Okay, bullet point list, and fuck being civil now.

A) Mind control didn't suck in the original. It wasn't supplemental. You were as good as they were with it, and arguably better. Psionic powers are crap compared to how they used to be, while people talk about them like they're better. And YES I KNOW HOW TO FUCKING USE THEM YOU TWAT.
B) Yes, I'm fucking blowing up Sectopods. They're still the most threatening enemy of the game regardless of the fact that I kill them like nothing.
C) 40 is the starting will. Look at the math again, retard.
D) Yes, I use Psi Armor. Why didn't I fold it into the math? Why should I? I was already generous-- VERY generous-- with the will gains. In fact, /I GAVE THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE WILL GAIN IN THE MATH/.
E) I do know how to find good Psi soldiers. IT ISN'T FUCKING WORTH IT IS THE ARGUMENT I AM MAKING. Why should I sort through a shit ton of rookies so that I can counter their mindpowers or debuff when I can just KILL THEM? Like I said in my PREVIOUS GODDAMN POST, I do use two of the abilities. Two of the abilities are useful. Two. That's it. Everything else, /you really are better off just throwing out damage./

Also, this line.

"That is not your gig. If it was, then the game would have taken away your psychic soldier's ability to use their standard loadout. But they didn't. That's your indication that your main combat weapon remains the same. Psychic abilities supplement. That is all. "

Uh, no. They don't take away your ability to use frag grenades even though it's a fuck awful idea.

Plus it directly contradicts this later in your own post:

"Granted, the game doesn't tell you this, but then, this is X-COM. You're expected to figure it out for yourself."

 

Okay. Have fun with that. I'll just be over here with my 210 Will soldier.

 

20+ psychic recruits? You serious?

I get one. Maybe two. And then i blow everything the fuck up with my standard loadout, because focusing on psi-powers just is not worth it.

Giving up Flight/Stealth/Max HP for greater psi-power--not worth it.
Giving up better aim/more HP/grenades/etc for greater psi-power--worth it ONLY if you don't breach-and-clear ethereals in one turn, which i've never had a problem doing.


I have never, ever had a situation where I could accomplish something with Psi powers that couldn't be done just as, if not more, efficiently with standard weaponry.

 

This.

Psionics just feel like a cumbersome and unnecessary addition to an already full skillset. Every time I field a Psi capable soldier without the express purpose of leveling that soldier, I tend to forget to even use their powers.

I can't count the amount of times I've said "Oh Christ I hope you still have a rocket." when in deep shit, or "Flushing shot don't fail me now." when setting up a reaction. But at no point in this game have I said, "Damn, if only I had Psi-Powers right now."

I guarantee that most people, when in doubt, will fall back on the soldier's class skills rather than Psionic ones.

Personally I feel that building a Psionic Lab should unlock a new character class, one based solely on Psi-Combat and carrying only a pistol (+ support items). This at least would separate and distinguish the class at the most basic of levels, instead of just tacking a few moderately OK powers onto an already capable soldier.

Stupid argument over mediocre powers.

 

Psionics are just another tool added to the army knife. The trick is finding the right time and situation they are needed for. I generally don't offensively use them, I use them if I need to cancel out the aliens abilities or I'm about to be ass raped and I'm out of ammo.

I figure the problem is that they figure into the equation far too late in the game for the player to ever begin to rely on them. The first psi soldier I ever got was when I had a squad of colonels and majors, at that point I already had a tone of abilities that I was far more comfortable using and knew the pros and cons of. On top of that, Mind Fray is a rather situational ability that only really shines as an upgraded form of suppression. It's not a very good indication of what the rest of the psi powers will be, nor does it give you any real inclination to find out what the rest of the powers could be.

Back on to snapshot snipers. Its the difference in the roles really, Squadsight snipers are built to utilize double tap more effectively while Snapshot is meant to more effectively synergize with In the zone and Executioner. The idea of the mobile sniper in this case is a game of long prep that results in a soldier that can wipe out a tone of aliens in a single round if positioned correctly. The problem is getting him to that point both level wise and location wise. Personally I will always prefer the safety of the squadsight sniper but I have to acknowledge that the snapshot sniper has its uses not as a frontline spear but as a knife in the back.

 

Come to think of it, a two sniper build would probably help a LOT in terror missions, especially early ones. Use your snapshot as a lineman and drop rockets on anything that moves, then tap on the flanking bonus. Probably be best off with two heavies, an assault, a support, and two snipers for early terror missions if you go this route. And you'd have to give the assault and maybe one of the heavies grenades to clear LOS.

