The Firaxis XCOM Series

When XCOM goes absolutely nuts on the ADVENT Forge.

And surprisingly, a Borderlands sorta-crossover short story to accompany it in the comments.

Speaking of crossover, it amuses me that since the latest Stellaris patch, you actually build your ships out of "alloys". Which would clearly be alien alloys to any pre-FTL civilization you meet.

Huh, I was somehow under the impression that Tactical Analysis was such a good continental bonus that it was only allowed for non-two-territory continents, but lo and behold there it is in Australia for my latest campaign.

And on the topic of crossovers... so back in my third War of the Chosen campaign, I wound up with more Rookies than I needed, got bored, and dressed a Japanese soldier up in a black Reaper trench coat, gave him the callsign "Chuuni." Wound up becoming an ironic/non-indicative nickname when he became a Psi Operative later on. Anyway, fast-forward to now when I'm doing one last campaign before uninstalling to clear up space on my hard drive, and early on Yoshio "Chuuni" Kato (re)joins XCOM as a mission reward. I have a chuckle and stick him in the training school just to give him his starting perks (I'm using the highly-recommended Mushashi RPG Overhaul), then put him on the bench so I can continue to develop my A and B teams.

But then comes tonight's Retaliation mission, and between fatigue and covert ops, I'm short on quality soldiers. I do what I can but there's still a spare slot on the Skyranger some hapless Squaddie is going to have to fill, and when I check over the bench-warmers I notice that Chuuni has a genius intellect thanks to his RPG perk, so between that and starting with the Templar's AP-boosting Resistance Order, if I level the guy, Chuuni is gonna be a beast! Then I notice that I've got some promising Sentinels and Riflemen and Assaults and one hell of a Sniper, but no one innately suited to be my favorite class, Ranger. And then I have to have a good cackle when I realize I'm giving an Arc Blade to a Japanese kid in a black duster in hopes of turning him into an OP swordmaster.

(if it makes you feel better, I only got into it through the abridged series)

Does anyone know of a mod that adds our Stock Poses to the photo booth?

The only pose mod I know of that doesn't allow more classes to access the existing poses is the Community Pose Pack, which looks to be mostly about memes. But it says it has 97 poses in there, so at least some of them have to be included on our list.

XCOM 2 is 75% off on Steam and free to download over the weekend.

Say.

Does anybody know why Saudi Arabia isn't in the countries list in XCOM 2? It took me a long while to even notice that, but I was trying to remake one of my EU soldiers in WOTC and it dawned on me that Saudi Arabia wasn't anywhere in the list. Was there a reason it was removed? Like, is it a lore thing, or did 2K have problems with the country or something?

Saudi Arabia's official policy as a country is to welcome any new alien overlords under any circumstances.

I do wish they had more languages for each country rather than make American the default standard if a localization language isn't already there.

Oh, huh. So. that just happened.

Y'all see the alien ruler, the snake one ? Y'all see the repeater upgrade that has something like a one out of ten chance to one shot regardless of health ?

Well, the latter just proc'ed on the former. From a demoman who walks around in fucking shorts. The first time I ever met the ruler. with a squad, of, like, corporals. on the second shot ever fired at the thing.

WELL, THAT HAPPENED.

I wasn't big on propaganda posters but this dude is getting one, no questions asked.

Edited by Yumil on Mar 30th 2019 at 5:04:06 PM

Oooh, I had that happen to the Archon King on the very first time I met it, all the way back in vanilla. Had a sniper with a repeater on overwatch on the other side of the field and she just popped him like a pimple. Bradford hadn't even finished introducing it yet.

Same, and that was when I didn't use the mod to make the Alien Rulers less bullshit.

To be honest, the Rulers were half the reason I packed people with repeaters. It kinda became a strategy in vanilla: activate the Rulers, pack as many people as I can with repeaters, only remove them when all three are dead and gone.

I got a mod that changes the nature of repeaters. Rather than a chance for an insta-kill, it increases critical damage. Bit more practical in the long run.

...

THE FUCKING MADMAN DID IT AGAIN.

THE SAME ONE

WEARING THE SAME FUCKING SHORTS

ONE SHOTTED THE BERSERKER KING.

This guy is getting all of the treats and then some. I'm making a duty of having him one shot the archon king too.

Coincidentally, both encoutners happened on a avatar center raid.

This is how I'm imagining this person, now.

