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 MrMoustaffa wrote:
My only complaints are that I hate only having one base, only being able to respond to one abduction out of 3 every time, the fact that you will never need more than 6 of anything, and the inventory system.

I think one base / one abduction out of 3 was made deliberately to increase the whole: "small organization vs unstoppable alien menace". Especially on the higher levels of difficulty, where there is no chance of keeping all countries. You really feel more like plugging holes and, especially at the beginning, everything is slipping from your hands.
It doesn't make much sense, but IMHO it increases the overall "doom" feeling.

The dumbed down inventory is the by-product of class + skill system. Picking skills affects your inventory so you have less interaction with inventory itself.
I would modify it a little bit - allow more items by default, maybe adding ammo management but I wouldn't change it too much. If you wanted to have the old inventory back you would have to scrap the skills and come up with the new ones.

I'm not saying I'm perfectly happy with the above, but I do feel there are good reasons behind those changes, not just: "lol eazy for consolez lolz" like most people think.

Oh yeah I understand why they made the changes, I just don't like them personally. The most ironic bit is that I own the new XCOM for 360 (my comp would explode the moment it saw the requirements. Hell, the ORIGINAL XCOM lags it a bit) I just feel like the inventory was over simplified.

Also, why do the aliens never invade your base? Those were some of my favorite missions in the original, since you often had to deploy rookies who weren't ready yet and your vets had to grab whatever weapon was closest. Those always felt really hectic and tense.

I've stopped playing XCOM

Every time I lose a country in the report, the game locks up.
It might only be when I lose two at once, but I just cannot get past it.
It's lucky I finished the game a couple of run-throughs ago, but I now cannot replay it.

But, as games go, XCOM was too short.
It might be to cater for the console-crowd, but I hoped I could drag it out a mission or two before the end.
The inventory things I could overlook, as with the single base, small squads, and worthless drones.
I doubt I'll be getting the DLC, and hope there's a bug-fix patch soon...

I must be lucky, the only two bugs in the game I have seen is the multi level UFO "whoops ran off the edge" bug and the "I see dead aliens" bug.

Totally disagree on the worthless drones. I love me some shiv action. They make great forward observers for my squad sight sniper and if they die it doesn't make the team freak out or cost me a soldier. I'd much rather send a drone into the unknown then a Col. Once you do Classic or Impossible soldier panic becomes a HUGE issue.

I agree with moustaffa on the one base issue. I would make multiple bases and create a stranglehold on the aliens. I would have Cydonia or Bust researched for years and never do the mission. Kill counts would be in the thousands and money was as smooth as a cup of green tea. Of course this was all in UFO defense and not Terror from the Deep, screw that game.

That's why you only have 1 base; to stop you from putting a stranglehold on the aliens.
XCOM: UD became stupidly easy late game, as you could just spam bases everywhere and get complete coverage. You can't do that here.

God this game has the difficult factor of the original sometimes. Had a 5 man team of 2 Col, 3 majors, and a plasma hover shiv. All deck out in flight/titan/psy armor, plasma, etc etc. Down a ship and start like any routine UFO clearing....

Moving my last guy into place, I see a Etheral and 2 Advanced Muties... crap. Etheral hits 3/4ths of my team with Torrent instant killing my shiv, a team member and leaving the rest at 1/4th health. I move in to try to recover somewhat killing one mutie, injuring the other due to bad shots, and scratch the Etheral. 2 more members get killed. I recover one, lose another and finally kill off the pack with 3 guys at 1/4 heath and one full health.

Thankful to even be alive I move up super cautious. I scout up a path... 3 Muties, a Sectoid, 2 Drones... i get wiped in two turns after that.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU X-Com!!!!!!

...but I love you for being hard

Aaaaand Second Wave is officially in.

....and man does it look hard...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-01-08-free-xcom-enemy-unknown-second-wave-dlc-makes-it-even-harder

Oh HEELLLLLL YES! Bring it on!

This in particular I love...
- Marathon: The game takes considerably longer to complete.

I'll have to point out however these we spoilered a ways back when modders started digging for unreleased options.

So is the one DLC that you have to pay for any good? I've got around 5 bucks worth of points left on my account and was thinking about getting it. New missions is always a good thing in my book, but I don't know if it's really worth it.

Anybody buy it? Was it any good?

The missions are downright hard (playing on classic). First mission you pass gives you a Sgt giving you nearly instant access to build a office school which is great. However the second mission I haven' beat yet, it's damn hard.

