XCOM Enemy Within: First Impressions

[Xeorm]

I highly doubt that you are playing C/I and actually take risks in order to secure meld. You just grab it if it's in your way or not terribly out of your way and you just cleared the path towards it. So, again, it's a pointless chore. Nobody who plays Ironman would charge into a fog-covered area just to grab some meld that has 2 turns to go, at least noone who wants his playthrough to last more than 2 hours. So yeah, on normal runs it's a save scumming waste of time, and on Ironman it's pointless, so it's a pretty stupid addition either way (in my opinion always).

I haven't found it to be that awful either. Most maps I only have to go a little out of the way in order to grab them. I've really liked the addition of the objectives so far.

 

[Carnagath]

I highly doubt that you are playing C/I and actually take risks in order to secure meld. You just grab it if it's in your way or not terribly out of your way and you just cleared the path towards it. So, again, it's a pointless chore. Nobody who plays Ironman would charge into a fog-covered area just to grab some meld that has 2 turns to go, at least noone who wants his playthrough to last more than 2 hours. So yeah, on normal runs it's a save scumming waste of time, and on Ironman it's pointless, so it's a pretty stupid addition either way (in my opinion always).

I haven't found it to be that awful either. Most maps I only have to go a little out of the way in order to grab them. I've really liked the addition of the objectives so far.

The giant sigh of relief that I breathe every time those 2 fucking canisters are collected and I can go back to playing tactically in a tactical game is all I need to form a (very negative) opinion about this addition. Very unfortunate.

Anyway, in my case, it's mostly tiring, because I don't play Ironman. I was done with that when I tried it and within the first hour I had 2 squad mates in full cover, hunker down and smoke grenade, and the enemies did not miss a single shot. Ironman turns the game into a 35 hour long RNG-dominated roguelike, which I found just a tad counterintuitive as a concept. Roguelikes are supposed to be short, so that when you die and lose all your progress within half an hour or 1 hour, you are like "Welp, that sucked, let's try again on my next coffee break" or whatever. But to have this happen after 15 or 20 hours due to RNG is just too devastating. TLR: I'm too old for this shit.

 

[tippy2k2]

snip

You can doubt it if you wish. I'm close to the Alien Base, and I have indeed taken SENSIBLE risks to get Meld. I won't blow up half my squad to get it, but I definitely extend myself a LOT more aggressively than I otherwise would.

I'm sorry you hate it so much. It was honestly a borderline necessary addition.

I have to agree with Mr. Guppy here. I've done four missions so far and the MELD forces me to act a lot faster and more aggressively than I probably should (I've collected 6/8 cans for reference). I am also playing on Classic with Iron Man mode on. The risks I'm willing to take will probably start dwindling as things bigger than Sectoids come into play but I love the addition of MELD.

It hasn't happened yet but there's a good chance that it's going to get someone killed eventually. However, the rewards outweigh the risk and therefore I shall send wave after wave of men at the MELD! Eventually, the kill bots will hit their limit and shut down, leaving the MELD ready for harvesting

 

[ThreeName]

Is it worth the $30 purchase now or should most people wait for the Steam Christmas sale? $30 seems pretty steep for an expansion.

Certainly looks fun though.

Lucky you're not in Australia, they're trying to charge us $50 for the damn thing.

>>Implying proxies don't exist

On one hand, I want to support the developer, but on the other, the publisher can fuck right off. This is me just being such a good bloke though. I'm happy to pay $30, because it reminds me of the good old days of real expansions like HL: Opposing Force and Crysis: Warhead, not the one-mission/new clothes tiny DLC nonsense of today.

 

[Sixcess]

Of course, I did bum rush Carapace Armor and flamer MECs before anything...

I'm starting to think that going into the EXALT intro mission without Carapace Armor is suicide, given that I've wiped twice on it now. Oh well, time to rethink my early game strategy...

 

[spartandude]

Of course, I did bum rush Carapace Armor and flamer MECs before anything...

I'm starting to think that going into the EXALT intro mission without Carapace Armor is suicide, given that I've wiped twice on it now. Oh well, time to rethink my early game strategy...

Heres whats worked well for me, do your usual early game stragety and then some time between the terror mission where you have to save civillians and the first exalt mission is when you start doing MECs and Gene augments

 

[Mangod]

Don't know if anyone has noticed it yet, but the buffed Sectopods are freaking brutal if you don't bring a Bullet Swarm-H.E.A.T. Ammo Heavy along, because otherwise it's like beating down a brick wall with your face.

MEC's are awesome, if slow to produce in any substantial quantity (which is good OR bad depending on your prefered levels of God-mode) and Gene Mods are considerably less broken than I was fearing.

