XCOM THREAD

Look at the stats at your soldiers, if you see a soldier that has low bravery or gets panicked/mind controlled a lot let them go. They are a liability.

…on a special mission inside the crashed UFO with a ticking bomb, preferably

Doesn't this game scale the difficulty based on how well you do?

If they survive the trial they'll be worthy of being my operative

OP at his base

Wow you really went into this blind? Nice, I had a lot of knowledge on what to do so it ruined lots of the "fun".
This game still surprises me though, always check corners if there are lids around. Getting jumped by one right at the skyranger ramp is pretty horrifying.

I believe I did have the right ammo yes, I am pretty sure because that is the ammo I bought for the interceptors when they got low. The thing is after my third interceptor I could not equip them anymore. Do I need something to equip the avalanche missiles to them? I though I had bought everything.

Better file name.

If it does, then it must have decided to just put me out of my misery the first time.

I just completed a mission using six S.H.I.Vs. I might as well use these forever honestly.

You need to buy avalanche missile launchers and equip them on your interceptors, they'll reload automatically as long as you have them in your general stores.

I did buy the avalanche missiles, but for some reason they were not accessible in the equip weapon menu. I made sure I had transferred the right weapons to the base. Maybe it was a bug, I was using the GoG version.

get openxcom user, you'll not regret it

In what way does it differ from the original? I've heard about it, but I don't know anything about it since I'm new to the series.

It's just the game on a modern, open-source engine with all the classic bugs fixed and a bunch of extra options.

wish the new games were superior rather then inferior, why the fuck did they casualize them

...

(checked)
Nice dubs.

muh wider audience

Dammit. Xcom EW just crashed again at the final fight. I was crushing those ayys with mecha-hitler, and four shivs. Oh well, I know I would have won anyways.

You can set psi to require line of sight in Open X-Com which you should be playing.

For what porpoise?

Damnit, meant to reply to, .

Because vanilla psi is bullshit when used at the beginning against you and it's bullshit when you yourself have psi against ayyys.

Ayys always target the weakest minds of your squad. So keep one retard around as a mind bullet sponge and you're good, it's a little cheap but once the Mutons roll around it won't feel so cheap anymore.
Terror From the Deep on the other hand is on a whole different level so anything cheap or cheating in this game is a completely valid tactic in the sequel.

I hope they don't butcher, terror of the deep if they're actually going to do that instead of just dlc for nucummie 2:the other game was a dream

although tbh I wonder if whatever the fuck it's called will be anything like it

The problem is that doing 3D for underwater is a pain in the ass for these sorts of games. Even Terror From the Deep is just a reskin.

why does this type of game matter? being underwater or out of water is merely a different state

Its fucking OP thats why
Early game only sectoids can use Psi but as ethereals get introduced you are expected to reverse engineer Psi stuff yourself and have a team full of Psi resistant soldiers.

where is this from? Xcom Apocalypse? awesome clips

Can someone explain to me why no one has yet been able to create a spiritual sequel that can live up to X-COM? How hard can it be to copy the gameplay, change the art assets and modernize the UI?

XCOM TFTD, XCOM Apocalypse, UFO spin off series (Afterlight, Aftermath and some other after), Xenonauts.

Reskin.

Even more ambitious than X-COM but shipped out buggy and broken, with many features missing.

I heard about them and they looked like budget knockoffs. What are the best ones?

I played it, and while a valiant effort, there's still something missing.

dark colony

In my opinion UFO Aftermath has the best atmosphere. Aftershock has more features such as drones, base building for production, research and so on. Amount of buildings space depends on the territory size. Weapons can have up to 3 different attachments. Armor can be customized too but it has nothing noteworthy on them.

The beginning at Aftershock can be pretty grindy since ammo for firearms will be pretty sparse, so you will better off killing the ayyliens instead of the biomass enemy since at least you can loot some weapons and ammo for them.

original Apocalypse was pretty shit but I hear they are making openApocalypse which might fix a lot of things. All of the games I mentioned are all spiritual successors to XCOM and one is a sequel. They are not carbon copies with rehashed UI which is what you meant by spiritual successor I assume. Xenonauts is the closest to what you want so far. Get some mods if you feel something is missing, they have an active community. As for UFO series they are much less forgiving than XCOM because of the way recruiting works and how quickly enemies scale. is pretty spot on, but they are a trilogy so if you start with second one things might get confusing.

Aftershock lets you recruit soldiers all the time where all of them are at level 1 if I recall it correctly and one of them will have higher level. This is not the case for Aftermath where you have to work with the soldiers that you get, there is no recruiting mechanism at all. Also Aftermath has a nice amount of different map types such as arctic ones, desert, jungle, urban ones and a few more I think. What I disliked about this game however that during mid-late game and you do a mission there especially ones that involves with the ayys your squad will always get ambushed which gets on my nerves. The base defense mission is the worst offender since your squads are spread through out the base so you have to waste time regrouping them and even more so due to shitty door mechanic it has like you need to tell the soldier manually to open it else the path will be blocked. Luckily in Aftershock they fixed it.

Aftershock got rid of the procedural maps which depending on your taste might be a improvement or a degradation. Personally I like Aftermath more despite its flaws since it has a nice atmosphere and a comfy globe scape music too. Aftershock makes it at least up for all the new features they have added in.

I haven't finished Afterlight yet so I cannot tell anything about it.
Yeah start with Aftermath first.