...I wish you got a rating for your property damage bill. Just for bragging rights.

EDIT: Also, since y'all were crying about 'em a few pages back, Mind Fray fucks up floaters like nothing else in the game. Just castrates 'em. It's pretty nice. And I managed to get fucked over by 'em once, so no more being smug.

 

I'm really tempted to give that a shot. See what I can make in a month and a half before the first terror mission.

Does mind fray just fuck with their stats or does it really impact them all that much?

 

Well, it cuts down on their mobility, which to me is more threatening than their drop-in ability. And it fucks up their Aim, which is already one of their weaker areas.

Basically it's a nice defensive option for a single target with low priority that you also don't want to get away and force you to chase far enough to trigger another group.

 

Hmmm, then Mind Fray would certainly make capturing heavy floaters later in the game a lot easier. Restrict their mobility, aim, and will and suddenly you have a target that is far more susceptible to a soldier running up with an arc thrower. Locking them down in a favorable spot has always been the hardest part with capturing the bastards.

 

Okay, I'm assuming this is an Impossible difficulty only thing but I have heard rumors that multiple Outsiders can spawn when assaulting UFOs before the Alien base.

Confirm or Deny?

 

Had two of 'em spawn once on Classic.

 

If you take long enough before assaulting the alien base, the ships will get bigger and have multiple outsiders in the final rooms, yes.

This can happen on all difficulties, as far as I'm aware.

 

Good to know, never had it happen to me but I had heard rumors. Working on the Alien videos now and trying to confirm as many of them as I can before I start working on scripts. There's no point doing these videos based on only what I have seen, they need to be done on what is possible.

 

So, finally got my hands on the game, and it bugs out just after my first UFO crash with the tutorial so I said fuck it and dove into normal Ironman mode.

I think I have the worst luck in the world against Thin Men, I've lost 2 of my vets from my first squad to them firing through heavy cover already and somehow got lucky when I first met floaters with them flying straight into my sniper and support's overwatch.

Built 2 satellite uplinks and I'm rushing Carapace armour as I need it, I'm going through Rookies like you wouldn't believe thanks to Thin Men and their ignorance of heavy cover around my guys. Not doing too badly as my highest guy's a Sniper and he's doing pretty well, desperately need to train some rookie's up though. 20 Days away from Carapace armour, think my next goal is to capture and interrogate something. After that, well, no idea.

 

It's going to hurt, but the next thing you need to do is research Plasma Pistol technology. Then start tazing Sectoids as fast as you can, and give their guns to everybody.

Trust me. Skipping lasers is worth it if you can pull it off.

In terms of dying, you need the Carapace armor, which you're already working on. Defense will save your elites, and you need to keep them alive badly. If you can get a Support soldier, keep him alive and evolve him into a medic with your perk choices. And once you get a Heavy and a Sniper, keep them alive and stick them together. You can rack up kills by setting up shots against the dangerous enemies for the Sniper and having the Heavy provide support and covering fire, which gives the squaddies something to fight against that they can actually kill. This equals experience, which equals promotions, which equals non-shitty soldiers.

Defense is more important than offense at this stage. You're already working on Carapace, so that's good. Get the mesh undersuits for everyone as well, and when it eventually becomes available, research the Chitin Plating immediately. Offense is necessary, which is why I'm recommending the Plasma Pistol research as your next thing, but if you don't have strong defense, nobody is ever going to make it past the Redshirt stage, and you're going to be even further up shit creek when the aliens stop playing around and start fielding their more advanced and dangerous units. I don't care how skilled you are, a bunch of Squaddies with basic weapons are going to get raped by a Muton pack on pretty much any difficulty level. Even playing Easy might not save you.

You need offense, which is why you go Plasma Pistol, but you need defense more, which is why you buy enough Carapace armor that the entire outbound squad can wear it (4-6 suits), even if Germany or China has to have a really bad day for that to happen.

 

Well that's a days work down the drain. Encounter my first Muton Berserker & I lose my entire squad. Everything down the drain because of the sheer luck factor combined with a god-awful spawn point for the mission.

Due to shitty luck with my recruits my main squad was 2 snipers, 2 heavies & 2 supports, not too bad of a mix. I had them all decked out in Carapace with their respective Laser weapons (bar my Snipers; Research completed but I was poor as fuck). Standard abduction mission in India for $200, I needed it for at least 1 laser sniper.