EXALT are... not exactly competent on the Encoder/Transmitter missions. Dashing into a kill field to try and get to the protected Encoder makes those missions a cake walk. They might need a buff.

Mechtoids are awesome!

In summary: get this expansion. If you liked Enemy Unknown, then Enemy Within is a great expansion, and definitively worth the price

 

[Bleidd Whitefalcon]

Is there a way of deactivating the Slingshot DLC included with Enemy Within?

You can turn both DLC bonus missions off if you so choose to (on the 360 version at least, I presume it is the same for PC). Same with all the "Second Wave" items.

Spoiler: For reference, here are your options

Advanced Options
Tutorial
MELD Tutorial
Operation Progeny (new to Enemy Within; Council missions)
Operation Slingshot (Slingshot DLC)
Iron Man
Beginner Voice-overs

Second Wave
Damage Roulette
New Economy
Not Created Equal
Hidden Potential
Training Roulette
Save Scum
Aiming Angles

OT: I'm digging the game so far. My "Let's Play" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/groups/view/Tippy2k2-s-XCOM-Army-Let-s-Play] soldiers have all survived so far and I'm just starting to dig into the new content. Having a bunch of new maps alone has felt like it was worth the price of admission and I haven't even gotten to using MELD. Adding the MELD is a sweet idea and gives the game a much better flow. It's a lot harder to "cheat" and move your men up six inches at a time in OW at all times when MELD is on the line...

No wonder Gigastar and I died! You started tempting fate with comments like that

 

[tippy2k2]

No wonder Gigastar and I died! You started tempting fate with comments like that

Tempting fate had nothing to do it; Command incompetence was bound to get some of you guys killed sooner or later

The fact that you guys haven't overthrown Command and installed Guppy as leadership is something I still don't quite get

 

[Bleidd Whitefalcon]

No wonder Gigastar and I died! You started tempting fate with comments like that

Tempting fate had nothing to do it; Command incompetence was bound to get some of you guys killed sooner or later

Well, Gigastar was a given anyway. We all know his track record. But the incompetence might have gotten us killed - tempting fate like that helped. A lot.

 

[EternallyBored]

I highly doubt that you are playing C/I and actually take risks in order to secure meld. You just grab it if it's in your way or not terribly out of your way and you just cleared the path towards it. So, again, it's a pointless chore. Nobody who plays Ironman would charge into a fog-covered area just to grab some meld that has 2 turns to go, at least noone who wants his playthrough to last more than 2 hours. So yeah, on normal runs it's a save scumming waste of time, and on Ironman it's pointless, so it's a pretty stupid addition either way (in my opinion always).

I haven't found it to be that awful either. Most maps I only have to go a little out of the way in order to grab them. I've really liked the addition of the objectives so far.

The giant sigh of relief that I breathe every time those 2 fucking canisters are collected and I can go back to playing tactically in a tactical game is all I need to form a (very negative) opinion about this addition. Very unfortunate.

Anyway, in my case, it's mostly tiring, because I don't play Ironman. I was done with that when I tried it and within the first hour I had 2 squad mates in full cover, hunker down and smoke grenade, and the enemies did not miss a single shot. Ironman turns the game into a 35 hour long RNG-dominated roguelike, which I found just a tad counterintuitive as a concept. Roguelikes are supposed to be short, so that when you die and lose all your progress within half an hour or 1 hour, you are like "Welp, that sucked, let's try again on my next coffee break" or whatever. But to have this happen after 15 or 20 hours due to RNG is just too devastating. TLR: I'm too old for this shit.

I just finished my first classic run since the expansion (no ironman though), but yeah, I'll agree with the other people saying MELD gives a nice incentive to play a little more agressively, but its hardly necessary. Unless you want to go really MEC heavy, or completely gene mod your whole squad, you can easily get away with ignoring the second MELD container the majority of the time, I mostly just go after it if I happen to run accross it, otherwise I usually don't worry about it too much, the vast majority of upgrades are cheap, only a couple mods and the lvl 3 MEC require any sort of saving up. Its an incentive to break away from the normal super-conservative classic and impossible play style, but it sounds like you're worrying too much about grabbing meld and getting too aggressive.

By the time ethereals showed up, I was pretty much ignoring meld since I already had all the gene mods and MECs that I wanted, stocking up in the early game is super easy and I never really found myself hurting for more meld that I didn't have yet. My only regret is that gene modding soldiers sticks them in that stupid sleeveless armor, and the model looks close to the same whether you're using carapace, titan, or archangel armor, you still end up in that stupid sleeveless getup.

