greydan

XCOM Enemy Unknown

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I'm not bagging on XCOM the shooter. I'm bagging on the exec who saw the old X-Com and said to himself, "This would make a great linear storyline." It's something of a leap, more so now that we have a modern XCOM that's at its best when allowing the systems to take the fore.

I don't think that's how the creation of the Xcom shooter originated. From what I've heard, I bet it'll make one hell of a post mortem.

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Forgive me for not reading 12 pages to see if anyone else has had this issue: I'm on the second mission, my guy is on the roof. It's his "turn" and I can't seem to do anything. I have four options: Fire, Overview, Rocket Launcher and Grenade. No matter which one I pick, I can't select "OK". I've tried pressing every key, and nothing is happening. The game is otherwise completely responsive: I can move the camera around. I can rotate the scene. I can select from the four option and click "More info", but I can't seem to do anything else. I can't even press Escape to get back to the main menu!

 

The game has been so slick and professional so far. I can't believe I've managed to paint myself into some weird corner already!

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I'm sure it must have been covered because the game can be pretty buggy, but I've had the same problem. Unfortunately I had to just quit out of the game and load it up again. I think I CTRL-ALT-DEL'd my way out. Hopefully you'll have a reasonably decent save? I know that at least twice I've been frustrated thinking I was screwed but my Ironman (Normal baby mode) save brought me back pretty close.

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Good gravy. I can't believe the game is still so buggy -- I thought they'd have patched everything by now. Weirdly, I managed to get out of it using the Steam overlay. I then saved and quit. A VERY disappointing start :(

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Hmm.. I didn't have any problems with that mission. In fact, I can't remember encountering any serious bug during my playthrough when the game first came out. Unless you count the camera which can be a bit annoying in some of the interior scenes.

 

Had all the other soldiers moved? Maybe the tutorial was expecting you to do something with someone else first. Did you eventually get past that point?

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I had it once, in the final mission. Either an explosion or a Berserker hit, I don't remember which, knocked my Heavy into the air, and he clipped a railing while falling. When he stood up again, he couldn't move or shoot. Saving and reloading allowed me to shoot, but not to move, so the poor guy spent the entire climax of the game on Overwatch by the entrance. It was a bit of a bummer, but a fairly explicable bug. Could yours have been caused by some weird physics stuff, TP?

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Not sure, but as I say, flicking in and out of the Steam overlay fixed it. Loving the game so far, despite that initial bug. Wish I didn't keep losing soldiers, though!

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So I finished my first month and got an 'A', feeling very pleased with myself. Then the next mission to appear was ranked 'Very difficult' and I've been struggling ever since.

Also: Why isn't there an autosave feature?

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Also: Why isn't there an autosave feature?

 

There is, in the options menu. It's just not enabled by default, presumably to... fuck, I can't even imagine a reason why.

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There is, in the options menu. It's just not enabled by default, presumably to... fuck, I can't even imagine a reason why.

 

Bah! Thanks for the heads up.

 

At the moment it's feeling like Atom Zombie Smasher/FTL, in that you're expected to play it repeatedly in order to learn the best way to manage your resources. As such, is it quite  short game? Or am I just playing it really badly?

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What difficulty are you on TP? On Normal you shouldn't be to pressed for amazing play.

Did you do stuff like build your officer training school to get a bigger squad?

Usually you should bring a weakling or two to train them up, but for harder missions you may want to pull out all the stops. Don't forget to capture live aliens for research too and get those satellites rolling for the cash.

What exactly are you finding difficult? Specific aliens, or mission types or just things in general?

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I'm playing on Normal, and don't get me wrong, I'm really enjoying playing it -- I just seem to have lost control of the situations.

 

The missions are tough, but fair, so it's really the management that I've fallen down on. I've been researching things in probably the "wrong" order and building the wrong types of facilities. It seems the game is quite unforgiving in this way: I've already lost two council members!

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Right strategy definitely helps. I don't think I lost any council members during my playthrough. Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to know what the right strategy is on your first playthrough.

 

There are a lot of good guides around the internet that you can check out, but here are some pointers: Max out your squad size early on. Keep your experienced soldiers alive: research armor and sacrifice rookies if sacrifices have to be made. At the beginning, you are short on engineers (I think), so choose the missions that reward you more of them (provided that the terror level is similar in all regions). Satellites are very important. Note the adjacency bonuses when building satellite and other facilities. Skip the laser research and focus directly on plasma (some may disagree). A sniper with squad sight, and later double tap, is extremely powerful. I had two of them in my squad all the times and they were constantly saving my asses.

