XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Is it important to have more then one person who is Psi capable? I am playing my first game now and my super squad of 6 Colonels has exactly one person who is psionic. I am getting close to the end I think, the big alien battleship is parked off South america and I am building the chamber to activate the etherial device.

It's not strictly necessary, but it is pretty nice to have a few Psi soldiers. I haven't beat the game on Impossible, but muton elites have low will and you can hit them with the psi attack more easily than a shot if they have high cover. It is also nice for psi inspiration since you won't have to rely on 1 user to remove panic.

On the higher difficulty levels, it's extremely useful to have more than one person with the Psi Inspiration ability, particularly to negate enemy mind control.

I didn't realize it applied to everyone, I thought it just applied to the psionic doing the mind controlling. If that was the case it makes perfect sense to me. If you're inside someones mind when they are killed it should inflict a morale penalty, regardless of if they are the enemy or not.

So what are you supposed to do with mind-controlled enemies? Wait until the mind control runs out, then kill them?

If it's the last one, basically, yeah. Have them stand around somewhere where there's no cover. You can also get them to throw their grenade at themselves, if they have one.

I really like the auto-grenade. Now if only my classic team could survive to the stage where psionics are an issue.

Scout with them, usually you'll uncover more enemies, and hopefully you kill one or two of them and they kill your mind-controlled scout. Running into the middle of a group and dropping a grenade at your feet is sublime. "Warning: Friendly Fire?" Oh yes, my friend. That will be just fine.

It was pretty hilarious when I killed the boss that way. I didn't think all the rest would just poof. I honorarily renamed that Muton Elite Randy posthumously. In my imagination.



So, those numbers the system just barfs uncontrollably at you after you win - the first one on all of those pages is broken, right? Because in each case my value was somewhere in the ten to twenty thousand at best and it was showing hundreds of thousands. That's, like, a running world total and not an average, right? Or do I really suck just that much?

Also hilarious - despite my early turtling strategy, I finished right about on average, as all the stuff in the back half of the game just whizzed by.

I just finished it today, and all those guys in the last room going away when you kill the right one was pretty much a let down to the anticipation. And I made it worse by waiting for the baddies to come through the choke point of a door, i.e., the kill chute or whatever you call the thing cattle are hustled through to become steak.

I had 4 guys fanned out with a sniper in the convenient sniper-down-an-alley medium cover there. Had to finish off one of my snipers who'd been turned. Overwatch everyone 3-4 turns then one come through, sniper blammo, cut scene and roll credits.

One annoying bug was I got a heavy in arcangel armor hovering above the center of the main floor but he couldn't move. Couldn't turn off the jets either. So he sat out two fights. Didn't think I was going to make it.

You've got to be right. And maybe it's only successfully completed games for the difficulty level you've chosen.

I know everyone was complaining about the warping enemies, but it's totally ridiculous and on a whole nother level on Impossible. On the smaller levels it's near impossible to fight without activating tons of enemies who will kill you. This is particularly difficult in the early stage (where I'm at). I have found I need to retreat from the starting area in order to move to a more defensible position.

I thought I was going to but eh, three Council missions and that's it? Council missions are already not the best part of the game, and three of them doesn't seem like a lot of content even if it does come with a new unique soldier. I figure if they put out like four more packs like this, I'll get them all in the inevitable bundle.

My dream DLC would be a whole new campaign. Add a few guns, a few aliens, and maybe a new class (and not just a single unique character like the guy in this thing), but mostly just add a new story, such as it is. Keep the general flow of missions, but have a new path of key events that take place through the campaign, and different stuff to research to get through them.

The sooner they stop doing piddly DLC/expansions and get cracking on TFTD, the better.

Have you tried watching beaglerush's impossible ironman playthroughs? They really made me re-assess what I considered fair in the game, since it turns out that in some cases I was just inaccurately weighing risks.

Yeah, I'm actually subscribed to his youtube channel. :)

Even with that, I think there is a fair amount of luck involved in Impossible difficulty and alot of map gaming. The map I was complaining about was the graveyard map where you start in the street. I did beat it, but I was trying to win without losing 1/2 soldiers and it just seems impossible. I gave up last night, but I tried many different tactics to see how it would turn out and it was really difficult to make what I consider "fair" risks due to some issues with the game. I think that following the principles in beaglerush's videos will get you a long way, but it really breaks down in a few of the maps due to what I think some bugs in the game, and some design decisions.

