greydan

XCOM Enemy Unknown

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If you have the Slingshot DLC, it can help with skipping lasers.  I'm pretty sure it introduces a couple of enemies with plasma rifles earlier than normal, so if you can capture one you can get a headstart on research. I know that's true on Classic, I don't know if the same enemies show up on Normal.

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Weapon upgrades, at least to Plasma, are essential, in my experience. I think going armor first makes sense, but get to Plasma as fast as possible, especially the Plasma Sniper, because makes your Snipers so much better.

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You need at least one (preferably 2) snipers to hand that are fully levelled up by the end of the game. Put him/her in an archangel suit, with double tap and there is no 'minor' alien on the map that isn't going down in one shot with the plasma sniper rifle.

As for the robot aliens - well you need heavies with HEAT ammo (that's the upgrade). They are your robot busters and HEAT ammo applied to both your LMG and your rockets. If you have the slingshot DLC and capture the alien battleship then you'll get access to fusion cores and then blaster launchers. These are your late game deus ex machina weapons.

Sectopods are an arse admittedly but creep forward and don't pop them until you are ready. Don't bunch up or the grenade launcher will cripple you and don't move anyone without lightening reflexes. Pour in firepower (your heavies leading) and they'll go down. Stay in high cover. Your MECs aren't that essential

In the base game, the gene mods are more beneficial iirc

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You need at least one (preferably 2) snipers to hand that are fully levelled up by the end of the game. Put him/her in an archangel suit, with double tap and there is no 'minor' alien on the map that isn't going down in one shot with the plasma sniper rifle.

As for the robot aliens - well you need heavies with HEAT ammo (that's the upgrade). They are your robot busters and HEAT ammo applied to both your LMG and your rockets. If you have the slingshot DLC and capture the alien battleship then you'll get access to fusion cores and then blaster launchers. These are your late game deus ex machina weapons.

Sectopods are an arse admittedly but creep forward and don't pop them until you are ready. Don't bunch up or the grenade launcher will cripple you and don't move anyone without lightening reflexes. Pour in firepower (your heavies leading) and they'll go down. Stay in high cover. Your MECs aren't that essential

In the base game, the gene mods are more beneficial iirc

 

MECs are fun toys but not that useful, gene mods are awesome, you can have a whole squad that cloaks gives you a lot of advantages.

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Memetic skin breaks the game. It's totally overpowered.

I agree about the MECs though. A nice idea not really implemented terribly well.

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Yeah, if I ever do another run, I think I may well skip Memetic Skin and force myself to use other upgrades.  It made even late game Classic pretty trivial a lot of times. 

 

I did find MECs more useful when using the Roulette Second Wave option.  Units who ended up with a poor collection of skills could be turned into MECs, which then at least gave me a guaranteed set of skills I knew could be useful, particularly when other units were healing.

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That reminds me, I always meant to try a game with an all MEC team, preferably all with the punching arm, and just punch everything to death. 

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That reminds me, I always meant to try a game with an all MEC team, preferably all with the punching arm, and just punch everything to death. 

I did an all MEC team where i gave them as many explosives as possible, it was fun to just blast through every map. You could stack mines then launch a grenade to blow up pretty much any enemy

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I really like the base AoE that MECs get. Shredding cover is very powerful, and being able to do it every fight is great. Get the flamethrowers and you have a mobile siege engine. While gene mods may be where it's at in the late game MECs are effective and reliable in the early game, so they can help you coddle those weaker early soldiers.

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It's not really sword combat though is it? It's basically the Berserker's bull rush ability for XCOM units, only without destroying cover. Very close range, extremely powerful but will leave you very exposed if things go wrong.

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Yeah, for me it was just about the fiction.  Ninja sword seems out of place/gamey. I've often wanted some kind of melee mechanic.  Give him/her a bayonet.

 

 

ETA: Not a big deal, just a kind of hmmm.

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My first attempt at stabbing someone with a sword last night ended in abject failure after my ranger missed and got her face chewed off by a reanimated zombie. Harsh yet fair if she can't hit with a sword......

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Definitely going to "try" to wait for a patch.  From the RPS review:

And one thing that makes me a whole lot less excited: Like many others, XCOM 2 doesn’t run at all well on my PC. I can get it to perfectly playable so long as I compromise on visual bells and whistles, but 60 frames is a dim and distant dream. Not too much of an issue for a turn-based game, but unfortunately it’s accompanied by irregular huge drops in framerate and accompanying lagginess. My PC’s also running so damned hot – just to run this at pretty much medium settings – that there’s no moisture left in the air of my room and it sounds like there’s a small motorbike under my desk. Something’s up, and I do hope it’s fixed soon.

Lots of talk of that sort in the comments, too.

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Definitely going to "try" to wait for a patch.  From the RPS review:

Lots of talk of that sort in the comments, too.

