Deadpan

There's a mod that adds a button to put all remaining soldiers on overwatch, and it's basically all I ever wanted.

I finished it today after binging on it hard, took 34 hours according to Steam. It may be a little bit shorter overall, but I figure that's mainly a function of the endgame being less dragged out. In the first game you sort of reached this point where there was nothing left to do but wait for something bad to happen so you'll have an opportunity to train your psi operatives and collect resources to build the stuff you need for accessing the final mission. Even though in XCOM 2 you still push the story along through missions and even optional objectives in missions, at least now you usually already have a mission available to you when you're raring to go thanks to all the Avatar facilities you want to blow up. Also, did anyone else ever get caught by the UFOs that sometimes chase you? I had avoided that for most of the game, apparently it triggers a special mission. At the stage I was at, it sure didn't end up being as dramatic as the game tried to make it sound, but I super appreciate the idea of having something that's similar to the base defense mission from Enemy Within, but happens dynamically.

Dragons move on every other beat, so you want to try to land on an adjacent tile when their move ends, use the one beat pause to attack, then jump backwards and repeat. Ideally come at them from above or below, since blue and red dragons have long range horizontal attacks if you attack them from the sides. Guess I'm late.

I think I would generally prefer if XCOM just communicated this more clearly (same with how much time adding engineers to rooms will actually save and stuff like that). As frustrating as it is to not be sure if buying these upgrades produces a single gun or stocks your entire armory, I can definitely see why they'd go for the latter. When your soldiers don't have to take turns using the same guns and armor as well as the same few medkits and special grenades, it limits the amount of min/maxxing through obsessive micromanagment the game allows for. It also means you can reach a certain baseline stat upgrade to keep up with the escalating difficulty. It's already pretty devastating to lose high rank soldiers and to then have to go back to using rookies, but at least if you can send those rookies out with high tech armor and weaponry, they stand a small chance. Imagine suffering a squad wipe and having to go back to rookies with standard issue pea shooters and wet tissue armor.

The game doesn't communicate some of this stuff super clearly. Anything you buy in the weapons tab gives you an unlimited supply, same for the armor tab, except those nanovests or whatever they're called, which you buy individually. All the projects from the proving grounds room also only give you individual items to give to soldiers, you need to repeat their experimental ammo stuff a few times to get different results and even more often to get multiples.

One of the things I really have to remind myself of a lot in this game is that unless the mission timer is getting really low already, I probably shouldn't be moving one soldier ahead when most others have already spent their turns. Sometimes you really can't avoid running into new enemies at bad times though, like when you're trying to flank somebody or they're just in a bad position, like several enemy groups pressed up against the back wall of a building somewhere. The permanent weapon upgrades are found in Engineering, there's a tab where you buy items like grenades and medkits, one for armor upgrades and one for new weapons. I've mostly been sticking with upgraded standard grenades since they seem to offer the best mix of shredding armor but also destroying cover. I tried using acid and fire bombs instead for a while, but normally I try covering multiple enemies with grenades thanks to the increased radius on grenadiers, and with these it's hard to get their effect to reach several aliens when they are behind cover. The fact that I'm focusing so much on getting rid of enemy cover could potentially screw me over at some point though. Very frequently I'm left with areas where there's not a lot of good spots to move up to after I bombed the hell out of the enemy, and a few times now I ended up laying waste to the building I had to climb for evac, so I had to go around it to find a different ladder and that was cutting it close with the timer. It's so satisfying though when you blow the floor out from under enemies to make them take extra fall damage. I'm a little disappointed that mind controlling an enemy breaks concealment, although I guess it would have been way to complicated to create a system for acceptible/inacceptible moves while trying to blend in among an Advent patrol. Still, now that I have a good psi operative it's really useful getting an enemy under my control to scout ahead. I especially like the ones in the big daddy suits for that, they're tanky enough to draw enemy fire for a while and you can make them just charge through walls to destroy cover. Pro tip though: When you manage to keep one of these alive throughout the entire mission, make sure you evac the person controlling them last. Understandably, they recover after that person is gone and if you still have people near them that might be bad news.

