The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 11

Right, let's do this!

Here we go again!

Giant Bomb's masterpiece.

FOUNDRY! BUILD A FOUNDRY!

Edit: RIP Gita next week probably. I don't envy the soldier who gets left in Commander Ryckert's hands with nothing but a pistol.

X-Com: Death of the Outsider is my favorite game this year

So excited for this!

The dates their soldiers died are all in 2015. I'm just saying.

Good job Alex

Finally used that Arc

Every week that goes by without the death of Abomination is an affront to humanity.

Vinny is a great dictator.

I feel like Vinny is influencing the strategies too much. I think he should just let them play how they want instead of advising them on EVERY step.

Very nice leadership Cmdr Navarro. Even with a smaller squad, you tackled the mission successfully.

A few things I noticed:

• Workshops are not where your weapons are build, but the equivalent of a science lab for construction purposes. workshops increase the number of engineers and decrease the build time of buildings and items
• you sent an interceptor to Africa, where you don't have satellites. you might want to transfer it somewhere else until you do

Also, you found the "make items available button"!

YAY!

Looking forward to seeing if Cmdr Ryckert will retrieve the covert operative successfully.

I'm sure it's been said before, but it bears repeating: the sniper Headshot ability is worse than a regular shot for low health enemies. What it offers is an increased critical chance in exchange for a lower chance to hit. [EDIT: Oops, this first bit was wrong. I was thinking of Deadeye in XCOM 2. Still, some of the rest of this still stands]. If a regular shot would already kill the enemy in one shot (which it would for example for those jetpack aliens who only have four health), it is strictly worse to use Headshot: you have a lower chance to hit, and the ability will be on a two turn cool-down, during which time something tougher might turn up. I know it's important to keep things moving and not spend too long reading UI nonsense, but it shouldn't take long to take a quick look at the damage range of the weapon you're using and assessing whether an ability like Headshot is worth it. The health bar of the enemy even flashes the number of pips a standard shot would take off – if the whole bar is flashing for a normal shot, there's no need for an ability that increases damage.

Also, pay attention to what's highlighted in red when using explosives.

And you can see how many enemies a unit can see by the little alien heads above the weapon icons in the bottom-right of the screen. If there's only one head, the unit can only see one enemy. Sometimes the heads are yellow, but I forget what that means. Mind-controlled enemies?

Dirt Bike can open doors, but only by barging through them like a badass. In other words you just move to a square on the other side.

Because @vinny was unsure in the UFO mission, you can do a non-dash movement, then choose whether to fire, continue your move with another movement, or use an ability like Run and Gun.

Oh, and adjacency bonuses do stack, so the most efficient arrangement for four rooms would be a square, giving each room two adjacency bonuses. Given that satellite uplinks only give you two satellites, each adjacency bonus is a 50% improvement. So four uplinks go from giving you eight satellites to twelve. Definitely worth it.

Anyway, I hope that's not excessive advice. I tried to stick to purely factual things rather than matters of strategy. The kind of stuff that it's useful to know but is difficult to pick up if you're only playing once every three weeks (or even once every week).

Love the series!

Vinny has an issue with micromanaging everything they do. It feels less than 30 percent of the actions is what they want to do.

I would die for Dirt Bike

@mitch0712: I agree, but I think Alex is used to running everything by Vinny at this point.

Thank god, they build ships!

Good round as always for alex, well played sah

Every single week, Vinny forgets that clicking the Meld doesn't use a turn.

uguu its so fustrating how short these episodes are, it feels like no one commander really gets a chance to get comfortable! Its compounded by how these are once a week too!

Is it instead of? I haven't played a ton (Vita memory card died and took my save with it :/), but I never saw the chance to hit go down when comparing a normal shot and a Headshot, and none of the in-game text suggested it was a trade-off.

@vinny tip on Run and Gun if you select it by mistake but dont move you can Escape to revert

@duskulblaka: That's how you get the 2 item slot per soldier upgrade isn't it? If so then i agree.

Oof, 6 minutes in and I’m already screaming inside my head: “what are you doing?!”

If anything this series proves that the game is pretty good at stringing along players no matter how poorly it’s going.

@stordoff: Crap, you're right. I was thinking of the very similar XCOM 2 ability Deadeye. I've messily edited my original post to reflect this. So it's not as much of an error as I thought, but still something worth paying attention to.

Anyway, it's a fair cop: I'm a smart-arse who doesn't actually know his shit.

When you guys have so much unexcavated space, do not under any circumstance delete buildings for the slighter adjacancy bonus. Yes, you want the adjacancy bonus, but that's something that should have been accounted for during planning, and the original building. At this point it's better to just go "oh well", since you don't have money enough to just throw around for Feng Shui.

Alex proving once again he's the ranking commander of the Exquisite Corps. Smart choices on and off the battlefield!

Toe to tip, that's an Oestreicher

Good stuff, easily my favorite series on the site right now (especially since Game Tapes is dead), but I agree that Vinny has taken over too much of the decision-making. It's sorta what the series has morphed into, since the first couple of episodes were a little bit too free-form, which had pretty disastrous results.