The stupid as hell thing is that when you get offered the first mission if you don't take it you can not have the opportunity to do the missions again. On Classic or harder you need the standard council mission for panic redux and the expansion missions do give you panic reduction (at least for the first two missions).

So I'm just getting into this game. I haven't read the thread for fear of spoilers. I've unlocked assault on alien base pretty quickly. I tried it out but it seems impossible. Is that just something I'm supposed to works towards after several virtual months?

Also, how's the DLC work? Does it just integrate naturally into the game or is it like a whole other storyline/game?

The alien base gets more and more difficult enemies to fight as time goes on so you may want to fight it when your squad is both skilled and your weapons have gotten powerful quick enough. That's my opinion of it anyway. You can handle and beat the alien base pretty quickly and sometimes won't fight that much. As i said the higher the rank of your soldiers the better. High ranking soldiers are much better than noobs with better weaponry and armor. All that said in the lab you want to research weapons and armor before most other things. Eventually you need to get the containment facility and the stuff that leads up to it. However interrogations and autopsies are the more useless research options. This is another reason why the south america starting location is the absolute worst. Not to mention it's only 2 countries to get that bonus and your starting country gives you only 70 credits per month as opposed to the normal 100 for all others except north america with the U.S. giving an astounding 180 credits.

I could give some tips on moving your squad in the gameplay too. As far as everything except the extra content goes i think (for once) i'm the most experienced person here or one of the most experienced people here on this game. I have tallied up a total of over 350 hours on the game so i feel like i've deserved that right. I'm probably not the best player as far as the game goes or the particular game forum on the site goes but for here i think i'm one of the best. Sorry for kissing my own *ss so much.

As a tip for playing the game my strategy is blow up enemy cover and then shoot them to death. They'll be much easier to hit this way and most cover is either completely destructible and/or explode-able.

Also whenever you move you move each guy one action space (so don't dash) and then when every move is used up you go into overwatch if you don't spot an enemy. If you do spot an enemy with one of your guys during a move then you can move the guys that have already moved one space behind cover that's appropriate for the enemies you found and then move the others behind cover and attack. When you uncover an enemy squad you are normally mid-movement and they react by getting a free move so will often flank you. This is part of why you only move one of the two action points for each guy and always leave a guy with an action point left to use for moving.

So anyway that's my huge as h*ll piles of comments. I know i went overboard and you only had a couple easier answered questions but there ya go. If you have questions regarding anything but downloadable content i should be able to help you with it.

Thanks. Blitzing the enemy base is just not working though. I'm getting whooped. First attempt was only about a month of game time. Takes like my whole squad just to kill one squad of those spider things. And there seems to be endless waves of spider things. Guess I'll wait 'me out and level up. There's no penalty for leaving it right?

Also I think I screwed up by building my base in US and my first Satellite in Canada. Sucks to be you rest of world!

There's really no benefit to autopsies and interrogations? They should have made it a damage bonus at least

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
The alien base gets more and more difficult enemies to fight as time goes on so you may want to fight it when your squad is both skilled and your weapons have gotten powerful quick enough. That's my opinion of it anyway. You can handle and beat the alien base pretty quickly and sometimes won't fight that much. As i said the higher the rank of your soldiers the better. High ranking soldiers are much better than noobs with better weaponry and armor. All that said in the lab you want to research weapons and armor before most other things. Eventually you need to get the containment facility and the stuff that leads up to it. However interrogations and autopsies are the more useless research options. This is another reason why the south america starting location is the absolute worst. Not to mention it's only 2 countries to get that bonus and your starting country gives you only 70 credits per month as opposed to the normal 100 for all others except north america with the U.S. giving an astounding 180 credits.

The US is the best start for the cash, but their national bonus is only good, not great, and with only three countries you can easily have it covered by the end of month two, or month 3 at the latest. This means you get the discount just before you're about to starting launching masses of satellites (when you can build satellite nexus) and before you upgrade to firestorms.

So I take Asia as my first base, the starting cash is good enough and its easy to lose a nation out of Asia and the bonus, while not great, is pretty handy once you start investing in all the foundry stuff. Then I build satellites as fast as I can (the limiting factor is having enough engineers to meet the requirements for most satellite relays), putting them either in countries that have gone red with panic (the satellite drops panic by two, and they only leave XCOM if they're red at the time of the council report) or in North America to score their bonus, and then wherever else will score me a national bonus (based on countries I've covered already to stop them defecting).

