XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

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Thad
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Thad » Mon Sep 05, 2016 3:44 pm

Another simple example: in Axiom Verge, the low health warning beeps in time to the music; it starts out loud but (mercifully) fades into the melody after a little bit. But it doesn't go away entirely until you pick up some health.

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Thad » Mon Oct 17, 2016 2:20 am

Picked Enemy Within up again today; got to the base defense mission, which is a great argument in favor of unfair, surprising moments in game design, and a great argument against going Ironman your first time through.

I knew there was going to be a base defense mission at some point, but I didn't know when, and I didn't know I wouldn't be able to choose or equip my team. I was surprised as hell that I survived until the last wave of enemies, despite everybody on my team having default equipment -- crap weapons, no armor, no medikits.

I liked the feel of it, though; as I've said before, the game does a fantastic job of making you feel good about losing. This really felt like a real sneak attack, like all my guys had just been sitting around in their underwear watching TV or something and were totally unprepared.

And it was clear enough afterward that my party had just been picked from the top of the roster, so it was easy enough to reload and properly equip everybody.


I really should have won the second time, but I made some stupid moves -- you know how sometimes you do stupid shit that you know you shouldn't do but you do it anyway because maybe this time it'll work? I separated a couple of guys from the group, and they got killed early, because of course they did, and I think I probably would have won if I hadn't done that.

The reason I think I probably would have won is that even after I did that, I still managed to make it to within one shot of winning anyway. One of those epic one-on-one final showdowns, and I came this close to pulling it off.

If I can manage to be less stupid next time, and if the RNG gods don't fuck me, the third time should be the charm.

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mothra » Tue Oct 18, 2016 2:04 pm

Damn you Thad just make the jump to XCom 2 already!

(But yeah the re-introduction of base invasion missions was an excellent idea, done nicely. XCom 2's version is fantastic as well.)

Alright, taking a swing at Ironman Legend on XCom 2. It is not forgiving. So far I've made it to the robot mission where you get Spark, who should help me out a lot.

I bought Shen's Last Gift before doing the Commander difficulty last campaign, and really enjoyed it. Good story, very fun three-part mission, and you get an insanely overpowered unit for the rest of the game. The Spark robot is basically the prototype of what Advent would eventually use for their killbots, and as such, has like thrice the amount of health as a regular soldier, with armor stacked on top of that. It also hits hard with armor-shredding ammo, and can (using a cooldown ability) make 3 moves a turn. That is massive when you get to Sectopods and Gatekeepers, and it's just very nice to have when you're facing down Mutons or Beserkers.

Definitely planning on building more than one of these when the option becomes available, since I honestly can't see any downsides.

Also: Sad that you don't get to use Lily after Shen's Last Gift. She really does come together as a very likable character by the time you're through.

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Thad » Wed Oct 19, 2016 1:26 am

I bought XCOM 2. And I'll get around to it one of these days. But if I'd just quit Enemy Within, I wouldn't have gotten the base invasion mission, and I would have missed out.

Way things are going, though, maybe I need something relaxing. Hey, the next Humble Monthly Bundle has Stardew Valley in it...

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jan 21, 2017 4:06 am

So, did anybody else find XCOM 1 to be buggy as fuck? Still finishing up my first vanilla campaign (end has been in sight for a while, but I need to do missions just to grind my psychic team up to spec). Every couple of missions I'm losing a mission due to an animation getting stuck, or inputs just ceasing to register. It's embarrassing how frequently the program just locks up.
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby malikial » Sat Jan 21, 2017 5:43 am

I played through the game 4 times, 220 hours without a single bug but then I have good luck with that.

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby beatbandito » Sat Jan 21, 2017 7:57 am

Guardians protecting Mali's purity aside, I don't think I've ever gotten worse than some LoS bugs out of EU/EW. Just a bunch of aliens on the other sides of buildings shooting me while my own guys stare one dead in the eyes like 'wut? I see nothing'.
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mothra » Sat Jan 21, 2017 12:17 pm

I remember a few "stuck waiting for flopping ragdoll animation" bugs. Usually you can wait them out, but sometimes they last forever. I get them even in XCom 2.

