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W.T. Fits posted:I'd say Godmother is another character who really needs a Reflex Grip. I was having a lot of trouble getting her kit to work in my first run until I gave her one. Yeah making sure a character can do two impactful things on one turn is very important. Some do so very naturally, and others don't. Naturally efficient: Blueblood - this is one of the reasons he's so powerful, he gets it naturally at intro. Terminal - coop, pin down, and heal are all options in addition to shoot. Starts with heal as an option. Shelter - swap is generally useful each turn, which flows into shoot or soulfire. Starts with swap. Verge - has 2 non-shoot options right off the bat, and gets more moving forward. Zephyr - hit then move naturally, but putting in "naturally" because the first very quick upgrade gives her Parry, which effectively absorbs a hit during the opponent's turn. Claymore - grenade + shoot right off the bat. Cherub - shield + shoot/slam, easy peasy two action efficient off the bat. Needs levels / non-action efficient, making reflex grips great: Patchwork - stasis becomes an option, and with proximity zapping and chaining / stunning a move can be a huge action, but both require leveling her up. Instead with a reflex grip you can shoot and zap, which is amazing damage output and cc if you go that route. Torque - tongue pull early on has limited utility outside of a turn-ending bind or when evacing, but even then it's a move + tongue usually. Reflex grip + bind build allows amazing combos like shoot + tongue + bind. Gets a bit more utility down the upgrade chain with poison spit but otherwise not much. Inefficient, making reflex grips amazing: Godmother - her ventilate and overall high mobility make up for it, but really all she is doing is move and shoot each turn. Very later on you can get untouchable which gives her kills an effective bonus action by cancelling out an opponent's action. Axiom - really only chooses between shoot and smash, and shoot is almost always better. Rage creates free actions but it's unreliable. Shrug it off creates amazing value but again unreliable. Reflex grip effectively doubles his effectiveness.
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May 27, 2020 14:41
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Tygan owns and every one of his lines in Alien Hunters being some variation of "but why" is great
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May 27, 2020 15:04
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RBA Starblade posted:Tygan owns and every one of his lines in Alien Hunters being some variation of "but why" is great Tygan is important specifically as a counterbalance to Vahlen, because having him around really lets you understand that Vahlen did not actually have to be Vahlen to be the chief scientist for X-COM, which only makes you appreciate her crazy style more.
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May 27, 2020 15:18
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Godmother learns Flush pretty early which doesn't end her turn and takes enemies out of cover, I've gotten a ton of mileage out of it once I figured out how it worked. I'd say Godmother benefits from a reflex grip but the thing she is crying out for most of all is more ammo.
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May 27, 2020 17:01
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reignofevil posted:Godmother learns Flush pretty early which doesn't end her turn and takes enemies out of cover, I've gotten a ton of mileage out of it once I figured out how it worked. I'd say Godmother benefits from a reflex grip but the thing she is crying out for most of all is more ammo. Godmother gets a million +ap skills and flush is her only action that doesnt end turn. A reflex grip takes her from two shots in a round to 5 all on her own. No one comes close to wanting that thing as bad as she does. And for her ammo issues, her mastery skill is a free reload every time she kills a dude.
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May 27, 2020 17:12
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W.T. Fits posted:I'd say Godmother is another character who really needs a Reflex Grip. I was having a lot of trouble getting her kit to work in my first run until I gave her one.
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May 27, 2020 17:20
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FoolyCharged posted:Godmother gets a million +ap skills and flush is her only action that doesnt end turn. A reflex grip takes her from two shots in a round to 5 all on her own. No one comes close to wanting that thing as bad as she does. She's definitely one of my favorites, possibly the favorite in fact. Always reloading, always blasting fools, wrecking cover with guaranteed shots, always moving, and a good sense of professionalism to round it off.
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May 27, 2020 17:24
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Godmother gets way better once you pay attention and realize Ventilate isn't necessarily better than just shooting twice.
