The Exquisite Corps: XCOM: Enemy Within - Part 26

PLASMA.

finally

Best intro :D

edit: Good Job as always Alex

(psssst, @vinny, you totally already have the option to build the psy lab since months ago, and also the improved arc thrower project in the foundry)

プラズマアアアァァ

Thank goodness.

You guys... finally got plasma? Am I still being April Fooled? Will you actually get new armor one day???

God tier intro, Abby.

Who's George Smith?

Heavies can't carry pistols, which I why they can't go on Covert Ops.

And to clarify: Expert Knowledge also halves the upkeep cost of labs and workshops, which is extra money in your pocket every month. It's still not as good as Future Combat (which won't actually be of that much use at this point since you've already bought most things it affects), but it's pretty good.

You guys don't hunker down anywhere near enough. It effectively turns low cover into high cover and instead you do pistol overwatch against dudes with 6+ hp. Hunker down is important hey

Please get Letterman a Mech Suit! Have they done that yet, because I don't think they have.

I love it when Vinny really thinks he's being hands-off, almost as much as I love it when any of the commanders think they're being very tactically-minded. At least they finally started clueing into the notion that giving the better weapons and aim buffs to the worser units helps feed EXP to them and balance out the overall damage per unit instead of focusing all of your death output on one guy who is only effective on outdoor maps with exactly one tall building.

They still have Jeff's old flamethrower MEC, they just had to clean all the Dead Jeff bits out of it.

@roy42: it would be really awesome if they had a small animation of some deck crew literally hosing out the dried blood and body remains out of old suits and armor that you retrofit onto newjoiners.

This might be shocking news, but X-COM is a great game!

What an intro!

Another episode with solid progress! However, is it enough to survive another round of......The Ryckening? Tune in next time to find out!

I can't read or think about the word plasma anymore without hearing it in a certain loud and distinctive cadence.

@fedallah said:

Nobody. Dan left him and Maximillian to be renamed by the others, and then the others kept the names because thought that's what Dan wanted...

Anyway, Vinny was on the ball this episode, having seemingly read up on a lot of the mechanics of the game. Leaving the satellite for later seems like questionable decision with the council report coming up in a few days. I wouldn't want to risk Dan forgetting all about it.

So the real XCOM was the friends we made along the way. This all makes sense now

Sell all of those EXALT Assault rifles!

@tdot: IIRC they sell for $1 each. You're better off just keeping them, and if you're lucky, sometimes the Council will request like 6 EXALT weapons and then you can give them away for a minor reward.

If memory serves, Abby sold nearly all of the UFO power sources and alien nav computers like 15+ episodes ago, so I forget exactly how many of those they have saved up. They probably don't have enough to actually build very many new aircraft. At the very least, Vinny should remind the commanders to put laser weapons on all of their existing aircraft; some of their planes still have the default missiles, which will perform very poorly against any ship other than a small/large scout.

Easy peasy. Well played Alex.

Very well positioned throughout. Good work.

How close are they to credits?

Really enjoying this thorough and methodical opening. Carefully reviewing every research option, reading descriptions, auditing every squad member and their gear before launching.

This is the kind of play I like to see!

Alex's episodes are always so comfortably thought out, which can only mean the next episode will be a dumpster fire!

Good job Alex.

They probably do have a bunch of junk parts and excess corpses they could sell for extra scratch. Nobody's visited the Grey Market in ages.

This is true. They're probably sitting on a little more money than they realize, so we'll see if future commanders notice this. They're going to need the money to buy plasma weaponry since they've confiscated literally the absolute minimum amount of alien weaponry required to advance the story. If they don't Arc Thrower a Muton or Heavy Floater at some point, they may finish the game without ever researching Alien Grenades.

that intro was so very good

My favourite intro to one of these.

