XCOM: Enemy Within

Because they're base personnel not soldiers. Blue hat and trophy related give it away.

If a soldier dies to flying floaters on a multi-level map, they can end up a floating corpse that you can't revive.

Makes sense. Soldiers that you "revive" aren't dead, just bleeding out. Seekers strangle you. I guess the medkits don't come with jumper cables. Or, wait, did you mean actual floaters? That'd be a bug then. Nvm.

well, it is poorly worded but he is right, I also had to reload once because I just wouldn't put up with a critically injured Major bleeding out because the body was flung into the air due to a glitch.

The game seems a bit buggier now than it was before, I also had a very weird spotting of my soldier through a 5m high solid wall with no windows, which activated 3 heavy floaters on the last move of my turn. Definitely too many glitches for Ironman playing...

Man, I forgot how much this game can suck you into long playing sessions.... "Just one more mission, then bed." Five missions later >.>

Heh sitting in wife's PT appt right now... Any guesses why I had her here 5 min late?

watching II playthroughs on the 'tube now, I didn't realize "hacking" those giant com relays in exalt missions would prevent them from firing their weapons. Who knew no coms means their guns unload and they'd have to reload? Makes it impossible to fail, you can just run up and shoot them all in the face. It's face-rolling easy...

Before I make a terrible mistake, if I make a mec out of a higher-than-squadie-ranked soldier, does he keep his rank, or does he start back at rank 1?

keeps the rank, you get to pick all promotions. Like a soldier reward from a mission

Quineloe_sl said:

watching II playthroughs on the 'tube now, I didn't realize "hacking" those giant com relays in exalt missions would prevent them from firing their weapons. Who knew no coms means their guns unload and they'd have to reload? Makes it impossible to fail, you can just run up and shoot them all in the face. It's face-rolling easy...

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Clearly this is the results of biometrics and a "link gunshots to my twitter account" sharing feature on the next gen smartguns and what the future has become.Thanks Obama.It's ok though, if you use Springfield instead of Glock you can jailbreak the OS. Don't even get me started on the google+ integration. Shit asks me if I want to use my real name every time I get ready to hold up a bank. I mean, come on.

Dandai_sl said:

I beat it for the first time the other day. I'm not what I expected

Spoiler

but I felt like the ending was a pretty big letdown. After you reach a certain point in the game your soldiers are unkillable gods. The only time I felt compelled to hide behind cover in the late game was against those huge mechs that do indirect fire and blast your ass like the space ships in independence day. But even then I'd only hide when I couldn't get a sniper in close enough to do a disabling shot...

The difficulty curve is heavily skewed towards the first couple months of the game, after which it almost becomes too easy. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how to fix that design-wise, but the game is definitely fun as a whole.

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Yeah, that's always been a core problem with the game. Plus the early game difficulty is mainly caused by RNG. Low aim stats means all your shots are gambles. No matter how perfect your tactics, eventually you have to take a shot, and even if it's a high % it can still miss. And on the higher difficulties where high cover counts for shit, a missed shot is death for that soldier. Add panic to that and one missed shot can wipe your squad. Once your stats improve, as well as your damage from weapon upgrades and you aren't getting one-shotted, it gets pretty faceroll. That's not even factoring in abilities.

That being said, still enjoy the hell outta this game and can't wait to experience the hell of trying to beat I/I again with all the new stuff.

TJT_sl said:

So I finally picked this up and have been playing Ironman obsessively. I neglected to get it earlier, because this game fucking consumes me when I start playing it. The Mec's are pretty good to rush to. And some of the gene mods are really nice.

However! Fuck that Zombie/Fishing Village Chrysalid Hive mission. Holy shit. I mean, it was pretty awesome. But playing a game that strongly rewards highly defensive play over anything else then having a rush to evac before an explosion was so detrimental to my usual strategy. Lost everyone but my Mec Colonel and my Assault Major. But oh well, losing is fun!

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Why didn't you just sprint towards the evac point? Melee units are terrible in this game, because you can never catch someone who is using his two actions to run and still hit them.

Dandai_sl said:

The difficulty curve is heavily skewed towards the first couple months of the game, after which it almost becomes too easy. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how to fix that design-wise, but the game is definitely fun as a whole.

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There's a few major factors why that is the case
1. Your squad size grows from 4 to 6. Enemy squad size however remains at 3 for the entire game. That means that if you activate two squads at the same time, in March you are massively outnumbered. In August however, it's even. I think by June, enemy squad size should increase to 4, that way activating two enemy squads at once would again be as terrifying as it is on your first few missions.

2. The one-hit potential from light plasma weapons on low rank soldiers is gone once you have Titan armor. No one can get 1-hitted anymore by anything once they wear Titan armor. I'd lower the max damage of the sectoid and thin man attacks to 3, so they can no longer 1-hit rookies. That way, the first 3 missions wouldn't feel as unforgiving anymore as they are now.

3. The number of enemy squads also stays roughly the same while explosives inflate excessively over time. Once classes are settled and everything, you usually sport a rocket launcher and a grenade against 4 packs of enemies. That leaves you with 0.5 explosives for cover clearing and guaranteed damage per squad.
Once your soldiers are high ranked and you have upgrades, you have a massive firepower inflation.
You have
- 3 grenades on your mec
- 3 rockets on your heavy
- 2 rockets on your second heavy
- 4 grenades on your grenadier heavy

That leaves you with 12 explosives against no more than 6 squads of enemies, or two grenades per squad. In addition, you have infinite cover removals through the MEC squaddie ability, which lets you save explosives.

So either nerf the number of grenades people can carry around (for example, don't let a grenadier heavy use both slots for grenades) or drastically increase the number of squads you can face in a mission.

I think the last one is the hardest. They want WAAAY overboard on explosives with enemy within. +2 on grenadier heavies due to the tactical rigging, Mecs usually replace assaults who didn't carry any grenades, that's +5 grenades right there. You can't just add that many enemy squads because maps are too small for that.

Its an easy mission once you've done it a time or two - but yea, its brutal the first time - the later times you just do it with a Skeleton (or better, Ghost) Suit + Sprinter talent Support dude in the ship to trigger it with everyone else outside by a ways and time it so he triggers it BEFORE his first move and it's cake.

During the base attack you only get more than 1 reinforcement wave if you lost a lot of soldiers.

Lets Play XCOM Enemy Within Ironman Impossible - Part 37 - Capturing an Ethereal at WHAT COST - YouTube

pretty good example of the explosive inflation I explained earlier. He kills a sectopod using almost exclusively grenades. and still has enough explosives for everything else except the cockpit, in a mission with 15 aliens, quite a lot actually. MECs are walking armories, way too many explosives.