Yep one of the developer made a video where he added a feature so that the Grizzly AFV can drive off-road too now instead of getting destroyed when the road below it is gone. Honestly it is not a surprise that X-Com Apoc is buggy since it was a pretty ambitious project to start off with and they had to trash a lot of features like it was supposed to have a proper diplomacy system. The programmers complained that it was difficult adding both a real time and a turn based system. The alien dimension got a lot of cut features too, it was supposed to have at least 7-8 different alien dimension with different map layout for each of them.

Do tell

throw a primed grenade from one soldier in the back to the next soldier in a chain until it reaches its target, it's contrary to reality quite efficient.

I'm curious since I've never bothered with them, are the firaxcom games any good? With or without mods?

What was missing with Xenonauts? I've tried playing it around 5 times now and every time I quit after the second encounter.
There's just something so soulless about it that stops me dead in my tracks despite nothing feeling outright bad about it.

Where do you think hot potato comes from you goof?

I'm quite sure soldiers would rather play russian roulette than pass a live grenade around with friendlies.

It's the lack of self contained story. Its story is only that it's xcom reboot and that's how it survives. It has no cinematics and the endgame screen is literally two paragraphs with no epic ending cut or anything. It also has visuals that get stale because you have to watch them for a really long time before they change. The gameplay itself is fine, it's whats around it that makes it a bit lackluster despite good premise.

I think it was less stale visuals, because it had about the same sprite variety as X-COM, and more the lack of any real art style. It just looks bland and forgettable because they tried to hard to make it look real. Your soldiers look like average fucks you'd see on the street and not the flamboyant badasses we got in X-COM.

I had no idea you could do that, sounds fun

The Firaxcom games aren't bad, but they have enough mechanical differences from the original games to make switching between them annoying. The biggest examples are how they handle ballistics, cover, line of sight, movement, and troop deployment.
In the originals, you can fire at anything, and deliberately destroy portions of the terrain by doing so. In Firaxcom, you can only fire at enemy combatants and missed shots are just as likely to vanish into the ether as they are to hit the terrain around them.
In the originals, cover is just terrain that obscures line of sight. If there's an alien standing behind a wall, you can not see it unless you remove the wall or find a different angle. In Firaxcom, cover provides aim penalties to incoming shots instead of obscuring vision. Cover comes in the form of "Half" and "Full", which amounts to the difference between standing behind a fence versus standing behind a solid wall. Units will also "peek" into adjacent tiles if they're in cover and the tiles next to them are empty, rendering them visible if they're sitting behind a solid wall but there's a window next to them, as an example.
In the originals, a unit can only see in the direction they're currently facing, making their vision a triangle or cone. As such, it's possible to sneak up on enemies if they're looking away from you when you spot them. In Firaxcom, all units see in a sphere around their position, so sneaking up on enemies is only possible if there's a solid wall between you and them.
In the originals, every soldier has a pool of "Turn Units" which are consumed when they take any action, such as moving one space, firing, ducking, turning around, etc. In Firaxcom, units instead have a "Blue Move" and a "Gold Move". Soldiers can move much more than one tile per "Move", but any movement will consume the "Blue Move" or "Gold Move", even if you only moved half the available distance or even a single tile. Also, firing, throwing grenades, or doing similar things will consume both "Moves", meaning that taking a shot without moving the soldier leaves them unable to move away from their position until next turn.
Finally, in the originals you can deploy up to 14 soldiers right at the start of the game, and I believe this number eventually goes up to 18 or 24. Aliens can also do this, though how many aliens you'll see per mission depends on the type of mission and/or the size of the alien craft. In Firaxcom, you're locked to a paltry 4 soldiers with the option of unlocking a grand total of 2 more slots later in the game. The aliens will start with similarly low numbers, but eventually will ramp up to numbers closer to the original games.
Beyond that, there is a lot less mechanical depth to the Firaxcom games in general, and the dependency on RNG is much more frustrating due to the low number of soldiers you're allowed to use at any given time. Also, the games were made with mass appeal in mind. Because the average pleb's understanding of math is "2 and 2 feels like 5" and "anything above 50% feels like 100%", the game's dice rolls will fudge in the player's favor over time depending on factors such as how often you've missed shots, how much damage the aliens have done to your team, and so on. This fudging is entirely absent on Impossible and can be modded out entirely, but it exists regardless.

So not even mods can fix it? I was actually kind of intrigued by having a smaller but more specialized unit count to manage rather than a small army.

Mods and modding can change or tweak a lot of Firaxcom's mechanics, but thus far they can't turn it into the original games. If that's what you want, you're better off just playing the originals instead.

For me it's the artstyle, not specifically of the modern Earth weaponry, but the aliens and more advanced weapons. They just look so fucking lame, like they came straight out of a Star Trek episode. Also, like others have said, there's no narrative around it. One thing NuCOM did right was the whole "shadowy council" thing, on top of the news reports. It really helps get you pumped up.

The only thing I remember from the first XCOM made by Firaxis was Bradford.

There's also the lady scientist who loves to chop up aliens and gets mad at you for blowing them up, and Shen, who makes all your guns and armor.
Their replacements in XCOM 2 are much less memorable.

I think it's because they don't interact as much. Shen and Vahlen had sort of a science vs engineering thing going on, and Bradford showed up to ask them how he could use the science and the engineering to kill more ayys. Plus they had some small personality traits, like Shen wondering the problems these new advances could bring humanity and Vahlen implied to be almost sadistic towards ayys in her research. It wasn't deep in the least but it was kind of endearing. The nigger and the I wuv the science girl didn't really have any traits or banter, aside from the girl being Shen's granddaughter. Punished Bradford was cool though.

