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Got the game gifted to me, and I am pleased to see that the Developers did not sleep in class. Was very sceptical but there may still be hope for this game, something I am happy about.

 malfred wrote:
So in the campaign...

Spoiler:

The chip in the commander has been feeding you simulated wargames. Is this the explanation for why a) you're such a badass tactical commander and b) you thought the first war with the aliens ended differently and c) why the heck you've played so many versions of the game

Maybe.



But there's a practical reason for it, too.


Some thoughts -

Way to go tutorial guy!



I understand why the devs emphasized timed missions. But some of the time constraints have been *very* tight, with literally no margin for error. And this is not on the harder difficulty levels. Typically the problem is the size of the maps. You start on one end. You have to get to the other end. And there's an objective that you have to accomplish on the way, while also fighting off any aliens that you come across.

Aside from that, it looks like a good game so far.

Loaded my game from last night and one of my characters is different to how I created them. Different headgear, props and stance. Anyone else had this issue?

I did put them through the training school. Does this alter them in such a way?

 Silent Puffin? wrote:
Well its unlocked but takes about half an hour to unpack. Basically it seems that preloading was mostly a waste of time.

Think that's preloading in a nutshell. I wouldn't ever bother with it if you have good/decent internet as it'll probably just download before it finishes unpacking (or, at least it does for me)

I may have encountered a game breaking 'bug'.

There is a mission where you need to defend the Avenger from apparently never ending waves of Advent troops and a scarily large starting force of gribblies; to win the mission you need to destroy a beacon at the far end of the level and if you fail the mission its game over (probably at least as the advent would have control of the Avenger). There are so many enemy units the mission takes ages (over an hour for me) and the map is basically covered by corpses. This is an issue as after a while the game becomes increasingly choppy and eventually just dies under the strain.

Enemy reinforcements (who arrive nearly every turn) and on map enemies mean that you have to advance very (very) carefully so there isn't a way to quickly finish the mission and (for me at least) by the time I was even slightly close to the object the game was dying.

Pre-order customization content only seems to work when making characters in the character pool, not modifying them "in-game".

I wanted one of my characters to take up smoking, but nooooo.....

Also it seems troops cannot get a tattoo unless they come with one. I guess The Avenger had no inking supplies on board.

Dang, why is it taking so long to download?

Only took me 15 minutes to download Fallout 4, why is this one 50 minutes?

Can't wait, sooo excited

Xcom seems to have applied RNG to the download and install times too

Well I managed to finish that damn mission.

64 kills and 4 deaths, including my highest ranking heavy whose exo armour disappeared even though I carried her body to the extraction zone. I had 1 rookie get enough promotions to reach Sgt and then panicked in the final couple of rounds and ran outside the extraction zone so I was forced to leave him behind.
Not a single scrap of loot, a measly 2 advances and a roster full of gravely wounded troopers was all I got for that ridiculous mission. Don't let the UFO shoot you down!

Anyone know how staffing gremlins work? I built a workshop and put an engineer in there, it says I get 2 gremlins but I can't seem to assign them to adjacant rooms. Help?

Edit: Ah, you have to click on the room you want staffed with gremlins and then select them from the top menu. I was trying to do it from the ant farm view.

On a side note, Workshops don't seem to be able to send gremlins diagonally.

Wow, they seriously upped the difficulty. The sectoids are a nightmare, make sure you kill them first when ambushing.

I find the serpents a bit more dangerous then the sectoids. But yes, both are absolute nigthmares to deal with.

 Nostromodamus wrote:
Pre-order customization content only seems to work when making characters in the character pool, not modifying them "in-game".

I wanted one of my characters to take up smoking, but nooooo.....

Also it seems troops cannot get a tattoo unless they come with one. I guess The Avenger had no inking supplies on board.

They have to level up a little first; one of my specialists found cigarettes somewhere on board . Same with camo and scars (the last of these makes no sense to me, but I'd honestly prefer a scar system where you only get it after you get shot or during character creation )

God, I hate Vipers. Stupid grazing hits...

 Spinner wrote:

God, I hate Vipers. Stupid grazing hits...

Or their huge AOE poison, their blinding attack or, most annoyingly, their long ranged grab attack. I'm even less of a fan of the Codex things and their AoE weapon disabling/massive damage attack and I am sure that there are all kinds of 'interesting' things that I have yet to encounter.

Most of the enemies are formidable in some way, anything above the basic advent trooper can be annoying to deal with. It's a lot more pronounced than it was in XCOM 1.

