The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 08

On a Monday, no less, and with no lasagna as incentive.

Can’t believe Alex didn’t name that dude Ernest “The Cat” Miller. Somebody call my momma!

I was hoping he'd name him Ferris Mueller.

More than that, the game is designed with many, many failures in mind. Even losing 5 missions in a row doesn't have to end your campaign. It takes a colossal amount of failures and almost intentionally wasting money and resources to actually fail. ESPECIALLY on normal.

I think we may be having a case of folks who were maybe a bit too precious with their XCOM saves and considered anything less than a perfect run (with lots and lots of save scumming) to be a total failure.

XCOM is at its best and most exciting when you make mistakes and suck it up and accept them, then move on. When you save scum your way to victory, you might as well just watch a Youtube playthrough, because why even bother? It's not like your tactics or skill won anything.

There was no "wonkiness," Alex just wasn't using the scroll wheel. Same exact thing would've happened with a gamepad, since you have to manually adjust the elevation no matter your control method. You'll notice once he figured this out, it was fine. Although he did seem to take several seconds each time for whatever reason.

DAN/DAVE HAS SQUADSIGHT.

HE CAN SHOOT ANYONE HIS TEAMMATES CAN SEE REGARDLESS OF LINE OF SIGHT.

States how badly they need interceptors.

Makes Carapace armor instead.

*facepalm*

We may just have to accept that none of them understand the controls with EITHER scheme.

@vinny your penmenship is amazing. Your ideas for series is even better!

I feel like The Abomination should be renamed Dan Langzone mostly because they keep calling him Dan.

I wish I could scream like Abby, because that's how I felt the entire episode.

Really though, you guys are doing great, considering the early game. Thank you for listening to feedback!

Under normal circumstances it's a pretty hard game to fail since it does take a lot of lost missions in a row to actually lose, but with the way they're playing where each person is constantly rusty, it always seems entirely possible that a mission will suddenly be a squad wipe of all their best soldiers, which would be a major setback. And it's still possible that they may go a while without new alloys depending how the next few UFO missions/Council missions go.

You're right though, it's Normal, they'll probably be fine. Vinny doesn't always give correct advice, but it does seem he has drilled them quite a bit on being cautious (whatever any of them think that means), which at least has sort of taught them to not dash into the unknown and not split up the squad too much? There are definitely 1 or 2 upcoming Council missions that I could see being a big ol' squad wipe, so I'm on the edge of my seat.

Also I look forward to Vinny convincing Dan that Dave Ryckert's troubled body should become a MEC.

Capturing Muton would have been tough in this mission, they are all on overwatch with plasma rifle which will likely one hit their rookie if hit. They don't have an assault with lightning reflex to break OW or to handle the capture.

Heat Ammo is good, considering there will be a cyberdisc in the up coming council mission, but the 50% nerf is hard and there's also the silly Sectopod buff. Double reaction with heavy's aim isn't reliable, but it might come in handy in Site Recon.

It seems like turn order is still confusing them, especially when there are interactables and abilities involve. Pressing button does not kill a turn. If you were parked next to a button previously, you can press the button then still have both moves left, you can also use your first move to move up to a button, press it, then fire/grenade/reload/move again.

Class specific turn order:

Basically treat rocket and sniper rifle as the same thing. Heavy with bullet swarm move and shoot is the same thing if it is the first action. Run and gun only allow shoot or overwatch after activating. There's a dirty trick where you can have sniper move then go on pistol overwatch, and then manually click him again then hit the switch weapon key...

Everyone goes crazy about MEC, but mimetic skin changes the game. Jumping and/or skeleton armor is also good for Site Recon.

Christ, based on Alex's color choices for "Gamespot colors", I'm pretty sure he is also color blind.

A heads up, even if the mission is a complete failure, your armour and weapons and stuff get put back into your inventory so you should be equipping all of your troops with the best gear.

I'd be interested in seeing them get into MEC stuff, I think that's a good way to justify bringing back hero and American sweetheart Ellen DeGeneres unlike Dan's bullshit!

Love this series. Wish y'all were a little (a lot) better at keeping your gang equipped. Seeing so many ballistics still in the game is maddening! Also please please when you build a game changer like cyber lab, at least have the curiosity to click on it ONCE. AAAAAaaaaaa

Thank you @vinny for finally acknowledging the "Face-off" nonsense will not continue in this series. It was unnecessary and causes too much controversy in the comments. Also Alex seems to be the most competent of the group so far and his play this week was top notch. Too bad he is always sabotaged by Dan's actions.

