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

[Surrealistik]

I'm going to agree that Scopes are nice for taking down Sectos. However blowing cover without blowing rockets so my Snipers can have their way with whatever's behind it is too good to pass up. With 3 Heavies I can do this all day; 6 instances of cover destruction and guaranteed AoE (that benefits from HEAT besides), not counting rockets.

[Luzahn]

Well, I believe I have found the deadliest enemy. Invisible car-fires.

[RagingKrikkit]

Play with the audio on. If your troops say "Fuel's about to go" when the car gets shot, well...

[Binks]

I've had that a few times. No audio cue either (unless it's under music, I have in-game music muted but everything else at normal volume). Just tabbing through people, some guys behind cover of a car that took a few shots but isn't on fire, finish up and boom, now I have a bunch of damaged guys behind an exploded car. Awesome.

Luckily it didn't start happening until after I got Titan and Ghost armor, so I haven't had a death from it, but it is annoying.

[Krade]

Wait, how it is the ONE WINNING STRATEGY if one can come up with a counterstrategy? Mind control doesn't break stealth, but unless it's changed in MP/stealth circumstances, it: a)requires LOS to target, and b)provides a nice visual cue to the direction of the controller.

So if you make a team of, say, a few heavies with Danger Zone... rocket launchers are one of the few weapons that can be fired indiscriminately. If your soldier gets mind-controlled, you get a pretty indicator to the enemy's position and can see the nearest point within LOS that you should fill with high explosives... or are there other factors to the "ghost psi assault" strategy that I'm not aware of?

I played a LOT yesterday. Enough to know that there is no reliable counter strategy. Your best chance is a squadsight sniper and catching him unaware. But Lightning Reflexes and Ghost Armor keep you from even being to hit or see him on overwatch if you can even see him. If he gets LOS on ANY of your units, it's done.

The problem with Heavies is that, to make a good one, you can only afford one. And grenades are WAY too expensive.

I was thinking running with Thin Men because of the free aiming poison, but I naturally got somebody who wasn't doing the Psi Assault and got destroyed very quickly.

[Surrealistik]

Aside from mirror matches, other cheese builds like Ethereals and mass Sec Coms can work vs Ghosts if you play defensively and seek to wait out his ghosting. I wouldn't call it entirely reliable but they can function and afford considerable resistance to Psi, while giving you free-aim AoE options.

On the whole though, I would agree; Ghost Armour needs to be hit upside the face with a nerf stick as it's far too centralizing (add a cooldown, increase point cost, allow battle scanners to detect & counter, reveal on Psi attacks).

[Krade]

Reveal on flank, I think, is the most logical thing they should do with it (if not remove it entirely). Since it only works if you're in cover, shouldn't it NOT work if that cover is negated by flanking?

[Surrealistik]

Battle Scanners reveal cloakers (they'd be made aware) + Cooldown (even if it's 1 turn) + Psi attacks break cloak is the best option I think; with those changes, a point cost increase may not even be necessary.

Reveal on flanking doesn't make much sense given that it's effectively a full on cloaking device.

[Krade]

Battle Scanners reveal cloakers (they'd be made aware) + Cooldown (even if it's 1 turn) + Psi attacks break cloak is the best option I think; with those changes, a point cost increase may not even be necessary.

Reveal on flanking doesn't make much sense given that it's effectively a full on cloaking device.

If it was just a full on cloaking device like that, it wouldn't require you to be in cover for it to work on the enemy turn. If it doesn't work if you're standing in the open, it shouldn't work if you're cover does nothing for you.

Also, You can't even bring Ethereals to ranked matches anymore. They cost 10500.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Battle Scanners reveal cloakers (they'd be made aware) + Cooldown (even if it's 1 turn) + Psi attacks break cloak is the best option I think; with those changes, a point cost increase may not even be necessary.

From Firaxis PoV, though, that is a big amount of coding, which they did not have a set method to produce except by patching, while a point change is precisely how they designed the MP balancing.

Grey Wolf

[Surrealistik]

If it was just a full on cloaking device like that, it wouldn't require you to be in cover for it to work on the enemy turn. If it doesn't work if you're standing in the open, it shouldn't work if you're cover does nothing for you.

Also, You can't even bring Ethereals to ranked matches anymore. They cost 10500.

