1elvis

I'm using the "UFO Rebalanced"-mod which up until now has worked like a charm. Now though I'm having a really weird problem and I don't even think it's related to that specific mod. Here's what happened: On my latest Classic/Ironman-playthrough, I'm in mid game. On my last mission the game froze up during the Aliens' turn. Camera didn't return to its regular position, music and level/character animations were still running but the HUD disappeared and the game didn't react to any input all all. Only solution was to ALT-TAB out and end XCOM from the taskbar. Happened after my heavy fired a rocket, causing massive environmental damage - I had that kind of crash with the vanilla version before BTW. I reloaded the game after that and when the time came for the next mission, the guys who were still on my team from the last mission still had their second loadout-slots (which is something the mod enables for Carapace and better armor). But: Two team-slots had to be filled with new guys due to injuries and those guys now didn't get their second inventory slots. I also noticed that scopes now gave +10 aim again, with the mod enabled this should be +5. I launched the mission anyway and the weapons also seemed to have reverted to vanilla: Lasers now did critical damage again on regular shots and the aliens' HP were back to their vanilla state as well. Weirdly enough, those on my team who still had their modded stuff, could use it just as if the mod was active: My assault-gal had her arc-thrower equipped as a sidearm and could use it without a problem. On a, perhaps, unrelated note: The story also seemed a bit screwy after the crash. Even though I already had captured an outsider and the shard research was available, Dr. Vahlen kept bitching every time I killed one of those things - and the game kept throwing outsider-UFOs at me, even though they usually don't show up anymore once you've captured one. So basically my game now is a mix of modded and vanilla content. I quit the game and re-ran the modpatcher, hoping that this would fix it, but no joy. Anyone know if there's a way to salvage my savegame or do I have to start yet another playthrough? E.

I second that. Feels like another concession to console-versions. When you're rotating the camera with two buttons on a gamepad, that very limited system of four fixed angles probably makes more sense than a camera you can rotate freely 360°. E.

^ They do. IIRC it even says so in one of the upgrade's descriptions. Something like "those upgrades will be applied to our entire range of handguns..".. or something like that.

Nothing wrong here IMO. The alien is too far away for you sniper to see it him/herself, and his squaddie is just two(?) tiles in front of him, so he probably doesn't have visual either. If another soldier on your team had LOS on the alien here, I'm pretty sure your sniper would be able to target the litttle bugger. In this situation, I'd move the other soldier to the full cover spot left of the ruined building door. He should be rather safe there for at least one turn, *and* get visual on the alien, thus enabling your sniper to engage. E.

Awww.. you shouldn't knock the heavies. Sure: They're slow and their aim's not that great - but I use them quite frequently. When buffed with the right armor/chitin, they can soak up quite a bit of damage and keep enemies under control with surpression. Although I have to say that I would've expected the heavies to have the largest HP-pool through buffs/perks. The way I see it, that role actually falls to the Assault-guys ("conditioning-perk"). I like to use them as my central point of advance, meaning 1 or 2 heavies will occupy enemies from a central position while my assault-guys flank them and take them out from close range. Also: Once you get the alien rocketlauncher, not having a heavy (preferrably one with shredder-rockets and the 2xrocket perk) on your team, would be pretty stupid. Gotta agree on snipers. I usually have my primary sniper devoloped in a "classic" role. Read: None of the close-quarters perks but the ones to emphasize long-range killing. I have her hang far back on the maps on elevated ground and thanks to double-tap she can really clean house once her squadmates start spotting enemies. It's a bit more time-consuming that way, since she can't fire when I reposition her, but IMO it's worth it. If you can spare the slot on your team, you might want to train up a second sniper with all the close-range perks (gunslinger, err.. that perk that removes the movement-restriction, etc). The added mobility is usually more useful when you have to fight entirely inside those large UFOs. Very good point. I've made it a habit now to always have one satellite in reserve and always one in production (when I can afford it). That way you can react to rising terror-levels and often prevent countries from leaving XCOM. Just make sure to launch the satellite for a high-panic country shortly before the council report. But: Don't forget about uplinks/power. I did at one point and thought I could counter panic because I had a satellite on stand-by. But when the time came for launch, I realized that I had neither enough uplink nor the power to build another one. Argh! New tip from yours truly: Try and build the officer's school as soon as possible. Get the Squad Size upgrade (one more gun on the battlefield can really make a difference) and also try and get the +25%-XP per kill perk and the one enabling shorter hospital-time for injured soldiers. I'd also recomend to improve medkits as soon as possible *and* to train a support guy up far enough to get the triple-medkit perk. Medkits really are life-savers. Another top priority should be armor research beyond the fiber vests. What you really want in early/mid-game is Carapace. IMO this should take priority over any weapon research. And I'd highly recommend using one of the rebalancing mods available that offer a second loadout-slot once you have Carapace-armor *and* turns the ARC thrower into a sidearm (which is probably what the developers intended to do with it in the first place, since all the graphics are there). The mod I use balances all this out quite nicely with nerfed aiming for the more powerful guns and slightly nerfed scopes. But having two loadout slots gives you much more flexibility and actually makes the nano-fiber vests a viable option. E.

