I'll see when I get to mutons then. I'm late on getting the first arc thrower so maybe I changed up the pacing, no idea.
I gotta say, the laser rifles are a lot more fun to watch than plasma rifles. Especially if they miss and blow an enormous hole out of the fucking wall.
Some modding achieves that. Removing ammo consumption from lasers makes them a bit more interesting to use for anyone that focuses on suppression. Other than doing something like that, plasmas just aren't very interesting, and I don't really see the reason for 3 tiers of them.
...Heavy plasma is for Heavy squad members only, isn't it? My impression was there was Rifle Jr, Rifle, Sniper, Heavy, meaning the only extra was "rifle jr.," which was more of a nod to balance so there'd be a crummy-but-still-plasma weapon for the early-game aliens.
You're right, I forgot it was only light plasma rifles and plasma rifles for everyone else (and plasma sniper of course).
Don't forget the +10 accuracy bonus for light plasma rifles. They're particularly useful in the hands of rookies, who need every aim bonus they can get.
I forget, did the original x-com have a thing where you could send your soldiers to do non-psi 'training', that would take them out of action, but up their stats afterwards? This would be nice to have (or an upgrade in the officer school), as late game, new soldiers are just awful.
Scope + close range can generally get them kills though, and at that point you have armor to keep it from feeling like Ensign Ricky tactics. I wouldn't really bother downgrading from Plasma Rifle to Light Plasma for the +10 - I found one of the "late game rookie" problems was having enough weapon damage and +crit so that the rookie would get the kill and not just wound enemies with non-crits.
I'm kind of curious as to how people gain levels. I've never seen someone level up for a missed or hit shot, so I'm assuming maybe you get a flat rate from doing missions? I can't imagine you only get xp for a kill.
I'll give new Supports Light Plasma Rifles until they get a few ranks under their belts since they're carrying Medkits, but yeah, Plasma Rifles with a Scope work fine for new Assaults. I don't generally give shotguns to Assaults until I have Alloy Shotguns and they have Rapid Fire. They definitely get experience just from going on missions, but advancement to the upper ranks is going to be crazy slow if they're not getting kills.
I think the tentative notion is that it's kills + missions + ill-defined bonuses for very successful missions, on the basis that you never see a battlefield promotion for anything other than a kill, whereas even if it was a much smaller amount for, say, healing or damaging enemies, you'd think you'd very occasionally see a battlefield promotion for one. The idea of bonuses is I'm assuming because 0-casualty alien-stomps seem to be the ones where you see a lot of promotions. Grain of salt with that maybe.
Might have been mentioned already but this Warspace Extension Mod seems like a beast of a balance mod, made specifically for Classic Ironman. Two item slots on "heavy" armors, reworked skill trees, better handling of the definitions of wounded and critically injured (and longer recovery rates), better Will/Panic stuff, trade-offs between lasers and plasmas, some more defense for smaller aliens (and less for bigger ones), etc etc.
While your dudes were assigned to combat training and not injured, they would increase their combat stats over time.
Much obliged, Elyscape, xanomon and Calistas! Welcome into XCOM, lads. Don't ask about the red stains on the inside of your carapace armour suits...
I'm starting to question the value of any shotgun, even the Alloy Shotgun. The Alloy Shotgun does awesome damage, but Plasma Rifle also does pretty good damage in the point-blank run-and-gun+rapid-fire situation where you're likely to use the Alloy Shotgun. I'm certainly not saying the Alloy is bad, but I'm starting to question is it really worth giving up all that range just for the extra damage on those close up assaults?
Doesn't the shotgun have a higher chance to critical hit? Relevant for an Assault trooper that took a lot of the +crit chance perks maybe?
For later-game tougher enemies like Etherials and Muton Elites, being able to run up to them and pretty much guarantee that they won't get another turn is worth it. Obviously sniping them is preferable, but you don't often have that option in ships. I will sometimes swap out the Alloy Cannon for a Plasma Rifle on Terror or Council missions, though.
I heard an interview with JaSo in which he said it was kills plus a little for completing a mission. They excluded things like healing because it was too easy to game.
I'm loving this game! I didn't have the guts to actually check the iron man mode option, but I have been playing it as if it were iron man (except for 1 hiccup really early on). I've now gotten to the point where I have psionics and need a strong psionic on my team. Last night I had a pretty catastrophic mission, completed the mission with 4 dead, including the only psionic i've found so far. I hope i'm not screwed!
If you're in dire need of a psionic and have cash to burn, you can just keep hiring rookies and putting them through the psi testing. They have roughly half the chance of a colonel to test positive, but all that means is that it'll take more time and money. Also, the officer school upgrade that increases will per level makes for really, really strong psi soldiers (along with increasing the chance a highly promoted soldier ends up actually being one).
The Will bonus also applies to those free soldiers you get from some missions, so you can net a high-ranking, strong-willed, potentially psionic character by taking them.