I am finding the timer missions to be extremely annoying, many of them seem to be all but impossible to actually complete. In the last example I tired it twice, once by strength (ran out of time) and once by stealth (all the enemies on the map clustered around the VIP extraction site which made it impossible to actually extract the VIP and there wasn't enough time to kill them all). I am finding that this is really damaging my enjoyment of the game.

Explosives are my friend! I love explosives!

In this game, you typically get one enemy who drops something per mission. If you use explosives to kill that enemy, then you'll destroy the dropped items (there's a brief message that mentions you destroyed them). But since over 90% of the enemies *don't* drop anything, and the dropped items are just there to give you minor boosts to your troops...

LET THE GRENADES FLY!!!!

^_^


I wiped out a squad consisting of an Archon and two Mutons using nothing but explosives. It was glorious. ^_^

And I took out the other patrol I saw in that mission by hacking the Heavy Advent MEC, and used that to take out the other two members of the patrol. ^_^

Had an odd incident occur during the game. I finished research on something (Elerium, I think), and got a message popping up telling me that my troops had now fought enough Mutons to make the Muton research item instantaneous. I haven't seen that happen with anything else so far.

I haven't been shot down by the UFO yet, but I did have one close call. The UFO's flight path took it nearby, and Central called for evasive action. The Avenger ended up flying around the world before coming back to roughly where it had started.

Central's "helpful" mid-mission reminders are quickly assuming roughly the same level of dislike as Vahlen's messages in the first game. Yes, I *know* that I'm supposed to be saving the civilians. But it's kind of hard to do anything to help the ones on the opposite side of the map... And I don't need to be reminded every few turns that the clock is ticking on my current mission.

On the one hand, the Avenger mechanic is kind of neat. On the other, it gets annoying to constantly have to leave the area that you're currently scanning, in order to fly halfway around the world to deal with another mission in a far off location.

I notice a lot of people saying the difficulty has been seriously upped (this may be a good thing IMO compared to the game cheating for you in XCOM 1 - but then, it depends how far they've upped it!) - So! For someone who hasn't had a chance to buy it yet, how's the difficulty compared to the Long War mod specifically?

Well, I'd say that everything is 1 difficulty level higher than XCOM1.

I think the really annoying bit is that the aliens seem to be freakishly accurate.


Sectoids:

They are either fairly easy to kill or a total nightmare. This depends on which ability they try to use. If they go for mindcontrol and succeed, that's pretty much game over early on(though you can get the mind shield early on to prevent this). If they go for Terrify its manageabl. If they resurrect a corpse, which the AI seems to always do if there is a corpse around, they are sitting ducks.


Officers:

Not particularly dangerous except when dug in and spamming their Mark target ability then shooting in the same turn and benefiting from their own ability.


Vipers:

Just all around broken. Way too fast, too much range on their grab attack, it should NOT be able to pull you through freaking walls, and it auto does 3 points of damage the turn its applied.


Mecs:

Do a lot of damage, but if you have a decent specialist its fairly easy to shut it down or take it over for a few turns.

So far, the only ones that have stuck around long enough to be a major annoyance for me individually are Vipers. Everyone else isn't too bad to deal with individually, you just need to focus fire and try to disable or discourage secondary targets (flashbangs aren't as good as they are in Long War, so far as I can tell, but overwatch works nicely!) That's in a knock-down-drag-out fight, though, and those seem to be few and far between - for me, by far the biggest danger is biting off more than I can chew and getting swarmed while trying to book it to the Evac point.

I love it when sectoids waste a turn making a zombie. Usually I can have a ranger run up and bisect (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) them next turn, and then the zombie bites it too. Mind Control is far more annoying, but it's doable...Jane Kelly spent half the (first? I dunno, haven't gotten far!) Blacksite mission mind controlled because I was scouting with her, and I just left her there while the rest of the squad defended a building against the newly-activated pods. The AI just put her on overwatch until the mind control wore off...at which point the sectoid did it again. Rinse and repeat...after the second time, she hopped down to politely explain why that was a bad idea.

How's everyone's Jane Kelly doing, by the way? Mine got nicknamed Viking; I gave her eyeblack and tiger stripes on her armor, along with a couple of those sectoid tattoos; she's killed enough of them. The lady's kinda terrifying.

Not read any of the thread yet, maintly because of spoilers. I will read up later.

Just here to say I bought the game last night (actually early hours of this morning), had a sleep and left the computer on and its still only 75% downloaded at approx 550 KB/s.

How big is this game?

My Jane Kelly has proven to be the bane of those shapeshifters and ever annoying vipers. Her nickname is havoc, somewhat fittingly as she generally causes very much havoc.

Also the darkness take those friking Mutons and their damned plasma grenades

Jane Kelly almost immediately died under my command.

No matter. That's Xcom.

