XCOM: One Does Not Simply "Shoot" a Cryssalid...

[Anarion]

Finally got some time to get the game going. I noticed so far that base sequencing seems to be a huge deal. I'm not sure I spent my money right either, as I bought some of the officer training upgrades and now I'm really short on engineers to the point that it's stalling pretty much everything else I want to do and I have no way to get more until the end of the month or if a lucky choice mission pops up.

I also quite nearly lost all of Africa, and it struck me as amusing that I was incredibly thankful when the aliens launched a terror attack on Nigeria, allowing me to drop the panic rating on the entire continent. There might be something a little off when you're going "yay, aliens are killing civilians, I'm saved!"

First is to hit. Second is separate roll, to see if the hit is a crit. To see the same effect, target a distant enemy with the shotgun. I've seen that chance to hit as low as 2%, while the crit chance is stable at 70%.

I am fairly certain it was mentioned in passing in one of the videos.

Which reminds me: has anyone specialised their assaults towards crit-happy? I understand they are meant to eschew the shotgun and use rifle primarily (so it would be a long distance attacker) with a likely ridiculously high crit chance with enough enemies present. I'd like to know if it is worth attempting.

Grey Wolf

I've done all my assaults as defense, though I also use shotguns exclusively (and imo the scatter laser is well worth the alloys as an upgrade over plasma rifles). Having them be able to run and gun in, take out enemies consistently, and then have the heavies and snipers pick off the rest has been pretty successful for me. And the increased defense means that they are very likely to survive the counterattacks from a couple enemies left over if the dice roll badly. So, I have difficulty seeing why the crit build is worth it.

Also, the scatter laser usually leaves mutons on exactly one health bar (on normal, which I'm doing for my first run). If there's a muton alone, an assault trooper with an arc thrower can usually take a turn of fire and do the capture by himself. If you have two guys, you can easily get a 90% capture chance in one turn on what was a full hp muton.