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Archangel armor DOES give a bonus to defense while flying, and it DOES, despite waht the game says, give a bonus for height.

Dunno about flanking.

Being high enough that cover shouldn't matter doesn't seem to give the flanking bonus, or at least it hasn't been for me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
-and ye gods...this play through is ridiculous - I have one support. I bought a bunch of dudes, and it was just heavy/assault/heavy/sniper/heavy/assault/heavy...
I really wish they didn't assign the classes for you.

That's why I save before the end of hte first mission. It assigns classes randomly upon getting back to base and promoting.

 Melissia wrote:
That's why I save before the end of hte first mission. It assigns classes randomly upon getting back to base and promoting.

It's okay now, the US just gave me like 1600 bucks for 3 heavy plasma and I hired four more dudes ... two of which are support.


Although that did remind me of the whole not being able to just sell my outdated crap... like the US army doesn't have a couple hundred dollars to give me for this stockpile of lasers I have laying around collecting dust?

Ok so i'm actually doing ok in classic ironman after quite a lot of games. All i have to say is that getting your officer training academy up reasonably quickly is needed as you will need to boost squad size pretty fast to keep up. For some odd reason i went with skeleton armor before laser weapons (go figure). I actually got pretty far into the game and even had 3 colonels. Well maybe not far but i've killed sectopods so that's reasonably far. I'd say go for 2 supports and 2 heavies. Heavies will be worth their weight in gold or more when you get ganged up on esp. when your guys level up and get boosts. In fact i don't think i'm exaggerating when i say early on it's more important to keep your elite squad alive so you can have super rocket heavies and supports that scout. Should things get bad you can use defense boosting smoke or the dense smoke. If you get your elite squad wiped out early on chances are you're best off just starting the game over if it's iron man mode. Right now i lost all most colonels and stuff but i had one support captain left (i like to imagine her as ripley from the aliens series now for some reason).

I can't stress the importance of falling back somewhat, possibly using hunker down and throwing smoke grenades for your guys caught in a bad situation in the open. This is why it's always good to keep one or two supports with a move left.

Boosted heavies are hilarious. I'm not exaggerating by saying i basically just nuked the crap out of the aliens with rockets in a few missions and just retreated my supports just before the nuking if they gathered up around them (like chrysallids just love to do).

Right now since my support is my only real skill on the team i'm just trying to level the rest of my guys before i take on the alien base. I know that isn't too far into the game but in the first game i got owned for not being prepared and it happened a lot to where my squad competence was very low. Currently i have about 4 sergeants with my support major.

As far as skills go i usually go for ones that boost defense or dodge attacks. For the support i chose to have 2 smoke grenades even though that's probably a bad idea. For heavies i think the plus 2 strength rockets are better but the boosts 2 tile (radius or diameter?) rockets are definitely a god send. You have 2 heavy support colonels and you'll see those guys just nuking everything as long as they have the range. I mean i must've had 60 something kills on one of my heavy colonels before he died and a lot of these were elite guys too. Also if you get heat ammo the double damage is also included on the rockets so you'll see 16 damage being laid down upon robotic enemies in a blast. I might not remember it correctly but i think that's enough to lay low a cyberdisc but it's definitely significant damage.

So as far as the game goes now it's more about heavies doing most of the damage to masses and you have the shredder rockets and normal rockets (please take the shredder rockets as that gets a boost to 6 damage and boosts damage of other attacks). If that's not enough heavies boost your aim on enemies even when they miss if i remember correctly.

I'm trying to see if i can get ghost armor now but i don't know the tech tree. I don't think i'll see another sectoid again in any normal circumstance and i never captured one early on. I did try capturing some things like berserkers, thin men and mutons and succeeded but i haven't really gotten much else other than the outsider shard thing of course. I am already starting to fight armored mutons and sectopods though. I mean crap i even fought a battleship which wasn't quite a good thing to face.

-------------------------

So yeah long story short 2 heavies, 2 supports and 2 of whatever else (maybe one sniper and an assault). Go for the officers academy thing fast and get those upgrades going, don't let your elites die esp. not the whole squad and try your best to have colonels and heavy colonels at that (shouldn't be terribly hard as heavies can rack up a lot of kills), capture some aliens to get tech at a decent time in the campaign like when you start to see some mutons, and try to wait until you have near full satellite coverage or all around low panic levels on every remaining country before you feel fairly safe that losing a squad of elites probably won't doom the campaign for you.