 Spinner wrote:

I love it when sectoids waste a turn making a zombie.

Yeah, I've found the trick with Sectoids is to kill one of the chumps near them so they waste that turn making a zombie, giving me more time to take down the Sectoid.

How's everyone's Jane Kelly doing, by the way? Mine got nicknamed Viking; I gave her eyeblack and tiger stripes on her armor, along with a couple of those sectoid tattoos; she's killed enough of them. The lady's kinda terrifying.

Mine got the nickname "Stinger". She definitely earned it, with as many times as I've used her Slash ability.

Although, now that I've learned a bit more about how to play and what I should build and research first, I'm going to start a new game and see how things go now.

Sectoids can resurrect mimetic decoys, a full group will spend their entire activation killing one and then a survivor will resurrect it the following turn.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Vipers:
Just all around broken. Way too fast, too much range on their grab attack, it should NOT be able to pull you through freaking walls, and it auto does 3 points of damage the turn its applied.

They are certainly annoying but I don't find them particularly bothersome at the moment. Their grab attack is really buggy, if it hits sometimes they pull their target though walls, sometimes the targets stops at the wall and sometimes they are pulled towards their target only to stop half way and bug out. It only does 2 damage to me, on standard difficulty (veteran?) at least. It helps that my snipers can usually one shot them now

I have also had a viper disappear when its cover was destroyed only to reappear in the next alien phase after I forgot it was there, with unfortunate consequences.

I still find Codexs to be the most irritating enemy with their damn cloning and teleport abilities.

Overall I am finding it much harder to have an 'A team' as even minor damage means a lengthy rest period and it is easy to get damaged. High level snipers are still ridiculously OP though (I have had my colonel sniper kill an entire reinforcement wave by himself in one overwatch thanks to the killzone skill).

 Silent Puffin? wrote:
Well I managed to finish that damn mission.

64 kills and 4 deaths, including my highest ranking heavy whose exo armour disappeared even though I carried her body to the extraction zone. I had 1 rookie get enough promotions to reach Sgt and then panicked in the final couple of rounds and ran outside the extraction zone so I was forced to leave him behind.
Not a single scrap of loot, a measly 2 advances and a roster full of gravely wounded troopers was all I got for that ridiculous mission. Don't let the UFO shoot you down!

Did you have a defense matrix? I have one built, but no UFO.
Which is fine I guess; I like having a precaution, even if it never really comes into play.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Did you have a defense matrix? I have one built, but no UFO.
Which is fine I guess; I like having a precaution, even if it never really comes into play.

No, this was fairly early in the campaign so I didn't have it researched. I also tried to evade but failed.

I didn't have much trouble with the UFO mission.



Most missions have groups of bad guys that patrol the map. I've come to the conclusion that if you're undercover, these patrols will invariably move directly toward you. This is despite the fact that the patrols have no clue that you're present. I'd had my suspicions. But what cemented it was the Alien Facility mission that I was running in which four patrols all "just happened" to simultaneously converge on the corner that my team had carefully advanced to - including two Sectopods, and an Andromedan (fortunately, I managed to take control of one of the Sectopods, which distracted three of the patrols, and I was up on a wide cliff top, which made it a bit harder for the Sectopods' patrols to reach me). If my conclusions are correct, then I'm disappointed.

Eumerin wrote:
I didn't have much trouble with the UFO mission.

When I got it my highest rank was Lt (both of whom died on the mission) and I had little in the way of research so no turrets nor upgraded weapons/armour. I could hold ground ok (after the initial huge wave at least, which included my first Berserker) but I couldn't advance due to the near constant reinforcement waves. I finally managed to get close to the objective but the group guarding it forced a retreat which hugely lengthened the mission. In the end I had to sacrifice my highest ranking ranger to bring it down after RNGesus frowned on me and I was unable to clear a wave in a single round so they began to overwhelm me.
54/63 kills (I was getting swarmed at the end) and 31 turns......
http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/311115421205733917/38DFEE827838F176F59B530D8D61D7A1EB0249BF/

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Did you have a defense matrix? I have one built, but no UFO.
Which is fine I guess; I like having a precaution, even if it never really comes into play.

No, this was fairly early in the campaign so I didn't have it researched. I also tried to evade but failed.

Ouch. I did the guerilla ops that stops it from happening, so no UFO for me I guess.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

Ouch. I did the guerilla ops that stops it from happening, so no UFO for me I guess.

I have had the event twice now, I managed to evade the second one. I also have a fully upgraded defense matrix, just in case

The avenger defens mission happened to me too today, having researched magnetic rifles and the upgrade for the shotgun my troops where Well armed...... I thouhght. Until the beserker came along