Pissed about an X-Com FPS? Firaxis hears ya...

[Amaron]

Squad sight is slightly OP.  I was on a realllly long map, with a good elevation point.   My squad infiltrated a UFO, and the crystal dude popped up.  My sniper who was about 5 screens away shot him, through a tiny doorway, and 2 other openings.

1. Never put your sniper on overwatch (well, not never, but don't just do it habitually) until the last action of your turn, you will get more options to use them if you keep them open

Actually there's one advantage to overwatching a sniper right away.  If you overwatch the sniper, she will instantly pop any revealed enemies before they can get into cover.  At least in normal it works since they don't go into cover until discovered.

[Xuri]

e: maybe a more interesting example is missing 5 75% shots in a row.  (1-p)^n means that for 1,000,000 samples about 1000 of those will miss all five consecutive shots...  It's easy to think it's a broken system but people really don't get math and then like to post about it in all-caps.

I'm aware that it works like this, but that doesn't mean I have to like it! ;P

[Mrbloodworth]

Dude. Assaults. I run them up in greys faces and double tap them. 


I have a question, maybe this got cut. But how can I, other than mouse, move around my base ( I thought it was more free moving than this in videos ), and also, previous videos shows you being able to zoom into the modules and see whats going on. Was that cut? Clicking on most things is just a list now.

[bhodi]

Weird, I ignored the +3 move perk. Why would I want a guy who's forward out of contact with the team? At least, until I get stealth suits, and even then, it's my assault class that is forward, since I run and gun directly in. Maybe i'll try it next game.

Mostly Yoru the squad sight helps because on a leapfrog, your snipers are in the back and when edge forward to trigger sight of a new unit, you can fire on it with your sniper who is already stationary, probably get a hit, and then have the option to back the guy off or rush forward. Otherwise, the enemies will get a turn to fire at your dudes before your sniper can get in it (except with a pistol...).

Far better to just move them last, move them up in a sprint if no one has seen an enemy yet.


It's just a list, I don't think you can move around the base.

[Mrbloodworth]

Huh, I distinctly recall zooming into some guy on a tread mill in an earlier video. Guess it got cut.

[Yoru]

Weird, I ignored the +3 move perk. Why would I want a guy who's forward out of contact with the team? At least, until I get stealth suits, and even then, it's my assault class that is forward, since I run and gun directly in. Maybe i'll try it next game.

I have the +3 move and 3x medkit perk on my medic support. It's great because it also applies to the initial movement radius, allowing your medic to move-and-medkit in a single turn over a wider area. I've had this save the lives of soldiers who got poisoned by a Thin Man while low on health. If it'd taken two turns to scoot over and heal, they'd've been dead.

[bhodi]

Okay, if it applies to the initial movement that's different. I read the perk as it increasing the run distance. There are a few descriptions that are very vague, like 'bullet swarm' which I just thought enabled 'fire and move' when actually allows you to fire twice in a round? I like holo-targeting but that one's a no-brainer if true. Mayhem "confers additional damage to suppression and all AE abilities"? What other AE abilities? Does that include rockets? grenades? How much damage? I took it, and turns out it adds 2 damage to everything. Phew.

Has anyone figured out how to use a grapple? I couldn't. It's also a shame the flying is janky as fuck, they really did a one-pass on mouse selection of tiles and shoved it through QA because it's basically broken if you're in a higher floor view than the base.

[Merusk]

Okay, if it applies to the initial movement that's different. I read the perk as it increasing the run distance. There are a few descriptions that are very vague, like 'bullet swarm' which I just thought enabled 'fire and move' when actually allows you to fire twice in a round? I like holo-targeting but that one's a no-brainer if true. Mayhem "confers additional damage to suppression and all AE abilities"? What other AE abilities? Does that include rockets? grenades? How much damage? I took it, and turns out it adds 2 damage to everything. Phew.

Has anyone figured out how to use a grapple? I couldn't. It's also a shame the flying is janky as fuck, they really did a one-pass on mouse selection of tiles and shoved it through QA because it's basically broken if you're in a higher floor view than the base.

Yeah +3 move is great for Support-Medics.  It was a no-brainer pickup for me for the reasons Yoru went in to. 

I have Holo Targeting on my Heavy and it's GLORIOUS. Particularly if he's suppressing someone that the sniper has a clear line of fire to.

I'll agree with BW on the Assaults being great for running up and wtfpwning people.    Saved my heavy's ass last night when the last Muton form the previous pack I mentioned was left with 4 health and flanking the heavy.  Run & Gun  -> POW IN THE FACE.  Dead Muton.

The Team synergy aspects of this are just FANTASTIC so long as you develop the squad and learn how to make them work with each other.  Much better than the original where 1-2 "super soliders" who'd lived forever and had uber stats would do all the heavy work and killing while the rest of your team would mop-up.

