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StashAugustine posted:I use it to grant cover to people who get flanked. For example, I tripped a Mechtoid and a couple Sectoids and he moved to the point where he was gonna flank my Heavy. I used the Heavy to shoot a rocket and then moved the mec to cover her flank. This is a fantastic idea. Definitely going to start using this style of move. Thanks! Tender Bender posted:Man, I really hate the forest crash sites. Long stretches of partial cover and (relatively) sprawling maps are just a painful slog to navigate. I just spent like half an hour following the sound cues and leapfrogging through cover to pick my way in a circle around the entire drat map, encountering one pack of sectoids and one pack of thin men in this huge loop of forest outside the UFO. Just boring as hell, but it's either that or get impatient and rush ahead and risk getting all your dudes exploded. It's you, you're the boring one. Rush ahead and take the risk. It's really not going to be as bad as you think. If it's early enough in the game that you don't have a MEC or mimetic skin or even an assault with a flashbang then it really doesn't matter if you lose a single soldier to scouting. If it's after that, well, EW handed you a boatload of tools to break and abuse the game.
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Dec 11, 2013 19:22
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Tender Bender posted:Man, I really hate the forest crash sites. Long stretches of partial cover and (relatively) sprawling maps are just a painful slog to navigate. I just spent like half an hour following the sound cues and leapfrogging through cover to pick my way in a circle around the entire drat map, encountering one pack of sectoids and one pack of thin men in this huge loop of forest outside the UFO. Just boring as hell, but it's either that or get impatient and rush ahead and risk getting all your dudes exploded. For all that small UFOs at least have a good interior layout for the attackers, I agree that the forest approaches to them are usually hellish. Trying to just trigger 1 pack of aliens in the open woods with miserable cover usually feels like a losing proposition. EDIT: I agree this also is only true early game. Later on, an assault makes a great scout, and a squadsight sniper with a halfway decent position trivializes maps this open. At that point, the worst part of the map is the potential alien clown car inside the medium UFO's back half. edit2: there were a bunch of  here about how I'm a bit fatigued with XCOM. They're not new or interesting, so I'll just state that while training roulette is pretty rad and it adds some awesome new decisions to the game, I wish that it reliably gave supports the option to take 3 medkits, so that they could keep their niche in my squads. I also wish that Berserkers were more like a heavy Chryssalid in the amount of threat they they present alive, that Seekers had a 'heavy' version and that they spawned in mixed packs throughout the game for variety, and that EXALT were maybe a little more threatening, either with slightly buffed stats, more numbers, or just less comms towers on their maps. Also XCOM is still rad and I'll definitely play it again.
KaoliniteMilkshake fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Dec 11, 2013 |
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Dec 11, 2013 20:20
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KaoliniteMilkshake posted:I also wish that Berserkers were more like a heavy Chryssalid in the amount of threat they they present alive, Play with no squad size upgrades and this is entirely a reality.
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Dec 11, 2013 20:30
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Brotato Broth posted:I'm just going to start ignoring council missions entirely from now on. Thin men are poorly designed bullshit regardless of difficulty. 
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Dec 11, 2013 23:02
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Fangz posted:It is fairly situational, but I find situations where there's only low cover are more common than situations where my MEC needs to get on to a roof. One of my MECs has OfA, and one has Jet Boots, and I've used Jet Boots a total of maybe once, and OfA all the time. I started using Jet Boots to get my MEC on top of trucks during council missions or those abductions where you're fighting in streets. The lack of cover doesn't matter, and it seems like they get a slightly longer range from up there. Doesn't hurt that I ended up with an entirely broken 123 aim MEC after medals, giving him an effectively guaranteed hit on anything he could see. Combining NCE/HP makes for the most hilariously overpowered soldiers sometimes.
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Dec 11, 2013 23:11
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Yeah I'd like to see NCE bump up the cost of hiring soldiers to offset the fact that you can get some ridiculous rookies if you get lucky. I think the whole idea is that the cost of hiring more soldiers in order to cherry pick the best ones becomes a money sink, but since rookies are cheap enough to be near-negligible you just end up hiring 10 for $150 and are almost guaranteed to have at least 2 or 3 with 70+ AIM. A single 80 AIM rookie is arguably more valuable than anything else you could buy with $150, especially at Classic and Impossible difficulties. If rookies were $25 or even $40 each with NCE it would really make you think twice about gambling hundreds of credits on the off chance you'll get someone gifted. Edit: a nice alternative to NCE might be tiered hiring. Rookies with 55-60 aim and low will are $10, 60-70 aim and medium will are $25, 70-80 aim and high will are $50, etc. Then you could really throw those $10 rookies through the meat grinder. 
