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doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
I have yet to field a 3-rocket heavy and may never. I mean, it's an attractive option but so is what amounts to +50% damage on a rocket - makes softening muton elites and other tough nuts to crack that are often clustered together a cinch, clearing their cover and enabling normal-weapon kill shots or rendering stuns easier.

I use alien grenades all the time, particularly on combat supports. If you can pack two items and you're meant to be a high-will defensive frontliner, well, no harm in packing a grenade.

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doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!

THE AWESOME GHOST posted:

How are you supposed to build a Rifle assault? I can kinda see that it would be useful but a Shotgun Colonel is so awesome

The rifle assault is more or less identical to the shotgun assault, favoring rapid fire and lightning reflexes and so on. The difference is in execution: Rather than dashing up close to maximize crit chance, you're instead dashing to a really advantageous cover position to take two shots from considerably longer range. You have the tankiest forward scout, basically, who can really hold their own in a firefight.

e: Of course they won't have the same punch as a shotgun assault, but rapid fire is rapid fire.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!

Klyith posted:

Personally I build my Rifle Assaults with more offense boosting skills, to make up for the lesser rifle damage and crits. Plus a rifle guy is not as likely to be as big a target as a shotgun assault who needs to get up in alien grills.

Shotgun Choices: Tactical Sense, Lightning Reflexes, Rapid Fire, Close Combat Spec, Resilience
Rifle Choices: Aggression, Lightning Reflexes, Rapid Fire, Bring em On, Killer Instinct

That rifle build can do some fantastic damage without having to move into dangerous spots, and is possibly even better at dealing with oh poo poo moments than a shotty assault -- bring em on is fantastic for that. Rifles are also much better for overwatch, but that takes away all those crit bonuses, so you need to take shots on your own turn to get your money out of it.

I see what you're doing and I like it. I'm definitely setting my next rifle assault up like that, which will probably be on a fresh Impossible game since I haven't cracked that nut yet. I'm not sure if my assault-heavy playstyle will quite work out on Impossible yet, but here's hoping.

Coolguye posted:

I don't build them like this. I build rifle assaults by basically walking down the entire defensive/left side skill tree for assaults. I favor Defensive Sense, Flush, etc. Shotgun assaults get mostly right side/aggressive skills, with a few gimmes like Close Combat Specialist. Rifle assaults aren't really made for having a huge body count, they're there for controlling the disposition of the battlefield and eliminating key targets.

I'll flesh out my specific choices for them when I get back in a couple hours.

I get why you say this, but I've found since they're way more often going to be my pointment my shotgun assaults benefit a lot from heavy defensive options. Klyith's shotgun spec is identical to how I handle my assaults in general, historically speaking.

I also don't take Flush anymore. I used to, and it definitely has its uses, but rapid fire is just too ubiquitously useful.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!

3Romeo posted:

What the gently caress are those huge machine things called, cause jesus christ, they wrecked my poo poo p. good, wasn't expecting that

edit: Serious point, though: I'm playing on normal so I'm only somewhat hosed losing two thirds of my A-Team. How bad would something like that gently caress me on classic?

Sectopods. Always terminate with extreme prejudice.

On Classic losing 4 guys isn't a game-ender, not really. As long as your gear is in shape and you've got a couple guys to babysit your rookies/squaddies while they catch up, you can bounce back. Usually.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!

Voyager I posted:

Give ghost armor to Snipers for even more guaranteed crits. With double-tap, headshot, and ghost armor, a Sniper can basically murder anything in the space of a single turn.

The only armor snipers should never bother with is Titan. They kick rear end with ghost and archangel both, really.

Archangel + In The Zone is a pretty choice combo, for example. But with archangel and an upgraded SCOPE my flying colonels tend to get crits more often than they don't.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
I can't remember if I said it in this thread or the previous one, but Slingshot's missions are greatly eased by having a disproportionate weight toward Heavies in your team. For the third mission, based on my experiences in the first two, I figured I'd want some shredder heavies so I'd have a huge amount of rockets to throw around, and ended up bringing three of them to the table in that mission.