You know guys… it's kinda strange how there is no chryssalid on female egg insertion porn arround the net… no pics, no SFM…

I'm not complaining, just found it strange…

Don't remind me. I still seathe at the idea of auto/burst weapons being a single "shot" where either all bullets hit or all miss, and objects in the path are ignored.

I wish there was more games that used the engine of Silent Storm. Collapsing a whole building on the enemies without having to even get inside was so fun.

You can get extremely creative in how to handle shit in X-Com, which is something I wish more games had.

There aren't any separate pilots for them, they are assorted already. You have to wait for them to be refueled and rearmed after each flight. And the ufo-based designs need Elerium as fuel.

And you have to wait for them to be repaired first too, if they get damaged.

I'll tell you exactly why. People who make X-Com spiritual sequels don't understand what made X-Com the game it is. Firaxis claimed it was the love and attachment you get to soldiers, and decided to add skill trees. Xenonauts developers decided the formula just needed more personal squads and air combat. Want to know what the pattern is?

They've all fucked with the squad mechanics. Soldiers in X-Com have to be faceless and expendable. Attaching faces to squads (and/or reducing squad size) prevents the game from functioning like a war game and makes it function more like a tactical RPG. When you lose a veteran soldier in the base X-Com, you might feel upset or bad about it. When you lose a veteran soldier in the X-Com-styled games, you get set back in the campaign.

You see, the reason there are so many soldiers sent on missions in UFO Defense is because you're EXPECTED to take loses. You're allowed to play aggressively in many situations. In fact, mutual surprise (the mechanic that prevents reaction fire when you spot an alien on the same step it spots you) downright encourages it. You play the game in an entirely different style, exchanging mass amounts of gunfire in the open, exploring maps that are filled with suspense (because the game is allowed to kill your soldiers without you knowing what happened), and other things along those lines. You can't play Xenonauts or NuCom like that. Xenonauts and NuCom are about taking cover and exchanging fire from a superior position. It makes the game slow and unsatisfying. That's why people just can't get into them and don't understand why.

Honestly, if X-Com spinoffs keep wanting to add classes to their games, they need to either evolve to a global class level, or just remove the concept. When soldiers become too valuable to lose, the game suffers.

A side note: none of the spiritual successors have advanced the formula. The things they thought were advancing the formula actually ended up hurting the game in the long run. If I was working on a game, it'd have to be advanced through advanced equipment loadouts that were specifically designed to encourage aggressive play.

You say that like UFO: Extraterrestrials wasn't a thing. Or as if the original devs themselves understood what made X-Com great and didn't make a bunch of shit afterwards.

This so much. The interface needs to also be less cumbersome and more responsive. No tedious camera panning, no overly long animations. Just a consistent camera angle and maybe a quick pop up when the turn changes with a snappy interface. That will facilitate having a larger number of soldiers in the game at once. It's sad because the intro mission to Firaxis' Enemy Unknown basically lies about the game. You are presented with a simple mission with an extremely high casualty rate, which is supposed to set the tone of "don't fuck around, your dudes will die." But dying past an early point in the game is almost a non-option and people who play Ironman have to do so extremely tediously, with constant half-moves and overwatch.

One thing though; the game(s) constantly offer to reward you with progressively higher ranked soldiers. So you can afford to lose a fag now and then when the game throws high quality replacements at you. Losing a well trained X-Comfag was a massive pain though

I think it's even deeper than that. UFO defense makes the dice roll mechanics of the game work like no other game I've seen. Let's use final fantasy tactics as a comparison. FF tactics uses much of the same dice rolling mechanics, but ultimately it only makes a frustrating game because when you lose your team it's game over. You can only reload, and in the case of story missions they are the same every time. In UFO defense when you lose a mission, or a UFO gets away you have failed yes, but you can learn from it. Imagine if in every mission in UFO defense if you lost the entire team you would get a game over, and have to reload a saved game. The dice mechanics in UFO defense actually serve a purpose by mimicking the lack of control a commander has over the battlefield. UFO defense has a lot of mechanics that turn based rpgs have, but it's more about the careful spending of resources, and deciding where to use them that makes UFO defense such a unique game. Another example is that you can encounter very large UFOs very early in the game. It wouldn't be prudent to risk your early interceptors on such a target so you decide not to attack, and deal with the consequences. In other games you don't have that option if you're way out of your league. The only thing I wish is that terror, and UFO crash would let me fight multiple times so long as it's within the time limit. I could send in a team to weaken them, and then send in another fresh team to finish them off. That would be nice.

There's a reason for that. It made the same mistakes Xenonauts did. It was just a drag to play through. The only big difference I can think of between the two is I don't remember a cover system being in UFO: Extraterrestrials, which would be more meaningful if firing a gun didn't take an actual 15 seconds. There is nothing really worth talking about with it, and the fact that it has a very small audience doesn't help.

You fabricated that on your own, because it has nothing to do with my post. But if you want to know how the other X-Com games ended up:

TFTD's corridors that were designed to force you to be fired upon when you passed through doors punished players for playing offensively, as did the deep sea missions in general. Many of the towns were less open and more about searching tight nooks and crannies for aliens that can and will sit dormant for 20 turns before ambushing your squad. This is why the game is more of a crawl and less fun. Some people think it's the alien difficulty, but if you replace all of the aliens in UFO Defense with the aliens from Terror from the Deep, then it'd be roughly as fun as UFO Defense. To put it bluntly, TFTD was not fun because the maps sucked to play on, which is also why people who play OpenXcom mods that add the TFTD maps skip them frequently.

