XCOM Enemy Within: First Impressions

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

So is there a doctor in the house? I have 1 support out of 80+ agents. Lots of heavies if anyone wants to trade.

I am gonna find and kill every exalt member til I find the D-Bag who set my plasma sniper back by 3 days. Speaking of which can anyone tell me what the green X by the countries when doing an intel scan is?

I've kind of faced the opposite problem in my EW playthrough on Classic. Usually I am struggling to keep two of every class at the highest possible level, but in EW there are so many missions in the mid-game (the usual abduction/terror, UFO's, loads of council missions due to Slingshot and that other mission line with Anette Durand and EXALT on top of that) that I'm swimming in soldiers ranked Captain or higher. For the early game I had a single assault, but by now she could easily be replaced by at least 2 other soldiers.

 

[Dodgeboyuk]

here is my Recipe for the best covert agent

sniper (with gunslinger)
plasma pistol
improved pistol upgrades from foundry
gene mods inc second heart and the health Regen one
and medals!

this allows for dealing damage and avoiding/surviving damage (because the operative has no Armour)

also big bonus if that operative has psionic powers later game

 

[Jandau]

Yeah that seems to be the biggest problem so far, with or without Enemy Within. The problem is that the campaign isn't time-restricted like, say, FTL, which means you can just take your time, research everything, do easy missions over and over and after a while you're assaulting the first alien base with a completely decked out squad with Plasma weaponry, Titan armor and max level on all 6 of your troops. And since you didn't assault the alien base until then that means you never saw a hint of Ethereals or Sectoid Commanders. And the rest of the campaign just becomes tedious busywork as there's no researches of note left and no cool things to do beside getting one of your squad to max level psionic.

What the game needs is for aliens to be an actual threat that can bite you if you take too long before you act.

It was a problem with the original too. In all honesty it's also a problem with Civ, although it's a problem stemming back to long before Firaxis became shepherds for the series so it's hard to lay all the blame at their feet. It's a gripping challenge right up to a point, and then everything snowballs hilariously into a cakewalk victory.

Enemy Within is a fine expansion that really beefs up the early-mid game. But it also helped underscore the weak end game that has been there since the beginning.

To be fair, the original didn't have that problem, at least not nearly as much. It did have a weak midgame, when you're well settled with Lasers, Plasma and basic Armor, merrily slaughtering Snakemen and Floaters. But once lategame rolls around, you slowly start to get drowned in waves of Ethereals (and the Ethereals from the original were a legitimate threat, not the lolfest from EU/EW) while countries start to drop out of the XCOM program, one by one with pretty much nothing you can do about it. Yes, perfect play and cheese strats can overcome even that, but the point is that it's still damn hard. There's no time limit on the game, but it slowly starts grinding you down more and more if you take too long. You can still do all the research and get a well built squad, there's plenty of time for that. You just can't get to the same level of pointlessness as you can in EU/EW (all countries under sats, zero damage taken in every mission, etc.).

 

[squid5580]

here is my Recipe for the best covert agent

sniper (with gunslinger)
plasma pistol
improved pistol upgrades from foundry
gene mods inc second heart and the health Regen one
and medals!

this allows for dealing damage and avoiding/surviving damage (because the operative has no Armour)

also big bonus if that operative has psionic powers later game

Give him mimetic skin you will never lose lol. In one of those king of the hill missions I camped him in the protection node and had tons of exalt all standing around but couldn't hack it. My team was just to far away to make it there and clear out 6 of them in 3 turns.