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May 27, 2020 17:29
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RBA Starblade posted:Godmother gets way better once you pay attention and realize Ventilate isn't necessarily better than just shooting twice. Well yes, but it is better to shoot then ventilate until late in the game. Early on ventilate has such bonkers damage compared to a normal shot that its absolutely worth it.
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May 27, 2020 17:32
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Godmother is a character built for the flanking necessity of X-COM 2 but then plopped into CS where her aim gets pretty nuts and crits just aren't special.
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May 27, 2020 17:41
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RBA Starblade posted:Godmother gets way better once you pay attention and realize Ventilate isn't necessarily better than just shooting twice.
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May 27, 2020 17:42
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CapnAndy posted:Guaranteed hit is nothing to sneeze at, especially with a shotgun. Sometimes you just need to Ventilate a guy who's halfway across the screen. IDK if eventually I'll get a better sniper than Godmother and I don't know if I want one. She's absolutely the biggest shitwrecker on my squad right now. Also, I slowly started to realize that I think this is my favorite XCOM so far. It gets right to stuck-in gunbrawling which is what I love most about these games; just enough to the strategy layer without being too much. And the fact that they beautifully converted an Alien Invasion into a goddamn buddy-cop procedural? *chef kiss* Dr_Gee fucked around with this message at 17:54 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 17:49
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CapnAndy posted:Guaranteed hit is nothing to sneeze at, especially with a shotgun. Sometimes you just need to Ventilate a guy who's halfway across the screen. Oh definitely, I mean I went to the very end of the game before I looked at the numbers and thought "wait a minute" lol and she went from behind Bluebood, who's also great, to unstoppable
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May 27, 2020 17:51
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CapnAndy posted:Yeah, I thought that too, and in fact I gave it to her first, but in practice it turned out to be not that useful as far as I was concerned. She's Shotgun Lady, so I play her like an Assault/Reaper -- first turn is almost always moving to properly flank the poor bastard whose day she's about to ruin with her second action. For her I think the laser scope and auto-reloader are the way to go. She wants those crits because it's very important that whoever she cuddled up next to is too busy being dead to take their next turn, and she burns through ammo worse than anyone else and like I said, I need her constantly mobile. I can't afford to be wasting time with her reloading given how often she needs to do it. Using a move to try for crits is really not worth it in Chimera Squad. Crits are a measly +1 damage, shooting twice is way more damage on average even if you miss the second shot half the time. Especially given shotgun damage ranges and ammo effects. I basically used Godmother as a fixed placement gun turret as soon as I got her a reflex grip and she was the hands down MVP of the run from that point on.
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May 27, 2020 19:15
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I would definitely like a Chimera Squad 2 to mix things up a little, maybe occasional missions bigger or more like traditional XCOM missions to break things up? I liked the game, but by the end of my first playthrough the mission loop had started to feel pretty rote and repetitive.
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May 27, 2020 20:24
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Nah just do a DLC with 2 new investigations, balance revamp, tons of new maps, and 5-6 new squad members.
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May 27, 2020 20:38
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The way they handled crits in this was so nonsensical that I'm not sure why they even included it as a mechanic. Most people see crit and assume it's 200% damage, or at lest 150% damage. Not a flat +1 damage. They could have just cut it out entirely and not changed the game at all. Including it just serves as a trap for anyone who reasonably assumes that the standard meaning would apply.
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May 27, 2020 20:53
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BobTheJanitor posted:The way they handled crits in this was so nonsensical that I'm not sure why they even included it as a mechanic. Most people see crit and assume it's 200% damage, or at lest 150% damage. Not a flat +1 damage. They could have just cut it out entirely and not changed the game at all. Including it just serves as a trap for anyone who reasonably assumes that the standard meaning would apply. Yeah it took me a while to realize that crits were barely doing any more damage at all. It's especially weird because they still have a bunch of abilities that boost crit rate or crit damage but it's all percentage based so the boost you're getting is way smaller than it looks on paper.