I've always thought that the cover requirement was kind of odd. It's difficult to reconcile that with the narrative given that flanking doesn't break stealth. TBH, I've always figured it as a kludge half-assed gamist limitation for true cloaking. Personally I think they should just drop the token cover limitation and let it act as a full on cloaking device full stop, but subject it to the counters I'd proposed. Having it thwarted by a simple flank I think nerfs it far too much (not to mention the luck element involved there by stumbling into one) and would demand a significant point cost revision.

As for Ethereals, lol, yeah. Can't say it doesn't make sense though; they were definitely overpowered for their points, and properly microed, could annihilate most teams with casual ease. They often made for lazy win button victories.

[Anarion]

I think it's justified by flanking because it functions sort of like a chameleon effect, causing you to blend in to your environment. If you're in cover, even flanked, you look like part of the wall or log or whatever. If you're standing in the open, however, there are probably distortions and weirdness in objects at a distance that gives away your position.

Also, out of curiosity, if you just stay patient and hide behind full cover not at a corner (so that the opponent does not have LoS to you) how does that do against someone in ghost armor? If they cloak and move every turn, they'll run out before they find you unless they get lucky. But if they don't cloak, you might catch them in the open. I imagine a team with a couple regular sectoids or floaters for spotting and then a good soldier or two that is hidden. If they kill your sectoid, who cares, they just gave away their position and aren't cloaked anymore. If they mind control it, who cares, it's a sectoid. You can shift position or kill it yourself.

[BRC]

So I abandoned my classic playthrough, and started a new one. Then, two missions in I realized I had been doing well because I had accidentally set it to Normal.

I switched the difficulty back to Classic, but I've already got the lack of raised Panic, and the free OTS. Should I restart with a proper classic playthrough.

[Krade]

Other thing that would help:

No cooldown on Mind Control. One use only. Since you can only afford at most two decent units, they only need to kill one and the mind control the other.

[Cikomyr]

I think the game just... destroyed all my saves of the past 5 hours...

The saves are all scrambled, out of order...

.....

I might cry

[Surrealistik]

I think it's justified by flanking because it functions sort of like a chameleon effect, causing you to blend in to your environment. If you're in cover, even flanked, you look like part of the wall or log or whatever. If you're standing in the open, however, there are probably distortions and weirdness in objects at a distance that gives away your position.

Haha, I wouldn't know about that; seems like a stretch to me personally.

Also, out of curiosity, if you just stay patient and hide behind full cover not at a corner (so that the opponent does not have LoS to you) how does that do against someone in ghost armor? If they cloak and move every turn, they'll run out before they find you unless they get lucky. But if they don't cloak, you might catch them in the open. I imagine a team with a couple regular sectoids or floaters for spotting and then a good soldier or two that is hidden. If they kill your sectoid, who cares, they just gave away their position and aren't cloaked anymore. If they mind control it, who cares, it's a sectoid. You can shift position or kill it yourself.

Playing defensively like this, and stalling until they run out of charges is the only hope you have of beating a Ghoster in most cases. That said, a smart player won't fall for Sectoid bait; they'll ignore the Sec scouts and go after your real point investments. Assaults can also better afford to move without having Ghost constantly active due to Lightning Reflex, thus conserving on charges.

That said, one effective thing you can do vs Ghost Assaults is force them to decloak by tripping overwatch fire via a sacrificial Sectoid due to their Close Combat trait. Doing exactly this has won me several matches.


As for Mind Control, I think it's alright as is. The only thing I'd change about it is forcing your char to have line of sight to the target for its entire duration, and _maybe_ give it a maximum range and/or increase cooldown. If you end a turn with the controller or the target out of LoS/range, the MC ends.

[Drascin]

I think the game just... destroyed all my saves of the past 5 hours...

The saves are all scrambled, out of order...

.....

I might cry

Don't panic!

If you're like me and just make a new save every time you save instead of overwriting, that is probably simply due to number of saves. The game gets all bent out of shape after a certain number of save files. If you delete a lot of them it should work again.

For easier removal, go to the game's savegames folder and delete all but the last handful of saves AND the profile.bin thingy so that when loading it reindexes the saves.

[Cikomyr]

Don't panic!

If you're like me and just make a new save every time you save instead of overwriting, that is probably simply due to number of saves. The game gets all bent out of shape after a certain number of save files. If you delete a lot of them it should work again.

For easier removal, go to the game's savegames folder and delete all but the last handful of saves AND the profile.bin thingy so that when loading it reindexes the saves.

I needed a Hero!

Thanks mate!

