The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 24

Lunch was hard without XCOM today, but at least my dinner will be good. (I hope everyone stays alive)

"mostly lucky"

uh-oh

38-minute episode :(

Somehow I expected that first enemy turn to go quite differently than it did.

How have they not gotten plasma weapons yet. They are doing well considering they're still using laser weapons, but if they upgraded to plasma these missions would be about half as long. Plus it would make it easier to level as the aim modifier is better, much better damage, and twice as good grenades. Late game the easiest way to have inexperienced units level up is via plasma grenade kills.

I enjoy imagining Vinny's face every time Dan attacks someone just as Vinny says "wait.." only for the attack to critical hit kill the target.

Did this narrow the EXALT headquarters down to a single location?

Good Lord, man, the reckless clickfest continues! I can not wait for this comment section to develop...

I'll be crazy impressed if they can beat Xcom 2 with the dlc and no save scumming. That game can get rough.

Oh god my anxiety, it hurts..

38 minutes, actually quite refreshing to see a bit of hustle.

After watching this episode, I think Dan has actually regressed the most.

When he doesn't currently have a visible enemy to focus on, he seems the most likely of the 3 commanders to use a soldier's full turn to dash them really far away and out of cover in hopes of finding their location. He even did it with Abomination near the end of the mission (~35:00 into the video), which should've gotten Abomination gravely wounded (EXALT laser weapons can't one-shot Ryckert's HP, but it was an almost guaranteed crit). He got saved by the fact that on Normal difficulty, sometimes the enemy will literally waste their turn running around and doing nothing instead of taking an obvious shot.

Aside from that, Ryckert and Zhang (both max XP colonels) hogged almost every single kill on that mission aside from a couple of Dirt Bike kills, but thankfully you get a small amount of XP just for participating in a mission so the supports got to level up thanks to that. Honestly, I don't expect that kind of long-term XP strategy from Dan at this point - I would settle for him just focusing on the mission at hand better, and not getting people needlessly killed.

Never did like guacamole... Dan you're a lucky son of a....lol

This is exactly how much input I want from Vinny, especially when it's Dan zeroing in on the absolute first option available to him, it's like the seasoning on hilariously bad decisions. I wonder how much Vinny has realised and is bewildered by the continued success of the corps. He has to suspect it by now, surely.

So much for anybody of the Squaddies getting leveled up while Dan is around.

@bisonhero: I'm just not sure he is into this feature anymore.That and I think the only reason he wants the "strongest guys" is he just wants to get through the missions as fast as possible. His luck is really uncanny though. Never has ceased to amaze me the crap he gets away with lol. That's just Dan for you. Though being away from a game for two weeks you do tend to forget things so I'll give him that.

Being away from a unit for three minutes he forgot that he can't fire a rocket after moving, I don't think two weeks is what Dan needs to watch out for.

If Abomination ever gets knocked off I think the earth will find itself under alien rule in short order.

Dan is EXALT.

Yeah, Dan certainly seemed to rush through his turns, though I can't say exactly why.

• Maybe he or Vinny had a meeting or something else scheduled to go to the day this was recorded, so they really wanted to knock out a 35-50-minute episode so Dan played fast (and he's already bad at the game, so it comes off as fast and careless - maybe he was trying as hard as he could under the time constraints they had that day).
• Or maybe he just doesn't have the concept of stopping and taking a look at all of your options before committing to moves and legitimately thinks this is how most people play the game (though this is very hard to believe when he clearly takes his time finding the right moves in Picross, and he must be taking his time if he's having any success in Into the Breach).
• Or maybe he has read the comments and knows that Normal XCOM is near-unfailable (you have to really fuck up for 8 countries to leave XCOM on Normal), so he knows that even if he showboats on his turn and runs soldiers into danger, it's not actually endangering the feature very much. Instead it's just generating entertainment for the viewers, and then the other 2 commanders can pick up the slack.
• Or as you suggest, maybe he's really kinda bored with the feature, so he's not intentionally doing badly, but he's just rushing through his episodes because he's not very interested in it anymore. I don't know how GB deals with video feature fatigue, other than quietly cancelling it (Kingdom Heartache, etc.).

So yeah, hard to say exactly why Dan's last few episodes have seem so rushed, but it's really noticeable, and I think it makes for less interesting episode. Dan's episodes all boil down into:

• Dan impulsively commits to a bunch of moves, dashing people for no reason, not retreating people from danger, etc.
• Usually at least 1 XCOM soldier or civilian VIP dies
• Then for the rest of the mission Dan gets lucky because Normal AI is borderline idiotic (the AI has a modifier to dramatically decrease how often they ever decide to fire rockets, throw grenades, or use special abilities that deal AoE damage even when XCOM soldiers are grouped up, plus the AI has a significant chance of deciding to waste their turn dashing and ignore a very obvious attack like what happened to Dan at the end of this mission).

