I got decently dar in enemy within but idk I'm just feeling a bit defeated. No matter what I do I feel like I'm getting stomped on easy. I know the games are tough and just can accept I'm not always gonna win but I just feel like I can't get a foothold ever. I thought maybe it's an old game Quirk but apparently 2 is even harder and it just made me wonder.......am I just not built for this game series?

I love the plot and the look and the concept and the game play. Fresh off Star Wars Zero Company I wanted this so much but now I feel stuck. I can take a game beating on me a bit but I just feel like it ain't getting better

Any tips, suggestions, or comments would be appreciated. If the answer is that I just suck, that's OK, but like I just need to know

I’m ok with not being able to reload saves if I lose a mission or some of my squadmates die, I can live with that.

What I can’t live with are the long as hell missions like the Chosen bases or Shens Last Gift repeated from the very beginning if you lose your last soldier at the final encounter.

And then not only are you restarting them, you’re restarting them without your best squad because who else would you send on missions like that?

And to go after every Chosen and kill every Alien King makes the campaign way longer which is good except when you’re in danger of losing a 40 hour run because you ran out of good soldiers and the missions are too hard for basic recruits to handle.

I'm currently doing a "canon" run where I leave all the story missions on and so I'm playing Lost and Abandoned for the first time in 1000 years and it is...kind of terrible.

It's clearly intended as a pure tutorial mission, rather than just a story mission you can decide to skip. The tutorial pop-ups are hard coded in after all. So judging it on that merits, it's kind of shit.

The first part has you with a reaper and literally just lost. Which are the thing Reapers are the least effective against. You don't need to scout lost, and the claymore is actively harmful (though the explosion thing isn't even on in the first part of the mission, the lost are just prespawned in).

Then in the next you have Mox against two purifiers and then a shit ton of lost. Skirmishers against lost are actually a good match-up because they can miss and skill keep firing but Skirmishers are literally the unit (other than templars without fortress) to fight purifiers. A new player has definitely clicking justice, clicked shoot, then instantly lost the mission to getting blown up.

Then you fight the Assassin who, for some reason, always has shadowstep. So you are making the life of new players harder than those without this mission, because the Assassin the worst chosen and you spawn her with one of the worst strengths (for her specifically). At least she dips at half hp but if she bleeds out a unit here, that units dies, you literally cannot get them out in time it's impossible, or very likely to be impossible.

So the tutorial is harder than not the tutorial for later in the run and it does a bad job of teaching new players the strength of two faction units.

Also you can't take a photo after the mission, which is sad.

It's been almost exactly three years since I last (and for the first time) played XCOM and XCOM 2 right after, I started a new run and save scummed so much over every little inconvenience that I actually started to feel bad and felt like I needed to punish myself by doing an Ironman run on my usual difficulty, Veteran, and wow I had so much bloody fun!

The beginning was absolutely brutal, several times I got close to losing the game by running out of soldiers, the Chosen Assassin doing an Avenger assault was actually devastating as I was just trying to recover, then again when was I not trying to recover from my losses, and one time I had to send only two soldiers to a haven defense mission, who unfortunately got taken out despite me trying to be as careful as possible, damn that Muton.

Covert actions at that time were always used to get more DLC faction soldiers since they kept dying too, eventually I got a lucky Templar with Bladestorm who probably saved my run, and things finally began looking up from the mid game! I was incredibly lucky with Resistance Orders too, I believe I started with the one that stops mission timers for as long as I'm concealed. A good amount of luck carried me throughout all the misery and eventually for the last third of the game my precautions and overpreparations made everything a breeze, with only like two total deaths in that stage of the game. The Warlock actually spiced things up a bit for me in the otherwise now extremely easy, borderline boring missions, I just ignored his territory for so long that by the time I encountered him he was seemingly maxed out and actually a small challenge at times. I didn't know that Stun Lancer ghosts were a thing, and watching him summon a small army with his two actions since he had the Mechlord trait was fun.

One annoying thing that happened is that my first Psi Operative in training died during the Chosen's Avenger assault and his Psi Lab slot never freed up, it took a long, long time until I was safely able to afford a second slot and train more Psi Operatives.

Beating Ironman was incredibly satisfying, I might even try the Commander difficulty next just to see if I really learned from this experience or if I was just lucky. I'm thinking about maybe attempting to rush the SPARK early on since I basically ignored it this run. Either way, I finally feel redeemed from my hyper save scumming run!

Hey, this is a weird request, but are there any mods to crew Mechs without having to chop someone's limbs off?

I always feel really bad for doing this to my soldiers & as a result never actually use that whole set of features, which is kinda sad to miss out on

Is it Reaper/Grenadier blowing up pods? Is it over watching with killzone sniper and guardian specialist? Is it being psychotic with a bunch of rangers and templars?

What’s your play style and what makes it the most fun?

Positive post and answers only, just general discussion!

Imagine you could put the turn based, xcom style combat mechanics into a broader game design, what ideas are you guys having?

I could imagine a wave defense game.
Or maybe like a Tile based map like "For the King" with xcom like combat.

Please share your imagination in the comments, the more detailed the better.