Really wish people would post their specs when they make these comments in reviews. I want to know how my machine stacks up to theirs.

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Listening now.  Wow.  I will definitely be waiting for a patch.  Hell, I might wait for a sale.

 

Seriously sounds like kind of a mess.

 

 

ETA: The fact that this stuff has not come up in reviews just makes you wonder yet again about how in bed the review platforms are with the companies.  If what the guys are saying is true, they ought to be ashamed.

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Listening now. Wow. I will definitely be waiting for a patch. Hell, I might wait for a sale.

Seriously sounds like kind of a mess.

ETA: The fact that this stuff has not come up in reviews just makes you wonder yet again about how in bed the review platforms are with the companies. If what the guys are saying is true, they ought to be ashamed.

To be completely fair, both Dave and Rob get totally lost down the hole of listing every little thing that didn't work for them about the game, something that I last remember happening with the Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion podcast, which combines in this instance with a very rose-tinted memory of how the 2012 predecessor played at launch to make them both mostly miss the forest for the trees. Dave is correct that there's a bigger and messier design here, this time around, but the flaw is that it explains itself poorly, not that it's a bad game. I think there are very few failures of design in this game, and most of those that are present are inherited from the previous installment.

Check out the episode thread for a lot of better-considered responses than mine!

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Listening now. Wow. I will definitely be waiting for a patch. Hell, I might wait for a sale.

Seriously sounds like kind of a mess.

ETA: The fact that this stuff has not come up in reviews just makes you wonder yet again about how in bed the review platforms are with the companies. If what the guys are saying is true, they ought to be ashamed.

I'll post a proper reply in the thread for the episode, but all I'll say now is that I don't think I've ever listened to a 3MA where I've disagreed more profoundly against the main conclusions of the panel (or at least some of the panel) while agreeing with the observations about the game. David Heron's statements that 'apart from armour and the support class everything else is a step backwards from XCOM: Enemy Unknown' and 'XCOM 2 is a bad game' are just....... Man I don't even know what to write. I cannot understand where those opinions come from. Did he play the same game as the rest of us?!?

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Thanks for the pointer to the game thread.  I guess I didn't look hard enough for where to discuss this.

Heh, I was just sent here, having bought XCOM Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within as a bundle in the last Steam sale!

 

As I said in the other thread, I played the really old progenitor games like Rebelstar and Laser Squad, but spent a long time on console rather than PC, so missed out on XCOM all these years! I am playing on Ironman mode on Easy; I don't really play strategy games but don't want to spend ages save scumming. I think it's fantastic, and every couple of missions I find new enemy types where I have no idea what they are capable of, which is scary. I am most worried about messing up on the building side, but would rather go through a few failed campaigns than look up optimal builds.

 

There are a few guys that I have really got attached to, I'm sure it's a big mistake since I get yelled at when explodifying a room full of aliens when the alternative is that my heavy will definitely die. I've lost 2 good people since the tutorials (I think all those first-mission deaths are scripted). My last mission ("Very difficult") had me stumble through a room en route to some Meld, only to activate floaters, sectoids and seekers all at once, with the floaters right behind the door! I managed to get everyone out OK, but only thanks to a stabilising medpack in one case :).

 

Strangely enough, the game has framerate hitches and drops, similar to those I heard about in XCOM2; I have a 970 and a i7-4770, so I'm pretty sure it should be able to run a 4 year old game :P

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On easy, I wouldn't worry too much about optimal builds for your rooms. Even on normal I wouldn't call that particularly important. If there's one thing I've learned from watching BeagleRush's Live and impossible series, it's that a grenade that's guaranteed to kill is better than two 80% shots. Don't worry too much about destroying the bodies, you'll get plenty.

 

I don't recall the performance being that bad on my machine, and it also ran fairly well on the Xbox 360, so I don't know why you'd be getting frame rate hitches. Maybe the cinematic camera? I turn that off immediately since it ends up just zooming in on walls or showing that the alien doesn't have any line of sight on my soldier before she gets vaporized.

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Thanks for the advice... I won't stress too much until I raise the difficulty :). And yeah, the issues are more like occasional hitches in cinematic a rather than anything drastic. I mentioned them because they might indicate troubles in the engine that maybe persisted into the sequel.

Ironman is actually quite like the old games on the Spectrum, since there was no saving mid mission. I later played emulated versions on my PC and could save snapshots of battles that made it far easier!

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I haven't played on Iron Man, because I'm scared of save corruption, but I usually play through without reloading anyway. Non-EW XCOM I made it through the whole thing on normal, only having to reload once at the final fight (which I guess lets you reload when you fail anyway) and XCOM 2 I'm about half way through (maybe?) and the only time I've reloaded is when I came home and tried to play a round when a bit tipsy. Not a good idea.

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