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Smiler » Sat Jan 21, 2017 12:51 pm

Mongrel wrote:So, did anybody else find XCOM 1 to be buggy as fuck? Still finishing up my first vanilla campaign (end has been in sight for a while, but I need to do missions just to grind my psychic team up to spec). Every couple of missions I'm losing a mission due to an animation getting stuck, or inputs just ceasing to register. It's embarrassing how frequently the program just locks up.


I was getting real tired of the game one point and the thing that made me uninstall the game was the combo of not being able to see inside of UFOs because the roof would never fade out when the camera was supposed to be looking inside, and the fact that an alien squad spawned right in the middle of my squad and fucking murdered them all.

This was of course before they put a patch out for the PC version because they were stalling to find every bug due to how fucking shitty it was to patch games for the 360. I guess they still have tons of bugs anyways. Good!

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jan 21, 2017 2:47 pm

beatbandito wrote:Guardians protecting Mali's purity aside, I don't think I've ever gotten worse than some LoS bugs out of EU/EW. Just a bunch of aliens on the other sides of buildings shooting me while my own guys stare one dead in the eyes like 'wut? I see nothing'.

Yeah, I get those too, but I can live with those. The most infuriating is when I put three guys next to a civilian in a Terror mission and the civvie doesn't recognize any of them, but the next turn the aliens can run a guy up and kill him just fine. The funniest is that whenever I do a terror mission on the "army base" map with all the tanks, there's a heavy floater that spawns to the left. If I kill him with a sniper he doesn't get a death animation and so it looks like there's a heavy floater just sitting there all game doing nothing.

Actually you reminded me that it's 100% guaranteed that whenever I ghost in to find an Ethereal and some Muton guards in a scout cockpit, some of them will randomly teleport to another location in the ship when my ghost cloak comes off. Like, not a showy teleport with effects, just a forced respawn which appears to be a glitch 'cause I'm pretty sure even Ethereals aren't supposed to actually have a teleportation skill.

The game full-on faceplanting means I regularly lose 15, 20, 45 minutes of play (and I also lost some missions where I was doing really well and got some great lucky shots) and that's way more annoying to me than than occasional weird teleporting aliens
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mothra » Sat Jan 21, 2017 3:20 pm

Yup yup - a big reason why I always recommend people XCom 2 or Enemy Within over vanilla XCom is because of that fucking teleport "glitch."

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Blossom » Sat Jan 21, 2017 7:05 pm

Re: Long War 2

uhhhhhhhhhh
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jan 21, 2017 11:12 pm

"Oh, uh, I didn't realize the end was that close/simple/easy. Heh."

On to Enemy Within now. At least I won't waste so much time with shitheaded soldier skill builds that make me throw away all my great starting soldiers and grind up new ones.

Thinking I might skip Long War for XCOM 1 and just go straight to 2 though after this Enemy Within campaign. Arguments for/against?
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 22, 2017 1:31 am

Also, I found the missions in Vanilla got REALLY repetitive by the end. I'm surprised the enemies always spawned in almost the same locations every time on a given map - even original XCOM 20 years ago was much better about random or pseudo-random spawning for enemies.
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby beatbandito » Sun Jan 22, 2017 7:39 am

EW Long War gives you individual options. You can still set it for a shorter over-all campaign but with fixes like flank crits and random placement every map and every save reload. I would recommend having it over a vanilla playthrough.
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 22, 2017 5:47 pm

Okay, I'm getting the "Just go straight to Long War instead of vanilla EW" from multiple people, so what I really want to know is, what should I know about EW Vanilla before going to Long War?
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby beatbandito » Sun Jan 22, 2017 7:07 pm

It's EU but the robots are good and the enemy humans are a joke.
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jan 22, 2017 7:13 pm

Exalt? So they're not really a challenge in unmodded EW?
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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Thad » Sun Jan 22, 2017 8:45 pm

They are at first, but there's a pretty sharp difficulty cliff. I had some really great early Exalt missions where I barely managed to get my spy to the exit (everyone else was dead), but by the end the balance had tipped hard in the other direction.

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Re: XCom: Flooding the Market with Dead Poisonlizard Salarymen

Postby Mothra » Sun Jan 22, 2017 10:45 pm

I actually drag out killing them for good as long as I can, since they're completely free, safe XP for whoever you send in to massacre them.

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