[Xilren's Twin]

I'll agree with BW on the Assaults being great for running up and wtfpwning people.    Saved my heavy's ass last night when the last Muton form the previous pack I mentioned was left with 4 health and flanking the heavy.  Run & Gun  -> POW IN THE FACE.  Dead Muton.

Had this bite me in the butt during my first base assault. Was in a long room with 4 troopers left and 1 floater left who was in run and gun range, so i ran up to him to max my hit percentage and right when i get there the fog of war revealed 3! chryssalids and 2 drones who promptly surrounded my poor guy.  He was able to still off the floater, but of course was killed and zombiefied immediately.  Which left me with 2 heavies and a sniper vs 6 ; if it hadn't been for the heavies ability to shoot twice in a turn, i would have been toast.  Finished the base clear with those 3 but lesson learned.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yeah, its a risky move, if you cant see beyond your target. But if you have two that can work in tandem, with a sniper backing them up... Its Rambo. No idea if this will work in the later game.

[kildorn]

Squad sight is slightly OP.  I was on a realllly long map, with a good elevation point.   My squad infiltrated a UFO, and the crystal dude popped up.  My sniper who was about 5 screens away shot him, through a tiny doorway, and 2 other openings.

1. Never put your sniper on overwatch (well, not never, but don't just do it habitually) until the last action of your turn, you will get more options to use them if you keep them open

Actually there's one advantage to overwatching a sniper right away.  If you overwatch the sniper, she will instantly pop any revealed enemies before they can get into cover.  At least in normal it works since they don't go into cover until discovered.

This is fine to do with Opportunist, which removes the aim penalty for overwatch shots. But in general don't do it (you can't double tap like that either). Squad Sight + double tap is brutal. Gunslinger and Double tap allows you to help out in a UFO breach party as well (the huge ones have shit outside sniping LOS)

[Amaron]

This is fine to do with Opportunist, which removes the aim penalty for overwatch shots.

You don't need opportunist with this method.  When the target is discovered it's not in cover.  If I don't use overwatch, they usually run out of LOS.

[kildorn]

You have a huge penalty to hit with overwatch is why. Taking a 20-30% penalty isn't usually worth it imo, they'll show back up in their next turn and you can take the overwatch shot then.

My snipers can't hit shit during overwatch without opportunist. What would be an 85% shot (in the open, long range) five dudes will reliably miss.

[Jobu]

SO FREAKING GOOD!      




Sadly poor Neil bought the farm shortly after taking that.

[Mrbloodworth]

R.I.P N.D.T.

[Kitsune]

I'm suspecting something may be wrong with my game.  I went through the opening mission, no problems.  Start the second mission, pick an easy one.  Land and the scientists start babbling about how the aliens have 'evolved again'.  Wait, what?  Again?  What do you mean, again?  That implies that they'd already evolved once before or something, and this is the second time we've ever seen them.

Then four aliens with like sixteen health each fly in and proceed to one-shot the entire team through cover from across the map.

[bhodi]

That... doesn't sound right!

Hmm, there's a patch being downloaded, I wonder what it did?

[bhodi]

So, I've become an unstoppable Juggernaut at the end of the game. In fact, I don't think I'm going to even finish this game since I roll through everything. I guess that's normal mode for you. I'll definitely have to replay in classic for a bit more difficulty, thin men went from terrifying to 'meh' even in the early game, since single shots were no longer fatal and I could kill them in one hit. I kind of wish there was a difficulty somewhere in the middle.

I really need to plan for my classic mode building plan this time though; I ended up doing poor planning on the satellite network and power system. I also think more workshops earlier would have been good, and I think I can probably ignore the laboratories as well. Everything seems gated through engineers, I'm not sure why you'd go the science route. Not having the early building is going to hurt. I think I'll probably go africa, and dump my second satellite in the US, start building 3 (if I can afford, otherwise 2), power, satellite station, then dump the 2 in south america for the research. Or, maybe just mix and match for maximum dollars. Definitely going for laser rifles first, though. So many choices!

One thing I do wonder, do they increase the monster numbers based on the number of guys you bring? Or are the 2 extra just gravy? If the numbers are static, I'll probably rush for more squaddies.

Edit: Someone suggested this as a start:
1. Base: Europe.
2. Build 2nd Satellite.
2. Build Workshop (this is why we're in Europe)
3. Build a 2nd Sat Comm adjacent to the first.
4. While Sat comm is building build 3 satellites.

[CmdrSlack]

It looks like my first playthrough may have hit a major snag.

I took a very hard abduction mission in Canada because it was the most critical fear level of my three options. I was all proud of my newly developed laser sniper rifles and pistols. I bring the majority of my A squad with a few rookies filling in the slots for my injured A-teamers.