@vinny One Important Tip:

- Country will only leave council on the day of Council Report, which means, you can leave any country at level-5 panic till the Council Report day :)

- Launching satellites early in the month has the added downside of facing raising panic during the rest of the month :(

- BTW, going after higher pay country or full continent coverage can also be a good thing. As some continent coverage bonus are best obtained early.

People saying the "Face-Off" stuff was bad are dummies!

That sort of pass-along group storytelling is EXACTLY what the format can be used for!
Dan saw this and kickstarted a fun subplot that takes advantage of the format.

That was a lot of fun. Thanks Alex and Vinny!

@vinny Great episode! A note for next time: You'll want to put Snipers on Overwatch. Like, a lot.
Since they can see all allies' sight-range with that special ability they got they see what the team sees!

If the rules of the series allowed for that I would be okay but in the VERY FIRST EPISODE they established ground rules for the show such as once you are dead, you are dead. At no point did Vinny say "Do whatever you want" If it wasn't an issue Vinny wouldn't have had to address it in this episode.

Calling people dummies just because they don't agree is pretty childish...

Oh, phew. I was starting to worry it was just me. They passed what I thought was a pretty decent orange and picked... something very not Gamespot to me. I thought the calibration on my TV was really off for a moment - I had to go to Gamespot to double check what their colors were.

They shot the Muton and it had minimal life left. After any unit on overwatch is shot, including aliens or XCOM, overwatch is cancelled. And the arc thrower works more effectively against wounded enemies too.

What really pissed me off was the complete waste of an opportunity to augment some soldiers. The cybernetic lab was built almost at the beginning of this video and nobody cared to do anything with it. A MEC soldier really comes in handy for these DLC missions (and for everything in general). Unfortunately, Dan will probably get the subsequent battleship mission, and it's not going to go well at all. But if they do pull it off, they get a ton of alien materials.

Is it possible to turn one of those heavies into a MEC?

Also for god's sake hire some new rookies, after this next mission you're going to need them.

Why does everyone, whenever they go to the grey market, beeline to SELLING ELERIUM? It is the scarcest resource in the game. Don't sell Weapon Fragments or Alien Alloys either, especially before corpses

And 46 is not a lot of Elerium. A single weapon or item uses 20 or more Elerium and research projects (a ton of them) eat it 10 at a time

Good job Alex.

This series is really fun to follow!

I held it together pretty well while watching this, but I snapped when Alex said that they have a ton of it.

This is my favorite series. I love it. I sincerely love it.

After some searching, I found the song in the opening. Fuck yes.

https://us.audionetwork.com/browse/m/track/murderville_129521

Sooooo Commander Ryckert for the Battleship capture. There will be blood.

I'm doing an ironman run myself, dude @xbob42, and it is also my first time playing; I feel like not being able to save scum is an even more pressing case for playing cautiously and actually learning how the game and classes and systems work anyway.

The game has been offering plenty of opportunities for me to be bailed out of catastrophe, sure —

- First terror mission is apparently half as bad as all future ones

- If they ever get to assault the alien base it reduces panic worldwide

- It eventually will just do a couple of softball abduction missions to build EXP back up

— but by the same token:

- I also haven't been upgrading my interceptors properly and so I've missed several UFOs, which means fewer resources, which means it's harder to shoot down even more UFOs until it takes pity on you and gives you a small UFO again.

- They keep getting their dudes wounded, which saves them from getting wiped in harder missions but also keeps incapacitating units.

- If they take a sniper that they don't understand how to actually effectively use into Site Recon they are losing at least two more units, if not everybody, because they haven't had to face melee units or just how far Chryssalids can move.

- Plus there's the fact that they're either terrified, ignorant, or just forgetful about capturing aliens, which is the only way the main story is going to continue, and in a battle of attrition between them and the game, the game will stop being so forgiving after awhile.

I'm sure they'll keep chugging along for awhile before they will game over, but it's kind of hilarious for them to be complaining about getting too many heavies when they don't use snipers effectively, they don't heal anybody with support, and their default tactic is to stay behind cover and hold overwatch instead of even attempting a flank.

@gregalor: I just wonder if there's some text-blindness that creeps up on you when you're playing on stream. Because when an item says "NOT RESEARCHED. This item is extremely rare. We cannot produce it ourselves. It can only be found from UFO reactor cores. We must carefully manage our limited supply," my first instinct would be to not sell it.