Anony Mouse fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Dec 11, 2013 |
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Dec 11, 2013 23:41
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I just wish I had more than 1/10 soldiers coming up as Snipers  I really want to get an Snapshot ITZ death machine to go with my You get one sniper at the start of the game, then you have to drag him a mile over broken glass before he becomes a Squadsight sniper. You're lucky if you can get a complementary Snapshot sniper in any reasonable time frame, and mine just ate Thin Man bullshit because the cover inside the office cubicles is really weird. At this rate I'm not going to get one before Matthew "Alecto" Hawkins rolls into town and I mean that guy's a guaranteed psionic so why bother training one up who may or may not have brain powers in the meantime. It's already May. Guh.
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Dec 12, 2013 00:41
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NCE, and the 80 aim 60 will rookie turned sniper with squadsight and sentinel, is completely balanced.
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Dec 12, 2013 00:48
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Judas Priest posted:NCE, and the 80 aim 60 will rookie turned sniper with squadsight and sentinel, is completely balanced. It's only balanced if they get covering fire and HEAT ammo later on so they can decommission sectopods in between turns. It really changed how I used one of my snipers when they became a heavy weapon that I deployed and anything in front was indiscriminately vaporized.
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Dec 12, 2013 01:19
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Judas Priest posted:NCE, and the 80 aim 60 will rookie turned sniper with squadsight and sentinel, is completely balanced. Squadsight, Sentinel, Opportunist, and Covering Fire would be the best combo.
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Dec 12, 2013 01:36
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I love how OP snipers are in this. I usually keep 2 or 3 on my squad and sit back and let the snipers do their thing! My buddy got me into this game and we tried to check out the online matches and went head to head. Well he set it up and didnt put a cap on it. I laughed the whole time while i picked a team full of etherals and he just made a mixed squad. Talk about unfair but funny as HELL!! Needless to say he didnt stand a chance, loved to mind control and make him shoot his other guys!
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Dec 12, 2013 01:40
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Does Hidden Potential also affect HP increases? I have a Colonel that still only has 5 base HP and well, thats weird.
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Dec 12, 2013 01:45
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Mike N Eich posted:Does Hidden Potential also affect HP increases? I have a Colonel that still only has 5 base HP and well, thats weird. Yes. It also affects movement.
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Dec 12, 2013 01:53
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Trailer for a new movie about MEC soldiers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE3JMfuPFdQ
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Dec 12, 2013 01:56
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Both OfA and jet boots are really good. The normal disadvantages of height (usually only low cover up there) don't apply to MECs and depending on what you grew them from/their stat growths, the aim really helps them. Two of the highest damage shots in the game can always benefit from more accuracy. MECs make great units to be the first to send up to high ground to see what is up there. OfA, on the other hand, can also help if you accidentally trip a flanking set of aliens or need high cover and a reload. It can be really helpful for pressing the advance if you've moving long distances towards a rapidly fading meld node. If there were more timed objectives, it'd be much more important, I think. Of the two, jet boots are the ones that are easier to use and easier to take advantage of, and I prefer them, but OfA isn't bad. Grenades, resto mists, and prox mines don't end it, so if someone badly needs healing and can't move to cover (say they just recovered from being strangled) you could run a MEC over, OfA, and then resto mist. Not the greatest, but not bad either.
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Dec 12, 2013 03:04
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I think aside from the difficulty a problem of the end game is that the maps get really samey. It goes from all the varying maps of abduction to UFO after UFO in a forest of some kind. That's really turns end game into a grind. Adding some more mission/map variety would go a long way. As would mixing up alien packs so it's not always so predictable.
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Dec 12, 2013 03:22
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AgentHaiTo posted:Trailer for a new movie about MEC soldiers. Looks generic and forgettable, a tough feat with mechsuits. I'm pretty sure cinema is dead and we aren't getting anymore good films, like ever. It's all romcoms, remakes and superhero films now.
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Dec 12, 2013 03:34
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TehGherkin posted:Looks generic and forgettable, a tough feat with mechsuits. I'm pretty sure cinema is dead and we aren't getting anymore good films, like ever. It's all romcoms, remakes and superhero films now. Looks pretty sweet to me. We do get the occasional gem... Fakeedit: I sat here for a full minute and couldn't think of anything outstanding. Real edit: Those mecs do look incredibly not-cool.