And then the game decided to field three mutons. I have a feeling that my nigh-indestructible A-team may not make it out of this one, no matter how many reloads. The map has 3 thin men, 3 mutons, about 5 or six floaters, and an unknown quanity  of sectoids. All of my cover options are fucking cars and the mutons have plasma grenades.

This is on normal.

I may have to start a classic ironman game tonight and radicalthon it.

[bhodi]

It looks like my first playthrough may have hit a major snag.
And then the game decided to field three mutons. I have a feeling that my nigh-indestructible A-team may not make it out of this one, no matter how many reloads. The map has 3 thin men, 3 mutons, about 5 or six floaters, and an unknown quanity  of sectoids. All of my cover options are fucking cars and the mutons have plasma grenades.

This is on normal.

I may have to start a classic ironman game tonight and radicalthon it.

The way I handle unstoppable numbers (I once got 3 squads of mutons and 1 overseer in a small UFO) is to simply put everyone on overwatch out of range and then pull back your scout. If everyone is behind full cover with no sight lines (not on the edge) the enemies will advance up until they can see you, allowing them to get into assault range and for you to pepper them with reaction shots. It works pretty well, though it's fairly tedious. If you're on the overpass, you're pretty fucked. I hate that map so much; a narrow car-lined alley with no full cover and too much forward distance to move from car to car. You know if you have autosave on, you can load before you deploy and get a new map? That might be the way to go.

And all cars are bombs; whose bright idea was it to have cars do as much damage as alien grenades (6)? Totally dumb; they should do no more than 3 damage when they explode.

[Merusk]

I'm suspecting something may be wrong with my game.  I went through the opening mission, no problems.  Start the second mission, pick an easy one.  Land and the scientists start babbling about how the aliens have 'evolved again'.  Wait, what?  Again?  What do you mean, again?  That implies that they'd already evolved once before or something, and this is the second time we've ever seen them.

Then four aliens with like sixteen health each fly in and proceed to one-shot the entire team through cover from across the map.

Yeah theres... a few bugs.   Like last night my game paused on the graveyard map for a second and suddenly there were 6 floaters that spawned right on top of my team after I moved the 2nd char.  Not near.. RIGHT ON TOP, and then the game ended my turn and destroyed my team.   I reloaded and it didn't' happen again so it was a definite bug.   Glad I opted not to do Ironman.

[Murgos]

Sadly poor Neil bought the farm shortly after taking that.

Einstein should totally have snowy white Guile hair.

[CmdrSlack]

It looks like my first playthrough may have hit a major snag.
And then the game decided to field three mutons. I have a feeling that my nigh-indestructible A-team may not make it out of this one, no matter how many reloads. The map has 3 thin men, 3 mutons, about 5 or six floaters, and an unknown quanity  of sectoids. All of my cover options are fucking cars and the mutons have plasma grenades.

This is on normal.

I may have to start a classic ironman game tonight and radicalthon it.

The way I handle unstoppable numbers (I once got 3 squads of mutons and 1 overseer in a small UFO) is to simply put everyone on overwatch out of range and then pull back your scout. If everyone is behind full cover with no sight lines (not on the edge) the enemies will advance up until they can see you, allowing them to get into assault range and for you to pepper them with reaction shots. It works pretty well, though it's fairly tedious. If you're on the overpass, you're pretty fucked. I hate that map so much; a narrow car-lined alley with no full cover and too much forward distance to move from car to car. You know if you have autosave on, you can load before you deploy and get a new map? That might be the way to go.

And all cars are bombs; whose bright idea was it to have cars do as much damage as alien grenades (6)? Totally dumb; they should do no more than 3 damage when they explode.

This is a new map to me. It's a bar and grill with a large parking lot. Fortunately, my godlike sniper has the "toss the camera" skill, so I managed to spot the asspounding before stumbling upon it. I may have to send my crazy Aussie assault soldier in to lure the mutons back into sniper and heavy fire overwatch doom. The big problem is that the hard cover is very limited as the building is about 75% of the map.

EDIT -- I may have to move up the western edge, take out the thin men and breach the building, effectively flanking the mutons and floaters.

Man, I love this game. So excited to have a weekend here where I can play for hours. Bonus points since my kid is enjoying it as well.

[koro]

Well, after six Classic games where I couldn't get past even the first month, my seventh is doing absolutely stellar by comparison.


Of course, now the game's starting to really lay it on me. I'm getting almost nothing but terror missions now.

[kildorn]

Yeah, last night I had three instances of a pack of aliens just spawning in the middle of my units. Not the usual thin man scripted spawn, just "three floaters.. NOW!" and sectoids and whatnot spawning in a location they couldn't possibly have moved to(well behind my sweep and clear, etc)

The last mission also bugged out on me in my normal game. It's supposed to spawn some stuff to open the way, never does. I had to wiki how the mission is supposed to play out because I couldn't figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.

[Murgos]

That... doesn't sound right!