The fun bit comes when I finally get around to covering South America, because before then I don't bother with a single autopsy. Then I just sit there and grind through dozens of autopsies, benefitting from the instant result, one after the next.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
There's really no benefit to autopsies and interrogations? They should have made it a damage bonus at least

It's just research bonuses, and you won't really miss them. It would have been way cooler if they gave damage bonuses from the autopsies, and other cool bonuses from interrogations (like being less vulnerable to the Muton's blood shout, for instance).

What gear are you trying to assault the alien base with?

Because if your answer is assault rifles and combat armor you're not going to have a good time

Make sure you don't make the key until you're absolutely ready. Otherwise you're stuck waiting on that mission and there's no way to scan, since everytime you hit scan it'll center on the base.

I've got the Key and I scan all day long.

Really hate those spider things. Every time someone gets a class assigned though it's support. Need some assault guys to fight them I think.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
I've got the Key and I scan all day long.

Really hate those spider things. Every time someone gets a class assigned though it's support. Need some assault guys to fight them I think.

Snipers, mate. A well trained sniper on overwatch can kill them before they even get close.
Heavies are also nice with the 2xOverwatch perk.

Heavies are d*mn near needed in the game esp. on harder difficulties. If nothing else you need to blow through enemy cover so that your enemies are easier to hit with the rest of your guys.

As a hint you may want to stay in full cover and if you have to be in partial cover (like if there's no full cover around) you can use 'hunker down' as it turns half cover into full cover.

I can not stress enough just how important later abilities are in this game. Snipers getting partial cover to count as full, snipers that can do 'double tap' (two shots) or in some cases 'in the zone' (basically allows you to keep shooting enemies one after the other as long as each kills and the enemy isn't in cover which is esp. useful in later difficulties where enemies have more health when you use rockets to destroy enemy cover). Also it's useful to note that 'in the zone' always considers chrysallids outside of cover so if you have a sniper able to one shot each one (easily done with plasma snipers as they always do at least 8 damage which is the full health of a chrysallid). You can quite possibly have one 'in the zone' sniper take out 4-5 chrysallids pretty easily and handily.

As far as other advice goes if you have the (-2 to damage if in cover and not flanked ability) then you can take combat stims with it and whenever an enemy attacks a heavy and you have that on you take half damage of normal with a -2 off of that. Getting at tops like 4 damage from anything with a heavy's titan armor super high hp isn't unheard of. I think combat stims also make you immune to critical hits. It's pretty hilarious.

Then there's the ghost armor which is easily the best armor in the game hands down as pretty much everybody agrees. It gives 20 defense, has 6 hp and can cloak. Also when cloaked the biggest deal is that it almost always allows your shots to do 100% critical hit chance when cloaked except for some flying enemies like possibly drones and that's not a big deal. You could also just cloak a guy and make some fairly risky moves and remain cloaked and unable to be attacked unless a psychic somehow reveals you (usually incredibly uncommon even if they see you and i think they have to get super close) or if you are on overwatch or an enemy gets within range of you with the 'close combat specialist' skill on an assault class (anybody that closes within 4 squares of the assault allows him to shoot at them as a reaction shot).

I don't like the double reaction shot skill of the heavy. I'm pretty sure the 2nd skill option is heat ammo which does double damage against robotic units (sectopods, drones and cyberdiscs). Also heat ammo is confered to the rocket attacks, special attacks and grenades as well as normal attacks (so basically all heavy attacks). Considering the incredibly high health of these enemy units heat ammo wins out in my opinion and double reaction shot only works if the first reactionary shot hits anyway and heavies seem to hit less than the other classes often times.

Use rockets against chrysallids. It's the best thing to do. So generally try not to move your heavies out too far. You should also probably have alien grenades at about this time from one thing or another. It's pretty helpful vs mid-tier enemies and even enemies in classic difficulty. In classic or harder the only useful thing about frag grenades is destroying cover and possibly damaging enemies enough to make them easier to capture with an arc thrower.

If at all possible though highly unlikely you can equip some of your dudes with the 'chitin armor' in your items and during terror missions (where chrysallids are incredibly common) you can put those guys close to where the chrysallids are to force them to fight said guy. Since chitin armor adds health and causes melee to do much less damage it's usually pretty effective.

I also want to state that you probably don't want to make your defense too high when facing things such as mutons, muton elites, armored floaters or cyberdiscs as these enemies can throw grenades at you (it becomes fairly frequent and annoying and is d*mn near brutal mid-tier when you only have carapace armor and an alien grenade hitting 2 of your dudes and destroying your cover can pretty much spell a huge loss for your team. As far as explosives go the sectopod has a mortar ability too but it takes until the next enemy turn before the attack goes off (generally it forces you to move your guys around from where they were so the mortar doesn't hit them esp. if they're near some vehicles).