Most of the time, I only use concealment to sneak up on the first enemy group I can find and land a good grenade on them while they are still clumped together. When a timer is in play, I definitely don't want to spend too much time setting up the perfect ambush, but even in other missions grenades became the standard opening seeing how important it has become to shred armor on the beefier enemies early on. Upgrading your entire weapon stock instead of building individual guns feels very welcome, not only because it reduces micro-management a little when you don't have to shuffle your limited supply of guns around all the time (on top of your limited items) but also because it limits the amount of valuable equipment you can potentially lose on a wipe. It's already pretty disheartening to lose an experienced soldier with a decked out gun and one of those combat sim stat upgrades, so I guess the game doesn't want to punish losses too hard by also taking your base damage away. Also, weapon upgrades! I'm pretty far into the game and didn't get a lot out of them for a while, in part because I lost some along with the soldiers who fielded them, but also because the process of getting them in the field is kind of inconsistent (and I rarely have enough intel to spare to buy any). but I got some nice ones lately and at this stage they really give you a considerable boost. My most badass sniper not only gets extra aim and a chance to instakill enemies, but two free reloads per mission, and when you combine that with the ability where in one turn she gets to shoot again and again so long as she gets a kill with every hit, that's nine shots in a single turn potentially. I was in a pretty bad civilian rescue mission lately where most of my good soldiers were wounded and I couldn't even bring a full team. My best medic and my only psi operative ended up unconscious with a sectopod and friends on top of them, but that one sniper, one a hill at the edge of the map, took care of everything on her own without a scratch. Camping like that I still failed the mission, but at least I didn't lose those people and the equipment on the dead rookies.

I've played the game on and off basically since release, but without spending any money. Unlocking things purely through playing was always a slow process, gotta make buying packs appealing after all, but even if I could never get all the flashiest cards this way, it still generally felt like if I stuck with the game long enough I could eventually build just the deck I would like. Which, by the time I really got it together, probably wouldn't be competitive at all anymore. But at least I could still play it for giggles, or cut a few corners, or cobble something halfway decent together from all the disjointed parts in my collection. This change just makes it feel impossible to ever keep up. Either I resign myself to only playing Wild, which might become this weird side affair for complete lords that own every card in the world, or I resign myself to slowly building up new collections all the time that I eventually lose access to. I might not be the kind of player that makes Blizzard filthy rich, but it's still kinda important for them to keep people like myself around, to keep the environment healthy: keep matchmaking times short, give all those big spenders some dillweeds to stomp with their legendaries, that sorta thing. I wonder if this move is going to work out for them.

Okay, there's lots of things I like about the new XCOM, not sure how I feel about how many enemy types just sort of bumrush you though. A single hit from a stun lancer can knock one of your soldiers unconscious, effectively rendering them useless for the rest of the mission with just one hit, unless you got a medic to take care of it (think going into a kind of permanent bleedout state in XCOM 1). I had this happen twice really early into missions and it's super annoying. The new Floater types also seem really keen to just fly past your cover and hit you in the face, and it's really hard to prevent that since they have such a high dodge chance. Also, I just ran into Chrysalids for the first time, and apparently these pop out of the ground now when you get close. So where previously you could at least sort of negate their charge by taking them on from a long range, now as soon as you see them they're already on top of you.

I was listening to the podcast while playing Salt for the first time, so as intended, I pretty much got the reverse of Chris' experience and mistook podcast audio for game audio. The only sounds in the game until this point were effects, but the jazzy tune kicked in during a calm moment I had on a tropical island in between sailing around and honestly fit pretty well (I almost wish this was actually in the game now). Also, it was just low key enough that I expected it might be diegetic and coming from a source somewhere nearby.

There's a local Jamaican place that makes great stews, so I used the opportunity to try to make something similar. I used this recipe for inspiration, but deviated a little bit to get rid of leftover vegetables. So besides the beans and sweet potato, I used mushrooms, spring onions and fresh tomatoes. Also I noticed too late that we were out of stock cubes, so had to use water instead. Other than that, it turned out pretty good.

I really enjoy naming after friends who volunteer on Twitter. It seems like a really neat and very simple way to get people more invested in the emergent stories of their soldiers' lives and deaths.

I think the next step is to just stand there quietly eating Nature Box pea treats and extend the bag to Chris when he walks past.

I kind of feel similar about there being too many dungeon runs now. I have an old save file lying around, but I made most of my progress there early on when physical damage and hellions in particular still ruled everything. I started from scratch with the full release, and now the amount of work I'd have to do to get my buildings upgraded again just feels really daunting. At the same time, with the changes made to the games economy and how much more gold you have to spend on treating diseases, R&R, etc., those cost efficiency upgrades feel really crucial to long term progress. As it stands, I got several full crews up to Level 3&4 pretty fast but I'm still a long way from actually being able to upgrade their equipment and skills to the same level, let alone adress their most concerning quirks, and consequently they all struggle a bit with the missions I send them on. I haven't lost too many, but it still means they need to have diseases or stress removed pretty often. Because hamlet upgrades are still permanent, it feels like the most optimal way to get ahead with the way the systems interact at the moment would be to throw my current roster into the meat grinder until I get a more efficient base and can then replace my losses with better equipped, better trained squads. That would be such a massive timesink. and still, progressing as I am now, with the occasional losses and the incredibly annoying hero perks doesn't feel like what the game is, it just feels like the annoying thing I have to do for now because I am not at that high-end level yet. Also, while the the sanitarium definitely needed to be nerfed in some way so you could no longer keep your entire roster basically flawless, now that it is more costly to remove negative quirks, I feel like it highlights how randomly you get stuck with them. This was probably already a problem since forever, but it was relatively low-key when you got to remove those quirks after every single expedition. Now that they stick around for longer, I get pretty annoyed when a hero did really well on a mission, rolled over all the enemies, found lots of treasure, comes out with less stress than before, and then the result screen randomly declares that they picked up a terrible new habit and got infected with an awful disease. When did that happen then, eh?