[nooblade]

I wonder, are Cyberdiscs any good in multiplayer? I never found out if they have constant flying or if they just hover above the ground all the time. Anyway, I should guess that those would be a counter to psi-assaults, although at least one would get killed by shotgun.

Also, I remember drones being cheap similar to sectoids, anyone use them?

[Surrealistik]

I wonder, are Cyberdiscs any good in multiplayer? I never found out if they have constant flying or if they just hover above the ground all the time. Anyway, I should guess that those would be a counter to psi-assaults, although at least one would get killed by shotgun.

Also, I remember drones being cheap similar to sectoids, anyone use them?

No, and drones aren't worth using unless you're running discs.

EDIT: Actually, Discs can be alright, but you certainly can't run pure Discs. Disc + Sniper is a popular combo.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Having been watching Iskandar's LP of XCOM, I would just like to state for the record that XCOM must use Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy as a recruitment center.

[mistformsquirrl]

That's always been true Shneekey <_< including in the original game.

[NEO|Phyte]

Spoiler

Show

[Zevox]

Spoiler

Show

Pfft, that's totally unrealistic.

I mean, really, a female rookie? In this game? You have better odds of finding a fan of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

Zevox

[DaedalusMkV]

Pfft, that's totally unrealistic.

I mean, really, a female rookie? In this game? You have better odds of finding a fan of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

Zevox

Are you joking? All three of my games thus far have had roughly 50-50 gender ratios for active soldiers. Maybe a slight imbalance in favour of bulky-guys, but not a huge one by any stretch.

As any fan of XCOM 1 knows, there are only three uses for Rookies: Automatic laser fire spam all over the board, scouting so nobody important dies and being a walking bomb. This game is much better at that... Because you can't spam automatic laser fire to destroy everything or be walking bombs.

[Zevox]

Are you joking? All three of my games thus far have had roughly 50-50 gender ratios for active soldiers. Maybe a slight imbalance in favour of bulky-guys, but not a huge one by any stretch.

I had to save-reload a lot in my first game just to get the roughly 50/50 ratio I required for my Persona-theme team, and I haven't found subsequent playthroughs to be giving me particularly more females. The odds of getting each sex seem to be something like 75-25 male-female, at the least, in my experience.

Zevox

[Anarion]

I had to save-reload a lot in my first game just to get the roughly 50/50 ratio I required for my Persona-theme team, and I haven't found subsequent playthroughs to be giving me particularly more females. The odds of getting each sex seem to be something like 75-25 male-female, at the least, in my experience.

Zevox

I agree with Zevox anecdotally. I finished my classic ironman playthrough and hired over 90 soldiers in the course of the game, which is a pretty good sample size to say that it clearly favors men, though I'm not sure of the exact ratio.

And by the way, if anyone ever tells you that losing your entire team of high-ranking troops 5 times and losing over 62 soldiers total means you can't win classic ironman, they're lying to you.


Also, I found the coolest bug ever: permanent cloak.

How it happened: I was doing an abductor boarding mission. One soldier was cloaked nearby a sectopod right outside the right wall of the ship on the raised platform as he had been the spotter and my other guys were moving up. Next turn I moved up but ended up tripping a couple more spawns and some chaos involving several rockets and shotguns happened. When the dust cleared, I had cloaked a low hp assault squaddie and had him in cover, and his heavy buddy was a couple squares away.

Sectopod fires and kills the heavy, cloaked assault panics, runs, and hunkers down. On my turn, he remains panicked, but also cloaked. I regain control of him, still cloaked. I shoot a muton, still cloaked. I run him into a room with 3 heavy floaters. He shoots one, still cloaked. They meander about, jumping back and forth and do nothing. Proceed to clear the map with 1 assault and the three survivors playing clean up and getting everyone a promotion.

I think it was the panic into hunker that did it because somehow hunkering next to the UFO wall caused him not to lose cloak during the panic and then it was sticky the entire remainder of the battle while I controlled him.

[mistformsquirrl]

I've run 2 and a half games now, and I've run into the same problem as Zevox as well; lots more men than women.

[Drascin]

Me, I've noticed that all my assaults tend to be women.

[Cikomyr]

Agreed. Most of my assaults seems to be women as well.

The hard thing about Rookies in original X-Com, is that the game had a Elder Scroll approach to experience. If you wanted to be good at something, you had to do said thing, again and again.

So if you want your soldiers to be crack shots, you needed to make them shoot a lot.
You want them to be super strong, you needed to have them carry heavy stuff all the time.
etc... etc... With a few exceptions.