Bah.. I don't really need the ability to assign voices myself. Right now they all sound rather generic anyway, since they all use the exact same "library" of sentences. I'd rather have the computer assign voices for me, but those voices should have more variety to them to make the guys more distinguishable and "unique" on the battlefield. And by variety I mean both the country-specific accents as well as unique responses to certain commands. I've had turns when three or more guys used the exact same confirmation one after the other - how much more generic can you get? ;) I do realize that XCOM isn't as RPG-heavy as Jagged Alliance 2, but I have to quote that classic game again as a yardstick. The characters in JA2 (and in JA1 for that matter) were so distinguishable and unique that you really started to care about them (or, in some cases, to hate them) and you really didn't want to loose your favourite soldiers in battle. Not just because of their stats but also because of their "personality". I remember hiring Reuban (that crazy hedge-trimmer-killer) in Deadly Games just so that I could listen to his insults towards the opposing team. IMO, taking the JA-approach and having a limited pool of unique soldiers available for hire would've been the better alternative for XCOM - with the added bonus of increased difficulty. Depleat your supply of soldiers and the game is over. As it is now, they're all pretty much disposable since you have an unlimited supply of recruits and the customization-option means that none of them are unique in any way. And like I said above: It wouldn't have been *that* hard. All you really need for a (very basic) "accent"-approach would be eight unique soundbanks 2x English (British/US) US for USA and Canada, British for everyone else. Not perfect, I know Spanish for Spain, Mexico and S-America (sorry Brazil) Generic Slavic for everything east of what used to be the iron curtain German for.. err .. Germany (yup, I'm biased :D) French for France, Belgium and any applicable country in Africa Generic "African"-accent for any African countries not using French Generic Asian for Japan, China, Korea ... which is less soundbanks than the game offers on vanilla anyway. And whether a voice actor speaks his/her lines in US-English or in an accent wouldn't have made a difference in time or $$s That would leave out some countries of course (Greece, Israel, Saudi Arabia, etc) but it would be a start. E.

That one is on my list of minor gripes / my wishlist as well. Wouldn't have been too much to ask of the developers to have some of the voice actors use a german/british/french/african/etc. sounding accent. As it is now, I do mind the loss of the perks that a high ranking soldier had when he/she dies. But I don't really mind loosing that particular soldier. Meaning that the soldiers have too little personality as it is IMO - I would've wished for a bit more "role-playing"-type of feel in their management. Having more variety in their speech, including accents that match their nationalities, would've been a nice little step in this direction. E.

Couldn't agree more. There's a serious lack of information going on in the game - both on and off the battlefield. Maybe they should've skipped on one or two of those fancy HD-videos and invested more in actual "depth". As in, for example, more weapons. Where are upgrades/Tier two versions of standard projectile-weapons? I want my Heavy to run around, mowing down aliens with a friggin Minigun à la Blain/Jesse Ventura in Predator. The more I play it and think about it, XCOM seems pretty rushed. The fact that "Second Wave" is in there but not running by default is a clear indication that the developers were running out of time and had to finish the product with various features unfinished and/or underdeveloped. The lackluster final mission is another indication for this. After all this build-up, all those questions raised by my staff during the story ("what do they want?", "why do they attack us?", "why are there several species attacking us, not one?", etc.), I'm getting *this* as a final mission and plot resolve? I'm sorry, but running through a tube of a level with every species encountered thus far attacking me in order of their danger-level isn't my idea of a grand finale. If they hadn't insisted on making this game so story-driven and more about actual managment, fighting *and* finding stuff out yourself via research and an extensive UFOpedia, I think the game would've been a lot better - and last but certainly not least - a lot more replayable. After one playthrough I skip all the videos/story-sequences anyway. Maybe the solution to this would've been a second game-mode (besides "Story"), which would work without all the video-crap thrown in and would've relied more heavily on micromanagement, research and development.