Posting is thread for wrong this.

I have fond memories of playing Sven Coop after school with a buddy. In hindsight, the maps I remember playing didn't really use the presence of multiple players for anything interesting, they simply included so many endlessly respawning enemies that having more people around was the only realistic way of dealing with them. Players also got infinite respawns, so you could theoretically still play most maps on your own or with just two players, it simply took a lot longer to achieve whatever goal the level had since you would get blown up after the tiniest bit of progress. The most coordination maps tended to ask of you was pressing two buttons on opposite sides of a room at the same time to open up one of those horde areas. Going back to it now, I am also reminded that a lot of map makers latched onto the parts of Half Life that are least interesting to me, namely the soldiers and the shooting thereof. A lot of the custom maps seem to favor the weapons from Opposing Force, which are just so much more boring than the weird Half Life guns, except some maps give you a mix of both and it's just immediately a mess. I can't fault people too much for not making their levels more visually interesting than empty canyons or empty corridors, but I really don't understand why they don't fill that space with something more interesting. "You are a soldier, go shoot other soldiers" is a really common theme in custom maps and it's so boring. Half Life soldiers also just feel like one of the weakest points of the game mechanically. You can't really evade their attacks like you can with headcrabs, zombies, bullsquids, houndeyes, etc., but the game came out before the age of cover systems, so in the end it's just one of those things where you point your gun at them and hold down fire until one of you falls over. With that in mind, I have a few recommendations for people who want to try it. Stadium, one of the included maps, contains an arena area accessible by teleporters and consoles that allow you to fill that arena with friends, enemies, and friendly enemies. This isn't as mindblowing as it used to be, but if you want to see AI respond to other AI it can still be pretty interesting. Garghunt is one of the more restrained maps available: There is a starting area and there is a big pit, which has one of those big flame-shooting, foot-stomping green giants from Half Life in it. Because you don't have to deal with a million enemies in this scenario, it frees you up to strategize (like one player distracts it, one player searchs for weapons) and then be delighted and frustrated by how well your plan works out (or not). Apache Battle (named helebat in the map list) is another map that basically has one big enemy instead of a million little ones. You start in a tower with supplies, there is a helicopter flying around outside, and on the other side of the canyon is a stationary rocket launcher you can use to destroy it (although like in Garghunt, the thing just respawns, so there's not much fanfare to winning). Phobia is one of relatively few custom Xen maps, so it's worth a look for having more interesting enemies and environments than most. Then again, I just replayed it and immediately got stuck.

Mr. Remo is my father. Please, call me Donkey Kong.

No, you got it mixed up. If you were looking for the right thread, you are in the wrong thread here, meaning that you are actually in the right thread. If you were looking for the wrong thread on the other hand, you'd be in the right thread here, meaning you were in the wrong place. Edit: Oops, quoted the wrong person.

The title of this thread and first sentence of the story led me to assume we were gathering ideas for how to best make Chris Remo uncomfortable now that you realilzed you are on the same bus as him. Imagine if instead of mumbling his name you whispered "Spelunky is not that good" just as he's walking past.

Keep your embarassssssment to the life thread please. Also, keep thread recommendations to the "Does this thread exist?" thread. I'll apologize for my error in the penance thread.

My bad, I was in the wrong tab.

Wow, I am so glad that there's finally a thread to discuss legal claims, conservative politics, old SimCity games, mill design, cart making, wheel mending and ship building!

I wonder what would even be left if you try to get rid of the queer parts. It was already kind of obvious here when they show him doing the same couple of guitar riffs over and over again while something else is happening in the original, presumably when they reach the songs about female characters being in love they will just be replaced with a reaction shot from the same episode stretched to three minutes in length.

That one also tripped me up completely. I mean, even if one of America's most wanted were to download this, I'm pretty sure that cursing their way through tutorials and engine documentation would be a better use of their time than whatever else they might get up to, or why exactly does this specific thing have to be guarded in such an alienating, half-assed fashion.

Tharsis, a game about space being mean to you, is out today. I only heard of this a few days ago by way of a Let's Player (the new normal of games media I guess) but my excitement immediately went through the roof. I like roguelikes, and I like games that portray space as a harsh environment, and this looks like a combination of both. Most games obfuscate their random generation for the sake of immerson, but Tharsis wears its dice rolls on its sleeve: you send crewmembers to different places in the ship to take care of problems, you roll a certain number of dice and then use those to do various things. More on this after I've had time to finally play a few rounds.