Made life pretty smooth sailing even on CI.

e: In case anyone missed the Assault Chat from like a page ago tops, I am normally a very Assault-heavy player, usually packing two or three.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!

bobfather posted:

Truth. 2 heavies makes even the second Slingshot mission (the only really challenging one, IMO) pretty easy. Just activate the groups of thin men, bring your heavy up and hunker down, and on the next turn rocket those assholes straight to hell. I usually bring Zhang with a Shredder rocket and have him as the point heavy, and then a second heavy with a regular rocket to stay near the rear. Works every time!

That one was dead-easy with my normal tactics - lots of assaults, flank and execute. My non-assaults followed the central corridor of the train while my assaults skirted the exterior. I think my only injury was on the Sprinter Support I had triggering the events in the train itself.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
"Commander, it's cool. We can just camp all the aliens. That'll work, it'll totally work!"

Could be worse, my pool of soldiers seems to be drawn entirely from Wolfenstein 3D. A whole bunch of thick-necked goons with bigass cannons and rocket launchers.

e: You just gotta field more rookies, man. That second assault will come, in time, I promise.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
Yes, I've had several nothing but chryssalid terror missions. Also a couple that were about ten chryssalids and the rest heavy floaters.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!

straw man posted:

Later, I wished I'd only bought two, since you apparently can't remove existing Ravens and replace them with Firestorms, but it didn't end up making any difference.

You can do this. You can decommission Ravens by selecting them in the Hangar for the menu where you outfit them with better guns than lovely rockets.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
It's been a while since I've decommissioned a fighter but I think it's instantaneous.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
Spawn clusters have a patrol pattern that they cycle through until they are revealed, of positions along a route that they move to. You can see this happen if you stealth up to them via Ghost Armor or spot them via the Sniper spy grenade and don't reveal yourself, as they do not counter-detect and thus are not properly activated. This behaviour has never been... quite right, shall we say.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!

Raar_Im_A_Dinosaur posted:

they should probably take away the aim penalty from snapshot. You're already losing out on so much without squad sight, why make it that much more useless?

I think the rationale is that the Sniper's inherently very high Aim is due to them normally requiring the entire turn to line up a shot with the rifle, which has longer range and is punchier than a normal rifle of its kind. Penalizing aim for moving before firing is honestly not all that bad, it's just not as ridiculously good as squad sight.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
For targets that your double tap sniper can't kill for whatever reason, assaults with rapid fire and stacked critical modifiers will drop your aliens in no time, while bullet storm heavies with HEAT rounds will generally chew through your mechanical targets.

Six heavies with shredder rocket and danger zone is also a fun team to roll with. Don't take them to terror missions if you do this.

Ghost armor on everyone. That's pretty much it, to get the most out of your research progression capture as much as possible and get the South American completion benefit then gun through all your interrogations and autopsies at once.

e: Yeah, I wouldn't even think to really promote a build order since availability of thermal vents greatly affects your base's layout and how/when you can build things, even.

doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
I try to talk everyone I can into playing on Classic at minimum. The way the game cheats in your favour on Normal is really coddling; the risk inherent in Classic is just a lot more satisfying because you end up with these totally kick-rear end emergent gameplay tales about how awesome it was when your star sniper just barely made it to the evac point after that dumbass rookie panicked and shot the VIP.

Whereas on Normal mostly you just shoot aliens and they die. This is exactly the turnaround in opinion a friend of mine in my workplace had; he thought the game was fun but a bit easy on Normal, then took a shot at Classic after he found out it was the difficulty the game was designed for.

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doomfunk
Feb 29, 2008

oh come on was that really necessary
all over my fine carpet!!
^^ completely agree about the B team angle. EU it was entirely possible to have your A team fully ready all the time, and so you'd have junk for a B team sometimes when some lone grenade drops your star whatever. This forces a rotation and it's great.

Testekill posted:

Jesus, the number of incidents is complete bullshit. I just had my first terror mission and literally a second after finishing it I get an abduction mission.

I couldn't be happier about the increased rate. In EU I was rolling the globe along for days sometimes hoping for a loving UFO or a single solitary thin man picking his nose by the Alamo or a sectoid spotted in a truck stop bathroom or anything at times.

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