I didn’t see a thread on this, but there probably is one. If so my apologies. Basically I got the game (well, the new DLC for the game) when it first came out on Steam, but only this weekend had the time to play. I played through a campaign on the easy setting just to get the feel for the game, and I have some questions and assistance with possible Mods from any 'dopers who have played the game and are into it.
Quest the first is, do you ever get to finish off Exalt? I had a ton of battles with them, either defend the comm gear or hack the comm system. But there was never any resolution by the time I did the final alien star ship attack. It felt…unfinished. Every Exalt mission they would say they were narrowing the possible locations for the Exalt base, but by the end of the game I still never found it. Is it part of the game and I just missed it?
Other random questions: Which second wave features are you using? I am going to start a second game on Normal difficulty and want to know which are the better ones to use. Also, I had loaded the Long War mod, which made playing Marathon a lot better, but I don’t see an update or a new mod like it for EW…anyone know if it still works? Any other good mod suggestions for the game?
That’s about it for questions. I like the new DLC…it adds a lot to the game, though it doesn’t really change the game itself from the perspective of story. I would like to be able to (like in the Long War mod) re-flip countries that have left the program and also to do some offensive operations against Alien bases and the like…it kind of sucks just waiting for attacks to happen and responding, you should be able to do more. I’d also still like base defenses…they have one set piece defense of your base in the new DLC, but it wasn’t as much fun as the old base defenses from the first game, and while there was lots of damage it didn’t really carry over into the game play except for the soldiers wounded. But I like the Meld stuff and thought that really added to the game, as well as the medals. Some new armor/weapons/gear would have been nice, as would a system where you can added your own stat points to your troops as they level…and maybe level beyond Colonel as well. My guys had all leveled out during the mid-game in game I just finished which kind of sucked…and if you play Marathon it’s even worse as they finish leveling around the time you get to the first alien hidden base.
There is a final Exalt mission, but it only starts when you choose to initiate it, and you launch it from the situation room, not the giant holo-globe. There’s a menu option in the situation room that shows which countries you’ve ruled out as being the home of the Exalt base. From here, you can choose to launch an assault against whichever country you think has the base - but if you guess wrong, the country cuts its funding.
Totally missed it then. I’ll have to check that out when I start the new game. So, you have to make an educated guess as to which country it’s in, and if you are wrong they cut your funding just like if they leave the XCOM program?
Right, but the more Exalt missions you do, the more countries you eliminate as possibilities. If you do enough, you can eventually narrow it down to a single country, so there’s no danger of getting it wrong.
Yeah, I knew about the new grenades and the reaper rounds…there are also the 2 new weapons that come with the Mec class (chain gun and rail gun IIRC). And the Exalt folks get new upgrades to the standard and laser weapons for that matter. But I was thinking more along the lines of more new weapon and armor, though perhaps it would add complexity without actually doing much, or breaking the game.
MECS get Railguns and Particle Cannons, as upgrades replacing their starting Minigun. They also get Flamethrowers, Grenade Launchers, Electro Pulse, Proximity Mine Launchers, and the Kinetic Strike Module aka the “Power Fist” as I’ve heard it called.
I’ve been active on the official forums and have been talking about quite a few things it would have been nice to have, in this expansion or the next.
For this expansion, it would have been nice if you could send a Mech trooper on foot, wearing their base augments and a suit of conventional armour.
For the next, I’d like to see sonic weapons (laser tier weapons that aren’t as good against mechanicals but don’t destroy terrain, and work better underwater), a +0 HP scuba suit, and an updated Magnetic Ion Armour.
Yeah, my favorite class. They replace the heavy troops I used to use and I use them as shock troops similar to how I use assault troops…rush into a room, get to very close quarters with the enemy and then kill them. That power fist thingy is great against the heavy UFO mechs, as one punch can take them to half their life, whereas it used to take a full squad to burn one down even with the late game weapons. I haven’t used the flame thrower, but the new grenade launcher and the mines are definitely great additions.
The Second Wave option of note is Training Roulette. It dumps most of the soldier skills from all the classes into a general pool, and most of a soldier’s skill choices are pulled from that random pool. It gives the soldiers individual flavor and makes for some interesting combinations that you would otherwise never see.
As for your soldiers hitting max rank before endgame, the solution to that is to flip on Ironman and bump the difficulty up. Your starting soldiers generally shouldn’t even be seeing the endgame. The game’s not really balanced around zero-casualty play - a team full of Colonels pretty much breaks the aliens, all the more so the earlier you get there.
Yeah. The game is meant to be played with soldier death. The harder difficulty levels and ironman make it much more enjoyable in my view. I’ve been playing impossible ironman lately, and it is surprisingly fun. I’ll make another plug for Beaglerush’s ironman impossible series on youtube. He’s made tightly edited, very funny videos with great tactics. Well worth your time.
I’ve found the game to be too buggy to effectively play on ironman - in my most recent playthrough I had two instances where the game froze up on me, and if I were playing ironman I’d have lost all my progress. I do play with soldier death; I almost never reload a saved game.
Make sure that your troops in the barracks are armed with whatever weapons you’ve picked up or built, since that’s what you’ll have to fight with. The first time I had the base raid happen, one of my characters had nothing but a pistol to fight with.
In the spirit of Christmas, 'tis the season of sharing a factoid that I mind-bogglingly never figured out in my 189 pre-Enemy Within Classic runs (1 finished) but had to since it resulted in getting my shit pushed thoroughly in each time I attempted the Portent mission : did you know that in civilian rescues where alien reinforcements drop in after you’ve secured the VIP, the spawn of the aliens is strictly tied to the VIP’s movement or lack thereof ?
I always figured it was a timed thing, and so always tried to rush the VIP back to the Skyranger to avoid getting swarmed worse than I already was. Turns out it was me did most of the swarming by racing the dude all over the place.
Haha. Yeah, I figured that out reasonably early. I have a pretty standard drill for escort missions. Finish off all enemies on map before approaching escort target, then reload and move all your guys to good lines of sight around VIP, overwatch, move vip one movement cost, kill thin men that pop out, wait a turn, rinse, repeat. Even on impossible the escort missions are quite easy like this. It’s the bomb missions that are truly, horrifyingly difficult.
But doesn’t having your covert agent hack the Exalt comms links impede the Exalt guys in some way? The voiceover seems to say so but I never figured out in what way it helped.