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May 27, 2020 20:56
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If they wanted to change up crits they should have had them ignore armor or something, not just do +1 damage
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May 27, 2020 21:02
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Damage and HP is lower across the board in chimera squad and variability of damage is proportionately larger. I tend to find the real point of crits in Chimera squad is to improve the reliability of damage. Turning 1/3rd a chance of killing an opponent to a 100% reliable kill means a lot, especially since unlike in XCOM 2 you can't rely on having your last squad member to clean up low HP enemies at the end of the turn. EDIT: VVV Well, yes, moving to flank is a lot less useful. But I still throw in target analysers on breaches because it helps tidy up opponents. Rolling the crit, at least on impossible difficulty, is pretty often the difference from one-shot-one-killing enemies on the breach, and well, not. Fangz fucked around with this message at 21:28 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 21:11
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Fangz posted:Damage and HP is lower across the board in chimera squad and variability of damage is proportionately larger. I tend to find the real point of crits in Chimera squad is to improve the reliability of damage. Turning 1/3rd a chance of killing an opponent to a 100% reliable kill means a lot, especially since unlike in XCOM 2 you can't rely on having your last squad member to clean up low HP enemies at the end of the turn.
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May 27, 2020 21:20
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Does your Thor Patchwork in endgame with the range upgrade use the 1-3 more damage on the chain or the improved chance to stun / disorient? I went with damage my first playthrough with her so I went stun on this playthrough and it's just nuts. Running next to someone and then shocking someone else gives you two shots at stunning half the map. Really powerful stuff.
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May 27, 2020 21:26
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Hunter Noventa posted:If they wanted to change up crits they should have had them ignore armor or something, not just do +1 damage The worst thing, if what I've read is right, is that crits don't do max damage plus one. They do the standard damage roll, then add one after. So a crit can do less damage than a normal hit, which kind of defeats the point. It's even worse when they're even rarer than in base XCOM 2. You have lower chances of getting something much less useful, but the game still treats it as exciting.
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May 27, 2020 21:37
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Dr_Gee posted:Also, I slowly started to realize that I think this is my favorite XCOM so far. It gets right to stuck-in gunbrawling which is what I love most about these games; just enough to the strategy layer without being too much. Does this mean I don't like Chimera Squad? Heck no, I like it a lot. It's a lot of fun. I think the stuff it's experimenting with were mostly successes -- I love the Breach mechanic and having alien squaddies, utility items being a free action is at least interesting, but individual turn order rather than XCOM goes/Aliens go needs to go back in the trash where Firaxis found it. It's a great entry point to introduce people to the series. The lack of stressors and complexity I'm bemoaning are selling points to people who have stayed away because XCOM is, quite famously, the game franchise that will ruin your entire game when the posted odds were 95% in your favor. I'm just saying, at the end of the day, it's very much a side game, and as good of a side game as it is, it doesn't measure up to the main games.
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May 27, 2020 21:47
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Fangz posted:Damage and HP is lower across the board in chimera squad and variability of damage is proportionately larger. I tend to find the real point of crits in Chimera squad is to improve the reliability of damage. Turning 1/3rd a chance of killing an opponent to a 100% reliable kill means a lot, especially since unlike in XCOM 2 you can't rely on having your last squad member to clean up low HP enemies at the end of the turn. Sure but that's all variable numbers anyway, devs can make them whatever they want. Pistols could do 300 damage and enemies could have 800 health. Remove crit and just move the low end damage number of every weapon up by 1 and you get the same effect. Or take 1 pip off of every enemy's HP bar. Or increase their hp by 50% and make crit work like it does in 2. Or keep it all as it is, but don't call it crit. Call it lucky shot or something, anything that doesn't make people think of an existing mechanic in a billion other games that works in a known way. Not least of which is the game that this one is based off of and uses the engine and a lot of the assets from.  The current design makes me think that they felt they had to include crit because it was expected, but they really didn't want to so they flattened it down to almost nothing. Which is probably the worst possible solution.