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Dec 12, 2013 03:40
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Anony Mouse posted:Thin Men loving suck, but it's for all the right reasons. They fill a very important niche in the aliens' arsenal. Calling them poorly designed is a bit of a stretch. I can definitely understand the frustration at having your favorite heavy get sniped while hunkered down by a Thin Man halfway across the map, though. They probably are, but it's not a niche that needs to be filled so drat early on. They just turn the whole thing into a tedious "which full cover haven't they shot to pieces yet" crawl slog when the only overwatch breakers available are grenades and hopeful dashing. OTOH, I cheated myself an ubersoldier so I could survive just long enough to get nanoweave fibers and basically breezing through the rest of the game with non-cheat dudes. This game seriously needs some difficulty adjustment.
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Dec 12, 2013 03:43
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Brotato Broth posted:This game seriously needs some difficulty adjustment. Are you browsing the forums on your phone? Hold it carefully. Laptop? Make sure it's sitting securely on a table. Drinking coffee? I'll wait for you to set it down. You could just be bad at this game.
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Dec 12, 2013 04:10
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Brotato Broth posted:They probably are, but it's not a niche that needs to be filled so drat early on. They just turn the whole thing into a tedious "which full cover haven't they shot to pieces yet" crawl slog when the only overwatch breakers available are grenades and hopeful dashing. You've been saying this again and again but I really don't think it does need difficulty adjustment. I suspect that (if?) as you keep playing it you're going to start finding it fairly trivial and then you'll move up to impossible and it'll all start again  I guess I agree that this game seriously needs some difficulty adjustment, but probably not in the sense you mean. We need ways to make the endgame harder.
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Dec 12, 2013 04:17
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General Battuta posted:
That's exactly what I meant though? The early game is too brutal whereas mid-endgame is just too easy.
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Dec 12, 2013 04:19
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I'm not convinced the early game is too hard. Thin Men are bullshit but on Classic and below I think it's possible to beat them reliably without savescum. I haven't mastered Impossible and can't speak to it.
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Dec 12, 2013 04:27
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General Battuta posted:I'm not convinced the early game is too hard. Thin Men are bullshit but on Classic and below I think it's possible to beat them reliably without savescum. I haven't mastered Impossible and can't speak to it. Early classic is genuinely not that difficult if you know what you're doing. Not easy, but outside of awful RNG strings you shouldn't be doing poorly.
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Dec 12, 2013 04:37
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Brotato Broth posted:That's exactly what I meant though? The early game is too brutal whereas mid-endgame is just too easy. This is a fairly common sentiment among most people who play the game. However, this is typically taken as a strike against the late game as opposed to the early game. The game has easier modes if you want an easier game, but each jump in difficulty is balls hard by design
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Dec 12, 2013 05:02
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twitch.tv/defenderofsoul So he's assaulting the temple ship in I/I 21/21 4 man squad right now, if you want to see the end of game stats. (Also there are plenty of ways to artificially make the game harder on yourself. My current I/I game I'm trying no explosives allowed. Vahlen loves me and the rookies are pretty unhappy about not being issued frags.) Anias fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 05:18
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To contribute to the end game chat, I'm playing Impossible. Survived through September with only the Temple Ship left to do. I have my uber team, but only 2 of them are psionic, and I really want to just dominate the end room using some badass psi troops. I then get it in my head to hire a bunch of rookies and farm for godlike people, since I had NCE enabled. Ended up finding my dream team and had them all ready with top tier weapons and Mimetic Skin by December. A medium UFO comes and they handily waste the crew of 7. Then mid December, a terror mission rolls around. 'How bad could it be?’ I thought, as they dropped into Nigeria. They have their Mimetic Skin to keep them safe, but nothing can really prepare them for the 5 Sectopods and 10 drones, all relaxing within activation distance of each other. Now, these guys are all squaddies. It's tough for them to even waste 1 Sectopod in a single turn. But 5? I don't even think my dream team could handle more than 2 at a time. So Impossible end game can be... impossible.
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Dec 12, 2013 05:20
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Anias posted:twitch.tv/defenderofsoul Did anyone get a good idea of just how on earth he made it through the strategic layer with all of those Second Wave settings? Even on impossible there comes a point where you can basically fail upwards but this seemed completely undoable when he first started.
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Dec 12, 2013 05:27
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Been busy as hell since EW launched and haven't had time to really dig into the expansion. Are there any good LPs since it launched? Looked at beaglerush and didn't see anything.
