elsewhere on the internet, it's just a straight subtraction from an enemy's percent chance to hit you, which is calculated by their offensive skill modified by distance (closer is better for all guns except the sniper rifle). Of course, who knows what an alien's base offensive skill is.

I have no idea how the Offensive and Defensive stats are calculated. All I know is that "Hunker Down" doubles the defensive bonus from cover, and once I got my snipers the skill that doubles all cover bonuses they almost never got hit. I'm pretty sure if you checked the awkward "character info" screen you can pull up using F1, there'd be some way to track what modifiers are being applied.

All cover does is give a bonus to your squaddies' defense skill. If a character has line-of-sight on enemy, they can fire and be fired upon. What's slightly more confusing is how line-of-sight actually works. This would be a great situation for a tutorial to explore, if only by positioning your team in various places and demonstrating when they can fire and when they cannot. Like Orv said earlier, full cover blocks a character's line of sight to an enemy if there is an adjacent square of full cover in the direction of the enemy. This gets a bit dodgy on diagonals and goes completely to pot when one of them is on elevation. On a different but slightly similar note to what people were discussing a page or so back, it really seems like Classic and Impossible difficulties up enemies' to-hit and critical chances while depressing those of squaddies, but without fully reporting these altered weights to the player. I've played a couple early missions on Normal and Classic back-to-back in order to compare, and it really does seem like squaddies miss more and get hit harder in Classic under near-identical circumstances. I wish there was more transparency here, it would alleviate some people's feelings of excessive randomness.

Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women, man! The only game I own that I've never even played a second of is Team Fortress 2. My friend made me buy early one morning when the price suddenly dropped to like $2.50, but I had bad enough memories of Team Fortress Classic to put it off until the whole hats-and-drops business turned me off permanently. I was raised thrifty enough that I actually feel guilty about this, sometimes. Everything else I own I've played at least an hour of, which is a point of some pride. Even something awful like Spellforce 2, which I bought solely because I was impressed by what I now realize is a fairly generic Eastern European fantasy art style, got maybe four hours of my time before I called it quits. Oh, except for Fallout: New Vegas. I want to play it badly, but every time I boot it up, I quit the moment I get to the appearance screen. I just get this unbearable feeling of disgust at the thought of having to mold another Bethesda putty-face into something that won't give me nightmares. I think I have a mental block.

These two things are probably related. Most battles, I'll set up a perfect overwatch net, but I still have to send a brave soul out to poke the AI into coming out and tripping it. Even then, most of the time it'll retreat and force me to come find it instead, which makes for a more exciting experience, but doesn't sit quite well after a while. It feels like a kludge, maybe? They couldn't program an AI that could outmaneuver guys in overwatch (and who can blame them, I certainly can't manage it most battles) and needed an incentive for players not to turtle anyway, so seeding the map with clusters of aliens that are only activated once spotted must have been a pretty good solution. I don't know. Let me tell you, though. When you're playing a harder difficulty on Ironman, there are many moments when you wish you were capable of surprising the AI with its pants down like it's able to do to you. Rk. Cho and like ten other guys so far, RIP.

I played it on Normal my first time and felt really conflicted about it. On the one hand, the gameplay experience felt very fair and consistent on that level. I never lost a soldier unless I did something irreparably stupid. On the other, there was a definite difficulty curve I sailed over right around the time I launched my tenth satellite and got my whole squad using plasma, where the game just rolled over and stopped trying. I blew threw the final level like it was a joke. Maybe I've just gotten that much better, but I don't think so. I've now played two missions on Classic Ironman and still feel really conflicted about it. The consequences are felt so much more deeply when guys are getting smoked left and right, but that means the game is now occasionally unforgiving in all the wrong ways. I don't just mean a rookie panicking and offing two guys on my first mission, although that was a lark. I mean that sometimes I'll get shot by someone I can't see even though aliens can always see and shoot my guys, or I'll surprise a group of aliens by flanking them but have them use their free move to flank me instead. The harder the difficulty, the more it becomes clear that there are little ways in which the AI is playing a different game from the one you've been taught, which makes learning from your mistakes more of a challenge. It's not enough to make me go back to easier difficulties, but I'll probably keep it in mind as a caveat, like the strangely wooden interface.

Yeah, the Elite Force games, especially the first one, were really creative in pushing the bounds of typical Star Trek hand-waving technobabble to justify all sorts of otherwise goofy video game business. In particular, the holodeck was used to explain and structure a pretty clever deathmatch system for multiplayer. Regarding the actual topic, it's funny how the blade never really cuts both ways. With the new XCOM, I've heard multiple people complain about the limited item capacity of soldiers without batting an eye at the infinite ammo they do carry.