Huh. Never happened to me, then. I must have gotten tremendously lucky. I really wouldn’t want Jack “1Inch Punch” Ripper let loose in the middle of my squad :o.
If you have Enemy Within and a MEC Trooper, sometimes you can see them standing around with their “Base Augment” mechanical limbs visible. Occasionally they’ll be running on one of the treadmills.
Just finished the game again last night. It’s every bit as good as I remember. I would love to see more games in this genre (not so much alien-fighting as tactical squad games).
I wish I knew why this scratched the tactical itch so well, when games like Divinity: Original Sin don’t. It may be the beautifully simplified interface, the lack of an inventory system (seriously, who the hell thinks complicated inventory management is fun?), or something else, but I freakin’ love this example of the genre.
Next time Enemy Within is on sale, I’m so there.
Dorkness,
DOS seems to be based on old JRPGs and seems largely melee-based with one team standing on one side and the other team standing on the other, Pokémon-style. A gun-based, cover-based game seems to provide more opportunity and doesn’t feel as contrived as DOS-style games.
Have you tried Door Kickers? Not quite the same as XCOM but very much a tactical squad game. There’s a demo.
Me.
I suppose de gustibus and all. A little bit of inventory management isn’t bad, but games like Divinity make inventory almost useless to me. I want to spend most of my time figuring out how best to kill the bad guys, not figuring out how to make sure that the character with the highest barter score has the best weight-value ratio.
Huh–I wouldn’t have characterized DOS as two sides. I played with a ranger, a mage, and two melee fighters, and the fight tended to have several levels, what with the first two characters hanging way back and the latter two characters charging in. But somehow combat just took too long and wasn’t as satisfying. You might be right that the cover element is important. I’ll check out Door Kickers–thanks!
At one point, I was considering writing a mod for Skyrim that would put the items weight/value ratio in the item description text.
DON’T JUDGE ME!
There are of course Skyrim mods that put weight/value in its own column in inventory, and allow you to sort high to low on that basis.
Not sure if it has been mentioned yet but I HIGHLY recommend the mod XCom: Long War for those that are fans of the series.
It makes the game significantly more difficult but also deeper and more fun (and longer).
You can see it in action here: Northernlion XCOM Long War: Season 1, Northernlion XCOM Long War: Season 2
You can get the mod here (a bit harder than most mods to install but not terrible): Nexus Mods: Long War
Such a mod is one of the first I added when I began playing Skyrim.
I must say that I belong to the category of compulsive RPG players who can’t leave behind anything that isn’t nailed to the floor.
Although to my surprise, it seems that after a couple decades I finally improved and now can resist the urge to move back and forth 6 times between the dungeon and the shop to make sure I collected and sold every one of the 57 rusty daggers.
They didn’t include any Oriental languages, though.
Is it hard to mod the Steam version of the game? If not, how do I do it?
Just to let everyone know, X-COM: Enemy Within (the DLC for X-COM) is on sale this week.
Typically thirty dollars, it’s only $9.89 until Monday.
I know I plan to buy it sometime before the sale ends and I think that, at the same time, I’ll be looking up the Long War mod and installing that.
Next week I foresee a lot of XCOM playing in my time.
I tried out the Long War mod. It’s certainly different from the vanilla game. It’s not just the pacing, but all the tech trees and promotion perks have been revamped. I’ll have to retrain myself for a totally new game.
Of course, not a week after I downloaded the mod, they release a new version, just today.
I picked up the Unknown Enemy and I feel your pain. My mission on that map was very similar to yours but not as bad. If I moved a tiny bit in the wrong direction I picked up multiple mob squads which lead to everybody being dead. After reloading enough times I finally got a chance to flank the ship and not pull every muton in existence.
Then I went into chickenshit mode. Get a firing line set up with almost everybody in overwatch and send my fast guy up to be seen and then run him back. I got lucky enough that my overwatch shots did decent damage and I was able to roll the flank to clear the front of the ship. I then cleared the ship, sent the team out back for a few beers and ran into ED from room 209.
Panic ensues, friendly fire causes more panic, rockets fly, and I get to reload again.
I swear this game is the best bad relationship I’ve had. When it’s good it’s about the best but when it’s evil…
Long War is great but a word of warning to any who want to try it:
XCom is almost a completely different game with Long War. It expands on XCom in almost every area. That’s the good part.
The bad part is it is very hard and very unforgiving. Worse, it is quite possible to have lost the game LONG before you know you have lost the game and that can be a real drag.
That said it is an outstanding mod. If you’ve played enough XCom to be kind of tired of it this is well worth a try.
The Long War is completely kicking my butt, even on normal difficulty. The good news is that you’re given six squad members right at the outset. The bad news is that you really, really need all six just to get through a mission.
The “good news” about Long War is that the mod is deliberately balanced so that difficulty is pretty even throughout (unlike regular XCOM, which is bullshit punishing early on - who doesn’t love Sectoids doing 6 damage crits on rookies in high cover ? - but becomes a walk in the park past the midgame).
The bad news is that this flat difficulty meter is firmly pegged on “EXTERMINATE ! EXTERMINATE !” 
There are some things you need to remember in Long War.
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Don’t worry about nations backing out of XCom. You can get them back later. Indeed I would suggest if you aren’t losing some countries you are probably doing it wrong.
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SKIP THE FIRST TERROR MISSION! Really…just skip it. Yes you will lose that country. See #1. You can get them back later.
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Rename your fighter aircraft (you can take the default the game suggests). If you do they gain experience.
3b) Don’t ignore your fighter aircraft. They are very important as the game goes on to protect your satellites and so on. Keep them upgraded. -
Build a deep bench. You need a very deep pool of specialists to be able to tap.
4b) Don’t forget SHIVs. I almost never bothered with them in vanilla XCom. Here they are much more useful. -
Be sure to mix up the training trees. There are a LOT of tech specialties and having a mix is good. XCom Long War Perk Tree (some may deem this a spoiler)
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Bait alien overwatches with soldiers who have Rapid Reaction (or whatever the perk is that makes it very hard to hit a soldier with an overwatch shot).
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Be super careful about getting aggro. It is all too easy to aggro 2-3 groups at once and then you are in big trouble.
