The Firaxis XCOM Series

Anyone else ran into this bug where when you break concealment and one of the alien panic due to your Alien Ruler armor, your overwatches and Kill Zones don't trigger?

I don't even do Overwatch ambushes any more by the time I've managed to get alien armor onto my mans.

By the late game, I usually have one overwatch-spec'd Specialist and/or Kill Zone Sharpshooter do all the overwatching.

But you still skip Covering Fire, right?

I don't usually do Overwatch ambushes, period. I'd rather have more options for my crew than risking a miss from an overwatch and give the enemy a chance to attack (I know accuracy is better on an overwatch when the enemy is caught unaware, but I hardly use stealth outside the start of the mission anyway).

Oh yeah. Threat Assessment + Guardian is my go to. So many shots. A Specialist can wipe out a pod all by himself if he's lucky.

Streaming my Legend/Ironman rematch again. Let's see if it becomes a lesson in how a good tactical layer can be completely unraveled by Alien Cypher during expansion.

Major Fridge Brilliance Moment: XCOM 2 psi-ops have stronger versions of EVERYTHING Elders can do in EU and EW.

Domination is better than vanilla Mind Control, Null Lance does loads more damage than Psionic Lance and has superior range and even pierces multiple targets, Void Rift is completely superior to Psionic Rift because it also triggers random Insanity attacks that could potentially have the Rupture effect due to the skill that buffs Insanity, Soulfire with Soulsteal outclasses the Elder's Lifesteal skill that they use on their own servitors.

I feel the superiority of humanity's psi is pretty much stated in the Temple Ship of the first game. If not by the babbling from the random Elder, then from the fact that the volunteer picks up Psionic Rift and can do over 20 damage with it (one-shotting a lot of things that Void Rift would only have a chance to debuff after failing to kill it).

The power difference between Dominate and Mind Control aren't so clear cut, either. Even though it breaks over time, Mind Control has a cooldown, which means it can be used multiple times on multiple different enemies. Dominate is permanent, but only gets one successful charge, meaning the best targets for it are also the ones with enough Will to make the attack non-guaranteed.

The Commander's Avatar also has stupidly high success rate with Mind Control and has a gigantic Rift as well, also Null Lance.

Still doesn't get the rest of a standard human psi-op's crazy psi powers though. Solace and Fortress are hax, and the Stasis Skilltree is deceptively powerful.

Yeah. An interesting thing I noticed with the Commander is that that Void Rift only counts as a single, non-turn-ending action, so if you want to blow all your cooldowns at once, Void Rift into Null Lance can be a thing.

Stasis by itself is probably one of the most overpowered things in the game. I mean, it's an undodgeable, reusable CC with a low cooldown, that only costs 1 AP without ending the unit's turn and has the unique advantage over all other CC of completely locking out all of a Ruler's reactions (or both AP, in the case of Sectopods and Gatekeepers). Even Mimic Beacons ain't got that going for them.

Okkkkkk, so a full-on Long War mod for XCOM 2 actually is happening. I never would have expected that.

Why not? XCOM 2 is generally fairly short (barring playing Legend) and the first mod was pretty popular. The the game itself being more mod friendly (aside from that whole issues with inflated file size that may or may not have been fixed?), so it seemed inevitable to me.

Unrelated, I keep forgetting to post this, but for anyone interested in seeing one of the stupidest maps ever, I snipped out the mission so that it has its own video. TLDW: I didn't see enemies until the timer was basically halfway done and by then, I was practically on top of the objective. Anyone familiar with how hard Line of Play lets the AI cheat for finding the squad knows that there couldn't be anything but bad times ahead.

edited 5th Jan '17 1:24:55 PM by KuroiTsubasaTenshi

Well, they already mentioned they were working on another game entirely; leading me to assume they'd be busy with that; and they did mods that were more or less some bits from Long War so then I figured they were not doing an entire one.

But you've got a good point about modding being much easier for them now - if the old mod was that often struggling with actually implementing it, I suppose that difference (and how they'll be doing it full-time) should make up for it.

The return of Pulse tier (not in name)

Also, in case you were wondering, LW2 will be a free mod on PCs.

edited 10th Jan '17 5:09:07 PM by VutherA

Things I'm glad I learned in practice rather than during my Ironman run: Stun 2 on Andromedons actually means "cheat mode time" and they get their turn anyway, even if I go out of my way to not knock it into the mech phase.

New Long War class announced, based around getting the two E.X.O. suit rocket launcher and flamethrower weapons innately (and what's that about infiltrating?).

Johnny Lump's statements on his studio's forums say that the those heavy weapons are unique to the Technical class while everyone else will get the gun-type heavy weapons on E.X.O. suits, the Technical class along with their Perk Pack mod classes and the Psi & SPARKs is the entire class lineup, pistols are returning for all classes in the utility slot (of which there will be three), all classes will have a special secondary and rocket scatter is returning.

edited 12th Jan '17 9:39:02 AM by VutherA

I'm... not a fan of rockets missing....

I would be if you could have more of them.

Like in the original X-COM. Large Rocket spam for days.

He also says there's a hard maximum for scatter so perhaps that maximum will, at least, always leave the center tile targeted guaranteed at least to be hit? Perhaps they consider Gunners' suppression sufficient to sometimes lead in a Technical spending a turn to approach for a better rocket shot. Perhaps they regard the power of rockets so early as plenty enough to justify dealing with a bit of unreliability? Perhaps they think this scatter is the perfect way to make people use the flamethrower more often (I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, really...)?

Or maybe that'll just break it! Que sera, sera.

edited 12th Jan '17 5:26:31 PM by VutherA

Doing Legend/Ironman again soon. Trying to get out of the woods is hard.

Interesting thing I learned on Sunday: giving Shen a Medikit adds 2 additional charges to her hacked 3 base charges. This would seem to indicate that she also has Field Medic (probably to no one's surprise, since she's a super cheaty Specialist), though the Medikit's own charge appears to get lost—likely overridden by her base 3 charges.

Shen's AMAZING! while also being an Adorable Dork!

More opportunities for Faceless to jump you (also strategic layer additions I guess) (For real though on that first bit)

Apparently, fatigue is being replaced by how there will be multiple targets available at once that you'll want your soldiers to infiltrate as much as possible to enforce keeping a large enough roster.

edited 17th Jan '17 2:37:11 PM by VutherA