The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 07

Let's do this!

I finally get the achievement, and on one of my favorite series! Oh wait...

:)

Edit: Still didn't get it, lol

Love the letters.

ALL ABOARD THE TRAINWRECK.

I'M READY FOR THE END TIMES!!!!!

Those were the words of The Sorrow

Goddammit Dan. I actually love that :p

This is either the beginning or the beginning of the finale.

Abby "Big Plays" Russell

I think we all forgot how "easy" the first one of those missions is.

Something I was thinking about: They are probably going to get destroyed on the XCOM base defense mission that is new in enemy within. That mission is a direct game over if you lose it, however you get the option to redo the mission (even on iron man mode). Will that be considered the end of the series if it happens or are they allowed to make use of the redo option in this particular case?

Damn nice mission Abby!

Yeah I just got up to that mission the other day and boy is it a nightmare! I wouldn't blame them if they restarted despite Iron Man mode, I sure as hell did. I'm also very excited to see the Newfoundland mission.

Boy the team really should have some upgraded armour by this point.

Wow, She did such a great job on that terror mission, I thought for sure she'd wipe

I legitimately feel sorry for Abby on this mission. I don't know how I'd do it without a good sniper.

Abby, dashing is perfectly fine and you don't need to keep apologising for it. Whoever told you to never do it gave you some bad info.

It's generally a bad idea to dash deep into an area where you have no visibility at all, but there's nothing wrong with dashing up to a squadmate to support them the next turn, or pushing yourself a little further if it will give you better cover or visibility for the next phase.

It's a weird thing since iron man mode in the game actually does allow you to restart the mission, so if they are following the games definition of iron man mode then a restart would be allowed. On the other hand it is a game over.

Woo, great job Abby =D

Can't wait for the Cybernetics Lab to be built... That's one of my favourite things added by Enemy Within.

RIP BRAD

Huh, the amount of aliens on that mission was tiny. Kinda weird to see having never played on normal.

-There was only a 50 percent chance to hit that muton in the second mission because it had full cover and was NOT flanked. Moving up closer only marginally increases chance to hit. Flanking to put a soldier in no cover is fine if you have a 100 percent chance to kill the only remaining enemy in sight. Also, being in cover doesn't really help against melee enemies like chrysalids.

-Give your snipers the best pistol available and have them overwatch on turns they move instead of hunkering down or take a shot with the pistol if they have a good chance to hit.

-Sniper gets an ability called something like battlefield scanner that can reveal cloaked units.

-If you have people with poor cover and a specialist has a turn and not a good chance to hit anything, have the specialist use a smoke grenade to provide them with more defense.

-Sell anything that is listed as (damaged).

Those floaters out of nowhere were kind of bullshit.

A breath of fresh air compared to last time. Actually fun too. Go Abby

It's like Yukiko's Castle boss fight all over again! All the people just waiting for doom, and Giant Bomb comes out victorious once again. Take THAT, naysayers!

It's 6:23 AM here, and you damn skippy I got up to watch this.

I love Dan channeling Dusty Rhodes during his letter.

I wanna believe they have a shot at finishing the game, but this game does ramp up the difficulty later on, we shall see how it goes, but great job Abby!

"They're gonna try and turn humans into bad guys"

Aren't humans the ultimate bad guys if you think about it?

nothing wrong w dashing if you're dashing to cover

@bb4lake: those don't exist anymore

Remember, you can pistol overwatch with your sniper.

I feel like I should point out that I'm pretty sure that whenever there's a read alien head in the top left of someone's turn, that means they have a shot on someone. You don't have to manually try to go into aiming just to find out.

The Abomination is my favorite character. Such deep lore.

Huh.

I must not have a played X-COM on Normal for longer than I thought, but I definitely remember the first Terror Mission being a hell of a lot harder. Only 2 Chrysalids and two crappy floaters for fire support? And here I was thinking they'd be doomed without more laser weapons.

Not to say Abby didn't also ace that mission though. That was very well played.

Quick tip about doors: don't open them until all your troops are in position. Ideally you want to open a door at the start of a turn instead of midway, so the aliens don't get the drop on you.

All around well played by Abby.

This is a Friendly reminder to play xcom 2 war of the chosen before I click Play!

Build more laser rifles!

They're starting to turn the corner in the game and get to the point where your soldiers start feeling more powerful and able to go toe to toe with the aliens. Hopefully they can survive. They're also going to need to start getting some more rookies soon enough...

Abby killed it! Shame about Brad, but this was pretty good.

Question about view count: Does it count viewership on downloaded episodes, or just by watching it? I'll be skipping the Dan episodes, but I want to show that i'm still enjoying the rest of this series, so what's my best course of action here? I guess I could download the episode, and watch it on the site. Any info on this would be appreciated.

@roytheone: Oh I did not know there was a restart for that mission! I did it Iron Man mode and I was terrified that whole mission, just sending the base security guys off as fodder while my mechs punched everything.

Dan is a poet lolol

I think Abby may have turned this one around! The difficulty curve on X-Com is weird. I kinda feel like it front-loads a lot of the difficulty in the early months, and it all gets *way* easier once you have a few levelled up troops and the upgraded squad size.

Nice, looking forward to what Alex's is gonna do next week.

Also Rip Brad, even with all the warnings he left us too soon.

Guess the game went a bit easy on 'em for the first terror mission (I was definitely expecting more enemy groups). The squad size upgrade helped too.

Nice that Brad got some time to shine here.

This was my favourite episode yet. It was tense, things largely came together, but not without some cost. And the ridiculous Ryckert arc moved in a direction I'm fully behind.

A few thoughts:

- Abby really need to stop using controller for this, mouse control is not great but using controller is terrible (at least for her).

- On the subject of Dashing: the one step dash should really be avoided unless you already know there are no enemies in your path of movement. You should always try to use a normal move and see if you want to dash in the second phase.

- On the subject of Flanking: leaving your solider in the flanks are a surefire way of killing them. On higher difficult it usually means instant death. So the general advice is, if you are being flanking and computer is not setting up an overwatch trap, you should really move into covers, instead of overwatch or fire.

Well played Abby

@sogeman: Haha, I know. Just never got it back in the day either.

No one says you can't dash. They say don't dash into the unknown, which is exactly what happened when you tripped those enemies early on (EDIT: And later with those Mutons) . Even that first time was fine though, as long as you are covering things, the problem is when you dash someone into the unknown with no support from the rest of the team. They are going to be dead quick.

Also if you are not going to be flanking much and playing conservative (that's fine), don't agonize over 60% ish shots. Just take em.

Good job on the mission though. When the Crystallids came in you were well prepared Abby. The way that mission goes bad is if you do something like dash a soldier into finding the Crystallids then they kill that guy, turn him and things get crazy.

Use a scope. 10% to aim does matter and definitely also helps if you Overwatch a lot, as it knocks the aim penalty for that down some.

I know some people complain about Overwatching a lot (they do do it too much instead of flank) but this mission was an example of why it works, especially in the first game.

On the difficulty up (can't recall the name) there were definitely at least two more Crystallids, which gets hard. I had my first play through of the original XCOM: EU when it came out basically wiped on this mission because it took out all my soldiers who were any good. A Crystallid got one of my guys and then two more came into the action and it was a wrap. I could not do enough damage.

Two came from the exact direction they did in Abby's game, but then two more came around the left side of the building and killed the one guy I left back there.