If they end up redoing this series when it ends (or move on to xcom2), I would love for Vinny to research the game, so he knows how classes should be played, what skills are best, upgrade paths etc. That way , the commanders can ask questions, and Vinny can drop some comprehensive info that lets them make more informed decisions. Not necessarily the "right" decisions, but at least let them know what the consequences of those decisions are.

Solid episode! Not the cleanest mission, but nobody died or was seriously wounded, so close enough. And you guys finally built more aircraft, and laser weapons for them, which was definitely needed by this point.

@vinny, some more tips to pass on to the commanders. The railgun you thought about buying does indeed replace/upgrade the MEC's minigun. The railgun is functionally the "laser" weapon for the MECs, so consider buying one ASAP. Also, take another look at the MEC customization options, because you can give them rad paint jobs and patterns. Also, if you're wondering about if mission difficulty is "fixed" or advances over time, I can clear that up: most of the missions advance in difficulty over time and spawn harder units as the game progresses (abduction missions, UFO missions, terror missions, EXALT missions all work this way). But the "council missions" (the missions you get from Optimus Prime in the situation room) tend to be heavily scripted missions with fixed enemy types and enemy placement, such as the mission where Alex activated nodes on a train or the one where Dan activated nodes on the battleship.

So the UFO mission you did this episode isn't any kind of recurring story mission, but rather the other way around; every UFO mission was a chance to advance the story by stunning an Outsider. Even after you finish this story objective, UFO missions will continue to happen, but stunning an Outsider won't be necessary anymore. The UFO crew was harder on this mission than say, the very first UFO you fought (which was likely all Sectoids), as Floaters and Seekers are considered tougher enemies than Sectoids. All UFOs are piloted/captained by an Outsider at this stage of the game, though once you pass a certain point in the story, Outsiders are phased out and the aliens start deploying a different enemy type as the pilot/captain of UFOs.

It was a nice watch, but not much drama.

very concerned about the next mission IWBR

@telfo said:

Hopefully they figure out disabling ADVENT weapons with the clickable nodes makes those missions so much easier.

Nice knowing you, Gita.

I thought the terror mission would be the end of the squad, I was wrong. I am positive that the Exalt mission will be the end of the squad.

I am very concerned about Gita's well-being.

It also looks like South Africa's going to pull out of the council unless a miracle happens in the next 3 days. I could have sworn that capturing the outsider dropped the terror level everywhere, but maybe I'm thinking of how XCOM 2 main objectives work.

Just give Vinny his own week already. He's already playing the game by proxy.

@laserjesus: I think the covert mission in south africa is both the cause for the red alert, and the solution if it succeeds. Gita is probably is a lot of danger for being to low level to be useful as a cover operative, but as long as they keep her out of danger and make use of the two MEC troopers ( which might help a lot with the way Dan plays), they might be fine.

@mitch0712: me too! this week was particularly annoying. I was shouting "JUST LET HIM PLAY" every minute... i don't know if i can continue this series if every single move is going to be questioned.

@matiaz_tapia: I forgot that the terror level went up there because of ADVENT stuff.

Also, Dan being in charge is precisely why I'm very concerned about her well-being. Hopefully MECs being designed to barrel around like wrecking balls will play to Dan's benefit. He did play pretty competently on the Battleship mission until that cyberdisc showed up and started wrecking house, but that's cyberdiscs for ya.

@mitch0712@blarambleblah: I figure that Vinny giving this much help is fine unless the person who's behind the controls is upset by it. Alex seems like he's genuinely happy to get the help, but I don't know to what extent Abby or Dan is okay with it or not.

Vinny: "im not telling you how to play"

Also Vinny: "No. Don't move there. Why don't you move here."

@cornfed40: I played through the entire campaign after they started this feature and none of the EXALT missions (just two types) seemed particularly difficult. If anything they made me feel like a bad-ass since the human enemies go down so fast.

Vinny STOP! Micromanaging their gameplays already! Let them start making their own decisions already!! If you want to keep joining in YOU join up and play! Please STOP! They can learn on their own!

@dynamix: They really aren't that hard, and I agree, dropping human does for some reason make your squad feel pretty badass. I was more referring to the pure amount of guys those missions throw at you, even though none of them are that tough. Its groups of 3 dudes everywhere, and if I recall, most of those missions threw at least 16 Exalt at you, Plus, with the cover tactics most of the crew use (i.e. everyone clustered behind one of two pieces of cover once shit starts to pop off), they haven't really had to face the devastation that enemy grenades can cause. Plus those Exalt heavies with rockets of their own that can damage 3-4 guys at once, along with destroying cover.

They are all very beatable, just different enough than the regular alien mission that I can easily see them stumbling forward into two groups of Exalt and having 6 dudes on them at once (I made that mistake the first couple I did too)

Painful cautiousness, but considering the alternative :) Don't underestimate those meld opportunities but overall good job!

Next week's episode is going to be a nail-biter.

I'm gonna preface my signature in all my e-mails and letters with "What a good day" from now on.