----------------------------

I have yet to finish the campaign and the alien base assault might give me trouble but so far things look to be going alright. Every place that can have a building has one and now i have so much power i can just get rid of the normal dinky power generators i needed earlier for something else like the mission specific buildings i need to make.

Oddly enough i have enough money, elerium and alloys for enough weapons to handle most of what i've got (esp. money though since it's at about 3k cash) but i have almost no weapon fragments of all things. It's probably a sick joke because i've been blowing everything to oblivion and that prevents you from getting anything but a corpse. The only things left i can research at the moment are better fighter craft (firestorms?) which i actually need and want because i fought a freaking battleship not long ago and lost 4 plasma cannon interceptors that just got 2 shotted (not that i could've successfully boarded it and won the fight) and then i can research light plasma rifles which i don't care about. Chances are the light plasma rifles might open up the tech to plasma pistols but right now i'd rather have some firestorms.

--------------------------

Sorry that was long-winded and a wall of text. I apologize for never being able to keep things short and sweet but i've been playing endlessly for hours. Finally getting past getting owned constantly is definitely a nice thing. It's kind of funny because i think i actually earned the 'wet work' achievement (some mission in 5 turns or less) just from using rockets. The amount of death and destruction all those rockets inflicted was just ungodly and awesome. If only i could've put it on youtube for you guys to watch. In the campaign on classic difficulty on iron man mode i've only lost argentina from the council and only 3-4 nations have a panic level of 3 while everybody has less. It's not as hard as i remembered it. It takes a while to figure out a working formula but once you do enemies just die en masse.

 Bromsy wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
That's why I save before the end of hte first mission. It assigns classes randomly upon getting back to base and promoting.

It's okay now, the US just gave me like 1600 bucks for 3 heavy plasma and I hired four more dudes ... two of which are support.


Although that did remind me of the whole not being able to just sell my outdated crap... like the US army doesn't have a couple hundred dollars to give me for this stockpile of lasers I have laying around collecting dust?

Yeah, that bugs me, too. Most I've seen is them asking me for laser pistols.

To be fair, the money used in XC:EU seems to represent millions, not dollars.

 Melissia wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
That's why I save before the end of hte first mission. It assigns classes randomly upon getting back to base and promoting.

It's okay now, the US just gave me like 1600 bucks for 3 heavy plasma and I hired four more dudes ... two of which are support.


Although that did remind me of the whole not being able to just sell my outdated crap... like the US army doesn't have a couple hundred dollars to give me for this stockpile of lasers I have laying around collecting dust?

Yeah, that bugs me, too. Most I've seen is them asking me for laser pistols.

To be fair, the money used in XC:EU seems to represent millions, not dollars.

I don't know. It doesn't scale well then since soldiers are 15 million dollars a piece or whatever with that exchange rate.

I just rage quit.

Ethereal mind controlled my most powerfull assault dude and took out my entire squad because the dude had the close quarters perk where he gets a reaction shot everytime someone moves. Everyone died.

Yeah. The nice thing about Ironman? You don't play as much and can do other things.

 malfred wrote:

 Melissia wrote:

 Bromsy wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
That's why I save before the end of hte first mission. It assigns classes randomly upon getting back to base and promoting.

It's okay now, the US just gave me like 1600 bucks for 3 heavy plasma and I hired four more dudes ... two of which are support.


Although that did remind me of the whole not being able to just sell my outdated crap... like the US army doesn't have a couple hundred dollars to give me for this stockpile of lasers I have laying around collecting dust?

Yeah, that bugs me, too. Most I've seen is them asking me for laser pistols.

To be fair, the money used in XC:EU seems to represent millions, not dollars.

I don't know. It doesn't scale well then since soldiers are 15 million dollars a piece or whatever with that exchange rate.

Sounds about right for me. The soldiers are given state of the art body armor and assault rifles (even if they suck), communications equipment, etc, and they're having hazard pay and etc-- this isn't uncle sam.

 Soladrin wrote:
I just rage quit.

Ethereal mind controlled my most powerfull assault dude and took out my entire squad because the dude had the close quarters perk where he gets a reaction shot everytime someone moves. Everyone died.

The best thing to do against a mind controlled guy that you have is to use disabling shot with your sniper or snipers (it only does like 2-3 damage anyway) and also to just run away from the mind controlled guy until the mind control wears off (i think it's about 3 turns). If i remember the ability has a 5 turn cooldown so you should be able handle the ethereal in 2 turns or 3 as a mind controlled guy can't do anything the turn the opponent controls it. I feel your pain though. Many close calls i had where i was about to snipe some ethereal and was one shot away from winning and then suddenly bam! my mind controlled sniper snipes him after the ethereal managed to hit him as well. I was so pissed.

