XCOM : Enemy Unknown - by Firaxis Games - Thread

Another Iron Man Classic game lost tonight.

It's always Thin Men. They always wipe out my entire squad on those missions where you have to rescue people, and the game drops them in as reinforcements.

I'd love to know what their AIM and CRIT stats are, because I've seen them hit men in high cover hunkered down, and they just don't seem to care.

Never a problem for me, always have a sniper holding back on overwatch, in fact I make sure I have at least 2-3 team members on overwatch each turn. Makes the game rather easy.
 
Ok I'm pretty board now, just stunned my first unreal.
But then again the original games where like this. Similar maps and same aliens. It's just rinse and repeat trying to. Gather resources and advance game, till you can do final mission.

It's not helped that my only sniper is out getting psi trained and I need that powerful double tap, on missions.
 
Has anyone had much of a go at multiplayer? I've spent my limited time playing this game entirely on singleplayer, and it would be interesting to know if multiplayer will actually add to the life of the game, or if it's just some extra thrown on that's nothing special.
 
I've been in turtle mode for a while and after months of grade A reviews and a 48/1 W/L ratio, and I decided to give XCOM the night off for some psionic training and ignored a terror mission. But the affected country pulls out and ends my game :/

I didn't even need their funding. What happened to the game ending when aliens invaded your base, or bombing it, or running out of money?

:o
 
Last edited:
The glitches and bugs in this game are starting to irritate. Game is freezing now during overwatch cutscenes. Had to kill the game process and reload from an earlier save. Lucky I'm not on ironman setting I guess.
 
Another Iron Man Classic game lost tonight.

It's always Thin Men. They always wipe out my entire squad on those missions where you have to rescue people, and the game drops them in as reinforcements.

I'd love to know what their AIM and CRIT stats are, because I've seen them hit men in high cover hunkered down, and they just don't seem to care.

My heart sank when I was on my latest bomb disposal mission, had already lost my token red-shirt guy (rookie) in the mission and so was down to 4 sgt/cpl types with simple weapon/armor upgrades, hit disarm on the bomb and 5 thin men beamed in instantly on overwatch around my team. 2 or 3 are usually a serious pain.

Only way I 'won' that mission was due to my Support guy having a skeletal suit and was able to grapple out of harm's way to the roof of the cemetry/church and pick them off, rest of my team were sitting ducks to the 2-3 thin men that survived the end of the turn. Lone survivor and a major set back from that.
 
My heart sank when I was on my latest bomb disposal mission, had already lost my token red-shirt guy (rookie) in the mission and so was down to 4 sgt/cpl types with simple weapon/armor upgrades, hit disarm on the bomb and 5 thin men beamed in instantly on overwatch around my team. 2 or 3 are usually a serious pain.

Only way I 'won' that mission was due to my Support guy having a skeletal suit and was able to grapple out of harm's way to the roof of the cemetry/church and pick them off, rest of my team were sitting ducks to the 2-3 thin men that survived the end of the turn. Lone survivor and a major set back from that.

Yeah the trouble is they drop them into positions where they have LOS on your troops, and they are already flanking for massive crit bonus and you have no cover.

And since most of your non-sniper classes have a 65% chance to hit only, you'll miss quite a few of your shots. And of course you can't move because of overwatch.

I think the only thing you can do is spec your team for high accuracy and accept you are going to take casualties. Give everyone a scope, get a couple snipers in your squad, and forget about grenades.

In other words, have a team dedicated to these missions.
 
Can't say I have any issues with those missions using my standard squad... at early levels they only drop a few thin men on you, which are easily taken out by overwatchers before they can do much damage. Once you get to the missions where they're dropping 5 on you, your guys should all be tooled up with at least carapace armour, and probably titan/archangel/chitin and will have enough HP to shrug them off.

This is on Normal mind, might be a different story on Classic.
 
Not to belittle Normal mode, Classic does seem to ramp up the difficulty in terms of alien accuracy/damage a fair bit, and you suffer considerably higher set backs in terms of guys dying along the way and several soldiers hospitalized for 2-3 weeks, which in turn saps funds to retain a healthy squad online, so it's a problem that cascades out of battle time too.

I'm researching Titan now (and I even went with South America base so my research on autopsies/interrogations doesn't even eat any time), but Thin Men can still pull off routine 9 crit damage shots that incapacitate or kill most members of my squad. I will struggle to make the armour once its researched due to riding on ~$50 income per month and nothing in the bank (relying mostly on gray market sales). Had 5 thin men drop on my squad of 4 (only have 5 slots atm and rookie was already down), and haven't even seen archangel/chitin armor appear in the list to be researched yet.

It's not unbeatable, but going from losing a rookie in a mission to losing the entire team can almost be brought about by one unlucky move now, and that is all it may take to bring a classic ironman run into a downward spiral (I'm thinking of when I rustled 3 mutons and 3 thin men accidentally at once recently - and annoyingly the thin men usually don't get shot at at all by overwatch reaction fire if they move into a hard cover spot and fire direct from there, or if they jump up / drop down a level in order to put them in visual range - hence why I found grappling to be a life saver in return recently).
 
Last edited:
Had to laugh (and cry at same time) when I saw my first cyberdisc recently.. 4 full bars of hit points, my best guys having half that. I was saying prayers trying to bring it down in 1 round hoping none of my guys would miss it, took every shot to land to kill the damn thing :D
 
Hi everyone,

Got this game the other week must say i love it, major time sink which is great, been some time since i played a turn based game, so took a few goes to get back in the swing, i find the bomb misions not to bad, (playing normal, never played x-com), just make sure you spread your squad out a little then on the turn you defuse get everyone in over watch and get the last one to turn it off, so as they drop in you gat a few, they all go in over watch so your go again should kill them all.

cyberdisc are a total nightmare, the good thing about them is when they blow up they hit everything around them, so just make sure you don't have a team mate sat under it, found that out the hard way. At the mo if i spot 1 that means there are two on the mission with there support bots, healing away.

Can you arch stun the cyberdisc?

Nice one
 
This game is a bit borked how the hell can he not see the big beserker right in front of him.
DB470CE7CFB6C09160DD03D448C9D76BCBC30919
 
This is on Normal mind, might be a different story on Classic.

Not to belittle Normal mode, Classic does seem to ramp up the difficulty in terms of alien accuracy/damage a fair bit, and you suffer considerably higher set backs in terms of guys dying along the way and several soldiers hospitalized for 2-3 weeks, which in turn saps funds to retain a healthy squad online, so it's a problem that cascades out of battle time too.

Classic is a different game altogether. Groups of 2 aliens become groups of 3. You have less HP, the aliens have more HP, and they gain a bonus to accuracy.

If you lose your best squad in Classic and you're several months in you might as well restart the game. It's pretty unrecoverable. A squad of rookies/squaddies cannot defeat 6 mutons, 2 floaters and a Cyberdisk, when they all patrol into the area at the same time.

You can use the easier missions to train up your rookies which helps somewhat. But losing your elite sniper or you best medic often starts a downward spiral. You realise how much you rely on their high level abilities.

Normal is pretty easy in comparison, tbh. There's also a massive jump from classic to impossible.
 
You can back out your interceptor before it gets blown up, and if still in range, send out a second one to finish the job. Just in case..

I only had one per continent unfortunately, and it was one of those where one more hit from either my ship or the UFO was going to win, so I went for it lol.
 
Back
Top Bottom