XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Nope, its usually just a scripted drop.

And Classic Ironman can be done, you can make it past a wipe.

I preferred not to care if it could be done and just went for a rebalancing mod.

I'd like to see a mod that removes the stupid panic cascades

Well, that's helped a bit by some rebalance mods adding bonuses to will either by promotions or by the equipment being used, as well as The Second Wave randomizing beginning stats so that you can get some people with higher Will.

One of the mods lowers the chance of shooting your own teammate, which i think is the big culprit.

I've tested 30 soldiers for psi powers now and haven't found one yet. I've got tons of rookies though!

it's more than the escort mission, the aliens drop whenever you reach the VIP in the escort mission, but in bomb mission, the alien will drop when you disable the primary bomb as well. the aliens they drop are always thin men no matter how far you are in the story. so usually it's a slaughter in late game..

I usually average about one Psi-capable soldier for every five in the barracks. Very high Will (100+) have always been Psi-capable for me, but I've had a bunch of high-90's troopers that weren't.

I've also had plenty of 70's guys who were, so Will isn't everything.

Someone picked apart the code, apparently if you already have some psi guys, then it's harder to get more.

Lame. I really don't like how they stacked the odds for this and other things in the game.

Totally. The squaddie upgrade basically gets rid of the problems with unit distributions, because you can just hire a ton of new guys and then only use the ones you want, but none of it really makes the game better. Just let things play out how they do.

I just finished my second game on Normal Ironman. Why on Earth do they not keep those stats somewhere for you to compare to your prior games or provide you with a high score detail for those stats?

Yo - I might have done real stupid. So, you guys said go capture all the shit you can capture because it's like Pokemon and you want one of each because interrogations is like mad crazy informatives, right? So I got a couple of Sectoids in one mission and that was good, and then the next mission was a landed UFO. I was trying to get a Thin Man, but he jumped up on top of the ship and I wasn't going to try to chase that, so I just had one of my snipers blow his head off, but then the Outsider inside the ship popped and I could jsut run up to him and taze him so I did. And accidentally completed an objective I didn't even have yet. Now the next mission I have to go on is the first appearance of Chrysalids and I ain't even flown my third satellite and zombies have ten hit points which is about five more than what I can expect with one shot from just about anybody. How bad did I screw up?

Good question. I fought my first chrysalids in a terror mission with just regular weapons and the moderate health and armor upgrades you get early, and it sucked. Crucial to my survival were supports who'd just gotten the x3 heals along with their fast movement and the snipers, and I also got lucky in that most of the civilian kills happened offscreen so they didn't zombie.
You'll probably be fine, though.

Terror missions can go south pretty easily even if you have decent gear if you're not familiar with how enemies spawn and what they tend to do. Once you've fought a bunch of Terror missions, they're pretty manageable even with starting gear. The main thing you need to get a handle on is figuring out what positions your team will probably take each turn, then moving the soldier who's most likely to trigger a spawn first so everyone else has full movement to deal with it. Knowing what will probably trigger a spawn is the part that mostly comes with experience.

For example, I'll often have an Assault Run&Gun to a spot in cover to rescue a nearby civilian as my first move. That tends to trigger a spawn, and everyone has moves to deal with it. It may seem risky, but most aliens are going to be gunning for civilians. Once that first spawn is taken care of, you have some breathing room to figure out the safest way to get to the other nearby civilians.

The movement tactics are not that different in non-Terror missions, but you don't have the time constraints forcing you to take risks.

Why can't XCOM make body armour from the same stuff it uses for the walls of the alien containment chamber?

Why can't they make airplanes out the same stuff they make the black box out of? AMIRITE?

Speaking of which, I know I turned the tutorial off and somewhere around the third hour it would have told me to do this, but it might have been nice to know that I'm supposed to make airplanes in the hanger and not in the foundry or the workshop. Because now I have to replay basically a day of stuff because I lost satellites (and, subsequently, Mexico, because they lost their shit when I didn't scramble jets the second they reported trouble with a satellite and subsequently pulled out a couple of days later) not because I couldn't defend them, but because I didn't know how to build new airplanes and thought that I was just stuck at two until I hit one story beat or another. So, you know, eat a dick, game.

