Troy Goodfellow

Episode 190: The XCom Review Show

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Panic induced friendly fire seems to be trigger by proximity as far as I can tell. If a unit is going to panic fire, they will shoot at the nearest target. I think they will default to shooting aliens unless they can't see any and so will shoot a friendly instead. Could be wrong though.

I actually stopped playing with ironman enabled over the weekend. There are some bugs which really bork the gameplay through no fault of your own, mostly the terrible camera on the PC UI and the "aliens spawn right in the middle of your group" bugs. I've also noticed on classic that if alien reinforcements move into your field of view during their turn, they complete their move, then you get the "discovered aliens" cutscene and then they get an additional extra move to which it does not appear over watch fire will trigger. This has happened to me many times and I've gone from a good defensive position to one where I'm completely outgunned and out flanked. Until these are patched I'm leaving off ironman at classic difficulty. The game is (rightly) hard enough at that level without game bugs or bad coding making it nigh on impossible through no fault of your own.

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An assault with the close combat (automatic reaction fire to anything within 4 squares) placed in good cover at a bottleneck, and at least one sniper (ideally with 'in the zone') are must haves to survive those 4x3 chrysalids missions. Chrysalids never go into cover, so its a bonanza for col. snipers. Of coarse you can't predict/discern alien combinations until you get the hyperwave decoder.

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Panic induced friendly fire seems to be trigger by proximity as far as I can tell. If a unit is going to panic fire, they will shoot at the nearest target. I think they will default to shooting aliens unless they can't see any and so will shoot a friendly instead. Could be wrong though.

I actually stopped playing with ironman enabled over the weekend. There are some bugs which really bork the gameplay through no fault of your own, mostly the terrible camera on the PC UI and the "aliens spawn right in the middle of your group" bugs. I've also noticed on classic that if alien reinforcements move into your field of view during their turn, they complete their move, then you get the "discovered aliens" cutscene and then they get an additional extra move to which it does not appear over watch fire will trigger. This has happened to me many times and I've gone from a good defensive position to one where I'm completely outgunned and out flanked. Until these are patched I'm leaving off ironman at classic difficulty. The game is (rightly) hard enough at that level without game bugs or bad coding making it nigh on impossible through no fault of your own.

yeah whats with those teleport/ middle of formation placement bugs? I didn't seem to get them before the latest patch.

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I thought close combat didn't even work with Chrysalids... From experience, not from anything I read.

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Panic induced friendly fire seems to be trigger by proximity as far as I can tell. If a unit is going to panic fire, they will shoot at the nearest target. I think they will default to shooting aliens unless they can't see any and so will shoot a friendly instead. Could be wrong though.

This seems right. The problem I have is that the guy who dies to trigger the panic in the first place is often the guy with LOS on aliens. The lily-livered weakling in the back rank panics, and all he can see are friendlies. So he caps them.

I should note that I've had panics actually turn out well, too, with actual alien kills.

Re: Chrysalids, I focus as much high explosives on them as possible, followed by every ounce of firepower I can bring to bear. And prayer. Lots of prayer.

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I should note that I've had panics actually turn out well, too, with actual alien kills.

Yeah, every once in a while these are awesome, when your unit has already fired a reaction shot due to overwatch, then panics and gets another free potential kill.

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I thought close combat didn't even work with Chrysalids... From experience, not from anything I read.

I've had it work out real nice a few times. Note: if they all move together, and enter the 4 space radius all at once, the assault only shoots once. But still - with a high crit and proximity and number of aliens in sight damage bonuses - its team-saving (most often 10-12 damage w scatter laser).

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I can't fire up the game. I saved at the start of a terror mission. I can't face it.

Oh, I think my cowardly Heavy has actually ended two missions by panicking and killing the last alien. The dude is a psychic and his will is something like 54...

Can someone confirm there's no way to capture and interrogate a Chrysalid?

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Can someone confirm there's no way to capture and interrogate a Chrysalid?

There isn't. I got the "all tech" achievement in my Normal playthrough and I never captured a Chrysalid. They, along with the three types of robots, can never be captured.

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I've just started to play classic mode and I'm a bit frustrated/annoyed/confused at the way the overall meta map seems to be balanced.

Now I love watching a system slowly falling apart into chaos as much as the next bloke, but on classic XCOM seems to start off already falling apart and give you little/no way of influencing it.

I feel the meta game gets wrong exactly what the combat get right(especially on classic).

When I mess up in combat I'm 100% sure its because I fucked up, but early on when country leaves XCOM it often feels arbitrary. Worse it doesn't feel like its a case of a cruel unfeeling world operating unaware of my existence, it feels staged.

Its like the designers decided that I need to feel threatened, and so set a stage appropriately. For me the best examples of games that are truly panic inducing such as the Pandemic (boardgame) are those where you can see the very moment where the world starts to fall apart falls apart. This tipping point feels curiously absent from the game itself, and because of that XCOMs meta game feels almost predestined. Yes you can still make thing worse with a bad decision, but it feels like your actions role in XCO is about mitigating the effect of events, not anything to do with preventing their cause.

In the end I've developed a attitude of just shrugging my shoulders and carrying on with a "guess that's just one of those things" attitude.

Don't get me wrong, I want a brutal and unfair world for XCOM. However I feel a strange detachment from it, because it seems to operate without a visual sense of cause and effect.

I'm probably phrasing all this wrong, need to think more about the proper words to describe the way I feel about it.

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Yeah, weirdly the best way to manage chaos is to push forward in the game's plot, which gives you large panic reductions for every completed stage. It doesn't feel like a sustainable, systemic, and self-sufficient world if the player can't approach it on their own terms and expect some kind of success.

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Yeah I've just realised why my classic games are falling apart so badly - I'm not reaching the alien base to reduce panic so get overwhelmed. It is a bit stage managed that aspect of the game, I think successfully completing a mission will reduce panic in that country, but failure will increase it across the entire continent is a bit too unbalanced.

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