So. I tried cleaning up my 300+ saves of xcom 2 and accidentally set myself twenty saves back by fucking up. So. The berserker ruler was alive again. And I had 2 missiosn to go throughto get back to where I found it.

But it's alright because while redoing most of the things the same way, and while the mission ended up happening on a different map, the berserker still showed up, and the man still killed it.

I'm going to be level-headed and assume there is some sort of predetermination going on - the numbers were fixed a long time ago and I just used them in the same sequence twice.

The alternative would be that this fucker willed itself back through time, space, probabilties and causality just to kill this motherfucker AGAIN.

At this point, I'm honestly just gonna call him purple haze. Tagline "here's your purple haze feedback : YOU'RE FUCKING DEAD."

Also got to do a really cool move for the terror mission that followed. A MEC, heavy MEC, and a pod of 3 cryssalids for starters, close enough to trigger them by walking too far but way too far to consider killing them on the first turn. Or maybe not ?

My reaper got up close to the cryssalids pods. Then her brother in arms gave her a second action so she could setup a claymore mine. Meanwhile, the skirmisher grapples to close some distance, walks up to them, use the free lightning ability to oneshot the first CEM, then use his grapple to propel itself against the cem, damage it and dodge his overwatch shot. Meanwhile, a scout uses run and gun to reach the crysalis and throw a grenade on the claymore mine, crippling one and killing two on the spot. THEN, the brother in arms of the skirmisher gives him another action so he can finish off the crysalis, and to top it off, the specialist gives him the defense protocol to help him facetank the heavy MEC.

I gotta say, that's just not the kind of crazy awesome shit you can pull in XCOM 1. The tools the game gives you to deal with sitations can get pretty creative. I didn't even had to put much save scum to get the play right.

Rest of the mission was more boring, as a game of "guess where the spotting area of the burrowed chrysalis starts and setup overwatch traps for them." but the templar got some pretty funky kills with her reaction to proximity attack thing so oh well.

I take it back. This is how I imagine him.

Combat shorts: a fashion to surpass Bradford's sweater?

Also, Beaglerush is back on YouTube showing off an XCOM 2 mod he's working on that underpowers individual soldiers and emphasizes suppression tactics and squad positioning. It takes less than ten minutes for things to get biblical.

I laughed way harder than I should have at that joke. Too bad that he actually dropped the shorts by now and actually wear pants. Instead, he's gotten rid of his top for a shirt. Sooooooo, now he's kenshiro just as in the video above. Checks out.

Who knows, maybe when I reach the last tier of armor the guy will finally have a decent outfit.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 2nd 2019 at 11:50:58 AM

HE FUCKING DID IT

HE KILLED THE ARCHON RULER

I had to prod around a bit to get the repeater shot to happen but hey. and he was wearing an actual armor this time... that looks like super tight latex that highlights his butt more than anything else. but. Still an armor.

So, this guy is singlehandedly responsible for killing everything bad about xcom 2. I'm gonna assume it's the manifestation of the collective anger of the fanbase against those guys made manifest.

And his final propaganda poster will be him in berserker king armor, with a focus on his crotch, and title with the peak performance meme as the tagline. Seems legit.

Edited by Yumil on Apr 4th 2019 at 2:52:33 PM

Is he a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus?

Is his name Flashheart? Or Chuck Nixon? Is he the spirit of the American dream made manifest and here to punch space commies?

They better put more in-game recognition of insane badassery for your troops in the next XCOM. Wonder when we're getting it...

"They're falling back", says my soldier in XCOM EW, right before said alien (who is Mindfrayed at this point) turns around, crits and kills said soldier.

Never change, XCOM. Never change.

Falling back into their old ways of RNGesus-Bullshit-Critting XCOM soldiers to death

Eyyyyyyyyyyyy

Edited by VutherA on Apr 5th 2019 at 2:08:53 PM

Hunker Down and Dense Smoke Grenades are so good in the first game for that reason. The first negates crits entirely and both behind full cover sum to 80 Defense, when there's few aliens who have Aim higher than that, which leads to a "can't crit what you can't hit" scenario. Granted, that floor of 1% does make me perpetually nervous and I've played the game enough to have been hit at least twice by a lucky roll on that 1% (once by a Sectoid on that computer office map with the fountain, while hiding behind the wall on the left side of the building; the other time was by a non-Blood-Called Muton while Hunkering behind half-cover while in Dense Smoke).