XCOM : Enemy Unknown - by Firaxis Games - Thread

Smokey Deza said:
What happened to the old days where you'd end your turn and hear gunfire followed by agonizing screams, only to return too find two of your guys have been slain and quite often you had no idea where they were even shot from?
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Pretty sure this never happened. In the original games the camera always followed the shots. You may not have seen the alien but you saw the shot and the direction it came from.

I've finally finished this and I'm in 2 minds whether to play through again. What's putting me off is that I don't think there is a different base building strategy to try. You have to go with satellites, power and engineers. I even finished the game with no labs last time. Some of the Second Wave options might be worth a play with but I dunno if I can be bothered with a whole 2nd play through.
 
Clav said:
I've finally finished this and I'm in 2 minds whether to play through again. What's putting me off is that I don't think there is a different base building strategy to try. You have to go with satellites, power and engineers. I even finished the game with no labs last time. Some of the Second Wave options might be worth a play with but I dunno if I can be bothered with a whole 2nd play through.
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I was feeling the same, I relented & started again on the next difficulty up still with Ironman on, & I'm finding it just as compelling as the first time, you're decisions have that much more weight to them because resources are so tight, it becomes a toss up between improving the squad or the base knowing every encounter could be the one that leaves your team out matched by superior enemy's, I've had my whole squad wiped out twice now (both terror missions) leaving me no real choice but a restart, surprisingly I think its great, is that masochistic?
 
Clav said:
Pretty sure this never happened. In the original games the camera always followed the shots. You may not have seen the alien but you saw the shot and the direction it came from.
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Correct. You always saw when your guys died, and while you may not have seen the alien that did it, you always saw the general direction of the shots.

Personally I don't have any problems with the presentation of the game. The only thing I've noticed is the cinematic "kill cam" when someone is guaranteed to die from the shots about to happen. Every time an alien shoots at my guys and the camera goes cinematic, I just scream.
 
I'm finding this a lot more frustrating on Classic. I'm trying to be careful and always use heavy cover but it heavy cover doesn't seem to make the difference it should. The aliens can just snipe you from miles away and you have to flank them or face very low chances to hit. It means that even when being really careful I'm losing 1 person per mission with 1 or 2 injured. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong because I'm not even being flanked :confused:
 
Borrish said:
I'm finding this a lot more frustrating on Classic. I'm trying to be careful and always use heavy cover but it heavy cover doesn't seem to make the difference it should. The aliens can just snipe you from miles away and you have to flank them or face very low chances to hit. It means that even when being really careful I'm losing 1 person per mission with 1 or 2 injured. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong because I'm not even being flanked :confused:
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Part of the ramp up to classic difficulty is an aim/crit bonus on all alien shots. There is a mod that I mentioned a few pages back which will remove this if you so desire.
 
Once they've gone they've gone. Don't let the panic get to high and ignoring a mission will add many bars of panic. They leave when panic bar maxis out.
 
Pestilence said:
Correct. You always saw when your guys died, and while you may not have seen the alien that did it, you always saw the general direction of the shots.
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Yes, sorry. That's what I meant to say but I said different.

What I'm actually getting at is in those games aliens were in a search-and-destroy mode. You could sit in your skyranger and not move one soldier outside but they'd eventually creep up to your ship and start shooting you, or even better, chuck a grenade inside.

In this, as far as I can tell an undiscovered alien will never enter my LOS and start attacking me when I end my turn. So, excluding terror sites, you have to go out there and wake them up before they come a threat.

It's like they're all just sat around in the woods having a picnic.
 
It's almost impossible to not let countries withdraw from the xcom project from what I can tell seems all you need is 2 satellites in each continent maybe 3 at best and just do the highest panic missions.
 
Smokey Deza said:
In this, as far as I can tell an undiscovered alien will never enter my LOS and start attacking me when I end my turn. So, excluding terror sites, you have to go out there and wake them up before they come a threat.

It's like they're all just sat around in the woods having a picnic.
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That's not actually the case. Yes nothing will happen when you are in the 'safe zone', however I'm assuming that's because the aliens are unaware of your presence. After the battle begins though, especially in the later levels on the higher difficulties, enemies will start to seek you out.

I got flanked by three mutons very late in a ship-raid mission as i was unaware i had missed them. Right at the end they charged into the ship and up behind me, resulting in being totally surrounded.
 
C64 said:
It's almost impossible to not let countries withdraw from the xcom project from what I can tell seems all you need is 2 satellites in each continent maybe 3 at best and just do the highest panic missions.
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Yep, this is what I am starting to find. Satellites help a lot and I generally get enough missions from the council to do the rest.
 
Borrish said:
I'm finding this a lot more frustrating on Classic. I'm trying to be careful and always use heavy cover but it heavy cover doesn't seem to make the difference it should. The aliens can just snipe you from miles away and you have to flank them or face very low chances to hit. It means that even when being really careful I'm losing 1 person per mission with 1 or 2 injured. I'm not sure where I'm going wrong because I'm not even being flanked :confused:
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High cover to high cover shootouts on classic can be rough due to the aliens having really good aim.

There are a few few things you can do though to help.

One of the things Ive taken to doing a lot lately in these situations is actually to pull my guys that have visibility to the aliens slightly back out of line of sight (like 1 or 2 tiles - just enough to break los) and then put them on overwatch.

What this does is force the aliens to use their turn to close the gap towards you instead of shooting (since they can no longer see you, but have been "activated") - so you get "free" overwatch shots during their turn, without the possibility of return fire. It doesnt work all the time, but anecdotally its working for me Id say 80-90% of the time.

The fact they are moving towards you also increases your flanking options, meaning your rooks with crappy aim have a better chance of getting a kill.
 
Completed my first iron-man classic last week, was good fun - played through again on easy to see some of the tech I missed & ended up completing it too fast lol.

Max level psi troops are so overpowered, the second you get 3 mind controlling troops missions turn into a cake-walk.
 
There is little replay value imo just feels like the campaign is playing a handful of multiplayer maps over and over
 
Isnt that kind of the point? Why does the difficulty have to increase exponentially the further you go on.

It'll just become impossible. In my opinion the game should be hardest at half or three quarters of the way through.
 
C64 said:
There is little replay value imo just feels like the campaign is playing a handful of multiplayer maps over and over
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I think there's little replay value because on Classic difficulty the build order is pretty much dictated to you. It's an all out rush for satellites.

I think at the moment my base is nearly full and it's 50% workshops :p You need them for keeping costs down and for materials rebates.

Early in the game I was short on cash, with 14 sats now up and panic under control, I'm short of Elerium and alloys :p Always short on something.

Current game is nice tho I've got North USA, Europe and Asia 100% so I've got some useful bonuses :)

Classic Ironman of course :p It's the way it's meant to be played.
 
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