Hmm, there's a patch being downloaded, I wonder what it did?

From the 2K forums:

Hi all,

We wanted to let you know the details for the PC update for XCOM: Enemy Unknown that went live today (10/11/12). I've included the notes on this patch below:

Various visibility/hiding optimizations
Multiplayer text chat support (press J to activate)
Mouse button 4/5 will switch soldiers in the Barracks
ESC hides the movement grid, if you do not want to commit to a move while it is activated
Squad Sight ability optimization
Fixed issue when equipping two grenades with Deep Pockets.
Fixed Rapid Fire sometimes consuming too much ammo.
SHIVs that are damaged will no longer become unusable.
Fixed some hangs/soft crashes in tactical combat.
Replaced software cursor with the operating system cursor to reduce lag and framerate dependence.
Fixed rendering bug which causes some soldier’s hair to appear as if it is rendering on top of environment fog.
1080p movies are now used at all times on the PC.

[Murgos]

Huh, I distinctly recall zooming into some guy on a tread mill in an earlier video. Guess it got cut.

No, Jake Solomon definitely does it in the Gamespot Quicklook video on youtube.  He zooms in to look at the commanders swank office, which is not something that's clickable.

I tried, I couldn't find any key combination that does it.  It seems silly to take something like that out unless it was buggy and causing crashes.

[bhodi]

Huh, I distinctly recall zooming into some guy on a tread mill in an earlier video. Guess it got cut.

No, Jake Solomon definitely does it in the Gamespot Quicklook video on youtube.  He zooms in to look at the commanders swank office, which is not something that's clickable.

I tried, I couldn't find any key combination that does it.  It seems silly to take something like that out unless it was buggy and causing crashes.

Your prayers are answered! 2gb patch:

Various visibility/hiding optimizations
Multiplayer text chat support (press J to activate)
Mouse button 4/5 will switch soldiers in the Barracks
ESC hides the movement grid, if you do not want to commit to a move while it is activated
Squad Sight ability optimization
Fixed issue when equipping two grenades with Deep Pockets.
Fixed Rapid Fire sometimes consuming too much ammo.
SHIVs that are damaged will no longer become unusable.
Fixed some hangs/soft crashes in tactical combat.
Replaced software cursor with the operating system cursor to reduce lag and framerate dependence.
Fixed rendering bug which causes some soldier’s hair to appear as if it is rendering on top of environment fog.
1080p movies are now used at all times on the PC.

There are a bunch of things not mentioned, and one of them is that you can now zoom in and out of the base with the scrollwheel.

[Amaron]

You have a huge penalty to hit with overwatch is why.

A 30% penalty is offset by them having zero cover.  It's a flanking shot which gives a big bonus.

[Mrbloodworth]

So I'm not crazy! ( About that, at least. )

[koro]

Bah, have to rename a new set of movies to stop the HORRIBLY LOUD AND UNSKIPPABLE splash screens on startup now.

[calapine]

Bah, have to rename a new set of movies to stop the HORRIBLY LOUD AND UNSKIPPABLE splash screens on startup now.

I think you should be able to disable them by commenting-out the relevant lines in XComEngine.ini:

StartupMovies=Logo_2KFiraxis
StartupMovies=UE3TechLogo
StartupMovies=LogoLegal_PCConsole

[Shannow]

Is there anything in particular I can do to make sure a squaddie is promoted to sniper? I have a bunch of assaults , heavies , 2 supports and no snipers!

I also love the fact that grenades are actually useful in this game vs original xcom.

[Merusk]

Kill all the others and whisper softly at the machine. "See, you should have been a sniper, then you'd still be alive, motherfucker."   Eventually the rest of the squad will let the rookie know.

[lamaros]

Squad sight is slightly OP.  I was on a realllly long map, with a good elevation point.   My squad infiltrated a UFO, and the crystal dude popped up.  My sniper who was about 5 screens away shot him, through a tiny doorway, and 2 other openings.

1. Never put your sniper on overwatch (well, not never, but don't just do it habitually) until the last action of your turn, you will get more options to use them if you keep them open

Actually there's one advantage to overwatching a sniper right away.  If you overwatch the sniper, she will instantly pop any revealed enemies before they can get into cover.  At least in normal it works since they don't go into cover until discovered.

Yeah, this is sometimes true (why I said not never), but because this is entirely random it is often better to be in a position to choose. Such overwatch shots are taken at a penalty, and might not be on the unit you need to target or any number of other things. They might also double up with other overwatch shots from your other units. What good is having two snipers reaction shot a sectiod that was within spitting distance of your assault guy already when there's a muton revealed later in the turn that might kill your other units?

So yeah, there are some times that it is useful, but as a general rule it's not smart play because you are ceding control of your decisions and acting habitually. If you have any desire to take it to the hardest difficulties this won't work, every decision needs to be reasoned.