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May 27, 2020 21:49
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Chronojam posted:She's definitely one of my favorites, possibly the favorite in fact. Always reloading, always blasting fools, wrecking cover with guaranteed shots, always moving, and a good sense of professionalism to round it off. One thing to note is that (at least in my game) killing someone with Scattershot does not trigger her auto-reload.
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May 27, 2020 21:58
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chiasaur11 posted:The worst thing, if what I've read is right, is that crits don't do max damage plus one. They do the standard damage roll, then add one after. So a crit can do less damage than a normal hit, which kind of defeats the point. Crits can do within normal damage bands in XCOM 1/2 as well, its just much rarer because they start out as a minimum of +2 damage at Ballistic tier and scale up with each gun upgrade. But you can definitely get weirdly anemic crits, especially with things like the Plasma Pistol which has a large damage range but fairly minimal crit damage etc.
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May 27, 2020 22:00
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CapnAndy posted:Oof, strong disagree. Like I said, this made me start replaying through the series, and even XCOM 1 outshines Chimera Squad to a significant degree just by showing all the things it's missing. No base management, no real sense of external threat (City Anarchy is utterly toothless), no meaningful strategic decisions on the macro level, no permadeath so no soldier management, no real sense of progression -- your guys start out the game already really good at their role For me, I think, I can see where they started down this route: Why NOT just 'skip the early game' and jump right into the part where you're past Rookies and like, actually empathizing and bonding with your soldiers - but instead of make your own fun, give people common ground to like and get invested in the franchise with by using a set cast. I sort of wonder why they didn't make crits just roll max damage.
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May 27, 2020 22:05
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Zore posted:Crits can do within normal damage bands in XCOM 1/2 as well, its just much rarer because they start out as a minimum of +2 damage at Ballistic tier and scale up with each gun upgrade. I vaguely recall 1 having separate damage tables for normal vs crits. Like you'd get a range of 2-4 normal and 5-7 crit, or something. But it has been about a million years since I last played the first game, so I could be way off.
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May 27, 2020 22:12
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BobTheJanitor posted:I vaguely recall 1 having separate damage tables for normal vs crits. Like you'd get a range of 2-4 normal and 5-7 crit, or something. But it has been about a million years since I last played the first game, so I could be way off. Yeah, its been a while for me since XCOM 1 so that might be how it worked there. I know in 2 you can have crits within the normal damage range of the weapon at Ballistics tier because crits just add a set amount of damage which you can see and change in the inis. Pistols are the only weapon that can do less damage with a crit than they could do with a normal roll, though mostly because Plasma Pistols break the damage range every other gun in the game uses with a 3-6 damage and +2 critical damage. Every other weapon will do, at minimum, the maximum non-crit damage on a crit.
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May 27, 2020 22:26
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TheParadigm posted:For me, I think, I can see where they started down this route: Why NOT just 'skip the early game' and jump right into the part where you're past Rookies and like, actually empathizing and bonding with your soldiers - but instead of make your own fun, give people common ground to like and get invested in the franchise with by using a set cast. Controversial opinion: I have always found the near-fetishization of the Rookie Meatgrinder really weird.
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May 27, 2020 22:28
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The rookie meatgrinder doesnt even work in XCOM 1/2, if you arent leveling up soldiers ASAP and getting those sweet ability synergies, youll have no good way to deal with the bullshit the games eventually throw at you, so every dead soldier is pretty big setback
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May 27, 2020 22:56
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John Murdoch posted:Controversial opinion: I have always found the near-fetishization of the Rookie Meatgrinder really weird.
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May 27, 2020 23:04
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I mean, there's a reason you can buy upgrades to have them come in already levelled up a bit and XCOM 2 will just straight up sell you high-ranking replacements. I think the "point" of the rookie meatgrinder is to drive home the point that this is a game with permadeath where it's very hard to avoid getting your guys killed, and thus you should be afraid of that, you need to have contingency plans in case it happens anyway, which means you should figure out that only having one dedicated kill-team is extremely brittle because you've got no fallback options if one of them eats a rocket, and you should get attached to the ones who manage to survive.
