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[Aklyon]

On the other hand, it seems that someone does in fact have a Freeman's Mind Voicepack already,

They even made a video for it! It is pretty amusing.

[Urist Imiknorris]

So, stupid question time. If I have a ranger with Untouchable, and I have them melee a sectopod to death, I'm guessing that Untouchable doesn't protect from that?

[debvon]

So, stupid question time. If I have a ranger with Untouchable, and I have them melee a sectopod to death, I'm guessing that Untouchable doesn't protect from that?

Nope because it's not a direct enemy attack. It doesn't work on the codex psionic bomb ability either. I don't know if it works on grenades or not but I would think no.

I read some people saying psi operatives were not that great aside from last hitting enemies. That's bullshit. I trained a magi and she's MVP on most missions. She played an incredibly important role on the final mission which led to me not losing a single soldier, not even coming close to it in fact. Your guy gets mind controlled? Stasis them. Insanity or mind control a big daddy. Null lance in combination with combat protocol. There are so many useful things they can do, obviously it's a resource sink but having two magi level operatives in one squad would be amazing I think. I need to try it.

Somehow my top ranger pulled off some insane jukes or something on a relay destroy mission. I accidentally ran him into a large open store building full of advent troopers, officers, mutons, and a sectopod. I killed a stun lancer before positioning him behind a wall. For some reason a lot of the troopers (and the sectopod) ran by him triggering bladestorm which didn't miss once. He was untouchable for the sectopod barrage and dodged everything else thrown at him with an aid protocol. I got him out of there without a scratch, every single enemy was at half health or dead (with sniper help) save for the sectopod. To top it off the sectopod killed two troopers with his followup laser.

[crazysheep]

I think I've had Untouchable work against grenades. For some reason, ADVENT explosives can actually miss XCOM troops, no idea how that works.

[darkrider2]

So if anyone wasn't doing this already, I have some advice for encounters with F****NG stun lancers. (all my hate)

Use the hunker-down ability (only works next to cover, ANY cover). I've gotten into the practice of hunkering my entire squad after activating pods of stun-lancers. And their AI will usually* still select to dash-stab instead of shoot their gun. It's been a total ass-saver for me on several missions.

Since dash-stabbing puts lancers in a really easy-to-kill position, I find hunkering to be effective, tends to make the other Aliums in the pod miss as well.



Maybe this is common knowledge, but I just figured it out after savescumming (10+ times) a commander difficulty mission where they first appear. 

[EnigmaticHat]

Having beaten the game, I would say that psi operatives are theoretically better than other classes on paper but have few niches in practice.

The problem is that the psi research takes about as long as mag weapons or plated armor, and then building the training center takes time, and then it will be about a month before your psi operative is even mostly comparable to your existing troops.  Meanwhile, researching mag weapons or plated armor gives you an immediate jump in soldier effectiveness.  There's also the minor issue that psi operatives want armor and weapon upgrades to be effective while the other classes don't need psi research to be effective.

Once you do get upper level psi operatives out yeah, they're straight superior to other classes.  To be honest a soldier with nothing except Colonel stats and Sustain + Domination would be comparable to the entire arsenal most other classes have.  Unfortunately you can't guarantee those skills and they don't get Colonel stats right off the bat so... yeah.  The problem is that the game gets easier over time and its like at what point does making yourself weaker by investing in psi justify the payoff?  And the answer for me is "in time for the final mission" because that's the only time you really need psi operatives.

As for usually though I play on commander, its possible legendary will change my mind (but I doubt it given the longer build and research times).

[Aklyon]

There are so many useful things they can do, obviously it's a resource sink but having two magi level operatives in one squad would be amazing I think. I need to try it.

Its pretty alright, yeah. You've got two separate cooldowns on void rift, null lance, stasis (shield), soulfire, insanity, two dominations...

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, Psi-troopers are absolutely essential. They're resource-heavy to set up for, take forever to train up, but once you have them they're the most versatile and most enduring class, because they have so much they can do and all of their abilities are only limited by timers, rather than hard-capped per mission like Grenadiers and WAR suits.

[Puzzlemaker]

I want to try to play a game with only rangers, choosing the stealthy options.  I believe it would be fairly hilarious.

That or maybe all specialists. 

[Lightningfalcon]

I want to try to play a game with only rangers, choosing the stealthy options.  I believe it would be fairly hilarious.

That or maybe all specialists.

I've done all swordsman. For that, you REALLY need to have battlescanners and armor.

[EnigmaticHat]

I want to try to play a game with only rangers, choosing the stealthy options.  I believe it would be fairly hilarious.

That or maybe all specialists.

I'm wondering what happens if you have only rangers with phantom, someone gets revealed, and then that one ranger who got caught uses the concealment ability? Does the pod deactivate?

[Lightningfalcon]

I want to try to play a game with only rangers, choosing the stealthy options.  I believe it would be fairly hilarious.

That or maybe all specialists.

I'm wondering what happens if you have only rangers with phantom, someone gets revealed, and then that one ranger who got caught uses the concealment ability? Does the pod deactivate?

Probably the same thing that happens on the conceal all hacking bonus

[darkrider2]

I want to try to play a game with only rangers, choosing the stealthy options.  I believe it would be fairly hilarious.

That or maybe all specialists.

It would be totally ridiculous and amazing until you hit the final mission. That pretty much goes for every ability/item that has limited per-mission uses (each ranger can only conceal once). That issue with the length of the final mission I feel is also why psi-operatives become so good on the final mission (infinite mana-wizards basically).

[Sean Mirrsen]

I just managed to squeeze over 30 FPS out of this game, still playing on the tablet.

I did it by playing in 640x480.
If it wasn't for the tiny font in the research screens and briefings, it would be hilariously playable.

(Also if the Intel HD drivers played well enough with DirectX11 to allow stretching the picture to fullscreen... :\)

[Mephansteras]

Finally beat my first Bronzeman Veteran run. Didn't abuse the restart on missions too much, mostly when some aspect of the game didn't work the way I thought it would and I got screwed over as a result. Still accepted normal losses and whatnot, although the game really gets easy on Veteran as you go along.

I feel like I did a lot of things very suboptimally, especially the base building, but it really didn't matter. I never had a lab, but had so many scientists that I ran out of things other than Data pads to research quite a few times. Also never built a workshop until late, which didn't matter much either.

Last mission was satisfyingly brutal, though. Wasn't sure I'd be able to win it on my first go at all, but we squeaked out a win with one dead psi operative, the ranger at 1hp, and several other troops down to half or less health.

MVP goes to the Long Range sniper on the team with Bluescreen Bullets. Had her use Serial a few times to absolutely devastate waves of enemies. Second award goes to the Ranger who was critted and poisoned fairly early on in the boss fight and managed to dodge/bladestorm her way out of about a half dozen attacks at 1HP and was pretty instrumental in us winning.

Now I'm going to try a Commander Ironman game. Biggest question is what mods I want to run. Is there any set that people are really enjoying?