The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 15

Oh, Lord I forgot it was Dan's turn...

Come on DAN! You can DO IT!!

#TeamSandbird

Last Dan episode, smoke grenades are useless

Looked what saved him this episode

MAGIC!

@vinny: You don't have to fulfil the requests immediately. You can go build the two SCOPES then go turn the request in via the Situation Room.

e: "That's too purple"... Er, are we looking at the same colour?

Birmingham, England does not look like that, hehe, however, I like it. :)

finally done that useless research

Things are looking good

I can't believe how Dan just evaded some major shit storm on that turn.

This guy was born under some mystical star.

@geralt said:

Haha, yeah, the number of fortuitous misses from the various robots was kind of insane. Granted, the smoke grenade from Vinny was probably the single smartest smoke grenade they've used in this entire campaign. Jason was very exposed and Abomination was technically a little safer because I think only the Drones (and not the Cyberdisc) could've flanked him, but both units were pretty overextended, and thankfully the smoke grenade made them hard enough to hit that the Cyberdisc spent its turn targeting a different soldier (and again, missing).

Can't really explain why but I love the shift from the briefing to the opening in this feature.

I gave some tips at the end of the comments for the last episode, most of which still stand. I won't repeat them here, but Vinny and the commanders, consider checking them out! Among other things, you guys are still being passive with EXALT because there's a whole thing in the Situation Room you haven't been clicking!

That being said, I am so excited for either Abby or Alex to take on the alien base mission in their upcoming episodes. Mostly excited to hear Abby's mighty barbarian shout of triumph should she be the one to complete it.

Gotta go all out buying satellites guys. Dan should have bought at least 3 satellites this episode. Maybe 4 or 5 while you have the money. If things go downhill this is the episode that starts the downturn. You need satellites and interceptor upgrades story things can wait when you don't have essential upgrades.

Instead of losing just 1 or two countries at the end of this month and next month you may be losing 3-5 and then that's the ballgame.

Fuck, this is good.

Since you're always wondering about the hit percentages, here's how the flanking system works:

The visual angle is rather unimportant, you're either behind the cover line or not.

Given that they seem to only be willing to play one mission per video now it looks like that duty will fall on Commander Navarro's shoulders.

Hot tip for the commanders: it's surprisingly easy to keep a low-rank unit alive to level them up through missions when you don't uncover as many pods as you possibly can in your first turn.

I wish I had their luck; I nearly lost one of my best units when I had this map because I didn't think shooting through a window with a regular shotgun would destroy the entire window and leave them out of cover. This was also when the game refused to give me any support units, so I had to babysit a unit with one health for 95% of the mission.

So I guess the new cycle is that Commander Navarro worriedly assumes they need to buy more soldiers and then Commander Ryckert makes all the units instead of Commander Russell? Does that mean someone else is going to take care of the base building in a manner that doesn't blow through all their money immediately?

Recorded vocals still sound scratchy ( i.e. @ 04:05, but all the way through), as if the gain is too high. I've just listened to your last GBeast podcast and the audio tends to sound much better on those.

You spelled my name wrong, Dan.

- David Fetterman

Dammit Dan! That's a Dutch flag, not French.

Just another day in a war without end.

Le Don is actually Dutch, not French. French flag has vertical stripes.

For reference, The 'orange metallic spooky wave' is the location of meld, the 'blue spooky wavey wave' is the location of unrevealed enemies.

Also you probably don't need to reload every 2nd turn, personable I only reload when the magazine is empty, over watch or position advancement/improvement is always preferable.

It killlllllllllls me that they still don't have a foundry

Haha, so close though! We need engineers... I thought for a second they might go with the foundry... nah more workshops.

Oh shit they went to my hometown.

Yeah, this is killing me. This video is like, 12 minutes of faffing about in the base, 20 minutes on the actual mission, then another 14 minutes of faffing about in the base. It feels like it has been ages since the last 2-missions-in-one-episode, which I think might've been an Abby episode like 8 episodes ago?