Apocalypse kept the capacity for large squads, and the tactical combat was still really fun, except for UFO assaults, as UFOs were very punishing to storm, so it's common to wait for the aliens to pile out. The issues with Apocalypse have nothing to do with poor design and more to do with the game releasing an incomplete mess. It was too ambitious. I firmly believe that once OpenApoc releases stable builds and modders move in and complete game mechanics, that it will take the throne as the best X-Com game. That will probably take a few years, since I imagine it's going to follow the same process as OpenXcom, and it's just going to be cramming the unmodified engine full of additional shit that doesn't mesh well for a year or two.

Oh right, Valen and Shen too.
I wish someone made mods that swapped them out for other people. I will say that the expansion for XCOM 2 adds some really broken mechanics. I'm not sure if it makes the game worse or better.

So, just like the expansion for XCOM did? Firaxis doesn't know how to balance sit, and when they try they inevitably fuck it up.

Nigger it was the comfiest reskin, back in the day that was refreshing as hell.
I'd probably give it a shot in nu-com if it actually captures the feel of being deep in the ocean.
I still play UFO defense and TFTD on my phone with openxcom, it's one of the best games to play on the go.

Personally, my favourite tactic in silent storm was storming a building with silenced weapons and then pilling my soldiers in, get my scouts to spot enemies and then snipe them from the distance, when some made their way to the building, they got shredded by my gunners on the first floor or stepped on landmines.

This has both its pros and cons.

If you wan a direct copy of X-Com, yes. If not, no

This silent storm looks pretty damn good. Is it worth a shot?

Oh hell yeah man, its a pretty good game mechanics wise and has some charm of its own.
The expansion its cooler because it takes you to the early james bond era and you can choose all the surviving characters from the first game (both axis and allies).

Hey anons I have a quick question. I am looking at the Long War mod for xcom enemy within on the nexus mod site, and was wondering if it will work with the cracked version. It seems to be by installer instead of files, and folders.

Yes it will.
Get ready for some true suffering.

I can't imagine it's anything like the suffering in the previous games. Does it at least make UFOs harder to shoot down? Cause it seems like all you need is a dodge matrix, and four interceptors even for the big ones.

Ahahahahahahahahahhahahahahhahaha.
Time for suffering.
Shooting down UFOs becomes cancer.
Even the Firestorm with the EMP cannon is trash.

Ha. Ha ha ha.

Why the hell are you not using the fusion lance? It also seems the mod doesn't like my game, I was able to uninstall it pretty easily though and everything works. I might try some of the older versions since the latest one is the steam version I think. Of course it could just be I have a version of xcom it doesn't like.

While it has some interesting ideas, I would just say it's not really worth it. The game becomes far too tedious as it progresses the point where you will you loath every time you have to do 10 missions in a row and there's 20 ships in the air and all your interceptors have a repair time of 3 months.

They miss all the time though. I bet mecha-hitler can take them.

Getting a fusion lance requires shooting down a battleship or assault carrier, and good fucking luck with that. Unless, you know, you're using the DLC which gives you a nearly-free battleship mission in June or something insanely early like that.

Besides the difficulty of getting a fusion core, you use the EMP cannon specifically because it has a lower chance to completely destroy UFOs. The Fusion Lance has the highest chance to completely destroy a UFO of any weapon in the game because of the very high per-shot damage. The EMP cannon is trash because it will still destroy UFOs that you really want the elerium and alloys from.

Ah I was wondering where those were coming from. It doesn't really help though early on because the interceptors can't use the fusion lance I think.
Excuse this naive question, but wouldn't that completely defeat the purpose of using the emp cannon?

Auto-Cannon + HE / AP / fire ammo >> lasers
Plasma >> lasers
Using lasers is a good way to die, because when you miss the aliens return fire and lasers are very inaccurate and miss all the time.
Get a few laser pistols in case you run out of ammo, but If you rush for anything, rush for plasma, not lasers.

I mean, the game shows you the insertion pretty much. They hoist the victim up, then rip open the neck and spew in the egg. it's quick and dirty. How would one make that sexy at all?

The EMP cannon has a lowered chance to destroy UFOs, which is not a zero chance to destroy UFOs. The second-year resource crunch is real, you want all the alloys and elerium you can get your grubby xcom hands on, so any UFO being destroyed is a disappointment.

I was thinking more about a pron game where the chryssalids would be replaced with either qt insect girls who fuck them then use their large abdomens to lay a large egg after one turn, or have a slime girl who fucks them then splits into two slime girls.

Ah I see. In the vanilla game you rarely end up needing anything but money. It also seems that the long war mod doesn't like my game. I tried, I probably need the steam version, or the nexus page doesn't have the one that works with the crack. Maybe I have the EU version? I'll try that in a bit.

Okay wait a fucking second, never mind I do have the steam version for sure. I don't know what's wrong. Either way looks like I broke the game. Rest in peace mecha-hitler.

Oh, yeah, that would work.

Also, if you do end up playing long war, I would recommend you do the Arc Thrower mod that changes its range into pistol ranges.

Now that sounds nice.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRgxWwX0NBw
It also allows you to put the Arc Thrower in the pistol slot.

You can probably do this even without long war, but you'll look like a total pussy if you do. Using it in long war makes it so that you don't have to rage quit/restart with a risky capture attempt.