Another important thing to note is that grenades and other guns take multiple shots to explode cars instead of causing them to go on fire and blow up within a full turn (after a friendly and enemy turn i think). Your early bullet based guns do absolutely nothing to destroy cover except for the machine gun. As your guns get better (laser and then plasma) you can shoot through cover and cause flammable things to explode or go on fire easier. Rockets auto destroy all destructible terrain completely within range. All cover and walls go away and all vehicles in range explode instantly. I can not stress the importance of rockets enough.

@MrMoustaffa: I don't know what you're talking about as it's always worked for me. Maybe it's been a while but i'm pretty sure you can always go back unless it's on the final temple ship assault mission and you've decided to use the gollop chamber but they warn you about this in advance.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
I've got the Key and I scan all day long.

Really hate those spider things. Every time someone gets a class assigned though it's support. Need some assault guys to fight them I think.

Snipers, mate. A well trained sniper on overwatch can kill them before they even get close.
Heavies are also nice with the 2xOverwatch perk.

My three best guys are a Heavy and 2 Snipers. It it wasn't for them I wouldn't get anything done. I need to spend more money on upgrading my weapons. I'm only now starting to equip everyone with laser weapons and I only have the level 2 armour.

I got my engineer guys working on some kinda support robot thing. Sounds awesome. It it awesome or am I gonna be dissapointed?

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
I've got the Key and I scan all day long.

Really hate those spider things. Every time someone gets a class assigned though it's support. Need some assault guys to fight them I think.

Snipers, mate. A well trained sniper on overwatch can kill them before they even get close.
Heavies are also nice with the 2xOverwatch perk.

My three best guys are a Heavy and 2 Snipers. It it wasn't for them I wouldn't get anything done. I need to spend more money on upgrading my weapons. I'm only now starting to equip everyone with laser weapons and I only have the level 2 armour.

I got my engineer guys working on some kinda support robot thing. Sounds awesome. It it awesome or am I gonna be dissapointed?

Ouch dude. Yeah, if you don't have las weapons by the time Chrysallids show up, you are going to have a bad time. Especially on Classic.
Shivs are awesome. Especially the alloy types, which can be used as mobile cover.

That's what I'm saying Assault on Alien Base was only my 4th Sortie or something like that. I obviously wasn't ready for it. Still not ready for it.


P.s. I hate spiders.

Really? Some think shivs are good at times but they have no real abilities and at this point in time i don't really need them. They can't take advantage of cover or anything. Basically they may as well have a bulls-eye painted on them though you can eventually get arc throwers to repair them with a foundry upgrade. In fact a few arc throwers might make them ok but i'd still rather keep doing what i've been doing. It's not really failing me yet. We'll see how i handle impossible difficulty on ironman though (hardest difficulty with one save that always updates).

What's "classic" difficulty.

Does Iron Man delete your old save when you load it or something like that? Ogre Battle 64 used to have that and it was brutal.

Classic Difficulty is basically 'Hard', but is called classic as it is meant to be more like the original games (or something like that)

Iron Man mode is when you dont get manual saves, you have 3 autosaves (generally at the beginning of turns, beginning of missions, end of missions and the like) and thats it. SO if you start a mission before you are ready and dont realise in time you are screwed, if you have a few bad turns and end up completely out of position, then you are screwed...that sort of thing. It is again meant to make the game harder and less forgiving of mistakes.

Beat that damn Alien Base! Got to a Abduction mission where I got slaughtered by those flying saucer things so I figured I go back and assault the base. Went much better this time. Spiders aren't nearly as scary with laser weapons.

Sigh, I miss Sectoids. Now it just non-stop Mutons. Then bigger Mutons then angrier Mutons now Mutons that are big, angy and Armoured. .....and then a fikkin Mech Warrior! It ain't easy being Xcom.
Anyway I got some psi-guys now. They mentioned it seems to be tied to will. Should I not bother testing rookies and low level guys until they level up for a better chance of getting a psychic?

After reading this thread I'm almost sold on getting the game. I just need to finish up what's already on my to play pile. Its been a while since I played a turn based strategy game so it'll be since from my usual habit of switching between FPS and RPG.

Those damn aliens are pissing me off right now but I do recommend it.