I really wish that if the commander cleared their first mission at or around the 30 minute mark (which happened this episode), they would take a quick look at the base situation but then spin the globe and do another mission. This series is moving at a glacial pace, when you consider that they started at the beginning of August and are maybe about halfway through the campaign. Especially when the first mission is a fairly mundane, short abduction mission, they should consider doing a second mission for that episode.

My biggest complaint about this video series as a whole is how unsatisfyingly short these 40-50 minute episodes are. Like, fine, the episodes don't have to be 2+ hours each like every other Giant Bomb video series, but even just going on a second mission each episode would probably only push the episode length to 60-70 minutes.

I think they need a missions where they send two vets and three rookies. Start building a few up, and risk culling the herd a bit. I can easily see them going into a mission where everything goes wrong and so they lose three of their veterans who will be hard to replace with such a thin bench.

@vinny : thank you, thank you, thank you a thousand times for the smoke grenade call

@avantegardener : I'm guessing that Vinny is having trouble with the color of the waves because of his colorblindness. The 3 commanders are on their own on that

Dan's notion of strategy appears to be to turn the base into a giant empty cave.

I love the obsession with the adjacency bonuses they have, they've spent probably 20-30 minutes over all the videos agonizing over those for the relatively small bonus they give and destroying/rebuilding facilities to get a slightly better layout. Then they forget that reloading ends your turn or that you can't fire the rocket launcher after moving. Classic.

Austin? Did you make a second account?

I love this series! Vinny, I know it's hard to withhold advice, but it's been a while since a real disaster took place *evil grin* Maybe just let a few high-ranking soldiers die in the next few weeks, to keep things interesting *cackling*.

@bisonhero: As a person who now ya like max 3 free hours a night that I spread between reading, playing games and watching GB content I’m extremely grateful for st least one series that isn’t a 2hr+ extended podcast with a game playing in the background. These are short, concise and to the point. I wouldn’t even mind if they trimmed down the base management stuff.

Part of me wishes they were playing on a higher difficulty. They're over the early game hump and at this rate they're just going to spend another 15 episodes steamrolling every mission until the credits. Not saying I want them to fail, but it does feel like there's no real tension at this point seeing as they're on a clear course to victory.

At this rate there's very little out there that can actually threaten them. If they delay Firestorm research then maybe a Battleship will take out a satellite, but apart from that they're pretty much set for the rest of the game once they get plasma weapons.

Great episode, but excuse me DAN!? French? That's dutch Don Rickles.

When are they going to build a foundry!?!?!?!!

DAN!

Are the Extra Life archives going up on the site anytime soon?

Oh gosh.... Quick-draw Ryckert at it again. Navarro was right with his prediction.

Love Vinny's wincing with every unsafe move Dan makes.

That was a nice save on that horrific first turn!

Just so you folks don't forget: FOUNDRY ( also Dan is right, always be digging, it's money, but not much. Your fight is against time and you need to keep up your tech against scaling difficulty. That's why "it's too quiet". You are safe for now because you have carapace armor and laser weapons....but that won't last long)

"i wish there was a button to overwatch all"

on pc, you can just keep hitting Y and TAB and you can have everybody in overwatch in about a second.

The smoke grenade wasn't actually that useful. The only shot the roof people took was from the drone. Nonetheless, it was a smart move at the time.

That could have gone so much worse.

Praise the RNG Gods!

What can we do to convince them to build a foundry?

@vinny just a tip for spotting the spooky snakes, at 31:04, right next to Abomination there is a small blip in the blue move radius showing a spot that you can't move into. As it is clearly within range this is the tile that is currently occupied by a cloaked unit.

@dg_nick: Without the smoke, the aliens would've had higher shot percentages at the roof soldiers, meaning they probably would've taken shots at those guys instead of focusing on the ground units. It was a very good decision period.