So I can have my entire team equip grenades, med-kits, and arch throwers at the same time? Even with just 40% chance that should make capturing any alien easy.

You will suffer because the mod makes the game even more repetitive and tedious.

yeah, they will be able to hold everything else, but swap the pistol out. Just realize that removing the pistol from a full team is a risky idea. Some times that pistol can save the day.

Is there any reason to use anything but HE ammo on the autocannon and have more than 2 in your squad?
I normally used them to destroy walls/cover or easilly kill any aliens standing against a wall.

It has the exact same cover system the original games had - if there's something in between there's a chance that something will catch a round. And you're really disingenuous at best when you go about not a single game being 1:1 when the one that tries it's best was mostly panned because it didn't innovate as much.

HE ammo destroys weapons and artifacts (along with everything else that is destructible) and some later aliens seem to kind of immune to it like the disc-shaped ones. You can blast them multiple times with HE ammo and they're still standing.

I mentioned lasers not only for their use as a weapon but because you can sell them for profit by manufacturing them and selling them back.

You're spot on about TFTD. I like everything about it more than the original, but the maps fucking kill it for me. It's based so much around forcing the player to scour every tile of the map at a snails pace. I love the underwater aesthetic and the idea of fighting through cargo ships full of containers and machinery or cruise ships with their varied environments, but it's just so tedious to play that I've never been able to finish a game.

Been playing X-COM through that OpenXCOM thing and good God, Cyberdiscs are every bit the nightmare in terror missions that I remember them being. Having upwards of five of those things flying around and eating my tank in 1-2 shots really hurts.

HE rounds for the autocannon deal 0-88 damage, but Discs have 110 HP and 34 armor on all sides and 50 on the bottom, making them fairly resistant to explosions in general.

Try charging at them with cutlasses and powder bombs :^)

Here's a story from xcom enemy unknown. Minor spoilers, but I don't think it really matters.
I am going to put him in any tactical game that will let me edit the characters from now on.

I'M TELLING MISTRESS!~

I wish piratez wasnt so fucking bloated with useless as fuck research and shitty mechanics under the guise is "hard"
I enjoy the challenges is offers but when you want to to research 5 things just to get the game started then you can suck my dick.
I don't even feel like a pirate anymore.

THE ABSOLUTE MADMAN

Holy shit that's rad. Fukken saved.

tbh you'll just end up tweaking the whole mod through the ini to make it playable anyway. it's cancer by itself. the author's idea of balance is "it's me against the players and I have to defeat them"

How the fuck do you install UFO Aftermath mods?
Downloaded the combo mod and there are no instructions anywhere.
Am I just retarded?

Which mods make XCOM 2 a better game?

It's stories like this that remind me why I love vidya. Thank you user.

How fascinating

Around 150 of them.
If it actually didn't crash that is
Pic from /vg/ but still applicable.

X-Com is fun.

It really is.
Which psychics? The Ethereals?

Nope, just a bunch of sectoids. Only one psychic among them and he managed to do that much damage. It just so happened that the first guy he controlled was carrying a heavy cannon with HE ammo.
I think I learned my lesson.

Psionics always fuck me up until I manage to get that one lucky break. The game is all about an uphill battle against a superior force, but once you capture their tech you can reverse engineer it and turn it on them.
Look on the bright side. You know the survivors are best used as mindrape bait now. Just give them a basic pistol or something and have them sit at the back of the skyranger.

Best two lessons I learned was that human armor is highly resistant to "friendly fire" laser damage and that primed demo packs aren't worth it.

I think one user in this thread said to make sure you check a soldiers stats, and if they have low will either use them for psi bait with weak armaments, or just don't bring them at all.

ufopaedia.org/index.php/Psionics#Alien_Psionics_Targeting

Post the one with more gore, specifically the crawling competition bet.

What about heavy lasers?
Is there any point in using them?

that's where you enable the FOV psy attack restriction.

Heavy Lasers see some minor use in taking down Sectopods if you haven't researched Heavy Plasma, Blaster Bombs, or Alien Grenades by the time they show up. Sectopods take 50% more damage from lasers and 20% less damage from explosives and plasma weapons, but even if you shoot them from behind there's at least a 50% chance they won't take any damage from it just because of how strong their armor is.
There's also the matter of them not requiring ammo, but you'll be drowning in plasma rifle and heavy plasma ammo by the time you research heavy lasers, I think.

And here i was using them as replacement for heavy cannons.

Openxcom has a mod that boosts the damage and accuracy of heavy lasers and makes them a pretty good choice until you have a steady stream of heavy plasma coming in.
And as the other guy said, they have some marginal use against sectopods. Though a blaster bomb can potentially kill them in one hit so unless you're at close range that's the way to go.

how about kinetic armour? there is a Gauss guns mod

Do any of you have xcom ufo defense wallpapers?

when can you make laser clips at thee workshop on X-Com final modpack? i already can make laser rifles but cant make ammofor it

...

Alright I am playing open xcom, and it's pretty sleek compared to the old xcom. My strategy is to build a small series of bases in order to cover as much of the important countries like europe, america, russia, japan, and a few others. It's working so far. My first mission I killed four sectoids, but lost two people when a sectoid threw a grenade primed for zero. Clever little bastard. Some of my rookies did really well though. Made some great shots. I am only going to use my main base for interceptors though since they have a massive range.

I don't know much about mods, sorry. Though if the Gauss guns are the same as they are in Terror from the Deep, they're probably just Laser weapon reskins.
Whoever modded them in might have put in the effort to differentiate them, but I wouldn't know.