On the other hand, I'm apparently doing a decent job at this. I mean, I survived my first encounter with Chryssalids with no fatalities. I captured the first Muton I ran into. I have, in fact, captured one of everything at this point except for a Chryssalid and a Zombie, and I think both of those might just be uncapturable. My base layout is a whole bag of ass (my steam pocket is all the way down on the bottom right, so I'm having to bootstrap some power solutions on the way, and I haven't uncovered the Satellite Nexus yet, which I probably ought to research once I get the benefit that makes researching alien flight technology quicker, so as to more efficiently get satellites up around the globe) and I'm still kicking it with basically starting guns, but I'm kind of not seeing the disadvantage just now. My snipers still eat people up. I can one-shot a zombie if I Critical with just a regular ass sniper rifle. The Assault Rifles leave something to be desired, but as long as I get three or four people an open shot, I can take anything up to a Floater down in one turn, and for bigger stuff, that's what Grenades and missiles are for, right? Maybe I accidentally put the game on easy. I thought I told it to start on normal, but this second go with no tutorial is much, much easier (aside from the aforementioned lost day of play that I'll have to make up now that I know where baby airplanes come from).

I do wish that the game would tell me what environment I'm \heading into before the mission starts, though. That way I could swap out snipers for heavies if I know I'm going to be doing a map with lots of corners and no sight lines.

"I never finished the tutorial and the game didn't tell me where to build an airplane."

Right, because there's no button called Hangar up at the top or anything.

As for environment... wait, what? Seriously? I didn't know it was possible for anyone to want more handholding than the people who actually wanted the game to tell them they had line of sight from a target square before even having to move, but it looks like it is possible.

What's funny about that is that if you let the landing animation play, you can see the environment without fog of war and sometimes spot the UFO.

But even so, it's not particularly hard. Just move... forward.

I don't really think either of those requests are "handholding." The LOS thing is just good sense (most SRPGs I've ever played accomplish it by letting you roll back your move, which is something I'm surprised isn't in here on non-Ironman modes) and knowing what map you're going to be on is kind of also informed by my experience in SRPGs where you'll want to optimize your team for the map you're heading into, and there are particular kinds of maps in the game that can dramatically limit the usability of at least one of the character types (Snipers). It's nothing you can't work around, but I think it takes some of the opportunity for optimization out of the game when I have to always assume there's a significant chance that the map I'm heading into could be full of big buildings that provide lots of cover and short eyelines. It doesn't break the game or anything - it's just nice to have, in no small part because I find myself wishing that my Shotgun guy had an Assault Rifle or my Assault Rifle guy had a Shotgun when I end up on maps that are heavily tilted one way or the other. I'd use a shotgun a hell of a lot more often if I knew when I was going to be on a map where I spend most or all of my time inside structures.

The airplanes thing is just a design squirk that may only apply to me. When you go to Make Items in your Engineers you see two tabs - one that is open by default with regular gear for people-shaped things and one that has a little airplane on it that also happens to contain a multi-day project that you have to start pretty damn early to build a satellite, which is an enclosed device that flies around. To me, that implies that you build the vehicles out of the Engineer menu and you only move them around in the Hangar menu. I mean, I learned it and now I know it and it's not a problem - it's just an inconsistency between that approach (which is more in-line with how you recruit soldiers) and what I feel like the system is telling me the first time I look at the airplane tab in the Engineer menu. I can definitely understand the thinking that led the design to work this way (in essence, planes are like people) - I just got a mixed message about that early on when I made my first flying machine out of the Engineer menus. So far as UI flubs in complex strategy games implemented to consoles go, that kind of thing is so very minor that it wouldn't be worth mentioning if everything else wasn't done pretty much right.

It's possible that you're the biggest dickhead on this board. I haven't done a scientific study or anything, but if I had to lay money today, you would be my bet. Like Brian said, it can definitely be confusing because the second tab in Engineering has a picture of an airplane on it. Also, I don't know why you would expect someone to think that the place to go to build an airplane is the "hangar." Airplanes don't get built in hangars, any more than cars get built in parking spaces. Why you think someone would intuitively know that although equipment, tanks, and satellites all get built by engineers, airplanes (which would naturally fall in the middle of that list) get built by hangars, is beyond me.

