greydan

XCOM Enemy Unknown

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I tried out Classic Enemy WIthin last night. I can't pass the first mission:(

I finished Enemy Unknown on Normal, i should be better than this!

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The first month or two on Classic is unfortunately an overwatch crawl, at least until you can get a squadsight sniper or better weapons.  Thin Men are your worst nightmare the first few times you run into them.  In the conversation above between Brannigan and I, we both wiped on an early mission that is mostly Thin Men. 

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Second Heart saved my favorite Assault tonight.  I decided to start modding my A team with it just in case.  I got that fountain map that Exalt torched you on, but it was with aliens on a terror mission.  Everything was going okay, until I unwittingly ended my Assault's movement on top of a ready-to-turn-zombie corpse.  He escaped that with 5 hit points left.  Then we found a Sectopod in the roof terrace place.  I had no choice but to run-n-gun him up there to help in fighting it, but I didn't realize how bloody big the explosion on those things are when the explode, so he went beep-beep-beep as I mopped up the rest of the mission.  I got two more missions before he was out of sickbay, neither of which went as well as they should have. 

 

Sectopods are brutal when you don't have a single soldier with HEAT Ammo on your squad.  My sniper with that perk was in the psi labs being tested for that mission, or it might have gone better. 

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just killed a run voluntarily because 90% of my rookies became snipers, most of which had like 50 aim. So......screw that modifier!

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Started my first (Classic) campaign on Enemy Within after picking it up during the holiday sale. Ah, so good. One thing that certainly hasn't changed is how much of a baby I am: Ironman is surely too much for me!

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I feel like I need Ironman on.  Without it, I would spend way too much time reloading.  I just couldn't let a bad turn go. 

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Actually finished a Classic Ironman playthrough last night for the first time!  Lost one Assault during the final mission.  Fucking Sectopods.  Overall I do feel like Enemy Within made the game easier, as did using the Second Wave options Not Created Equal, Hidden Potential and Training Roulette.  My best sniper ended up with a natural Aim of 124.  With a Scope on, that meant that even an enemy in full cover was nearly a guaranteed hit. 

 

Going to take a break from it now, though I am tempted to start up an Impossible game at some point and see how ridiculous that is. 

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I've had mostly terrible runs since my pretty good one, so taking a break for a bit.  Plus that whole life thing I guess!

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After playing Spelunky for awhile tonight, I decided to "relax" and goof off starting an Impossible game.

 

  :campbell:  :campbell:  :campbell:

 

And I don't ever see me trying to seriously make an Impossible run.  I was lucky if a squad of 4 rookies killed one or two Sectoids in a single round.  First mission, lost 3 with one gravely wounded.  Second mission, wiped.  Third mission, wiped.  After that I just skipped everything to fail and see the stat screen.  I'm sure it's doable if you have a scout always Hunkered Down and everyone else on Overwatch, but that seems like it would get pretty boring. 
 

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I was just listening to the Crate and Crowbar podcast, and Tom Francis (Gunpoint designer) said he always renames troopers off people he's Twitter friends with.  He had to chop the limbs off of Steve Gaynor to turn him into a mec trooper and he felt bad about it. 

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I've picked this game up again after getting the expansion over the holidays. It's as good as I remember it, but I still have one complaint about the combat system and that's the AI's free move upon being spotted.

 

There are two big flaws, I think: first, that the free move is not always triggered immediately and sometimes results in the AI getting it after fire's been exchanged, and second, if you stumble upon the enemy near the end of your turn, you almost always get flanked, as the AI uses its total of three moves (one free, two standard) to get behind your guy and crit him, often with no regard for its own safety. I've seen my friend, who's learning the game right now, lose about a dozen guys to this combo, while I try to tell him that, if he spots an alien without being able to kill it, he should pull back. I feel like that's a fine lesson, but it would be even more effective if the aliens couldn't advance towards a guy during the free move.

 

Anyway, it's only because the rest of the game is so good that this one design misstep bothers me.