While I don't mind the class-system per se, I think its implementation in the game is a bit odd and involves too much randomness. On both my first and second playthroughs I was desperate for support-guys (those triple-use medikits are probably the most important item/perk in the game, lol) while at the same time I was drowning in snipers. And since the game seems to randomly decide on class assignments on the first promotions, there was no way for me to counteract this trend. Like, say, promote a rookie to "Support" yourself early on and then try and train him up to useful levels by sending him on missions. The way it is now, I feel that you just have to be lucky to either get a support-guy as a reward or to get the right (random?) first promotion. I'd also love to have the option to train guys off the battlefield. This could be done in the Officers School and by using an experienced guy as a trainer - and progress should be slower than by doing actual missions and should probably be limited to a certain rank. Read: You can't aquire a rank higher than, say, Lieutenant through training. Kinda like what you could do in "Jagged Alliance 2". E.

EDIT: Argh! Typo in the subjectline and can't find a way to fix it via editor. Should read "mechanics" of course.. my bad ..:( While answering the thread about HUD-mods, I realized that my answer was getting out of hand and probably should have its own thread - so here goes. Note: The original request I'm refering to in the first paragraph was asking for removal of the confirmation dialogue for a soldier's action (such as "Reload" or "Overwatch"). Due to the less than perfect UI, I actually think removing the confirmations for a soldier's action would be a bad idea. For some reason, Firaxis decided to not assign a fixed "slot" to the individial icons (example: "Overwatch" is *not* always on position/hotkey "4" for each and every soldier). So by removing the confirmation-dialogue, you'd run the risk of misclicking when setting up your guys for the aliens' turn - and since you can't undo those actions once selected (another annoyance IMO), that would be a bad idea. Solution: Redesign HUD and assign fixed hotkeys/positions to buttons. Examples: Overwatch is always triggered by hotkey "4", Reload is always triggered by hotkey "5". Also: Where applicable, introduce "undo"-function that will allow unselecting actions as long as "end-turn" button hasn't been used (Overwatch being the prime example here). I'd even go a step further and suggest the following to bring XCOM more in line with what we know and love about other turn-based games: 1. Remove Overwatch-function entirely 2. Replace Overwatch with classic interrupt-system. If a soldier has enough actionpoints left at the end of the turn, he'll automatically interrupt the Aliens if conditions for an interrupt are met. Other games use thing like stats like character level, dexterity, intelligence, etc. to decide if an interrupt is sucessful, in X-COM it could be determined by soldier's rank and/or will vs. those stats of the enemy in question. 3. Enable player control during interrupt actions. As it is now, three guys on overwatch will often needlessly fire at the same low level critter. They'll do this even if said critter has been killed already by a squad-mate's overwatch-action or if other aliens are in view. Would be much better if the player could decide who fires on what and when during interrupts/overwatch. Especially if there are multiple targets in sight - that way you could assign one shooter for every target and/or prioritize targets (take out powerful aliens first while ignoring minor ones - prime example would be an encounter with a Cyberdisk and its little probe-guardians). You could also decide not to use the first interrupt if hit-chance is too low for your taste and simply see if you'll get another interrupt with better conditions (very likely if it's a moving target approaching you or moving out in the open). 4. This is probably getting into "mod-fantasy-land"-territory here, but: Replace "two actions per turn"-system with proper actionpoint-system. This would grant a lot more flexiblity during combat and remove a lot of silly restrictions such as the "no movement after shooting"-one. It would also allow players to move soldiers one step at a time, making map exploration/scouting a lot more effective and enabling them to retreat to cover should they make contact with the enemy. NOTE: I have never modded a game myself, and I have no idea if these ideas are even doable with X-COM - so please be gentle with your flames.. ;) Cheers E.

My first post here, so: Hiya all! On to my point: I'm currently on my second playthrough with the original game and I'm thinking about getting Dawnguard. Now, my understanding is that apart from the new perk-trees and equipment it "just" adds a new major questline to the existing game and doesn't need a fresh start to be played. But: Does it make sense to use it with a mid/high-level character? My current character is at level 51, so would it make sense to install Dawnguard for this character or should I rather finish this guy and then use a brand new character for Dawnguard? I'm pretty much done with all the major sidequests - I'm missing a few Daedric quests and just completed Alduin's Wall in the main questline. E.