It's all just a question of where you draw arbitrary gameplay lines in terms of how much information the player has before making a decision. They could have given you less (e.g. not told you the difficulty of the mission before going; not telling you what type of mission it will be; or not showing you what moves will be a "dash" versus a regular move before you move) or they could have given you more. These are just totally arbitrary decisions and the game could work just fine with more, less or the same player information both pre-misison and during the mission. Your absurd facepalming when someone says the game would be better with more information is pretty ridiculous. Although the game works fine as-is, Brian's right that you would get more use out of the variety of equipment, and have more interesting pre-mission decisions to make, if you were told what type of map you were going into. On the downside, though, you would lose the element of having to adapt to what you find. It's similar to the way the game does not allow you to pick soldier classes: on the one hand that can be annoying because it takes away interesting choices and control the player could have, but on the other hand it forces the player to adapt to whatever situation the game hands you.

And of course, you do build planes in Engineering eventually (which is a huge PITA with the way that works with hangars).

Yeah, I don't understand that at all. Who thought that was a fun way to manage your fleets?

Yeah you make that known every time you're wrong.

Try clicking on stuff. I hear that's how you make shit happen in video games with mouse cursors and buttons. Or finish the tutorial. Or open the UFOpaedia.

Except Brian wants to be fed this information instead of piecing together the simple facts that:

Terror missions, escorts, bomb defuse, and abductions occur on urban terrain with a mix of open and closed sightlines
Downed UFOs occur in swamps and forests, always
Bigger UFOs are always a mix of open forest with tight UFO spaces depending on UFO size

This information does not need to be spoonfed to anyone actually playing the game. How appropriate your equipment choice is based mostly on experienced predictions and a little bit of luck, the way it's meant to be, and the way it was originally.

The kicker is that it doesn't even matter, since with proper strategy you can use any mix of soldiers to your advantage.

And I don't facepalm. You should look carefully at what you're writing, because you're content with basically just saying "oh if it were like this, then it'd be like this, but if it were like that, then it would just be like that." Well, it isn't, because Jake Solomon is better than you at this shit, so get over it.

I have had squads wiped out completely because my advance scout ran forward two squares too far and stumbled into a giant clusterfuck of doom. I shudder to think what sort of rebalancing they'd have to do to make the game even more unforgiving because players know in advance what flavor of terrain they'd be facing. I'm not so sure picking up an extra heavy and dropping a sniper is all that interesting a choice to make, anyway.

I kind of have to agree here. If someone can't easily figure out this game, they need to go back playing solitaire.

Not to get into people's slapfights here but as I understood it you got interceptors via the hanger because you were buying them, not building them. The ones you build do come via engineering.

There's no tutorial for the whole "you don't have interceptors in X area" problem, but if you're playing on Normal your "tutorial" is being caught flat-footed, at which point you'll be in the hanger screen momentarily going "fuck fuck fuck, 3 days?"

So... could theoretically have been better tutorialized, but by no means a notable shortcoming.

I'm pretty sure the game warns you if you launch a satellite in a region where you don't have an interceptor, so there is that, but the game does a pretty poor job explaining why that's a bad thing. It was particularly tricky if you'd played the original game where you could intercept from anywhere to anywhere as long as you had the fuel. Early interceptors had limited range from their launch base, but Firestorms could cover half of the planet. Interceptions being region-locked is wonky, too. If a UFO starts in Russia and flies to Japan, you can still only intercept from Europe.

Actually, it might just warn you if you put an interceptor in a region where you don't have satellite coverage. I don't remember which, but I know I took a hit in my first game by not knowing I had to move an interceptor to the region where I'd launched my second satellite.

