Forgot to mention that that last wipe had one survivor… she was marked as “Captured”. I’m guessing there will be a possible rescue mission down the line? If so, that is AWESOME!
I’m coming back for you soldier, hang tight!
I’m playing on normal difficulty and this game is considerably harder than its predecessor in pretty much every way. I’ve found the only way to come out of a mission on top is to save-scum before every shot until I get a kill.
On top of that, there’s too much damn stuff happening all the time in the Geoscape. I can’t complete a “contact the resistance” objective that takes 2 days in-game, because I swear something new procs every 2-3 minutes of game time. “Oh, here’s some new intel. Oh, terror raid. Oh, guerilla strike. Oh, the Council wants to talk to you. Oh, your facility is ready. Oh, here’s another terror raid. Oh, here’s a new Dark Event you can’t do anything about for 2 weeks. Oh, and by the way, the Avatar project gained two points while you were reading all of that.”
I may have to turn the difficulty down to Rookie at this rate.
I’m starting to realize that you don’t need to take everything that’s thrown at you in the Geoscape, in fact, it may be detrimental to you if you do. That clock is ticking after all.
How much power creep is there compared to XCom?
Have they fixed the netcode? In the previous game, sometimes you would make a character make one action move (not dashing), there would be a hiccup and the character’s turn would be over.
In multi-player? I haven’t tried it yet, but haven’t heard anything about multi-player issues.
I feel like the main difficulty in the new combat is that the AI is much more aggressive about flanking and just generally punishing overextension. I’ve had missions go south pretty much just because I accidentally popped a pod with a ranger using a sword.
E: One strategy I find effective is to always carry one flashbang on my grenadier in order to disorient a squadmate that gets mind controlled just in case I can’t off the sectopod in the next turn or two.
The biggest thing I’ve found that ups the difficulty (aside from the smarter AI) is that the RNG just seems a lot more unforgiving. X-Com: EU used a random number seed for each mission that didn’t reset between reloads (though you could turn that off in Second Wave). This game seems to roll the dice on the fly instead, but still, I’ve had guys with a 90% chance to hit miss six reloads in a row before finally hitting on the seventh (and still leaving the target with 1 HP). It’s pretty darn aggravating to watch a guy with a minigun blast away at a flanked target the next tile over and miss.
Thus far, my rangers have a higher kill count than the rest of the squad simply because it’s nearly impossible for their sword attack to miss, and once you get the first tech upgrade for swords they’re capable of one-shotting Sectoids and Snakemen. I like the way the grenades destroy terrain now, but they’re also more aggravating to use now - you aim for the tile instead of free-aiming, so it’s difficult to hit more than one enemy with a grenade unless they’re right on top of each other.
I haven’t noticed the randomness being any more capricious, though I feel like they may have toned down the base aim stat of soldiers, likely because of the new modular weapon system. My sniper was nigh useless until I stuck a scope on her rifle.
It may be that they no longer lie to you about your odds, in the original X-Com on Normal difficulty they would actually fudge the probabilities a little bit in your favor.
So far, I’m loving it. A lot harder. I agree the aliens are a lot more aggressive; they won’t just sit in cover. You have to keep moving to survive
I lost my complete team saving a VIP. The VIP made it, but the team didn’t get to the evac in time. All of them were marked as captured. I have a bad feeling they’re going to come back as aliens.
You can rescue them! I just recovered one of my soldiers, left behind for lack of time in a previous mission.
If you mean the X-Com from '93 - there was a never-patched bug that dropped the difficulty setting after loading a save.
Personally, I’m finding the RNG works significantly better than their previous attempt, at least on the shooting side. Hacking results have been seriously weird, though. (I should probably make more of a conscious effort to go out of my way for the “permanent +20 to hacking” results.)
Well, I think I’m boned for this run. I discovered too late that making contact with other regions is basically the “satellite” of XCOM2, so ADVENT is two pips away from finishing their grand plan and I still can’t even reach any regions that contain their labs. I think I’ll ride this run to the end, though. I might be able to salvage things if the next mission or two goes well.
Though I’m still sore from the beating it’s giving me, I’m glad they didn’t screw around when making this one more challenging than its predecessor. The developers did a fantastic job making the gameplay inform the story. Both the ground missions and the world management make me genuinely feel like I’m in a desperate struggle to survive.
Not to say that XCOM (2012) didn’t also do a great job dovetailing its gameplay and story. I’m just impressed that they managed to do it again when they flipped the tables.
Skulljack is fucking bullshit, though.
Yeah I lost my first one too. Suffered too many losses and with just a handful of rookies and nearly zero supplies and intel, I was pretty much just watching those and those red pips go up.
Started up a new play-through and I’m doing better. I rushed a new squad slot, I make sure to include one, and preferably two rookies in every mission to build up a roster that can handle the injured and dead, and I’m being more proactive on gathering up territory for the resistance.
I’ve also got some better tactics in place for some of the mission types. For example, on reprisal missions on the resistance camps, I ignore the civs and make my way up the map as quickly as possible, killing advent along the way. Civs behind me are unlikely to be attacked, and the faceless reveal themselves once all advent has been neutralized, giving me more time to take them down before they get too close.
Disappointed to see they have the same 4-6 soldiers on missions, I was hoping they’d make it 6-8 in the sequel. The maps are big enough and the tactical game is hard enough to fit those two extra characters, I think, and it great expands your tactical options. I’ve gotten used to xenonuats where you can have 12.
Someone will mod it, I’m sure, assuming the modding is flexible enough to allow it. I do wonder how flexible the modding is.
If you design custom characters in the character designer, can you make them appear again in the rookie pool after they die? I like to name characters after my friends, watch them die horrible deaths, then I’d like to recruit their replacement and rename them as #2, #3, etc.
There’s already a mod to allow 8…but the interface doesn’t support it, so there’s issues.
The guys who did Long War have already up up some mods (that they were paid to do) on Steam, so it’s a sure thing that squad size will be modded. In Long War you could have either 8 or even 10 (I don’t recall off the top of my head) soldiers in XCOM Enemy Within’, and there were a ton of other things they added that I’m sure they will be bringing back. The modding is very flexible, at least it was in the first game based on some of the cool mods that were out for it, and I doubt they would have changed that model since it worked so well for them.
Personally, I’m having a good time with the game so far, though it still makes my blood boil when you miss a 98% shot on a critical alien critter and that turns out to be the one who gets a crit on your minimally exposed sniper and turns him or her into alien dog chow. :smack:
The modding for the first game wasn’t flexible at all - they had to unencrypt the ini files and then dig around changing values to see what they did in the game. It took a lot of really hard work to get The Long war going and make it as good as they did.
This is definitely not going to be that. They are even including all of the uncompressed assets for you to tinker with (50 GB download).
Even people without modding experience appear to be able to make pretty deep changes to the game, like making camera rotation arbitrary, and expanding or removing the turn counters.
I’m starting over. I’m losing a soldier or two every mission, so I’m constantly recruiting new soldiers. I just got attacked and lost most of my high ranking team.
Has anyone played with the new extraction mechanics? I’m wondering if since they added the functionality, they’re expecting people to abort bad missions more often.