inRain

Tried twice, beat it twice. The aliens did a lot of standing around during their turn, opting to save their time units for reaction fire/overwatch instead of shooting at me on their own turn, which kinda felt like the AI does not know what it is doing. Did not get to see that snow map.

There is not a lot to comment on yet, plays and feels like X1 (which is a good thing) with a lot better presentation. The computer I played it on could not handle it that well, so the experience was kinda clunky. I like the red beret and the new look in general for the troopers. They look much better than in X1! Overal X2 has the same menacing atmosphere i liked about X1.

Air superiority and heavy use of turrets tend to keep those base defence missions relatively rare, but especially when playing on iron man, I feel that you should prepare for the chance of base attack happening. I build my bases from the gound up with defence in mind. This slows down the initial base construction, but helps a lot when defending. I construct only one or two tiles that are in direct contact with the command center, and then build the rest of the facilities into the sides of the "map" through these entrance points. I got this idea from a player of the original game. The aliens must acces the ceter area through a single corner, allowing me to create a powerful crossfire from two corridors. Ten man garrison with machine guns and rocket launchers, and other conventional weapons have thus far been succesful every time.

My conviction is that the rifle really has no place in Xenonauts. It is kinda ok in close range, decent in mid range and kinda ok on long range. But here is the thing - in mid range and long range, sniper is superior, in close range shotgun is superior. In real life, versatility is a good thing, but in this particular game it is not. I engage the aliens in long range fighting, with snipers, MG:s and rocket launchers, using shield/pistol combo for scouts. These guys also carry shotguns. Where is the place for a rifle in such a build? Granted, there are other methods of fighting, where the rifle might actually fit well. One point about the Predator though - it is kinda expensive. You can get a bunch of powerful rifles with the price of one predator armor.

Sometimes bad luck just runs over, and that is all there is to it. I had great success with a super fast expansion strategy, where I started building my second base on day one, and had the third one operational at the end of the second month, and radar coverage pretty much maxed at the end of month 3. Building a base 500k, a radar 250k, two hangars 50k, two foxtrots 400k plus a hangar to main 25k still leaves some money for research during the first month - this affords you two bases at the beginning at month 2, when you can build two more radars, and found the third base. In my latest game, this worked miracles.

It's kinda like club level chess - if you blunder a pawn or a two, you can still win, though you might have to adjust your play to go for a knockout punch, knowing you will lose in a technical endgame, being down two pawns. If you blunder your Queen against an opponent roughly your level - resign, you have lost. End of discussion. So it really boils down to the size of your mistake. Most games have the possibility for a game ending blunder somewhere in there. You can come back having a squad wiped out. You can come back from multiple blunders in the air war. Losing a base early probably means resigning.

I used to employ a strategy i dubbed the "sidewinder", where my strike force would stick to a side of a map, and move to the ufo, avoiding the aliens as much as possible, breach the door with c4, and then gas the aliens into submission (or frag them if Androns). I used mostly assault rifles and a few snipers. It was a decent strategy that kept my squad together, limited the number of aliens fought at one time, and taught me to use concentrated fire effectively. My current tactic is to move a sniper block from good position to another, using scouts (with buzzards once possible) to scout for enemies, and then taking them out with massed sniper fire from a position beyond the alien visual range. I plan to augment this doctrine with a few mg:s. (Now that I know that the ufo-door can just as well be breached with an mg, making lobbing the c4 by the door obsolete method. I used to do the breaching with an rpg, but the amount of rpg soldiers that died doing that convinced me that c4 was safer.) I really like bringing a hunter scout car with a pulse laser or plasma cannon with me for additional firepower, though it has kinda fallen out of favor for a while (after one blew itself up by hitting a lamp post that I somehow managed to overlook). Really good for base defense too. I don't think a tank is worth the additional 60k, since it generally takes just one more hit to blow up anyway. For me the biggest and hardest thing so far has been the economic side of the strategic air war. Good thing I really enjoy micro-managing the air battles. Really, really early on I experimented with suicide tactics using c4, was kinda sinister stuff.

Yesterday I met a reaper that actually behaved semi-intelligently. I assumed there were no more reapers, after the first 20 turns of fighting. Went in a carrier, fully not expecting one to come through a teleport! a six-man strike force quickly became a two-man strike force, after some zombification and bad decision making involving plasma grenades. Did not expect that! Felt cheated and amused at the same time.

Them grenades men! One of every flavor to each man, and extras to those who have room for more

I save at the start of every month, and when I have to stop playing. If a horrible failure occurs, I'll reload and do the month again as a penalty. After having started the game over so many times that I lost count (iron man, veteran, first playtrough), I decided to cut myself some slack, and play veteran with this save system. Once this play through is finished, I'll install some mods and start iron manning again...

I bought the game expecting it to be hard, as promised, and boy it has not let me down! I started with iron man veteran bout three weeks ago, and finally had to relent, and start a play through with save game enabled (combat fatigue). I never had any real problems with ground combat, that part of the game I understood just fine right from the start - air combat took some work to learn, but I find it the most relaxing part of the game now - thoroughly enjoyable. It is the economy, base management and overall geoscape strategy, that has been the biggest challenge. I was promised hard, and I got hard.

Just now played a crashsite mission, scout ship, Ceasan crew. Sniper misses a 90% aimed shot, fires at least 25 degrees to the side and kills one of my soldiers. My men surround the ship, door opens and alien takes a snapshot at a sniper that I thought was out of visual range, killing him. C4-guy panics due to psionic attack and blows himself up (instead of the ship door). Soldier next to ship entrance panics next, drops his shotgun, and runs inside the ship with 5 aliens waiting for him... Time for a full charge! I did win, last man standing takes out the last alien with two reaction shots from a shotgun. 3 guys survive the fiasco, two hospitalized for a month. Did not rage quit, but did certainly rage...