Long story short I get absolutely butt-fucked. Encounter 2 Mutons off the bat with my sensor grenade or whatever it is, fine, take them out, advance in and have everyone on Overwatch. Cue shit going wrong.

First mistake; Advancing one of my Heavies without putting anyone on Overwatch. Encounter a Cyberdisk. ROcket takes out the 2 repair things with it but barely scratches the Disk. Nobody else has a shot/is in range. Cyberdisk hurls grenade, takes out half the heavy cover I had to begin with.

4 Mutons and a Muton Berserker burst through a door to my right. My now completely open flank. They take cover and the Berserker is standing right next to my Colonel Sniper. I can't do a damned thing; forced to pull both snipers back or have them get wrecked by Mutons. Supports dispatch a Muton between them, heavies both fucking miss, all 4 shots with 60 - 75% accuracy. I felt my heart drop from there.

Mutons mow down my supports with a crit straight off the bat and a car I hadn't noticed exploding, 1 dead, 1 critically injured but nobody else has a med/revive kit so, fuck that. Berserker calmly walks up and smacks heavy number 1 about whilst heavy number 2 panics, screws up her fear shot at the Cyberdisk and eats a grenade for her trouble with 2 Mutons yet to move.

They make quick work of her and push towards my Snipers. I know I'm fucked at this point and start rushing back to the spawn only for another Muton to appear and suppress my Colonel who I've had since day 1. Try to Headshot it & free him, Russian misses (I swear the Commies have the worst accuracy in this game luck-wise...) and I daren't move him because of the reaction shot. Berserker catches up and crits him, finished off by a Muton from behind. Cyberdisk blows up another car leaving my final guy in the open, alone, and truly fucked. I won't make the spawn next move, nor will he survive.

With a heavy sigh I exited to the menu & deleted the save. Considering how shitty a start I had I thought I'd done well to get back into it, eurgh. Next game, need to focus on satellites earlier I think and capture a specimen far faster, took me nearly a month due to bad luck with missing/having my Arc Thrower carrier killed.

My thanks to Egypt for their 5 brave recruits who all by some miracle, became snipers, 2 of whom carried me through some of the thickest shit and darkest situations I found myself in. I'll miss you guys.

 

I can't help to say it, but... "Why you no have Assault!?"

Those double-fire point-blank Shotgun rounds are delicious. Delicious!

 

Okay, first things first. Why do you not have any assault troops in there? 2 snipers is fine as is the 2 supports at higher difficulty levels but you really don’t have any reason to avoid having at least 1 assault trooper. Their main use is as a scout and they are just about the toughest thing in the world to kill in one turn. Carapace armor is just about always a good investment but you don’t need 6 suits of it since your snipers should never see frontline combat. Save yourself some money where you can for obvious reasons. Second of all, like raine said, Lasers are nice and flashy but not much more than that, specialty laser weapons are nice when you need a quick boost in damage but you can get the same boost for free by capturing enemy light plasma rifles.

Next paragraph. Advancing without overwatch on is fine, just means you aren’t dashing (something you really shouldn’t be doing anyway). Cyberdisks are irritating to deal with until you have heat ammo on your heavy. The trick with them is that they take half damage when they are in their closed up mode so you need to get them to attack so you can quickly take them out. Never have your troops clumped together otherwise they will go for the grenade automatically. They will also go for the grenade if they believe they don’t have a shot. Kind of like the Thin Men with their poison spit.

Were the mutons already discovered or were they just patrolling? Doesn’t really matter now, just tells me what advice I need to give.

As for your next game, your main issue isn’t so much build orders or capture time but really patience. Yes XCOM can fuck you over royally but it still has rules it abides by. The computer cannot see you if you are not in its line of sight, it doesn’t cheat. Being careful and patient is the key to killing everything.

Bit of advice for the early months though, all of the ground based aliens have a tendency to do something rather stupid that makes them easy to kill. If you send out a trooper and he gets spotted. Have him run out of their line of sight back towards your troops. The aliens then usually head towards your last known position, making them rather fun targets to put holes into. I had fun during one early abduction mission in the square graveyard with the mausoleum in the center. Didn’t even get beyond the first area before we had 5 sectoids, 3 thin men, and 4 floaters on us. Both of the rookies I was trying to train died automatically, lost a support as well but the assault trooper I had kept giving me line of sight. Every alien turn they ran out of the fog of war into my two snipers on overwatch. It was quite entertaining though it got a little dangerous when my snipers needed to reload.