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Maybe it's just a perspective thing.  I never viewed that as a "free move" but as a kind of overwatch that is unique to the enemy.  Call it "Reposition Overwatch" (RO).  They are sitting there, on RO, and when they see you, it kicks in and they run for cover.  You wouldn't just sit there turn after turn without overwatch while suspecting that an enemy was creeping up on you.  So why would the enemy?  But players would probably find them being on true overwatch to be even meaner than having them move.  You would lose scouts on more missions than not.  And without RO or true overwatch, finding pods ends up being overbalanced in favor of the player. 

 

There is a mod that allows you to disable it.  I actually tried it for one mission late game and found it to be gross.  My squadsight sniper with ITZ just obliterated ever enemy before they could even have a turn.

 

Plus with the three flavors of cloak in the game now, you easily decimate those pods of enemies since they will not run until the first shot is fired. 

 

That said, there is a Second Wave option that gives them a 50/50 chance to either move, or fire on you.  I haven't tried it, as I favored them moving over firing at me.

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Maybe it's just a perspective thing.  I never viewed that as a "free move" but as a kind of overwatch that is unique to the enemy.  Call it "Reposition Overwatch" (RO).  They are sitting there, on RO, and when they see you, it kicks in and they run for cover.  You wouldn't just sit there turn after turn without overwatch while suspecting that an enemy was creeping up on you.  So why would the enemy?  But players would probably find them being on true overwatch to be even meaner than having them move.  You would lose scouts on more missions than not.  And without RO or true overwatch, finding pods ends up being overbalanced in favor of the player. 

 

There is a mod that allows you to disable it.  I actually tried it for one mission late game and found it to be gross.  My squadsight sniper with ITZ just obliterated ever enemy before they could even have a turn.

 

Plus with the three flavors of cloak in the game now, you easily decimate those pods of enemies since they will not run until the first shot is fired. 

 

That said, there is a Second Wave option that gives them a 50/50 chance to either move, or fire on you.  I haven't tried it, as I favored them moving over firing at me.

 

I guess I just see it as a defensive thing, to keep the enemy from being wiped out by snipers upon discovery, so it feels wrong for it to be used offensively like it so often is, in combination with the AI's regular turn. I know it's not a design problem that's easily overcome, though.

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Started playing the expansion this week, and surprised I'm finding classic a lot easier than i had in the base game. For the most part the exalt missions are a joke, they almost feel like a xp farm in comparison to any mission involving the aliens. 

That said I'm used to playing on classic now & I play very very cautiously. Plus my risk of starting with officers training and the 25% xp perk as soon as i could really seems to have paid off.

 

Still love the randomly generated missions names too.  Just completed: Operation Brutal Whisper

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Not sure how far you are but there's a pretty sudden spike in difficulty on the exalt missions in classic.

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Not sure how far you are but there's a pretty sudden spike in difficulty on the exalt missions in classic.

 

I destroyed their base last night :D

 

I will admit it was noticeable when they switched to laser & gene mods, however i managed to hit plasma weapons ahead of the curve which meant by that time my squads damage output on overwatch was so high that often reinforcement waves would be dead before my turn would start.

 

I still don't feel like they were a patch on the aliens, chrysalids and cyber disks still always felt like a threat in a way the agents never did. 

 

I suppose what it comes down to is that it felt the exalt operatives play it too safe to really be a threat compared to the regular aliens, a 6 man squad running into a pocket of exalt could always pick off their strongest threats and soak the rest with a assault or mec before finishing off the survivors, where as aliens utter disregard for their own safety and comparative lethality sometimes seemed to just overwhelm a squad to a extent that someone it always felt like i was one missed shot from a dead troop.

 

Loved the base defence mission though, having the concentrated lethality of a full squad taken away from you and being forced to fight in really close quarters was nerve wrecking.

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I found Exalt to have a nice difficulty spike on my first playthrough, but in my next playthrough they really just felt like gimme missions once I was familiar with them.  The first time it was mostly due to not prioritizing their heavies, and taking a couple of rockets to the face unnecessarily. 

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