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At the beginning, you are short on engineers (I think), so choose the missions that reward you more of them (provided that the terror level is similar in all regions). Satellites are very important. Note the adjacency bonuses when building satellite and other facilities.

Very much this. I was quite surprised by what a difference satellite coverage can make.

Also this is a silly tip and probably a bit of a no-brainer for many, but you actually benefit a lot from building facilities in a 2x2 square and just having a look at your base and doing some planning first has been pretty helpful for me. My first goal is usually expanding one workshop to the right side, adding a second satellite uplink on the left side, adjacent to the existing one and then try to make my way to the steam tiles as fast as possible.

Sprinter and Supression are really strong choices for Supports. Squad Sight so far seems absolutely invaluable for Snipers.

I've yet to beat the game on normal (apparently I am kind of bad at this, so grain of salt to everything above), but man ... this is just a great game.

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Great tips, guys! Thanks so much. I'd figured some of them out: The lack of satellites and engineers has already kicked my ass (I've got far too many scientists). A little annoying that the game is unforgiving if you make the wrong moves at the beginning, but I already want to play it again with my new knowledge.

Also, no bugs since my initial one.

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No problem.

 

Depending on how far you have gotten already and how bad your current situation is, it might be easier to just start over. That is, if you want to be sure that you can actually finish the campaign. You may also find some satisfaction in seeing things through to the end on your first playthrough.

 

Like I said, I can't remember encountering any bugs during the campaign, so you shouldn't worry too much about that. There are other reasons to save regularly, though. :)

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Finally beat this after putting it down last October slightly before unlocking

mind control

. Seems like I stopped before an awesome part of the game because all those abilities are a ton of fun, and give you really nice surefire options for dealing with threats, and disrupting enemies. Great stuff.

The ending is super weird though.

 

I never tried out the SHIV, and I'm sort of tempted to go back and try to get that earlier to try it out, but I honestly enjoyed the game a bit more near the middle and end, where it feels like you aren't so stacked against. It was also interesting seeing some of the modifiers they allow you to switch on for new games after a clear. Some of them really harken back to old X-Com (rookies having random stats, and gaining random stats on level up, for example).

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The SHIV's a weird thing. It's basically a soldier with no customization options that provides cover, so it's cool to have one on your team, but rarely better than having a human trooper.

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Except there are certain times when the SHIV is so crucial. For example, it can't get mind controlled.

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Man it is insane how badly Firaxis dropped the ball in terms of DLC for this game. I would buy new map packs, new enemies, new weapons, heck new cosmetic items, without a second thought. Firaxis absolutely cranked out DLC for the Civilization games; I wonder what happened? 

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Based on everything we've heard from Jake Solomon in post-release interviews it seems like there will be some robust DLC package that comes out in the future (hopefully this year).

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It's also interesting that game developers are in a tough spot with planning out DLC because a lot of people resent the idea of developers working on DLC prior to release, but then if they don't get started on things until after the release it can potentially take awhile (because when is development ever ahead of schedule?), and then people wonder why it is taking so long.

 

Based on everything I've read I think Firaxis was really uncertain about what the reception for the game would be like, so they were cautious about post-releases, which I think is sensible.

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I bought this game when it was the daily deal a few days ago and am surprised by how fast I've been sucked into this game.  I'm going to read through this thread before I say any more because I'm not very far in and every thought I have has probably already be said.

 

Okay I read it, I wish all my guys didn't sound American.  I know it would be a lot of work to record lines in a bunch of different languages/accents, but it'd be cool if my Japanese guys and my African guys didn't sound like they were from the same place as my British guys.  I looked at the customization options and I don't think the sets of voices are different for each of the however many races there are, I might be wrong, but if they did that it would be cool.  Maybe some cool group of modders will do something.

 

Another thing, for capturing aliens to interrogate I'm assuming you only need to capture them once and then after that there isn't any benefit to capturing the same species anymore.  Is this correct?

 

Also one last thing, does anyone else play in a way that is objectively bad or unoptimal, but more narratively satisfying?  For example I just did the mission to assault the alien base and a lot of it was stuff in the middle with parallel walkways on either side and I started by sending one of my guys down the left side and the other 5 I kept together on the right.  My 5 main guys basically did all the work, but when I got to the end I had the 6th jump down and take out the commander, basically replicating

.  The only reason it even worked out instead of the guy who was solo dying very early was because all the aliens who got alerted to the other 5 rushed over to them and left him alone. 

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