|
Landing an Execute proc on an Avatar is hilarious and probably the only reason I did not wind up having to reload on my first attempt at the final mission. That, and Rapid Fire. My god is that perk insane.
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2016 17:44
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:41 |
|
|
peak debt posted:Stasis and Mindcontrol are powerful but ultimately replaceable. But I don't think you can beat the last mission without Solace. On my first playthrough, on Commander, I never wound up getting psi-ops. So yes, it is entirely possible to do the final mission without that ability. It is not, however, pleasant; Avatars are immune to flashbangs, so you can't break their MC with 'em. Revival Protocol does NOT clear MC either, so that's useless as well. If you don't have Solace, what it ultimately comes down to is having high enough will to resist one or two casts, and enough crowd control to neutralize your own people temporarily when some of them DO inevitably get nabbed. The effect does eventually wear off. But yeah, life would have been a lot easier if I'd had that ability.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2016 18:37
|
|
|
Still kind of mildly surprises me to hear so many people talking about game-breaking bugs and crashes. Admittedly I haven't messed with mods, but I haven't had this game do anything more than (admittedly pretty bad) LOS issues and bizarre animation interactions yet.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2016 05:26
|
|
|
To be honest, I still kinda miss the version of the tutorial / cinematic Gatecrasher from the trailers. Bringing down a berserker with ballistics sounds like an entertaining little challenge.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2016 19:17
|
|
|
I really don't care about all the cosmetic options, and have never bothered playing Barbie with any of my soldiers outside of the occassional hair style change. I feel like I have to be playing the game wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2016 17:41
|
|
|
Bradford's head on Shen's body. Avatars replaced by the true pinnacle of human evolution - Bradford clones.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2016 15:20
|
|
|
RBA Starblade posted:Without a couple enemy protocol +20 hack upgrades and the skulljack with skullmine upgrade you're going to fail them half the time yeah. At the risk of retreading old ground, you can always take the alternative of another grenadier and just kill them faster. I want to have well rounded, balanced squads, but it's hard to understate the value of cover destruction, guaranteed damage, and armor shredding all in the same package. Specialists are particularly frustrating because they have all the potential in the freaking world, but they really NEED those (completely luck-dependent) hacking skill upgrades to be reliable.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2016 21:12
|
|
|
Throne of Bhalz posted:I'm surprised to hear the lack of love for the support specialist. My typical team consisted of 1 Ranger, 1 Sharpshooter, 2 grenadiers built the same, and 2 specialists that were built to be polar opposites. As much as I loved having a specialist with combat protocol, I don't think I would have survived the run without the healing skills, especially restoration. Medics are awesome for the final mission, no doubt about it. The problem is, that's the only time they ever shine.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2016 16:32
|
|
|
Absolutely, hacking rewards can be pretty obscene. It's just that they are so unreliable that you are almost always better off just taking a shot or using an item, instead.If I've got a 20% chance to seize control of that MEC or a 50% chance to shut it down, that will trivialize the encounter. But if there's anything xcom teaches you, it's not to rely on shoddy odds.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2016 17:40
|
|
|
Thyrork posted:There really does need to be a point when Bradford will be all "Okay Commander I guess that works too. That facility is out of action, EVAC whenever you're ready." Apparently Solomon actually did handwave this with an explanation about how the base has a large, sealed-off underground component, and even if you blow the hell out of the topside you still have to take out the supports with demo charges to collapse the bottom sections too.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2016 13:06
|
|
|
Very true. Base defense turns into a hilariously one-sided curbstomp in the player's favor if you have a fully upgraded Defense Matrix.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2016 19:06
|
|
|