It's boring to watch compared to the hard-earned successes of Abby and Alex.

*If* they win this game, Abomination has to be the psionic hero that boards the enemy mothership at the end.

@bisonhero: It has nothing to do with the difficulty setting. EXALT soldiers on that type of covert op typically bum rush the objectives even if it means bringing them out of cover and not attacking any soldiers.

I wonder if they'll research and build the double capacity satellite rooms before their satellites start getting shot down

I have it on good authority that Dan has been trynna kill Tim Turi for years

100 percent.

well, they have enough heavies as it is.

Care free Dan. Will his luck finally run out

hopefully dan mutates his creation, or he doesn't have psionic powers.

I'm pretty sure they recorded this episode this morning, before recording This is the Run, so they actually were rushed.

Dan should call real Tim and apologize for what he's done.

His best man!!

Lately Dan just seems like he's in a hurry to get somewhere. Maybe he is, maybe this is the last thing they do on the day and he can't miss the bus or something. Whatever the reason, it does diminish the quality of the episode a bit.

On the plus side, at least both supports leveled up, lets hope they manage to keep them alive. They will be needed, that's for sure. Next time Abby should name Smith to something else now that he's "earned" an identity.

@lokez352: Playing it right now because this series spurred me to try the sequel. I died several times on the first mission. Restarted on Easy and I'm loving it.

Back to the short episodes :(

Dan! maybe check Abomination's shot before rushing into overwatch!!

I think it's Dan's plan to show he is pretty bad at these games, but he does get the missions done about as fast as they should be getting done. Being too cautious can be a bad thing too, they are taking a really long time to get anywhere.

@roy42: Touché

Tim Turi is a cop.

Dan must be the single worst XCOM player I have ever seen.

I was pretty impressed with Dan's Run...but I don't know if I would follow his orders if he was a real officer. Luck can sometimes only get you so far. But this is a video game and sometimes luck makes for a great episode to watch. Great work Dan and props to Vinny for just being gob smacked with what Dan was doing the whole time. I was with you Vinny. Great job everyone!

Boy I can understand forgetting information after a week, but after fifteen seconds maybe not so much.

@theflamingo352: If not lets hope Zhang makes it alive to that moment. Cause in my game he is compatible

As much as I love Dan, watching him play XCOM is hell

Coaching Dan at XCOM must be a personal hell for Vinny. Dan disregarding almost everything, dashing everyone on their first move, and almost exclusively using rockets, grenades, and snipers. Like I know this series is just for fun, but it's also kinda Vinny's baby and it sucks to see little effort put in from anyone.

Honestly Dan did a pretty good job here and I feel like Vinny was often giving him overly cautious bad advice. The only real mistake he made was running Tim into an overwatch barrage but otherwise he just took a bunch of really easy shots. Who wouldn't take a 90/60 shot in this game? Weird to say he was lucky when the odds were on his side on almost every shot he took.

If they're that rushed, it'd probably be a better option to skip the character customisation (or at least do it at the end when they know how much time they have) rather than rushing the actual mission.

@dannyglover said:

Yeah, I really wondered, because this Exquisite Corps is one of the shortest in the whole series, plus neither Vinny nor Dan even remotely considered doing a second mission. They seemed pretty set on doing some rapid character customization that came out pretty meh, then doing one mission with Dan playing lightning fast and not waiting to hear Vinny's suggestion. Makes sense that they had a lot of things scheduled for today, but I think packing this many things into one day hurt the quality of the output, as this was a pretty meh episode of Exquisite Corps. It definitely felt rushed and sloppy.

His shot choices were mostly fine. I think the part people think he did badly was soldier positioning.

Lots of turns where he put his solders in really questionable positions against enemies he didn't know the exact location of, with a good chance that his guys could get flanked on the next turn. Hell, the first turn he just ran Abomination as far forward as possible, when that sniper should never be in the front lines and should never be the one discovering enemy units. There were also 1 or 2 other times where he moved someone as recklessly as the turn Tim Turi died, but due to shear luck no one was in Overwatch waiting to take a shot. He left soldiers in really compromised positions where they could get easily flanked (and it wasn't a calculated risk where he knew what he was doing and it gave him some minor advantage, usually there was perfectly safe cover he should've chosen instead), and luckily the EXALT soldiers never really flanked him all these times Dan picked bad positions.

Still think there's an outside chance this run flares out when all that's left are Abomination and a bunch of rookies

Holy shit Dan I don't think you realize how badly that could have gone.