As for captures, focus on Sectoids and Floaters first. Thin Men are incredibly irritating to pin down and their only real use is for their research credit and the LPRs they have. Killing them is just more worthwhile until you get carapace armor.

Also, save grenades and rockets until you need several things to die or cover to be destroyed, using them early on a single enemy isn’t worth it unless it will save one of your men a horrible gruesome death.

 

It is possible to skip lasers entirely, but unless you have immaculate timing and gobs of luck you'll end up facing multiple missions where you've got nothing but starting weapons against Mutons, plus you need to go on a tazing rampage to get enough plasma rifles to equip your squad - and even then you've got to do further research and manufacture for your shotgun-assaults, snipers and heavies. And plasma weaponry is painfully pricey.

Plus dedicating your first couple of months to nothing but squad weaponry means you'll probably end up with an abductor or transport UFO buzzing council territory and you've got nothing but avalanche missiles to throw at them.

But hey, if you pull it off you get a month or so where you're curbstomping sectoids with plasma.

tl;dr: if you're experienced enough to pull off jumping straight to plasma you don't need the advantage it'll give you.

 

Like I said, I lacked any Assaults because out of the 20 soldiers I had at the time; I got 1. 1 Assault. And she was out gravely wounded for 12 days, so I was stuck using 2 heavies in place of an assault. All my previous ones got murderised by flanks and bad luck in heavy cover/muton grenades, or simply screwing up and it being too late to react.

I rushed Plasma and just couldn't pin anything down to capture plasma's either, sectoids were replaced by Mutons roughly around the time I finished researching Plasma technology so it threw me off, on top of deciding how risky it was having an Arc Thrower unless I knew I could pin something down.

Generally I think patience is gonna be the key, I lost too many heavies & rookies around Cpl rank so I was basically using rookies when I needed suppression and so on. 2 Snipers was nice and I feel like I needed Carapace on them in some missions (Muton range seems rather insane), especially when there's basically no heavy cover and they haven't reached captain yet. That said, I still can't decide whether rushing to gather as many engineers or scientists is beneficial. I initially went engineers than switched to scientists when I saw Plasma was something like 70 days (pre-interrogation).

Edit; If I don't get screwed by luck I get screwed by UFO's. Sigh. I forgot to move Interceptor's to continents where I have satellites so I lost 2 straight off the bat for nothing, 3 countries withdraw and I'm already poor as is. Wonderful. Why did I not just station my ass in Africa instead of in South America...

For the love of Pete. Lose my highest ranked guy (Maj. Sniper) to more spawn BS. Put him in heavy cover and throw out battle scanner, have my guys in Overwatch to take out the 3 Thin Men it found, move in. They activate, move to cover, now their turn. 2 Crits through heavy cover kill my Major. That's why I equip my Sniper's in Carapace armour, not that it would have saved him because they got lucky with 2 freaking crits, but still. 2 Gamebreaking bugs and now this... Why can't they keep patching.

Is there any way to actually change who goes on a mission? I can't seem to find anything and if there's a low risk abduction I'd rather send a squad of mostly rookies than my vets so situations like this don't completely fuck me over for the rest of the game. Seriously, I've had 8 snipers this game. And yet again, only 1 assault, and now I've got 3 snipers on my active squad. It's kinda silly.

Edit 2; In general there just doesn't seem to be enough money or time to actually get anything done. If I rush satellites to get coverage and income, I fall way behind on tech and get wrecked. If I rush tech, I miss UFO's and everyone panics so I lose regardless. That mixed with grievous wounds are destroying games. I had my only Assault out for 21 days, she wasn't back up before I lost the game, I can't afford the tech at the officer school to do anything outside increase squad size to 5, sometimes 6.

Maybe I just need to start selling everything on the grey market =\. I can be sitting on a boatload of corpses but be un-able to do something because my research is so stupidly slow, even with 2 laboratories. It just seems like whichever way I go, I either run out of money at a crucial period, or simply don't have the time to do anything (eg rushing Carapace; 20 days. Great, now I have carapace! ... But I'm poor and can't build any and my tech's miles behind).

Finally, someone said something about pistols; Maybe it's just me, but again, I can't find an option to switch to my guys pistols, they just reload, no pistol option at all. They all have one equipped, but I can never see an option for it?