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[Krevsin]

Is Mooking (using loads of expendable troopers) still as effective as it was in beta?

[alway]

Scott Manley's been doing some of this game lately, if you wanted to give it a look before buying. https://www.youtube.com/user/szyzyg/videos


As for me, been playing on normal difficulty. Just completed my first Terror mission; lost just 1 person. On the last round of combat no less but it put 5 of the others in the hospital for a good long time. I do like the AI behaviors in this. Each enemy type has a very unique way in which they approach combat, as noted in the xenopedia. As such, you need to approach each type very differently if you want to not be turned into giblets. It's quite impressive that they actually gave them such different behaviors rather than simply doing a "acts the same as X, but with damage weakness Y instead of Z" as we see so often.

[EnigmaticHat]

Is Mooking (using loads of expendable troopers) still as effective as it was in beta?

Ummm...  I mean you can afford to lose men.  I don't see any reason why you would encourage that on purpose.

Currently their price is $10,000 for both hiring and salary.  That's fairly small compared to your other expenses, however money is tight (at least on the higher difficulties) and if you fight using Privates they tend to be painfully bad in at least 2 stats, so expect them to be slow, weak and/or bad at shooting.

Honestly my experience with beta was that it was easy as fuck, although I did not play it all the way up to release so YMMV.  My conclusion is I don't even know why you would try that.  Playing carefully and keeping your men alive will give you a straight better outcome than swarming.

[Jacob/Lee]

Mooking is pretty difficult, anyway. As far as I know, the default transport has a curiously low cap of eight soldiers, despite having the floor space for at least double. You'll be hard-pressed to Mook with that meat budget, considering some of the larger UFO types may have equal or more than what you have in that case.

[GlyphGryph]

The cap is because each tank takes up 2 soldier slots... but 4 squares of floor space. So the floor space is based on the amount of floor space you'd need for 8 soldiers worth of tanks.

[Aseaheru]

how silly.

[EnigmaticHat]

Well I think the actual reason for the cap is that oldcom gave you too many soldiers, pretty much every adaption has reduced the number you get.

[Aseaheru]

Did they? UFO:AI increased the size by four from what they had and the longwar mod for the new xcom doubles the size from what it was in the base game.

[Neonivek]

To my knowledge one way they decreased the usefulness of "mooking" is by making the enemies different, some fundamentally so, then your troops. So it is easy to just lose your mooks needlessly without forcing the enemy into the open.

In the original Xcom and the remake all the enemies are essentially your troops with different weapons (Minus a few of the mechanical units)

[Aseaheru]

And with UFO:AI?

[EnigmaticHat]

I don't think you understand what I meant.  In Xcom: UFO defense you had 14 soldiers per map at the start, and a completely ridiculous 24 at the end.  Every adaption I know of reduced this number.  Obviously within series it can still go up.  Long war for example brought it up to a starting squad size of six... still less than half what the original gave you.

[Aseaheru]

But ends with double of the max of what it modded...

And I see your point, but there are also games in this brand that give you like 50 at the start.

[Krevsin]

My conclusion is I don't even know why you would try that.  Playing carefully and keeping your men alive will give you a straight better outcome than swarming.

I'm mostly doing two playthroughs at a time in whatever X-Com-ish game I'm currently playing.

One where I play properly and one where I go entirely silly on the whole thing. In the latter, I've managed to finish a mission with just one soldier (albeit it was one of the earlier missions, only 3 aliens encountered and a buttload of luck involved plus easy difficulty) and am now looking for a way to imperial guard something, like my silly games in the beta and the original X-Com went.

I've tried mooking and it worked reasonably well in the beginning and when there are few aliens, at least on Easy difficulty. But when more aliens and newer types begin to arrive, the mooking tactic is only efficient whenever I have advanced enough tech coupled with extreme amounts of luck.

[Sonlirain]

The thing with more troops is that htey get unwealdy. its pretty damn hard to fins cover and good shooting positiions for 24 people.
Moreso its also kinda hard to grow attached to troops when he's Mook no.22 despite how awesome he was by blowing up 3 cyberdiscs and a sectoid in one turn before being killed by a chryssalid that ran through a hail of reaction fire just to make him pregnant with an alien baby.

The "war stories" usually were written when people used squads of 6-12 soldiers instead of mookblobs.

And the newest Xcom goes out of its way to let you personalize your troopers by picking pretty much everything about them other than the nationality and class (and class got partially remedied in Long War) so you can personalize your little badass war hero.

[Sergarr]

I've seen a let's play of original x-com where the personalization consisted of giving every single unit funny names and also giving armor only to those who deserved it. It was fun.