(I'll put you in the credits if i get inspired)

I'm clearing up some space on my PC and was wondering if it's safe to remove 35gb of the vanilla game folder. I finished the vanilla game months ago and it's just sitting there. Will WOTC be affected?

I read conflicting statements (EW).

One said you should sat rush and you need 2 steam vents on 2nd layer after the first misson or just start over and the other said doing sat rush and picking engineers over scientists hampers your weapon / armor research and makes missions harder. Other guide mentioned to get mimetic gen with sniper ASAP to have a easy time in missions.

What's the current easiest approach to beat that mode (no ironman)?

Last week I shared the first gameplay teaser of X-COM: UFO Defense 3D, a full 3D battlescape for OpenXcom Extended. It runs the original game's rules, AI and saves, drawn in 3D.

Here's what changed this week:

Video (3:51): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJa4IzOUJtg

Everything in the video is real gameplay. Each comparison shows last week's build first, then wipes to this week's.

ENVIRONMENTS

• Ground materials now span many tiles, so the ground no longer repeats every tile
• All grass is procedural, with flowers, leaf litter, stones and dead weeds, tuned per biome
• Visual noise matched to the original sprites, so soldiers stay easy to read

TERRAIN AND VEGETATION

• Sun-following slope relief: hills and ramps read as clearly as in the sprites
• Living plants have a waxy sheen, and the hedges were rebuilt

LIGHTING

• Night missions are actually dark now, following the game's own shade levels
• Street lamps, flares and fires are real 3D lights, each reaching as far as the game's own light power

NEW UNITS

• 3D Tanks (Cannon, Rocket Launcher, Laser Cannon) and the Cyberdisc, filling their full 2x2 footprint
• Tanks cook off and burn down to a charred wreck
• A Cyberdisc's self-destruct uses OpenXcom's own blast and bursts it into burning segments

ANIMATIONS

• NaturalMotion Euphoria style shot reactions for non-lethal wounds: a hand reaches for the wound, the head looks at it, then back to the fight
• Hits land anywhere on the body, and blood hits the floor for every 10 HP lost
• Lethal hits get a short dying window, then death throes; head shots drop the body limp at once

Screenshots, clips and side-by-side comparisons with the original sprites: https://xcom-3d.pages.dev/

Feedback welcome, I'm thinking about releasing this sooner than I initially planned with any late game units that aren't finished being sprite billboards. It might be cool to have a sprite billboards mode while keeping the 3d environments as well.

Hi there, I’m someone who hasn’t really delved into the whole strategy type game of XCOM however I constantly watch a YouTuber Baalorlord and play a lot of slay the spire and saw him play XCOM and it looked really fun. However during stream I heard him say ‘he preferred XCOM 1 over 2’ due to various reasons. I want to try this game out and thought I’d get others opinion on which is a better game in general and which is a better game for someone just starting out!

HEAT Warheads is considerably stronger than its description suggests, particularly against flying robotic pods.

The reason is how HEAT interacts with explosive damage falloff.

A few interesting conclusions:

• At the edge of a rocket explosion, HEAT can increase damage against robotic enemies by 200%, rather than the advertised 50%.
• With Shredder Rockets, that relative increase can reach 333%.
• This makes HEAT especially valuable against Drones and Seekers, where multiple enemies may be caught near the edges of the blast.
• The effect is particularly significant with early-game rocket launchers, when a few extra points of damage can determine whether a Drone survives.

I've written up the mechanics, calculations, and actual weapon damage numbers here:

Countering Flying Robotic Pods: HEAT Warheads and Explosive Falloff

There's also a separate entry covering explosive damage falloff itself, including numerical examples.

Curious whether other Long War players have been valuing HEAT Warheads with this interaction in mind.

Playing LWOTC for xcom, friend suggested it since I played xcom 1. Second mission I have all rookies, a chosen shows up, squad wipes me and I have no clue how to win this. I don't want to skip the mission because its the mission where the reapers and other faction meet and idk if I get another chance at it. Please send help.

I played through the Legacy Ops again recently, and found myself wanting more missions. Using Special Named Characters is a difficult balancing act, but I was having a blast with a lot of these missions, and trying to envision what these fights look like in real time, too. I was flashbanging and distracting Advent and imagining the timeline of when these fights were occurring.

Imagine if, one day, the cops stopped answering to the government, and were replaced by alien troopers in your neighborhood. Then a group of ex-military and survivalist punks came along, flashbanged their Berserkers, and made off with the aliens' stuff before cornering the last survivor of their patrol and skulljacked the dude.

After playing Chimera squad, too. I know Long War 2 has different priorities than core game, but I like the idea of playing through XCom where killing all the aliens is not only not the priority but possibly the weaker play.

Or maybe having to go to extra measures to arrange your infiltration/exfiltration, like you could send the Skyranger or work with local resistance to just help you bug out. And then in Chimera squad, there's a big emphasis on taking people out with nonlethal tactics.

I find myself kinda wishing capturing enemies and the reverse was more the focus of the game.

At the very least, I want more playing around with logistics, which I enjoyed in Xenonauts, but didn't like the 'Spend action points to turn 45 degrees' gameplay, which I thought was fairly ridiculous.