
I have been bitten by XCOM: EU once more. I just had it all go wrong, but golly was it exhilarating trying to hold it all together.
The mission prior to the one that signalled the end will live long in the memory. Two soldiers remaining. Three KIA. One stabilized. Low on health. Weapons needing reloaded. Breaking line of sight. Dropping smoke. Having an assault class channel Rambo and bulldoze multiple hostiles to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. I thought it was a lost cause. Awesome to be proven wrong.
Cannot wait to start fresh tomorrow with a different approach.
I went stoopid on it for a while and built ubermenschen teams of psionic colonels that just massacred the aliens by the pallet load. By the time I got to the final, I was mind controlling the big bad and locking up the game engine.
Is that with the Enemy Within expansion?
Never got the expansions.
I just need to progress further then.
The release of Long War 1.0 made me dive back in... and I’m hooked all over again.
I’m up to September - barely managing to field a few gauss weapons, plenty of lasers, mostly still wearing phalanx armour, 1 chem grenade, 2 continents covered (Asia (home) and South America) with 4 laser-equipped (finally!) Ravens.
I’ve had a few successful landed larges - slow, slow, slow... ignore the meld (that’s not what you’re here for) and overwatch, overwatch, overwatch. I run (usually the scout, because lightning reflexes) the scout up (motion trackers are great), trip the pod, and run her/him back to the rest of the squad, waiting in good positions, with good sight-lines, ready to annihilate whatever steps forward.
Just starting to get a few psis, and genemods out. Finally unlocked iron skin (my favourite).
Mechtoids are getting common, cyberdisks are still terrifying (I don’t know if it’s new, but they have a “spin-up” aoe now!?!) and thin men (and overseers) are accurate AF (the game lies when it says they have a 35% chance to hit you... they hit every GD time ).
I’m ignoring Rocketeers completely, this play - it’s all about the DAKKA (Infantry). HMG Gunners (the squadsight ones), and squadsight equipped Scouts, and (obviously) Snipers, help keep the up the fire-power without putting themselves in danger. (I had a 2-mechtoid 3-sectoid pod not know what to do with themselves as my gunner and sniper whittled them down, with my concealment scout observing the carnage.)
Squad-comp is one of everything, but +1 infantry in place of the rocketeer. “It’s super effective!”
Since I can't play Chimera Squad (CPU is going through an RMA process), and I'm stuck with just a 2013 Macbook Pro for games that can't be played via GeForce Now (thanks, 2k!), I've started playing this one again. I've never played through an entire campaign of Enemy Within and I bounced off it hard when I tried playing it last year after I had just finished another XCOM2 campaign, but I'm really enjoying it this time through.
The thing that killed it for me last year was how slow the tactical layer felt, and that's definitely still the case, I'm just not coming off a recent XCOM2 campaign so it's not bothering me too much. Despite the things that EW added to try to get the player to be more aggressive, it still feels like the optimal way to play is to creep forward, with excessive uses of overwatch and hunker down, which can often make the opening moves of a battle feel pretty same-y. It's good that they fixed that with the timers and concealment in the sequel.
The strategy layer is also too dependent on an optimum way to play. Where you can survive being more aggressive in the tactical battles (especially as you get better weapons and armor), it seems impossible to keep a game going if you don't get X satellites up every month.
Anyway, despite those complaints, I really am enjoying myself this time. I feel like I'm entering the mid-game at this point, with a squad that's too good for the weak pods but has some occasional trouble with the newer enemy types. In XCOM2, I'd expect this to be the toughest part of the game -- in my last campaign I went through a string a 4 mid-game missions where I lost a total of 8 soldiers -- so we'll see how it goes.
The thing that Chimera Squad does that the other XCOMs never managed is to knock overwatch off its dominant pedestal. In XCOM (and heck, in X-Com) the lowest-risk, best-reward thing was usually to lure enemies into overwatch range since that made it harder for the enemies to attack you first. In Chimera Squad, there's generally something important to use that turn for right this second and spending a character's entire turn on overwatch is expensive. And they did it without nerfing overwatch itself--breaches where you get auto-overwatch make it apparent that overwatch is still as good as it ever was.
That important thing in Chimera Squad is that usually an enemy has the next action. The single unit action turns, rather than while team action turns, is probably the biggest thing that CS did to shake up the combat in the game. There's no more clearing out immediate threats then waiting for the remainder to come to you. If the current soldier can't deal with it, there is no second solder on line so the immediate threat will likely hurt you.
While the encounters in CS take out the scouting and initial luring of enemy squads, the Breaching mechanic still give you somewhat of a first strike.
At least that's how I see it.
You guys are both right, but it feels like CS changes the emphasis from turtling via overwatch to turtling via using both actions offensively. Which ends up meaning that in plenty of maps in CS I barely move my dudes, I just cycle through their powers in the appropriate order.
It's gotten a little stale by the endgame on the first run, and the fact that the strategic layer is paper-thin has soured me on the game a little. Sure, it's fine for a $10 snack between XCOMs, but it's not the XCOM3 we were all wanting.
Since I can't play Chimera Squad (CPU is going through an RMA process), and I'm stuck with just a 2013 Macbook Pro for games that can't be played via GeForce Now (thanks, 2k!), I've started playing this one again. I've never played through an entire campaign of Enemy Within and I bounced off it hard when I tried playing it last year after I had just finished another XCOM2 campaign, but I'm really enjoying it this time through.
The thing that killed it for me last year was how slow the tactical layer felt, and that's definitely still the case, I'm just not coming off a recent XCOM2 campaign so it's not bothering me too much. Despite the things that EW added to try to get the player to be more aggressive, it still feels like the optimal way to play is to creep forward, with excessive uses of overwatch and hunker down, which can often make the opening moves of a battle feel pretty same-y. It's good that they fixed that with the timers and concealment in the sequel.
The strategy layer is also too dependent on an optimum way to play. Where you can survive being more aggressive in the tactical battles (especially as you get better weapons and armor), it seems impossible to keep a game going if you don't get X satellites up every month.
Anyway, despite those complaints, I really am enjoying myself this time. I feel like I'm entering the mid-game at this point, with a squad that's too good for the weak pods but has some occasional trouble with the newer enemy types. In XCOM2, I'd expect this to be the toughest part of the game -- in my last campaign I went through a string a 4 mid-game missions where I lost a total of 8 soldiers -- so we'll see how it goes.
A month later and I've finished. It had been long enough since my lone complete play-through (late 2012 I think) that I didn't remember how the end of the campaign went, so that was fun. In the end, I don't think the expansion fixed any of the problems with the base game. It did add the Mec trooper which I really enjoyed having as part of my standard squad. I got less out of the gene mods, though some of the things they added were nice if not game changing in any way.
Also, that Newfoundland mission (which I'd heard was good but didn't know anything other than that) ...
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