It's hard for me to decide if i like archangel armor. Sure it's great for hitting your enemies but unfortunately if you're playing a mission that's very cramped and in buildings then it doesn't really help so much. This includes the aliens supply ships. For some reason there isn't a really good spot for you to just aim at everything in the air and when you're not in the air it's just 8 armor without any bonuses whatsoever.

@bromsy: It would be nice if the game let you sell your extra weapons and equipment on the gray market for when you don't use them anymore. Speaking of which that name always seemed weird to me. I couldn't help but laugh at the idea of the panic level on every country being like the terror alert level. We're at orange for somewhat alarmed but not too much. There has to be a humor for all this alien activity becoming so serious. Would be nice if they made the ufo conspiracy theorists try to show footage of some out of focus craft or something. That would've made the game much funnier i think. They sort of didn't take themselves too seriously but sometimes they did. I'm unsure if i would've liked to see a little more goofiness.

Well, a gray market is a real term...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_market

It's like "black market", but instead of being strictly illegal, it's just unofficial. At least that's what I assume they meant. Could be I'm over thinking it.

Really? I thought by gray market they meant like alien 'grays' like those little sectoids.

Anyway i think i'll play some more xcom now. Not like i got anything better to do.

I've gotten to the point that I consistently run out of steam on Classic/Ironman right around the time that muttons show up. I can (carefully) make my way through the first terror mission and quite skillfully take out any UFO missions, but about the time muttons show up, other aspects tend to get harder as well.

Of course, muttons are frustrating as I'm never expecting them then BAM, they run out of nowhere and murders one of my trooper.

The counsel missions are the worst, seeing as the game loves to pit me against a seemingly endless wave of thin men. It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to forgo grenades just to keep everyone with a medkit because poison kicks my butt so hard.

 YotsubaSnake wrote:
I've gotten to the point that I consistently run out of steam on Classic/Ironman right around the time that muttons show up. I can (carefully) make my way through the first terror mission and quite skillfully take out any UFO missions, but about the time muttons show up, other aspects tend to get harder as well.

Of course, muttons are frustrating as I'm never expecting them then BAM, they run out of nowhere and murders one of my trooper.

The counsel missions are the worst, seeing as the game loves to pit me against a seemingly endless wave of thin men. It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to forgo grenades just to keep everyone with a medkit because poison kicks my butt so hard.

Honestly it's probably is gonna take too long to repeat but just do as i said and use 2-3 heavies, get one of your guys to colonel rank, keep your elite squad alive for a good while and get some skeleton armor and laser weapons pretty fast. It's not easy at first but right now it's not that hard for me and i'm on classic difficulty on iron man mode.

So yeah use heavies as they're worth their weight in gold early on esp. when they rank up. They're mostly useful for rocket attacks as it's one of the best ways to take on hordes of tough opponents and it goes through cover. Heavies can also use attacks that help you hit the enemy so that's always good. I also use a couple of support soldiers as scouts and to pop cover for my guys. I'm unsure whether to use the 3 medkit route or the 2 smoke grenades route as boosted smoke grenades are pretty nice esp. when your guys are in even partial cover. Currently i go 2 smoke grenades on my supports but i may change that back to 3 medkits. Then again since i'm at titan armor it's probably a waste now to have more than a few medkits since i just use combat stims on my heavies and assaults mixed with smoke grenades for some extra hard to hit guys that are hard to kill as well.

Strangely enough this game isn't too bad and all my super elite guys died off. I think i'm left with like 4 corporals currently and then a bunch of squaddies since i have the upgrade.

I think the point of the game is to handle the late early and late mid game and then the late game isn't too hard from there. Of course you need to use smoke, cover and heavy rockets constantly. Now that i have better everything i get combat stims to use too and those help a ton. You have to play a lot smarter in classic difficulty and you can't fully run a support out with both moves when scouting so you can run back once in a while. I don't play super defensively but i do use plenty of smoke and explosions. It's also nice to capture some enemies at a decent time to get access to their plasma weapons.

Currently i finally have access to ghost armor and i beat the alien base mission in the campaign in classic/iron man mode. Ghost armor should help my support and sniper classes out a ton since i use supports as scouts i just cloak them and send them out across the map to find enemies and then run back when they're found.

I am getting pounded. I had to start over with a new strategy. Its like being 12 again!