A few interesting tidbits: 1. Patch #2 is out, and per the official forums, there's been at least one unannounced fix (in addition to the official changelog) -- the new rookies HP bug is no more. This bug meant that all rookies hired after the game had begun (i.e. not including your starting 12) had the same beginning health they would have had on Easy, irrespective of your actual difficulty level. In my Classic game, this meant my new hires were starting off with 6 rather than 4 health. Oh well; nice while it lasted! 2. Supposedly, on Easy and Normal, "the game literally cheats for you" -- if you have four or fewer soldiers, the game will rig the dice your way! (The discussion is from a couple of weeks back, but it came as news to me!) Glad you're having fun, MonkeyPunky! I'm not quite as far as you (psionics are still a ways off in my game), but I wonder -- could SHIVs be a partial solution? After all, they can't be mind-controlled, they're more capable than a rookie/squaddie, and if you have enough alloys, elerium, and cash, you can just keep spamming them. In any case, good luck and keep us posted!
A question on probability. I was discussing with a friend things he would do differently for Xcom, and he stated, he would've preferred that Xcom not use percentages, but instead something like a D20 system. His theory was as follows: What do you guys think? I'm not sure it's necessary, though I do believe that for any end-user interaction, percentages are the better way to go, as that's more likely what people are computing in their head when they learn they need to roll higher than 10 on a D20.
It's a good effort at rationalization, but still bullshit. Not only from a math perspective, but especially since the underlying random number generator in a computer is directly computing your "d20 roll" from a 0.0-1.0 range -- i.e. percentages. Which is to say that there is no difference between the two, barring a bug in the random functions which is pretty damn unlikely.
I are slow at games and now started this today. So how long is the tutorial? I ask because choices keep showing up grayed out, but I am definitely in charge of my destiny in other respects (like on the field, where I accidentally got my assault trooper murdered by a door not being in a particularly visible place on that first crashed spaceship mission). I'm assuming that, as soon as I can, I need to bail out of this balanced approach and focus on exploiting some narrow slice of talents and gear, but I'm going to be super pissed if the game takes the training wheels off when I'm not looking and I screw myself that way. Also, how come I can't pick three of the starting areas? Because that Africa bonus actually sounded pretty baller, but it was red, which is the universal symbol for "disabled for the tutorial." The game part of the game is pretty good, though. I assume at some point it will become slightly less chess-like (right now, just about everybody dies in one or two shots), but even this way is pretty cool when it works all good. I like hitting criticals on a 45% shot and exploding the mans' little heads.
The most important thing to know about the tutorial is that it's really bad. I have almost no experience in these games, but when I restarted in regular mode I was a much happier person. If you're playing on normal, there are a bunch of different ways to set your priorities early on without boning yourself. The hardest part is understanding the relationship between things you do and things you have access to. Engineers allow you to build almost everything that matters. Targeting engineers as rewards in early missions is often a good idea. I usually built a workshop or two if engineers proved scarce or if I needed to plan missions around panic levels instead. Dissections and interrogations substantially improve your access to new technology. Get the tech that allows you to taze aliens early, apply to <4 health aliens, and win. The holding cell gives you the capacity to interrogate them, but it also gets you intact weapons that you can use once you get the tech. Scientists are less important. In general, one main strategic arc I didn't grasp early is placing satellites which reduces panic at launch (giving you a way to do so in places you haven't had a mission yet). Reldan earlier said that given the delays incurred by production, you often need to have the plans for this month's launch in place before the 9th of each month if you expect to get paid for them by next month.
Fucking locked temple ship doors. Can't find any stray bad guys and I rifted and missled the doors. Shit in a bucket.
Man. You ain't joking. That tutorial does suck ass. For some reason it will only let you pick two of the five starting areas and when I restarted and played some on my own, I've already done much, much better than the game. Even if you don't count the three guys that get waxed in the first tutorial mission, I lost two dudes through the first ship crash, while on my own I've lost zero dudes thus far. There's one nation with a slightly elevated panic level (three) which I'll put a satellite over as soon as I finish clearing out space to put a satellite uplink and, you know, build one. Because I already have an extra satellite. What's the deal with dudes falling in from the sky in the terriblest places, though? I was doing an escort and I had just parked two of my dudes on top of a building and a Thin Man just flies in out of the sky like Superman and goes into Overwatch. With one of my dudes literally three steps behind him. I mean, I exploited it (recruit got his first kill, though I really didn't need a third sniper at this point), but that seems a little dumb.
I don't know if I'd call them "scripted missions," but in all the escort missions waves of aliens beam down at various points. I hope (but can't tell) that they are time-based, in other words, the longer it takes you to get out the more aliens you have to face. On another note, fuck Classic Ironman. It is just so, so easy to lose everything on one mission where things go south due to some unlucky stuff. I don't know how anyone manages to finish. It's really too bad, because certain things about Classic (patrolling aliens, harder strategic game) I really love, but I just can't put up with their constant across-the-map-crit-instakills or tons-of-dudes-at-once stuff that sometimes happens by blind luck and demolishes you.