To be specific - one of the biggest issues in the engine is sightline bugs. In my opinion either the engine is messing up, or the car is bugged on that maps because this happens:


The closest enemies spawn directly in from of you. They will spawn from any non-occluded view (anything past the van) or on a horizontal run parallel with the van. This prevents you from maneuvering since behind the van is the spawn area. Moving past the low cover will trigger a 2nd set of enemies (even 1 square). If you take too long, a roving pack of enemies will trigger even if you haven't moved past the van. I dunno - this seems very unfair and hard to assess risk wise. I still really like the game, but this sort of thing is breaking because it forces me to "know" the map and stop making educated risks. Rather, I should deal with the map a certain way because I know the map will unfold a certain way, even before playing it. I know this because I have played this map twice in the same run through - early mission and 3rd month mission and it unfolds the same way with different enemies.

Oh man, that cemetary map with the street is where I gave up my impossible playthrough as well. Or got bored of save scumming. There just seemed like no way to win without losing a few high ranking soldiers and as you mentioned, there's LOS bugs as well.

Why did you unlike my post Lizard King? Why?

No one likes a quitter.

Actually, I have no idea what happened. Perhaps my line of sight was blocked.

I'm not sure how to solve the issue where you're killing some aliens and 1 square away more aliens sit waiting to kill you, but don't activate until the worst possible moment (trying to flank). I don't want them to go old X-com style, but this new method is really annoying. It's probably best if the maps were bigger, and the enemies genuinely roamed as a group. They would hear explosions and gunfire within a certain radius (explosions map wide, normal guns 1/2 the map, lasers and plasma I imagine would be almost silent) and come towards it. It certainly would make things less aggravating when you are trying to make tactical moves and you're ambushed randomly. I know stuff like that happens in real life, but it seems odd to have 3 enemies sitting there waiting to fuck you over.

I wish they let you customize difficulties more. I like classic difficulty in combat, but I don't like the strategic gameplay enough to get good at it. My ideal would be normal strategic layer and classic tactics. It doesn't seem like that would be too hard to patch/mod in, so I'm hopeful.

The nexus has a number of difficulty altering mods, some giving you much more of an edge in the strategic mode or creating an in-between difficulty for normal and classic. They also seem to have mod editors and the like if you just want to make satellites cost less or require fewer engineers or something (I have no idea but it seems like all kinds of people are churning these out).

Look on the bright side, the strategic layer is actually fairly simple, there is basically just one optimal way to do it, sadly.

I highly recommend Aetius Classic Rebalanced. It contains Classic and Impossible tweaks, particularly removing the excessive hit/crit bonuses, giving you two item slots on all characters, but also increasing difficulty in other ways to make up for it (including longer hospital stays).

It's easy to use, but it's recommended that you play the game in Steam offline mode.

Is multiplayer really buggy or was I just unlucky? I brought an ethereal and when I mind-controlled stuff, sometimes I'd be unable to select off of the ethereal or the mind-controlee and I'd have to end my turn. A google search didn't find anyone else with this problem. Also, it disconnected once and there doesn't seem to be a way to resume matches.

Multiplayer is really buggy.

I started on normal difficulty and it was pretty easy, so I switched to classic ironman. I had a brutal start, but things are starting to come together (the first armor upgrade helps a ton). However, I have 7 countries gone from the council and I haven't even captured my first alien yet. Am I fucked or is it that manageable? If I restart I'll probably take the ironman off. It makes the game more tense, but not really more fun.

Fucked.

Also, ironman can be a problem because sometimes a mission gets bugged, and then there's no way to go back. Just play it with the discipline not to save-scum. You won't get the achievement but you'll get the same tension.

That really depends on how many satellites you have deployed. If the rest of the world is under sat coverage, you can eventually lower panic across the board and win. If the rest of the world has no sat coverage, you're doomed.

I will have 5 up shortly and will try to get more up in the near future. Sounds like I'm just semi-doomed. Hmm.

Money is so tight early on.

If you have partial coverage, you'll still be facing abduction missions which are guaranteed to increase panic across two continents, so it's then a matter of managing which continents take the hit, lowering any full red countries via satellites.

Getting full sat coverage should be your absolute highest priority. If necessary, sell everything (including elerium) to get enough money for more relays and satellites.

Wait, what? Having satellite coverage over a country means you don't get abduction missions there?

Partial coverage doesn't seem to stop abduction missions, though having a continent covered *may* keep it from being a target. When every nation has satellites, you stop getting abduction missions entirely.

Classic difficulty is more or less a race to get full coverage before panic becomes too widespread.

I wish they hadn't included the hard fail from too many countries dropping out. Connect it to funding, sure - if you lose too many countries and go/stay in the negative funding range for too long, then you fail. The arbitrary way they set this up is silly and constricting.

Oh, that's kind of dumb. No wonder everyone mentions the satellite thing as a knock against the game.

Now I'm definitely thinking of restarting, but I must be close to losing...

I think you actually still get the abduction missions, but you only get one each cycle (i.e., you don't have to ignore anybody, and thus don't take the panic hit).

They do stop, but you can still get them the same month you complete coverage.

So if you get full coverage, you only increase panic through failed missions?