Also I wish Alex had tried to build a MEC Soldier because I am now sure Dan will use it as a loophole to make another Ryckert, it's all part of the storyline

@jbick89: He wrote tonnes of reviews and articles for gamespot back in the day.

Disable shot and I think suppression could override overwatch. Regular attacks or rockets don't, I don't think grenade works also. Some claim destroying cover of the enemy is behind cancels their overwatch, but I tested it on a muton elite and it doesn't work. However green muton might use intimidate after getting hit which could override their overwatch.

Looking good! As for the doomsday predictions some here in comments are making, eh. This is normal difficulty. On harder difficulties, yeah fine, that's justified. On normal though, I see no reason the game cannot be finished going forward. Normal is not that bad.

This series is great, thanks!!

It killed me watching Alex go by Augment soldiers a dozen times and never even see it.

@gregalor said:

fwiw, one of the only tutorial/tooltip things I would change in XCOM Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within is something that said "for real, if you need some money just go buck wild selling alien corpses, just leave yourself like 5 or 6 of each alien type." The other obvious change would be to not have Dr. Vahlen constantly chastise the player for getting kills with explosives because she needs her precious weapon fragments; it's much better to teach the player that if they can get a guaranteed kill with an explosive, go for it.

I mean, alloys/elerium/weapon fragments all have text descriptions that imply they are scarce and shouldn't be sold and have almost no monetary value, yet somehow Abby and Alex love selling them. In retrospect, the devs probably should've made alloys/elerium/weapon fragments literally unsellable.

They think they have a lot of weapon fragment, alloy, and elerium because the numbers are high. They don't know the sheer quantity they need. Also low level corpses are 5 bucks each at this point of the game, it really isn't that far off from the 3 of elerium and 2 of alloy. The corpses are also tagged with not researched because who has time for autopsy right now.

That's not true. I'm playing an Enemy Within game right now and getting shot will not cancel an alien's overwatch. Learned that the hard way.

Of course Giant Bomb makes me look forward to Mondays.

EDIT: I am really surprised at the restraint of Abby and Alex not just running Dan into the fray with no cover, then claiming that was always a risk with that type of procedure.

There is a 4% chance they pull this off. Dooming the entire planet is basically inevitable, and I am excited to see which commander is forced to pull the plug on X- COM. The poor decisions are starting to snowball. I suspect a minimum of 3 squad deaths next episode.

Now I'm wondering what Greg Mueller is doing these days.

Great work Alex!

You guys should be selling a lot more of the stuff you are bringing back from these missions with the exception of alloys, weapon fragments, and elium (especially the corpses). That caraspace armor is super cheap. Bite the bullet and outfit your entire squad in it until you get something better.

Also how hasn't Bakalar made an appearance on the squad yet? Yall are forgetting a core member of the Beastcast!

Speaking of, here's a list of current and former staff who have made it on yet (and who hasn't already killed in battle):

• Gerstmann
• Jason
• Rorie
• Klepek
• Solid Scanlon
• Dave Snider
• Alexis

Other friends of the site who could join xcom at some point:

• Danny O'Dwyer
• Drake
• Pope
• Baer
• Johnny V
• Will Smith
• Fobwashed

A great episode, definite improvement. A shame that even watching this nearly a week late, the next watchable episode will be a week away at least.

Strange. I admit that I haven't played XCOM1 in awhile but I just played through XCOM2 again recently and you certainly can cancel overwatch on enemies by hitting them (and vise versa). In fact, I used that tactic often to prioritize enemies on overwatch as soon as my turn starts. I always assumed that this is a basic XCOM mechanic, especially since it is tactical.

@vovin: In XCOM 1, damaging an enemy will cancel them Supressing somebody, but it doesn't cancel their Overwatch. I don't think anything cancels Overwatch except *maybe* using Supression on the guy on Overwatch (and even if it doesn't cancel it, the accuracy debuff from Supression is so steep that the Overwatch shot will almost definitely miss).

Other than that, if you're late game, I think the psi abilities that completely fuck up an alien (mainly Psi Panic and Mind Control) will cancel Overwatch (and Supression) because those psi abilities completely change the enemy actions.

Bit late on Exquisite Corps so catching up on this now. Goddamn Alex sold the Elerium. That's super rare and super important! Also they should have launched the satellite over Russia as it provides a bigger resource allowance. Still, Alex did well generally. I have concerns about next (this) week though...