Yeah, open xcom is a pretty nice quality of life improvement over playing the game in DOSBox or trying to get the Windows 95 version working. I'd played a run on that before and had to switch back to DOSBox for the final mission because the game would crash upon ending my first turn.

Boy these aliens don't fuck around. I encountered 5 of those terror saucers in one mission. Lost 4 people to them, but I destroyed every one. Thanks goodness for the laser pistols.

Fuck you should see this shit. These aliens are tearing this one city apart. It's nothing but plasma fire, and explosions everywhere.

If you want to give up to date news on paris join a reporter's guild.

Very funny. Nice dubs.

Very nice

you just wanted to bump the thread like me now?

If the file name ends with .vfs then you need to place the mod file where the UFO.exe is located. This game doesn't has any dedicated mod folder for that, probably because the mod support got added later which is the v1.4 patch if I recall it correctly.

So I just did a few missions with the ethereals on battleships, and holy fuck all my team did was run around like autistic school children till they all died. I lost my fucking avenger because of that. I think I understand a bit more about the mind control though. It's not that line of sight should be required to make it easier because it's fun being able to abuse it when you have it. It's the fact you encounter 10+ ethereals one one map where as for other creatures like the sectoids only leaders can MC people. It actually makes ethereals less powerful when you encounter them with a lot of sectopods.

It's best to avoid large ethereal ships until you've screend your troops and gotten rid of any with weak psi strength.

Spirit. Soul. The core essence of a enjoyable video game. Playing Xenonauts was about as thrilling or exciting as playing around with excel spreadsheet. Hell, I've had far more fun learning to code than I had with playing Xenonauts with it's blandness.

No I don't think trying to make it too real was a particularly big problem, UFO-games had a nitty and gritty "realistic" art-style and atleast aftermath had a goddamn oppressive atmosphere.

Fuck that noise. That takes way too long for that shit. I just shoot down any large/very large ufos, and loot the smaller ones. The greater frequency of smaller ufos makes up for the fact they give less. I am going to do another play through on a much higher difficulty level. So far the only thing I have to watch out for is chryssalids, and ethereals. Everything else including the sectopods was cake.

So far I've played nuxcom excluding xcom 2, and ufo defense. What other games in the series do you recommend. I think I'm getting a pretty good idea of what made the game fun, and pretty innovative.

That wasn't my experience, then again, I did play it with that recommended starter kit of mods.

So wait, you only played nuCOM 1 and UFO Defense? Go play TFTD then Apocalypse. If you're really masochistic and actually enjoy the tactical layer of nuCOM, Long War will do it for you.

I tried installing long war, but it didn't work. I'll try again Later. I'll also tried to get a torrent of apocalypse, but there were no seeders. I'm still trying though.
Anons in this thread said it wasn't very fun because the maps made it a chore, but I'll try it.

Ace.

do tell. I've been wanting to try some out

Hey my torrent is finally seeding for xcom apocalypse. I want to play it vanilla except for patches that fix bugs. Anything I should know about game breaking wise. By game breaking I mean something that causes the game to crash, or bugs not a 9999 damage exploit.

Godspeed, Jeff, you glorious son of a bitch.

Mind sharing it?

For one, you need to get the mod "Xenonauts: Community Editoon". It already enhances the experience. From there on, just look around the Xenonauts forum for mods. I sadly don't remember the mods I installed but i'm pretty sure the "more vehicles" one was among them. I also know for a fact that a mod exists that changes the research flavortext. Believe it or not, that mod is very good. It adds a lot. It might be included in the CE but I'm not sure. I might go around the forums and install a bunch of mods and will then make a quick guide.

Now, I get what you're saying, but these games have a different kind of depth to it. Where it really shines is in the skills. That's where it starts to feel almost like a puzzle game at times. Most people who get frustrated with Firaxcom are people who played the first couple missions where your rookies have no way of turning the tide against the RNG other than grenades and flanking. The game really opens up once you start to get to the end of the skill trees for soldiers. It's no longer "move slow, hunker, and pray for a hit." Once you start seeing synergies between skills, you greatly even the odds. This goes double for the expansion, which added some much needed tweaks and content, and triple for Long War, which overhauls the skill trees and gameplay to increase your tactical options.

I don't recall anything like that. I know difficulty affects hit percentages but I don't remember it straight up manufacturing numbers based on your circumstances.

The only rigging the numbers it does are on Veteran/Easy where the hit chances are tilted somewhat in your favor with a flat hidden bonus and a further bonus for ever consecutive miss. Only Classic/Impossible do not have this rigging. They doubled down on it in nuCOM 2 where only Legendary difficulty doesn't have this rigging.
If you want to know more. Check this wiki page out; ufopaedia.org/index.php/Chance_to_Hit_(EU2012)#When_The_Game_Cheats…

It's literally the D&D system, some of the numbers are even similar. In D&D, cover gives you 20 for partial cover and 50 for full cover, Nu-com has 20 for half cover and 40 for full. I'm tempted to start modding it until it to make an unofficial NWN 3.
First step, all ranged weapons have to go, everyone gets ranger blades.

Not my experience.
Xenonauts was great.

I recall a bug with one of the alien ships and some terror unit resembling a giant nautilus. It gets spawned inside the internal ship wall, unable to change position, but able to turn around. Very dangerous for your soldiers, because it always has full/nearly full time units bar. You step in, you get shot.

...