Mystic Stylez posted:What is generally considered the best strategy for handling the last room of the game? Planning ahead for my next run. Bring at least one Psi Op with Solace. Failing that, buy Mind Shields for the first time ever. Avatars always open their first turn by mind-controlling one of your guys and will try again every time the cooldown is up. Your numbers are limited enough without giving them free guys, and they are immune to flashbangs. Avatars regenerate health gradually over time. Don't try to poke them to death - it would be a bad idea even if they couldn't, since the enemy reinforcements literally never stop coming and WILL overwhelm you eventually. If you're bringing consumables such as explosives, save almost all of them for the final room. Anything else is a waste. The one exception is medkits - due to the endurance nature of the fight, and the levels + armor your guys are rocking, this is the only mission in the game where a dedicated medic can really make sense. As mentioned earlier, rangers with Rapid Fire shine in this fight. There are few ways more effective for spiking out an avatar, then running up and shotgun-critting it in the face twice in a row. In my Commander playthrough, Jane Kelly got two of my three avatar kills.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2016 20:33
|
|
|
Maybe they don't come infinitely, but they definitely bring enough guys that my first playthrough's strategy turned in mid-fight from 'clean them all up, then burst down the avatars, since they are regenning and hiding in the back' to 'drop everything and take stupid chances if necessary, because I am losing control here and will most definitely get overwhelmed if I don't finish the fight in about the next three turns.' Maybe they are finite, and you can tank them all if you fall back across the bridge, I dunno. I've heard that bridge is buggy though, and the actual final room has poo poo for cover. Plus, ya know.... they spawn in on both sides, and the Avatars just love to teleport into the very back of the room. Where your choice is to move up to a lovely position to threaten them, or fall back and let them regen in peace. In light of all of that, spiking them out as hard and fast as possible just made the most sense to me.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2016 20:46
|
|
|
Eh, wouldn't this just make losing a soldier all the more game-ending? Like, if the bonuses for keeping them alive are that good and the penalties for losing them are even worse than they already are, wouldn't it just further incentivize immediately reloading as soon as you lose someone and only ever using your A-team?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2016 13:56
|
|
|
Soonmot posted:Yeah, I have no desire to repeatedly smash my dick in a door, so I stick to normal mode. Commander really isn't that bad. I agree that I've been reluctant to go up to Legendary, though.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2016 14:07
|
|
|
My God, Gatecrasher always strikes me with how horrible it is. A ridiculously un-fun mission where you can be one-shot-killed relatively easily if even a single thing goes wrong, and there is absolutely no reason to accept anything less than a perfect outcome. I'm all for a certain element of randomness, but my God does that stupid loving op always come down to a dice roll.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2016 01:45
|
|
|
I don't know why the bullshit factor in this game angers me so much more than it did in xcom 1, but it really does. In the space of a single mission I was spotted twice through solid, undamaged walls (and lost concealment on the first spot), got critted by a flashbanged advent trooper from the ground floor around 2-3 corners to a guy up a ladder on the roof, ran up to shotgun a guy to death and activated two more pods, and had two squaddies panic from near-misses. In one loving mission. It really pisses me off when I feel like I'm doing everything right and still losing.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2016 02:30
|
|
|
Speedball posted:"Let's see Beaglerush find a way to cheese THIS thing!" That is pretty much instantly what I imagined the devs saying on reading the description, yes.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2016 17:53
|
|
|
That's a fair question and I really don't know how to make it better. All I know is that the game is designed to encourage things like flanking, and the ranger is given an entire unique weapon that focuses around high mobility.... and in actual gameplay, daring to reposition without knowing for an absolute fact that there's nothing around the corner is basically inviting disaster. Once you get a phantom ranger or battle scanners it's not so terrible, but often times for any given mission, it feels like the deciding factor in whether or not you walk away with casualities is whether you get a bad pod activation. And that's not what I want the threat to be in a game about shooting aliens. As for the rulers.... it might be kind of a cool idea if upon breaking concealment, some kinda timer is started for the arrival of a Ruler. Or perhaps the existing mission timers for things like prisoner rescue could be extended or even removed, but with the flipside that now a Ruler shows up to gently caress you over if you take your sweet time. They sound a little bit punishing to be an all-the-time thing, but if deployed sparingly and under specific circumstances, they could spice things up. A lot of the new weapon ideas still sound incredibly stupid and DND-ish, though.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2016 18:12
