I've been keeping tabs on this game since it was announced, and everything I've seen about it so far seems promising. It's clearly xcom-inspired, they've confirmed permadeath roster management, and they seem to be hinting at the difficulty.

Why my optimism is cautious:

1. Star Wars games are some of the most hit-or-miss games out there. Sometimes they're amazing, other times they're incredibly mediocre.

2. We don't know much about replayability. XCOM is extremely replayable because the generated maps, missions, enemy placement, etc. can make each run feel unique. If Zero Company's missions are too story-driven and linear, I worry that I'll bounce off of it.

3. While they've hinted at the difficulty, I really hope they're not afraid to push the player (in whatever the challenge mode is). Many games phone-in higher difficulty modes by just tweaking health/damage sliders, unlike in XCOM, where they even brought in a dedicated director to make sure Legendary felt right.

Tldr

Warlock and the Lost meet up on Avenger defense mission, and my brain froze like my PC when a Gatekeeper enacted a mass resurrection of a large collection of fallen Lost and for my sanity required me to redirect every available resource to the Gatekeeper to not lose the campaign by virtue of locking myself out of the game if the enemy Gatekeeper survived.

Ended the mission with, if I recall correctly, 355 kills of which most of them where caused by the Gatekeeper who effectively doubled the body count

More detailed account:

::: spoiler spoiler On a Ironman Commander difficulty chill run, decided to take my time with the Chosen and deal with them as a pre-final mission victory lap.

So leave them to their devices and deal with the Avenger defenses as they come.

This ideal changed very quickly once I was accosted by the Warlock with "The Lost" Dark Event.

So I take it slow as every 2 turns I have to deal with the 4 exploding ghosts the Warlock likes to pop into battle. This forced me into a defensive position and had my Reaper scout and move towards the cannon while snipers pick off what I could in between down time.

Of course, I could not always get the ghosts so they explode and draw in Lost.

So I end up digging in around the Avenger with the rest of the team setting up a "Kill Zone" in a nice convenient pass.

By the time I gain control of the situation and start working towards finishing up the mission, I am sitting with the pass with a graveyard of probably about 100 Lost corpses lying about.

I move the rest of the team forward, taking enemy forces as I advance and on enemy turn, a Gatekeeper, spotted earlier but not finished as I had assigned it a "lesser threat" moved into range towards the Lost graveyard. Needless to say, I could not finish it with what little overwatch I had in place and it did its psionic wizardry.

Game hangs for quite a while and eventually comes to as it is now in control of an army of Lost. My turn has a new objective now that forces me to ignore everything else to kill that Gatekeeper as I cannot handle the thought of having 100+ enemies take their turn if I fail.

Fortunately I was able to kill it with every explosive and ability I had on hand and experienced an equally cathartic release of emotion as my PC was catching up to the sound of the hordes dying out in the ensuing psionic backlash.

Needless to say, I was able to complete the mission with 355 kills to the mission - which the game counts revived enemy zombies as a "kill" if they go down :::

I like to have one of each on my team, but if I absolutely have to pick between the two, Id go engineer, at least until the Recoiless rifle upgrade. I like engineers because I know exactly where the grenade will go, and, if sapper is picked, what terrain will most likely be damaged.

Rocketeers are fun however for those "fuck it" moments, when you need to deal a lot of damage to a large number of nearby enemies. The wide explosion radius also helps a lot with the native tile spread they have.

Which to you prefer?

Look, its ok in normal xcom when 5 thin men drop in on overwatch flanking everyone, but LONG WAR THIN MEN CAN GO STUFF IT! I know, i know, thats the reason i have scouts. But still, council missions are the only missions ive actively restarted. Why do they feel so incredibly difficult compared to the normal missions which are tough, and ive lost soldiers on, but never soul crushing like these?

Alright, Im playing Long War. Im no expert at long war, but i do have a pretty good idea when im falling behind. Its early June of first year, and I just got laser weapons. How far behind am I?

Also I recently lost 3 soldiers, an assault Specialist and 2 Corporals on a landed medium UFO, but eeked out a victory with my other soldiers. Big loss, but not irrecoverable, right?

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/21580314

Patient Recommendation: The Bureau - XCOM Declassified

I want to tell you about an often overlooked game that I really enjoyed my time with.

The setting is AMAZING, you are in 1960s America trying to contain an alien invasion with your team.

It got a lot of flak because it used the XCOM name while being a completely different type of game and it definitely had some flaws (the gameplay reminds one most of Mass Effect 1) - but if you see it on sale somewhere give it a chance, I think you won’t regret it. If anyone else has played it, do share your thoughts :)

cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/5553318

It's important to relax, Commander.

It was an Advanced Repeater, so the odds were 10%, but it's still dumb lol.

I reinstalled XCOM:EW recently and wanted to restart a campaign with some mods. Unsure what else I can try while waiting for a response from Github.

(as always, feel free to steal/repost any meme I post!)

I had some fun playing around with the cut/erase tool on some XCOM pics for this one. Still sloppy, but getting better.