There's supposed to be a way to download steam mods without steam, but it has never worked for me. Granted I rarely use it. I think it's called steam loader or whatever.

nexus soon!

xcom2.smods.ru/
Check there, mirrors most mods from steam. its not Russian dolphin porn viruses, don't worry.

I don't usually rely on spoonfeeding. I already tried that a few minutes before posting here.

Never ever

Can anybody else confirm? I don't want dolphin porn. I wish I had snek lewds to get replies.

>the site somefag always drops in one of these threads
Where'd you wander from? Be honest.

When I play a game I usually don't go to the threads unless I'm on a binge for that game like I am right now. The few games that I joined generals for include Stalker, Grand strategy, Gonster Girl Quest , Dwarf Fortress, and xcom.

I do have snek lewds but they're sfm.

I trust you but I'm going to have to verify that.

...

You sick monster

I don't really feel like playing xcom 2 to be honest. How does it differ from nucom 1?

Longwar is worth a shot if you can get the mod that makes dark events not retarded

I already tried, but it just cause my game to crash with the igg torrent. Maybe I was just installing it wrongly.

You have to place the mod files into a mod folder. Like so. Don't launch with war of the chosen, since Long war 2 isn't compatible with it and won't be updated for it anyways.

How braindead are the nu xcom games? Pretty much all I want is a somewhat difficult turn based strategy game that I can play to rest off a long tiring day and truth be told I'm starting to suck really hard at xcom because I can't keep myself awake enough to realize any fuckups I'm about to be doing.

Oh my god I'm retarded.

As in, I just want to shoot shit in a turn based fashion without really thinking that much, but I don't want to be too easy.

test

Braindead on normal difficulty and lower

Fuck It I meant to reply to,

Xcom ufo defense was kicking my ass on any difficulty besides beginner. I refused to save scum, but come on. Those terror missions really don't give you a chance. To answer your question they are definitely easier, but this mostly has to do with the fact that enemies often only begin moving from preset places when you first see them, and your soldiers are the equal of 3 or four ufo defense soldiers. I thought it was pretty fun, but mechanically inferior to ufo defense most of the time.

so enemy within is at least worth a pirate?

To be fair the install folder of xcom 2 is a mess.

Well man I feel bad for you. Furshit is usually pretty easy to source because of furry tagging autism.

Definitely worth a pirate yes.

I am talking about nucom one.

Gay.

do not peddle falsehoods

Yeah

I only bring the unfortunate truth, brother.
xcom.wikia.com/wiki/Viper_King_(XCOM_2)
If there were more of the snake ladies by that artist I would have used those instead

fuck

To be fair, only the one I posted is the viper king. The other two are definitely women. Have this as way of apology.

Were the vipers originally female, or was that just changed to please the fans?

Apology not accepted

Yeah sorry lost sight of things there. One last try before fucking off.
Try looking up "comandorekin" and "scrungusbungus" for snake lewds of the sfm variety. Fair warning there's a lot of not-snakes in both.

I'll cover for his mistake.

Yeah that's the stuff. apology accepted

They are all female, the viper king is something doctor vahlen did FOR SCIENCE!

So basically she felt left out because she couldn't have a viper husbando?

I think it was some genetic fuckup that escaped containment and formed a snek harem.

Wait a second are Vipers asexual? Like the Whiptail lizard whose males went extinct so they all reproduce asexually to keep the species going.
THAT MEANS THEY'RE ALL LUSTING FOR A MALE AND ARE GETTING DESPERATE, THE VIPER KING WASN'T SEXUALLY MATURE, THEY JUST WENT AFTER HIS SHOTA ASS LIKE LOCUSTS TO A FARM

unf

THE GREY COMMUNITY?

I tried because dubs demanded it.

pretty gud.

Hey user quick question. How will I know for certain that long war has been installed? Any obvious give aways?

As soon as you start up the first mission
The loading screen is in a building instead of the Skyranger, with all your units posing in a tactical manner

Then I didn't install it properly then. I used the installer, for some reason my cracked version doesn't have a mod folder.

The installer seems to want to put the files inside the XEW folder, but if I do that the game crashes on start up.

Wait a minute, disregard what I said. I was thinking of LW2 for some reason. Sorry about that

Check the main menu. Instead of "New Game" the button should have "Long War". Disregard he's a dumbass.

Do you have it installed? Can you tell me what folder?

You should have the mod installed in the XEW directory as that's the Enemy Within one. If it's crashing, check that it's the latest version of the game. Other than that, I can't really help you, dude.

Looks like it just doesn't like it. From what I can tell on the forums the mod is a mess. In any case I might as well move on. Maybe I'll try open xcom on veteran again. Just going to buy a boat load of rocket launchers, and fuck everything up. Provided the rookies don't shoot at the ground right next to them.

gud site

If I could upload my copy I would but that shit would take too long and no where I can really upload it.

Thanks anyways user.

Why does XCOM 2 modding gotta suck so much dick?

The last time I checked, the game loads all of your mods into RAM at the same time. If you have too many mods, loading ends up taking several minutes and any action causes the game to slow to a crawl.
But then that second bit might've just been how the game was. I haven't played it again since the start of the year.

openapoc is 50% done already

I didn't really like apocalypse. It felt too different from ufo defense, and it looked a lot more complicated.

Phoenix point when

wooo

Read: I am a retard.

Stop posting anytime.

It's not that bad. Just ==READ THE FUCKING MANUAL== and it should be easy. Worst case go check ofopaedia for starting guide. They have a couple.

Literally you.

Yes you playing an easier game while thinking someone else is retarded for not liking a harder makes you retarded. Kill yourself faggot.