|
|
|
That seems really loving bizarre to me. "Oh no, I've almost killed them, let'e be sure to give the poor things a sporting chance?" And yeah, while I like the overall concept of the rulers, their implementation sounds wonky as hell. Both the idea of killing and apparently skinning them to turn into armor (seriously, what the gently caress?) and letting them break the entire game's core mechanics by giving them shittons of free turns for no reason. I've got no problem with tough enemies but that just seems.... bad.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2016 20:07
|
|
|
I know I'm just bitching, but I just had an advent MEC rocket pod three of my guys (who were up on a roof, dealing damage to them and knocking out the tiles underneath, dropping them to the ground for 3 more fall damage, which killed them.) This coming after the specialist failed an 80% hack to disable it. Campaign wiped. I really loving hate this game sometimes. VVV: It patrolled out of the shroud - along with another pod on the other side - after I was already engaged taking out the Dark VIP's pod escorts - which by the way, was a stun lancer, trooper, and viper. IE, no grenades to worry about until that exact moment, and nowhere to reposition since I'd gone from pretty much alone to getting enveloped on two sides. Especially not when the specialist really, really, really should have disabled it. Two pods patrolling into me on the same turn from two totally separate directions is just another thing. Backhand fucked around with this message at 14:25 on May 8, 2016 |
|
#
¿
May 8, 2016 13:55
|
|
|
Out of curiosity, does anybody know if they ever fixed smoke grenades? Last I checked they were still bugged. Of course, it hardly matters since the way they are coded, flashbangs are flat-out better (at least against organics...)
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2016 02:16
|
|
|
Sylphosaurus posted:Yeah, I have to say that the entire "Ruler gets an action for each of yours" seems pretty drat unfun. Maybe it'll be like the muton counterattack / melee issue, and it becomes a complete nonevent by virtue of all Ruler attacks doing 1 damage apiece, having atrocious accuracy, and their AI spending most of its time shimmying back and forth in place!
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2016 02:23
|
|
|
Coolguye posted:The number one thing that people also forget about rulers is that you don't need to actually kill them, you can play defensively until they decide to peace out. Oh, and flat none of them are big fans of flashbangs, so once again cosmic horrors are made into pussycats by 15 bucks of magnesium, potassium, and nitrogen. You say that, but Avatars are totally immune to 'em. To be honest I just kind of assumed all the rulers would be too.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2016 20:18
|
|
|
I've had UFOs search for me several times. Never successfully evaded, but most of the time they just never catch on to begin with. Ultimately, I always seem to wind up with exactly one defense mission per campaign.
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2016 19:39
|
|
|
On the note of psi, it's also worth pointing out that stasis works on everything. Don't feel like you have enough power to kill that sectopod and its escorts in a single turn? Then don't bother trying - slap a stasis field on him, kill all of his little friends, then turn the entire squad's guns on him next turn. And Void Rift is pretty nuts against organics - not only does it do fairly solid AOE damage, but the secondary 'insanity' effect on it is not just a debuff side effect - it literally applies the insanity ability, separately of the actual void rift effect. This means that if you've gotten the schism upgrade for Insanity, you wind up stacking on even more damage, and rupturing them as you do so.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2016 14:06
|
|
|
Shred is one of the better things to have in the whole game, sure, but that's why I always run two minigun specced grenadiers per squad. 
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2016 19:53
|
|
|
I have encountered a fun new bug: I've completed the Advent control tower, and am trying to launch the final mission. Every single time I hit go, it starts the pre-mission cutscene.... and then cuts out about 3/4s of the way through, goes to a UI-less view of my squad in the Squad Deployment view in the hangar, and just sits there indefinitely. I have also discovered, in the course of this bug, that this particular cutscene cannot be skipped, so I can't even just try to skip past where it locks up. Anybody else seen this one before?
