Yeah, i didn’t run into berserkers until the very last mission on my first playthrough. Just lost my ironman save to an after mission crash, which still happens like a third of the time for me, good thing to learn early i suppose.
I haven’t finished a playthrough yet, but I’ve finally reached the point where my troopers have some armor and weapon upgrades going for them and I’m not having to fall back on rookies after every mission.
My crowning achievement so far was during a retaliation mission. I set my sniper up on a rooftop for the height advantage… and then, after I came out of concealment, three Chryssalids jumped up onto said rooftop and went after her in melee combat. Whoops.
She survived the alien turn, so I moved her to the other side of the rooftop, and then had one of her comrades fire his rocket launcher at the Chryssalids, wounding them, destroying the roof, and causing them to fall through to the ground level for additional falling damage. I then went back to my sharpshooter, and then had her use her Faceoff ability to fire her pistol at all of the Chryssalids and finish them all off, which got me the “Now I Am Become Death” achievement.
I only lost one civilian on that mission.
Completely by accident, I discovered another strategy for the use of the mimic beacon. If the enemies are primarily melee guys, they’ll run over and try to melee the mimic beacon. If you set up a ranger with bladestorm such that the enemies have to run past him to get to the mimic beacon, the ranger will get one free hit on each of them as they go past.
Just used this to great effect with an archon and a couple of mutons.
When you have a shadow chamber, and it tells you what aliens you’ll face on that mission, what is the number next to it supposed to mean? I thought it was alien count, but I just faced 27 alines on a mission that said 11. Is it some sort of difficulty rating?
Are you supposed to build the Shadow Chamber? I wasn’t sure ;).
I wonder if it’s viable to have a psi-only squad. It’d take a while to train them up, but then you could run in there and dominate 6 enemies which would be kind of ridiculous. PSI is very powerful - you get a lot of varied abilities, you can train them up rather than needing to level them up, and only training two at a time isn’t a huge limitation in normal circumstances.
Do the end of game world stats work for you guys? I got stuck indefinitely at “obtaining world stats”
I got stuck at the global stat lookup, as well.
I think the best way to balance mimic beacons would be for them to get destroyed if the aliens manage to destroy it during their turn.
I rather like that idea. There’s already a bit of balance in that the later game basically requires that you toss the mimic behind cover, to increase its chances of surviving the round. But even so, it’s still definitely overpowered.
If they do change it in a patch or expansion, my guess is that they’ll just make them single-use only. It adds the most balance for the least programming effort. Applying conditional rules or altering the enemy reaction is a lot more effort.
What I would have enjoyed was a bit more depth and flexibility for the stealth options. For example, if you deployed a mimic beacon while concealed, it would instead project an ADVENT unit, and actual units wouldn’t bother to patrol to that spot. Or it could project a radius within which the players would appear as ADVENT, and not lose concealment. Again, not likely to see this, but it would have been neat.
Speaking of stealth, has anyone tried to solo an Avatar Base mission yet? I’ve heard it’s one of the easier ways to complete those missions. While it seems a bit ruthless, I could see myself hiring a fresh rookie and sending them in alone. Once they set the bomb, the mission succeeds even if the party is killed, right?
Isn’t that how it already works? I thought once the beacon was destroyed, the aliens starting attacking other targets.
He means that if it gets destroyed, the item is removed from inventory and can’t be reused on a subsequent mission.
Yeah this. I have seen suggestions to make them single use only, but that seems a bit harsh with the 2 faceless corpses required per, having it be destroyed if it actually gets destroyed should be a balanced compromise.
True. If they made such a mod, they could also alter the cost or something. Or they could make it so it’s only lost if deployed on an evac mission. Though that wouldn’t have as much of a tactical trade off.
Trying a commander playthrough with actual ironman mode enabled. I know I generally recommend against that, but the temptation was too high with my psuedo-ironman mode last run and I reverted a two awful mission results where everyone died to ridiculousness.
To offset the difficulty somewhat, I’m running a mod that lets me add a 7th and 8th squad member.
I’m also trying true concealment, which is the one that reduces timers, but doesn’t start the countdown until you break stealth. That seems like a more fun way to do things than to be on the clock even though you haven’t been detected yet.
I’m a little disappointed how concealment works when you have a ranger still concealed. I was doing a VIP rescue mission last night. Took care of the first two pods easily. My ranger scouted ahead and spotted the last POD (featuring a gatekeeper). Looking at the red detection symbols, there was a clear path to the VIP and the extraction zone. I figured I could just keep everyone else out of those red zones and be good.
Nope, the red zones only apply to those in concealment. My specialist was spotted, I got hit hard, and the VIP died. I made it to the extraction zone with one turn left and four gravely wounded soldiers.
Yeah, once you’re out of concealment, it’s all line-of-sight. If one of your unconcealed units gets LOS to a pod, you both see each other. Heck, it even partially applies to controlled enemy units. Last night, I was on an Avatar sabotage mission, and ended up making a reckless decision that activated 10 of the enemies on the map, with three flanking me. I managed to hack one of the two turrets that was near the edge of my vision, which immediately activated a second turret and three Vipers, bringing the enemy count up to 14. It was a hell of a fight, but I managed to make it out with minimal injuries only. Very fun, but I was still annoyed that hacking a unit activated more enemies due to the increased LOS.
The wounding system is too random. I had a guy taken down to 1 hp, healed back up to 9, and then taken back down to 1 again. So he was about as hurt as you can be. But he just qualified as “wounded” with a 7 day recovery time. Meanwhile it seems guys who get hit for less than half their HP often come up gravely wounded with 2-3x that recovery time.
Commander ironman is going surprisingly well with very few losses so far. I haven’t even progressed to the point where I can unlock 7-8 soldiers per mission, so that isn’t even helping yet. Cash has been tight though - I’m almost into June and I don’t have a proving grounds up yet and only 4 resistance contacts - Intel has been tight too, not enough intel to make new contacts.
I’ve been dodging UFOs left and right. Is that a thing that just happens in Commander mode? There’s no dark event about a UFO hunting me down - I’ve just spotted one flying around 3 times.
Just completed my second play through at the highest difficulty setting (not Ironman though). This time I put in a number of mods for various things that were on Steam. A mod for new terrain, one to increase squad size, another to allow me to build everything I researched, a couple others. They definitely enhanced the game, though nothing so far is at the level of Long War to really change things. I’m hoping there are going to be some good game enhancements in the DLCs as I think I’ve taken the game as it is about as far as I want to right now.