Yeah, this is part of the reason that I think the jump from Normal to Classic difficulty is so significant. Normal is so forgiving and hard to fail that you can really blunder your way through without understanding how a lot of the tactical stuff works, given how on Normal the AI deliberately makes poor moves sometimes, rarely uses explosives/AoE attacks, and all the enemies have pretty manageable HP values. Even if you make tons of mistakes and have tons of soldiers die, you can make it to the end of the campaign, and it's pretty rare that you actually completely fail and have to learn what you're doing wrong.

Classic ups the enemy AI and gives them better stats, so you really need a good foundation of understanding how all the mechanics work to overcome these changes. If you go into Classic using Exquisite-Corps-level tactics, you'll start running out of soldiers pretty quickly and start failing a lot of missions in the early game. You really can't afford to lose any missions on Classic, given how everything is more expensive and panic accumulates faster on Classic as well.

At this point, the Exquisite Corps' campaign is pretty much unfailable since they already have so many satellites up and its actually really difficult to lose satellite coverage on Normal so there's almost no way 8 countries could leave XCOM at this point. I suspect they'll make it to the end of the campaign, while not fully understanding flanking. Hopefully they've almost reached the point where they stop asking if a soldier can shoot and then move.

Another week until next episode :/ ...

@halfdane1975: Two weeks, if you skip Dan episodes.

@cagliostro88: 100%, that was great!

@vinny: Another great episode! Another tip if I may, as I've gotten in the habit of dolling one out every week. Ya'll really really need to build a psionics lab and start training folks in there, as you literally cannot finish the game without at least one high level psionic on your squad.

Those psi-abilities are preeeetty great, so it's a very worthwhile investment to chuck a few squaddies in there.

That was a great opener.

"The S.H.I.V. laser could be cool, but I don't feel like I neeeed it right this second..."

I'm not sure Alex knew to what extent they definitely didn't need this laser mod for the S.H.I.V. remote vehicle which is a separate project they would need to do first.

Light plasma rifles are pretty much pointless unless you get them early for free from stunned aliens (I think they are the exact same stats as laser rifles). Hope they don't blow loads of resources building these instead of the better plasma arms.

Just want to add to the chorus that Vinny you were right - plasma rifles are not sniper rifles, they are plasma assault rifles, i.e. the upgrade from the laser rifle, and along with Titan armour should really be the highest priority. Good interceptors with good weapons close behind... Anything else at this point is not really worthwhile.

Don't build more light plasma rifles! There is an argument to say that they help squadies, as demonstrated here, but the full plasma rifle is just so much more powerful.

Epic header, Abby. Easily the best one yet. Expertly played, Alex. Vinne, you're my favourite, but you always promise to be 'hands-off' in every episode, and then jump back into advise mode almost immediately. Your advice rocks so let 'em have it; no need to make promises you can't keep, dawg!

They also have way more alien alloys and ellerium than they need at this point. Considering they will get more of both as the game continues, they can safely sell a bunch of them. They can get close to 2k credits if they were to sell their stuff on the black market, which solves their credit problems.

Alex's careful approach actually ramps up the tension for some of these episodes, I really like it. Sort of dreading next week's episode tbh, hopefully it's just a normal mission and Dan doesn't kill off the soldiers that everyone else has been developing. He probably will though, let's see how bad it gets.

Alex almost spending 9 days on researching plasma pistols was pretty good.

That was a pretty good intro abby, also I have one word for you just on word, Plasma.

I'm not sure if they noticed, but that ammo conservation perk is already paying off.

They have an aim bonus compared to laser rifles at least, so they were great for giving those rookie soldiers a few easy kills.

The ship research is a good call. The Stealth satellite upgrade is a worthy purchase, be a shame if they lose any now as the commanders are doing a decent job of covering the geoscape so far.

Nice work Alex!

Great intro.

Okay, that's the second time that Alex has put someone who has a shot in overwatch, Vinny should probably advise him not to do it. The enemy will just take the shot rather than move, this time it was almost really bad because the enemy had a rocket launcher and used it.

I don't think that intro will be topped in this series.

Abby Attenborough in the intro.