Oh btw heat ammo works on all heavy attacks to my knowledge so even rockets use it. Then again i'm unsure if grenades have the heat ammo +100% damage to robotic units ability. It's awesome vs sectopods and cyberdiscs though esp. with the 8 damage rockets you can get at colonel rank with the +2 damage modifier (they are normally 6 damage).

Going to be buying this game. How's the replay value?

Not great. Unless you absolutely geek out for the gameplay, you'll probably get your first playthrough on normal, which is too easy, then a playthrough on classic ironman. It's all pretty linear.

This game only did one thing for me. Remind me how awesome Fallout tactics was and how gakky this games gameplay is. It´s so dumbed down it´s not even funny.

Explain how the game was dumbed down?

No action points, extremely limited control of your squad, smaller squad, no inventory etc.

Some may call it streamlining but they did it to such a degree that it just became over simplified IMHO.

 Soladrin wrote:
No action points, extremely limited control of your squad, smaller squad etc.

Some may call it streamlining but they did it to such a degree that it just became over simplified IMHO.

I don't think it's too dumbed down.

Cover matters here. Playing on normal was way too easy. I'm two
missions into classic/ironman and I like how my tactics have
changed from run run run shoot shoot shoot to advance huddle
blow up cover finish the job. It's very cool.

To each their own I guess. To me it's just lacking a ton of depth.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't even that big a fan of the original but it just feels too simple for me.

Besides, I still prefer Fallout tactics for my turn based strategy fix.

I thought it looked challenging, but I've only seen highest level ironman gameplay.

I'm actually on the temple ship and about to beat classic ironman. I would've last night but i was one shot away from killing the uber ethereal and ran out of ammo for my main gun on my last guy left (female psychic). I ran back a bit and reloaded and the uber ethereal moved a bit and saw me and fired his attack which finished her off. One more successful hit on him. That's all i asked for. Didn't get it. Would've won me the game last night. Least it saves for the temple ship assault. Hopefully nothing bad comes of this.

So far to me classic ironman has to be played pretty specifically at first. You need an officer academy fast and you need to keep your elite squad alive for at least a while in the campaign. It's also needed to have 2 heavies and 2 supports. The heavies you need for rocket attacks and to boost your own aim with the machine gun attacks and the supports you need for all the smoke bombs you deploy which help a lot. Also get the carapace armor research but only as a stepping stone for skeleton armor as the defensive bonus, speed and grappling hook as well as only one less health than carapace armor is totally worth it. The main importance is to use everything in your power for defensive bonuses (cover, special armor, abilities, smoke grenades, etc.) and most of all when you feel your cover is too limited. It's also good to have a move or two left on your supports to throw out a smoke grenade on your guys just in case you're in a bad position. It might be annoying but don't bunch your guys up near cars and such when facing certain things that can throw grenades. It's not that enemies know to do this but when you deploy smoke or boost defense it's quite possible your enemy throws a grenade at you instead of shooting. However if your defense is too high enemies all too frequently will run away a bit and go into overwatch. This is generally a good thing for you but you have to remember who's on overwatch as you can use a high ranking assault to just dodge the first reaction shot.

 InquisitorVaron wrote:
I thought it looked challenging, but I've only seen highest level ironman gameplay.

A game being simple has nothing to do with it's difficulty. It's simple in what you can actually do. (compared to the original and other games in the genre that is)

 Soladrin wrote:

 InquisitorVaron wrote:
I thought it looked challenging, but I've only seen highest level ironman gameplay.

A game being simple has nothing to do with it's difficulty. It's simple in what you can actually do. (compared to the original and other games in the genre that is)

I guess.

The other game had simplistic character development. Raw numbers, pretty
much. Skill selection is far more interesting/deeper than just equipping a
guy with two heavy plasma.

I'm actually pretty new to this turn based strategy thing but i thought what the game gave was really fun. I wouldn't have thrown in 160+ hours already if it wasn't. I'll probably be over it in a few months anyway though. It's most likely new game interest that's got me playing so much. I will admit though i have no life to have played it so much already.

 malfred wrote:

 Soladrin wrote:

 InquisitorVaron wrote:
I thought it looked challenging, but I've only seen highest level ironman gameplay.

A game being simple has nothing to do with it's difficulty. It's simple in what you can actually do. (compared to the original and other games in the genre that is)

I guess.

The other game had simplistic character development. Raw numbers, pretty
much. Skill selection is far more interesting/deeper than just equipping a
guy with two heavy plasma.

And this is why I prefer Fallout tactics. Turn based (or real time if you want to) strategy with fallouts character creation system for every squad member.