Again, your conflating knowledge one gets from playing the game a bunch with some sort of skill at playing game. Those are two separate things, and all it does is advantage the guy who's played a bunch. (In a shooter, it's the comparison of a guy who memorizes a map vs. a guy who's a good shot or good at using the weapons in the game)

By giving away the knowledge that is gained by playing repeatedly, all that is really lost is the time that is involved for the new person to learn that, every UFO mission for some reason always gets shot down in an open area. (Something I wish they had more variety on)

Skill is irrelevant.

Resistance is futile.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.

Anyone else watching Beaglerush's Xcom videos? I think he does a great job in showing off the title, especially running an Ironman Impossible game.

That's my favorite LP series at the moment. I used to watch XCOM streams, but this well-edited, condensed format he's put together is *far* better. He goes straight for the highlights while providing humor and insight into tactics.

Beaglerush: Back at the cover team, prepare for your first XCOM drinking game. Take a shot every time Oakley misses one.
*Oakley misses a shot*
Oakley: Shot failed to connect.
Beaglerush: Don't worry Oakley, people are connecting shots with their mouths as we speak.

Made me imagine Beaglerush tilting back for a glam cam, slow-motion 100% hit, 100% critical glass of liquor inching up to his mouth.

I actually glossed over that, not because I thought the warning was inadequate but because it happened in a place in the early game where perplexing warnings were filed by my brain under aintnobodygottimeforthat.gif. But 10-20 minutes later when you get the UFO-detected-no-interceptor-in-range part, you're pretty much going to learn how interceptors work immediately. I assume that panic hit sucks more on classic but on Normal it's just like an unkind form of tutorial.

Jesus. Because this is an argument worth having. You are correct that it tells you that you don't have any airplanes, but the first time it did that, when I was trying to do the tutorial that was making me lose a bunch for no good reason, I never noticed that there was an option to build airplanes. There was, however, an option to transfer them, and since I had two, that's what I did. I am unsure whether that is because I was distracted, stupid, and not paying enough attention to the menu I was in, or if the tutorial does that deliberately, the same way it pointlessly greys out a bunch of other choices that seem to me to have even less to do with the actual prosecution of the game (like picking your starting area). So, while Admiral Sweaterman kept yammering at me about how I didn't have any airplanes, I figured that was because I just didn't know how to make airplanes, and these things were supposed to get shot down because that's the way this particular game wants to treat you. And what happened is exactly what you describe - after I totally lost Mexico to a very poorly timed shoot-down-then-panic, I found it so very hard to believe that this was on purpose that I went to the Hangar anyway and started twisting knobs and pulling levers. And then I found the "buy some planes" option. And then I backed up a few game days so that I could actually buy some planes. I still learned it, so it's not like it's some sort of game breaking bug - it's just pretty damn unkind for you to do that to your players.

Which, of course, is still dumb, because in the entire game, it is the only piece of metal that you go out and buy from somewhere else, at least so far as I've gotten. You get any weapons and armor that you don't have to get built by your engineers in engineering for free. When you want satellites you have to order them from engineering. I imagine that when I complete this foundry project and get the option to make a better airplane, I'll probably have to order it from engineering, because they'll have to put it in the queue and build it out. I suppose I should ask whether you can actually buy another Flying Mongoose or whatever the VTOL APC is that your guys go in from the hangar too, because I didn't see an option, but there's a line item on my monthly budget specifically for the upkeep of that thing, which makes me think that maybe I can get more than one and then I don't have all these entire continents losing their shit on me on account of I only have enough seating space to stop the aliens from doing butt stuff on one out of three continents per Synchronized Ass Data Operative Mobilization Event.

I'm actually finding the game to be mostly flawless, with no real, super big, major concerns. Except for one. Yo - Line of Sight needs some work. Specifically, I need to know why I can't shoot at a guy from where I am. Whether that's a little red line that shows me the crown of the mausoleum in the middle of the map sticking up just enough that it obstructs my line of fire or unit blindness or what. The reason being that in a game mostly concerned with tactics and strategy, it's pretty hard to make intelligent tactical and strategic decisions when you never really know whether or not a dude in a particular square is going to be able to see around that tree, or the corner of that building, or over that gentle slope up. That's the only real, actual, significant, really-ought-to-be-fixed problem I've run into thus far.