I didn't say that you not liking it makes you retarded. You're retarded because you consider Apoc "complicated".
Secondly, never wanted to play a game as a power fantasy? Doom with Russian Overkill? Nothing at all?

Oh you're merely pretending.

It's not complicated at all. I was able to figure it out when I was 8 without reading the manual, something I couldn't do with UFO Defense. Just give it a chance, sit down to play it with the manual open and you'll realize this shit is even simpler than the previous games.

Seriously? I found ufo defense to be pretty straight forward. I guess I can try it again, it kind of puts me off though, but I guess I'll get used to it. I'm currently playing age of kangs though.

How do I get good Holla Forums? Also i really like the over the top comic book intro in the old one.

Explosives. The more you blow shit up, the more likely you are to survive to the mid/late game where you get the broken stuff like Blaster Bombs and Psionics.
Tanks armed with Rockets, Auto Cannons with High Explosive rounds, and Rocket Launchers are all pretty decent.
Also, you don't have to use all your TUs. A good rule of thumb is to leave your soldiers with enough TUs to take a snapshot or two during the enemy turn because of how reaction fire works.

You got baited.

Try saving before every mission. Before you even send the transport plane there. Notice that practically all in your environment is destructible and your soldiers don't get fall damage. Never do night missions, but if you have to, stack up on flares. In the original game you have 80 items per troop transport, so more soldiers is not always better. Get a mini-tank instead or equip them with laser weapons to bypass the need for clips. Research better armor and alien weapons ASAP. If your engineers have nothing to do, manufacture stuff for sale instead of allowing them to be idle. A base completely unstaffed with soldiers will get destroyed once discovered by aliens, but there is no point of building missile or laser defenses there. You need at least 4 units of plasma defenses AND the grav shield to have your back covered against largest UFOs.

Against sectoids leaving your soldiers with TUs for reaction fire isn't very efficient, because of how small they are. Sometimes your soldiers will be shot even before these aliens getting into their sight range, and still being in their cone of sight.

*80 items LIMIT per troop transport

I forgot to add - never try to throw several grenades AT ONCE in the same place. The first one that gets off destroys the rest, negating their future explosions.

More: you need Elerium for more advanced stuff and as the fuel of alien design aircraft, so never sell it as it is if your store space is exceeded. It usually lies at the alien propulsion units in their UFOs and, if you shoot them down, it usually gets destroyed with them. So sometimes it's better to allow them to land and then try to catch them intact, even if that means to fight against their full crew without the casualties from the initial bombardment.

You'll need more than one base with a Skyranger to cover the whole globe. Just one won't be fast enough if a terror site happens to be at the antipodes to the base. The refueling period will render it unusable for too long after returning. That means having optimally two separate combat teams at the minimum.

Two separate combat teams for one base each, I mean.

If you want to shoot down the largest UFOs, you better have four aircraft attacking them simultaneously to minimize the time when they are being targeted with return fire. Only one weapon type at your disposal will have longer range than the enemy's, and it has only two shots per launcher. It's annoying that immediately after the last shot you have to close distance manually, or your plane will automatically back off the firing range the moment it fires, rendering it useless. Or, if that big UFO doesn't fly at its maximum speed, you can follow them without fighting to hopefully report their landing site immediately when it lands. In that case be prepared for the moment your 'spy' plane burns half its fuel and has to return. Have the spare nearby then.

what was the name of that X-files mod again?

Yes, for people who played it to death and know its mechanics in and out.

The X-COM Files
openxcom.org/forum/index.php?topic=4595.0
Those are some really nice pics.

Fucking lel

And then people wonder about steam monetized mods and shit

Hmm.

Laser weapons Unless they are Nuclear require ammo in the Final Modpack.

How's it any different from having a Paypal people can send donations to if they like the mod? As long as it's not required and they don't nag you about it, who gives a shit.

Why is schlomo summoning his persona?
Is that Moloch?

Something simple: if for some reason you want to have autopsy reports on every unit type, try to catch alien medic units alive. Some are a pain in the ass to get otherwise, like for example these mini-saucer terror units that come with sectoids. They blow up once they stop functioning, so there will be no remains left unless it flies more than one 'elevation' above the ground the moment of its 'death'. The self-destruct explosion will be contained to one 'elevation', and the remains will fall to another one below it. An illogical sequence of events, as you have the explosion not happening where the remains will land, but don't ask me why is that so.

I only forgive you because you play good vidya.

Patreon is either monthly or per update. It brings in a lot more cash.
Plus it also gives money to the jews at Patreon. I have no problems with Paypal but Patreon is run by the pc police.

Man and I looked forward to that Mod fucking faggot. Dude doesn't even have the skill to just overhaul the engine himself.

is it any good? it's not like the xpiratez one is ti?

Xcom but you're like 2-4 dudes instead, I liked it enough but the battlescape itself seems to be the biggest limitation for Modding anything that isn't a flavor of Xcom.

If you have more missions coming up than you can handle, try shooting down some UFOs over the sea. That's the simplest advice there is.

Frag grenades in silent storm make my dick hard
Silent Storm should be the golden standard of tictacs games.
The only hindrance was turn times for enemies taking a decade on mission start and pathfinding shitting itself if you mass moved units on different floors.

so no soldiers? how do the missions play out?

Much more thrilling, since one guy bleeding out means you've lost half the team. Also some other flavor and touches, your default mode of transport is public transportation so you literally go and fly on public transit and drive to the various locations in a car.

ya don't say
I'll give it a go