 

[Mangod]

So, just got it and now I can not play Enemy Unknown at all because the game crashes every time right after clicking on the Enemy Unknown option. Anyone else get that problem?

Can't say that I have. I had an unfinished Ironman game on EU when the expansion came out, so after downloading EW I booted up EU, finished the campaign and got to work on the expansion without problem.

Have you tried the XCOM forums? There's got to be some techsupport there for your problem.

 

[Pink Gregory]

Is it worth the $30 purchase now or should most people wait for the Steam Christmas sale? $30 seems pretty steep for an expansion.

Certainly looks fun though.

Lucky you're not in Australia, they're trying to charge us $50 for the damn thing.

>>Implying proxies don't exist

On one hand, I want to support the developer, but on the other, the publisher can fuck right off. This is me just being such a good bloke though. I'm happy to pay $30, because it reminds me of the good old days of real expansions like HL: Opposing Force and Crysis: Warhead, not the one-mission/new clothes tiny DLC nonsense of today.

2K do seem to employ some typical publisher questionable tactics when it comes to Firaxis; like the piecemeal DLC for Civ V before Gods & Kings came out (and the more recent map packs which just seem to be maps that are already there, but with randomised resource/terrain placement) and the Slingshot/Customization DLCs for XCOM.

Then there was the kerfuffle with the Borderlands 2 season pass not including all of the content that subsequently was released.

Hopefully 2K don't go the same route of season passes with Firaxis games in the future, and just sticks to expansions.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I say ruins, but really I so love and hate this game. I love the immersiveness and soul Firaxis Games poured into it. You can feel so engrossed in Enemy Within when Dr. Shen starts comparing MECs to the alien Floaters and wonders if we will cross that line when we come to it. Or just hearing the MECs speak, for that matter. And I love turn based tactics, but even Firaxis says that Iron Man mode is the way the game is meant to be played, and Iron Man mode is completely broken. No matter how good your tactics, the RNG ultimately decides whether you make it through or not.

I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. Players are somewhat at the mercy of the RNG for the first couple of hours of the game, when you're dealing with rookies and squaddies with shit all for health, bad weapons, and either poor abilities or no abilities at all. You're still influencing the outcome, but you have limited tools. By the time you're at 3rd-4th level on your core group, if you're still feeling "at the mercy of the RNG" it's because you're bungling the tactics.

But while watching a comrade get nailed in the head by a stray bullet while in "full cover" may accurately simulate real battlefield tension, it simply does not work in turn based strategy.

But it does. It worked in the original, it worked in the Jagged Alliance games. I'll never understand this insistence that ANY randomness is "too much randomness".

Aaand Aiming Angles... also like it, honestly. Thin Men hit your men more frequently, but your men also hit Thin Men more frequently. Of course, I did bum rush Carapace Armor and flamer MECs before anything...

Yes and no. Someone ran the math on Reddit. Aiming Angles basically gives you more of a bonus to hit the higher your accuracy is. It means that later in the game, with your pimped out uber-squad, Aiming Angles is making an already very easy game even easier. It also means that early in the game, when you have rookies and squaddies that couldn't hit the ocean if they were shooting from the pier, Aiming Angles isn't giving you much of a bonus. Along come the Thin Men, with their legendarily high accuracy that is unchanged from vanilla, and they're FEASTING off Aiming Angles. Once you've got Titan Armor you can pretty much dust them off. Before that, they will routinely crit for the full 9 damage on ~50% of their shots.

I'm starting to think that going into the EXALT intro mission without Carapace Armor is suicide, given that I've wiped twice on it now. Oh well, time to rethink my early game strategy...

See above. If you're hard wiping on Portent (the first EXALT mission) and don't want to save scum or groundhog day your way through it, try running it without Aiming Angles on. It'd still be hard...it's an enemy dense mission with a lot of vertical space, Thin Men, and a VIP to baby sit, but you won't need to cope with the Thin Man trick shot show as they get massive flanking bonuses from taking two steps halfway across the map.

 

[Megalodon]

I'm playing on C/I, and I've gotten approx. 75% of all Meld encountered. Of course it's forcing you to take risks, that was the entire point of it. The game over-rewarded caution and barely rewarded risk taking at all. At higher difficulties this meant a creeping, super-conservative method of play was always optimal. Meld is there to crowbar you out of your comfort zone and give you high risk targets to shoot for, without making them mandatory to mission completion (ala bomb defusing).