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Dec 12, 2013 05:48
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^^Beagle's been doing a live stream on Thursday nights at twitch.tv/miss_jamball. The stuff there isn't edited at all and they're pretty long but you can see some of the new stuff.Anias posted:twitch.tv/defenderofsoul He was just setting up the mec punch on the boss and the game crashed.
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Dec 12, 2013 05:48
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HelmetCheese posted:Been busy as hell since EW launched and haven't had time to really dig into the expansion. Are there any good LPs since it launched? Looked at beaglerush and didn't see anything. If you can handle his slower playstyle and accent Zemalf's current run is pretty awesome. I/I, and he does a really good job of explaining why he makes certain decisions. He starts with the sat rush strat, which I personally don't use on I/I, but hell it works for him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpbTkbv4L2Y Edit - One for all chat: After my recent I/I run that ended with zero soldier deaths, I developed a crazy preference for it over the jump boots. In addition to the benefits others have mentioned, I found it to be extremely helpful for capturing aliens. Support mec + OFA + flamethrower is my favorite mec at the moment. For most fights, you can give two soldiers 50% defense. It downright trivializes some of the earlier missions if you can get a mec to that rank early. fargom fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 06:11
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Woozy posted:Did anyone get a good idea of just how on earth he made it through the strategic layer with all of those Second Wave settings? Even on impossible there comes a point where you can basically fail upwards but this seemed completely undoable when he first started.
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Dec 12, 2013 06:35
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 I suspect this was more to do with my 98 Aim squadsight sniper more than getting used to the mission.  Still waiting for Slingshot to proc. I have a full six man squad and a cybernetics lab waiting to go though, so I might even get away with doing the second mission without much in the way of loss.
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Dec 12, 2013 08:30
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poptart_fairy posted:
Slingshot should fire long before Portent, did you skip it?
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Dec 12, 2013 08:33
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SeaTard posted:Slingshot should fire long before Portent, did you skip it? No, though I was offered the combat engineer Council mission on March the 6th this time around and Portent at the beginning of April. I think there may have been a fart somewhere and Slingshot got lost in the shuffle!
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Dec 12, 2013 08:36
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Anony Mouse posted:I assume you're familiar with his stream - it seemed like it was pure luck, really. He had to restart so many times just from losing one single mission. Even if he was doing well tactically (which is where he shines) with a 100% mission success rate, there were times he lost the geoscape purely due to evil RNG. Eventually he just got a perfect storm of having good soldiers (three heavies and a MEC carried him a loooong way) and a lucky string of missions. While luck was involved, his strategic plan needed to be rock solid to exploit that luck. He started in South America (for the instant alien interrogation to speed along getting the skeleton key), rushed a lab, tried to survive the second month (building one sat if necessary), and then hit the alien base at the end of the third month to bring panic levels down. Once you've done that, the geoscape stabilizes as you can afford to start putting up sat uplinks and mass buying your remaining satellites. He did the same thing on his six man run I believe and Tornis used a similar strat on his second wave run. There's some flexibility in fitting in OTS, mecs, or gene mods in there, but good soldiers are almost secondary; the real luck comes in not getting a bad bomb disposal mission or too many abduction missions in four country continents. Slingshot gives you a bunch of nice stuff and is basically required if you're attempting an I/I/Second Wave run. Which is bullshit, but oh well.
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Dec 12, 2013 08:40
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Slingshot just popped, so looks like it got shuffled behind Progeny. Pity I don't have alien containment yet - the live Muton capture would have been a help. Ah well! Also, there's no way to edit nationality of a soldier is there? I have a support who has rolled maximum movement tiles and has the ability which lets her move even further, making the perfect spotter for my squadsight sniper. These two work in such perfect tandem, and both speak Russian, it's a crying shame I can't fudge where they come from and pretend they're sisters or something.  e; reading back through that why the gently caress am I so invested in disposable lady dudes poptart_fairy fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 10:19
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I have an Indian robot man that I decided would be an orphan who was raised in a missionary school in Pondicherry left over from the French colonial days just so that I could change his VO to French because RoboFrench sounds awesome. You're not alone.  There is no backstory to explain his fashion sense however. csm141 fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Dec 12, 2013 |
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Dec 12, 2013 11:11
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Chief Savage Man posted:
Big game hunter in his downtime. Those tiger stripes aren't painted on, they're leather from his kills.
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Dec 12, 2013 11:33
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Imagine being the guy at X-Com whose job it is just to paint the stupid robot suits.
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Dec 12, 2013 12:07
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