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May 27, 2020 23:06
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Jabor posted:Keep an eye out for missions with a potential "Skylight" entry point. Synthbuttrange posted:Theres a lot of missions where you're hanging off a roof and come in through windows? Unless somehow you never got any of them! I've done both of these and still don't have the achievement! The skylight stuff they're just standing on the roof and then they jump through the skylight. The hanging off the roof is a rappel breach, isn't it? I've done multiple instances of that too. This is the list I found: - Door - Side Door - Main Door - Keypad Door - Security Door - Grapple Hooks - Ladder - Rappel - Skylight - Vent - Wall - Window - Side Window I've seen every single one of them apart from the grapple hook. It just feels bizarre that I'm three playthroughs in and have seen every other breach multiple times but never grapple hooks once.
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May 27, 2020 23:09
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Infinite Karma posted:Is the meatgrinder even really a thing for experienced players? In my first playthrough of WotC (after doing XCOM EW and Chimera Squad) I only lost 4 people total, including the automatic 3 from the tutorial. The part where you feel outgunned with your mediocre ballistic weapons and paper armor at the beginning (and still manage to pull out wins) is the "good part", not the meatgrinder where you don't bother to learn people's names because they die in droves. Skipping the really punishing part and going straight to the hard-but-fair part is a smart move. Yeah the meatgrinder has never been a major aspect of the Firaxis games because honestly losing too many soldiers, even rookies, is unsustainable. The game just isn't designed to handle it well because losing even a single soldier is a massive reduction in your action economy since you never have that many to begin with. The original game let you pack 14 guys on a skyranger, or 10 guys and a tank. That coupled with the fact that your units could potentially shoot multiple times in a turn meant that losing a few people on a mission was only a minor speed bump, and replacing them was relatively much cheaper than the Firaxis games because money is a lot tighter in EU/XCOM2, at least in the early game (and honestly if you can make it to the midgame you have basically already won, because the difficulty curve is very front-loaded).
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May 27, 2020 23:11
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Control Volume posted:The rookie meatgrinder doesnt even work in XCOM 1/2, if you arent leveling up soldiers ASAP and getting those sweet ability synergies, youll have no good way to deal with the bullshit the games eventually throw at you, so every dead soldier is pretty big setback Uh.... no. It makes the game much harder but you are massively underestimating just how easy firaxcom is. I did my first clear with 50something dead and keeping up in tech will let you clear missions with straight rookies/squaddies just fine, you just lose a few each mission. The game is very, very good at making you feel on the brink of defeat when you're in no danger whatsoever. That said, I agree with the earlier dude that the meatgrinder of the originals is vastly overrated and the only fun bit of that memory was the sniper who survived to squad sight and carried the team until the group could survive.
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May 27, 2020 23:13
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Honestly I didn't find the rookie meat grinder much of a thing beyond the first three or so missions even in the original Gollop XCOM. Once you get personal armour survivability improves a lot, and when you get the infinite ammo laser weapons you can just organise your troops in a mob, move a character forward to spot an enemy, mass fire with all your units, and then move your scout back out of LOS. Bonus is that this builds aim fast as well. And when you get mind control basically no one needs to be in any danger ever again.
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May 28, 2020 00:17
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FoolyCharged posted:Uh.... no. It makes the game much harder but you are massively underestimating just how easy firaxcom is. I did my first clear with 50something dead and keeping up in tech will let you clear missions with straight rookies/squaddies just fine, you just lose a few each mission. The game is very, very good at making you feel on the brink of defeat when you're in no danger whatsoever. Definitely, the big secret about XCOM 1 and 2 is that the "death spiral" is actually super hard to actually enter; they just do a good job at getting you to think that losing a couple missions is going to gently caress you, outside of losing a few in a row right at the start of the campaign.
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May 28, 2020 00:24
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Fangz posted:And when you get mind control basically no one needs to be in any danger ever again. One of the nicest things in one of the Original X-COM mods was an option to disable Mind Control for you and the aliens. It was game-breakingly boring to use.
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May 28, 2020 00:29
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