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2016 02:45
|
|
|
None, actually. It's vanilla.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2016 03:03
|
|
|
I got it working again; had to have steam re-verify the game cache. Probably should have tried that first. Still, obnoxious.
|
|
#
¿
May 28, 2016 04:03
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks, thread - I played through the ragequit-inducing Retaliation mission, never left full cover, never touched a civilian, never dashed - only took blue moves, and managed to score a stunning victory of only three gravely wounded soldiers (and my first Captain!) Grenadiers ad psi ops are both amazing against archons; explosive-specced grenadiers can just blast 'em, while gunner-specced ones can use Hail of Bullets for 100% accuracy shots. Likewise with psionics; archons get ripped up by soulfire, null lance, dominate, void rift, and insanity all pretty effectively. Of course, grenadiers and psi-ops are good against pretty much everything, so. 100% accuracy attacks are hard to argue with.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 1, 2016 18:42
|
|
|
oh dope posted:A move later, the vip has just escaped, VIPs can escape? I have literally never, ever seen them try to move. Is that a Legendary thing? I usually stick to Commander.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2016 16:01
|
|
|
NTT posted:If you kill a ruler you recover that even if you get wiped. Yeah, certain corpses that are tagged storyline-important or whatever are always recovered if you drop 'em, no matter what.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2016 14:14
|
|
|
Mister Bates posted:Holo-Targeting would be decent, except that the other Grenadier option at that rank is 'carry more grenades', which is a no-brainer. I dunno, I gave gunner-specced grenadiers a try on my last playthrough and was very pleased. Not only does holo-targeting make life much easier against high-defense targets like archons, but it can also be applied by Hail of Bullets, so you can follow up a guaranteed-hit attack with increased chances to hit for everyone else. That's a pretty nice deal, especially with Shredder on top of it all. Grenade launcher-specced grenadiers are definitely good, but I find that in the late game I tend not to need cover destruction as much - and it seems like the overall damage potential on gunner-specs is higher. Besides, it's not like you're losing grenades; you just have one less.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2016 19:00
|
|
|
RBA Starblade posted:I'm months in. Haven't done blacksite, haven't done the nest, just built proving grounds. I have no PCS mods and nearly no weapon mods. I'm about to get the continent bonus for instant build proving ground projects. I once made the mistake of selling elerium cores in the early months, when I had no Proving Grounds yet and wanted some extra cash to speed my advancement into mid-tier tech. I figured I had plenty of cores now and could easily find more as time went on. I was so very, very wrong in that choice. No amount of cores will ever be enough.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 7, 2016 14:07
|
|
|
So has Beagle actually uploaded any footage of himself fighting the Rulers yet? I'm curious how he deals with 'em given that they were seemingly designed for him.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2016 18:22
|
|
|
Alkydere posted:Mind Shields are a massive boon. Avatars have a 100% chance on their mind control, but any unit with a mind shield has a 0% chance to suffer any mental status. 100x0=0. Bonus points: Mind Shields also protect against stun, disoriented and panic (seriously, they're basically a "get out of shaken free" card for the entire campaign). Oh and the AI will still waste turn on mind-shielded units trying to use psi-powers on them. Avatar mind control can definitely miss. My first playthrough of the game I was foolish enough (hey, I didn't know, sue me) the final battle without either mind shields or psi ops, and I ate a lot of MCs. An unfortunate number definitely hit, but Jane Kelly had been Hardened previously in the campaign and resisted two of them back to back. On that note, my second playthrough actually saw Solace being kind of a liability; it seems avatars are smart enough not to use mind control if a target has solace and will be outright immune to it, so they wound up using a lot more Rifts instead - and those actually hurt.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2016 14:03
|
|
|
Lurdiak posted:Can I just say that I love how the game doesn't give a gently caress if you blow away advent-loyal civilians? Goddamn right you can. No sympathy for collaborators! As for sharpshooters, I was a little hesitant to go Gunslinger on my first playthrough and instead specced pure sniper because I really wanted that long-range capability. On making gunslingers in my next playthrough, however, I realized just how wrong I was. You sacrifice basically nothing by specializing in pistols; a gunslinger can still snipe very nearly as well as an actual sniper, and is much, much more valuable up close and on-the-move to boot. There are definitely some niche circumstances where a dedicated sniper is better, but they seem few and far between.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2016 19:41
|
|
|
We still need a full squad of Bradfords pouring forth out of the Bradranger.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2016 20:58
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:41 |
|
|
I'm probably pretty late to the party, but holy poo poo what did they do to sectoid AI. I'm having them ignore their psionics and just shoot my dudes in the loving face all the time now.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2016 15:30
|
|