If it was actually a choice, then fine. But I've lost more than 25% of the meld canisters without even seeing them. This coupled with being unable to collect if you dash to them, really pisses me off. I've repeatedly got into sustained firefights with multiple enemy mobs (2nd one walks into the combat zone before first is dead), only to see both meld canisters are lost, when they hadn't yet appeared on the map (first time attempting Classic btw). Or revealing one with 1 or 2 turns left, and realising it is physically impossible to collect. Then the game tells me I did a poor job of collecting the meld. Then I rage.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

If it was actually a choice, then fine. But I've lost more than 25% of the meld canisters without even seeing them. This coupled with being unable to collect if you dash to them, really pisses me off. I've repeatedly got into sustained firefights with multiple enemy mobs (2nd one walks into the combat zone before first is dead), only to see both meld canisters are lost, when they hadn't yet appeared on the map (first time attempting Classic btw). Or revealing one with 1 or 2 turns left, and realising it is physically impossible to collect. Then the game tells me I did a poor job of collecting the meld. Then I rage.

I don't want to come off a harsh but this is not a problem with the game, it is most likely a problem with your skill level. So far on classic difficulty I've only lost like 10% of available meld and most of the time I can get to the first meld within a few turns and end the entire scenario before the second one expires. Considering that the average turn length on the "distant" meld is something like 10 turns and 4-5 for the closest one you shouldn't have any problems unless you play very conservatively or fail to decisively end your combat encounters (which probably also puts you out there with a high casualty ratio). Just keep playing, getting the meld will become easier once you learn where the suitable aggression threshold is and you get more comfortable with extending your lines.

Personally, I think meld was a nice addition. It is a sort of high risk/high reward option were you can end up losing soldiers due to overextending, but you also have the possibility of fielding some really powerful soldiers later on. So far, and I just finished off the alien base, the MECs seem pretty balanced and the gene mods opens up for alternative tactics without necessarily becoming overkill. One thing I might nitpick on is that the flamethrower seems just a tad too effective. Having EXALT soldiers running in terror feels fine, it feels a bit less fine when chryssalids start running from my MEC, allowing me to negate their only advantage by using a tier 1 MEC ability.

Also, shouldn't they have fixed gunslinger when they rebalanced the skills? Having snipers run around and being more effective with their modded pistols than supports are with their assault rifles still feels kind of silly.

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

Is it worth the $30 purchase now or should most people wait for the Steam Christmas sale? $30 seems pretty steep for an expansion.

Certainly looks fun though.

I dont think that the steam winter sale will discount it beyond 10%, 15% at a stretch, but it will most likely just sit at "pre-order" price.

It's kind of interesting that the OP said that Meld is a game changer, because veterans like TB said that it barely changed their style of play.

Personally though, I am awaiting the second expansion so that XCOM Enemy Unknown is fully fleshed out, like Civ V w/ Gods & Kings and Brave New World.

 

[Yabba]

hey does anyone know if the bug where save games will apeare out of order and bug out has been fixed with XCOM:EW?

 

[Frankster]

I'm starting to think that going into the EXALT intro mission without Carapace Armor is suicide, given that I've wiped twice on it now. Oh well, time to rethink my early game strategy...

See above. If you're hard wiping on Portent (the first EXALT mission) and don't want to save scum or groundhog day your way through it, try running it without Aiming Angles on. It'd still be hard...it's an enemy dense mission with a lot of vertical space, Thin Men, and a VIP to baby sit, but you won't need to cope with the Thin Man trick shot show as they get massive flanking bonuses from taking two steps halfway across the map.

I did the first exalt mission with 3 rookies and 1 squaddie (my vets were in the hospital) and no special gear on classic so its well doable so long as you don't mind heavy casualties.

First time I got creamed after reaching the VIP, but 2nd time...Here's what made the mission a lot easier for me...
Between you and the VIP there's 2 buildings which both have comfy rooftops for your men to hold up on whilst you send one to go towards the VIP. From this position of height your men are able to easily rain death upon the aliens as they land whilst being decently protected due to the height advantage.

That said... All my men ended up dieing due to thin men being accurate and mobile, but it bought enough time for the VIP to leg it, and as my last man fell to the floor wounded... MISSION SUCCESS. Wtf didn't you want me to kill all the aliens left? Well i'm not complaining, time to shower the survivor with medals once he recovered from his month stint in the hospital (the award for this occasion was named "MEDAL OF THE UNDYING BARSTARD").

 

[BloatedGuppy]

What works, exactly? Precious, irreplaceable units dying randomly and forcing a restart? Maybe it works for you, but I've had my fill.

1. They're completely replaceable.
2. Games having a failure state doesn't make them broken.

It doesn't "work for me" so much as it works in general. It's a legitimate form of turn based strategy.