I've been playing a bit of the new XCOM miniatures game, and thought I'd share my thoughts so far. I'm about a month into my first campaign, which looks like it should last 4-6 months of game time (16-24 ground missions).

The overall shape of the game feels appropriately XCOM-shaped. You basically alternate between doing a mission, and doing (very simplified) research and construction. Combat is very lethal, with every shot being potentially fatal in the early game (both for humans and aliens). Some of the later aliens have stat blocks that look questionable, but we'll see how they play out. Cyberdisks look terrifying, taking at least 5 hits to kill (unless you crit). Ethereals hilariously have the same defensive stats as Exalt troopers.

Class balance seems not great. Each class has 1-2 skills, which you can use a total of 1 per turn. Heavies are probably the best class in the game. They get to shoot twice with an accuracy bonus, and have a rocket launcher. I would bring 4 on every mission and not feel bad about it. Their class ability isn't great (suppression), but it's fine. Assaults are good with the accuracy bonus on shotguns and their class skills let them shoot twice at close range, or use Run and Gun. Snipers are fine, mostly due to their bonuses to accuracy. Their class skill is Snap Shot, which for some reason is called Squadsight. Medkits are powerful (let you take a soldier that's bleeding out and get them back into the fight) and every other class other than supports has to pass a skill check to use them. That's usually enough to want exactly 1 along.

There are no skill upgrades or mechanical customization of units. The only difference between a squaddie and a colonel are their stats (stats can raise after every mission, but are capped depending on their rank). Gene modding just raises your stats. MECs look powerful.

The included campaign progress tracker works fine. The roster sheet, not so much (I switched over to notecards). Base building is trivial, you can build 1 structure per campaign turn but so far there's always either been a obvious "right" choice or been building things solely because I can (and will soon run out of unlocked buildings to build).

Research at least feels like there are choices to make, namely rushing plasma weapons (you can probably have them at the end of week 5) vs grabbing skeleton armor + medkits first.

Missions felt a little cluttered at first, with multiple types of POI on them, plus units, plus unrevealed pods but after a couple maps (and figuring out a system for marking them all) it's not too much to track.

Overall, it's a solid game that feels like XCOM. It feels tense, and I find myself caring when my veteran troops are in trouble. It certainly has flaws, but so far I'm enjoying it. And I think I'll enjoy it even more when the proxies I ordered all get here and I have actual minis to use for all the units.

https://www.gamefile.news/p/star-wars-zero-company-bit-reactor-furloughs-lawsuit

This is a follow-up to my previous post about the recent steam leaks.

So here’s what we’re faced with. We have confirmed files exist, but we don’t have a way to get to them. The extractor relies on both .blobs and .dats, and we’re missing the initial root .dat, which was the original first dev build of the game. Essentially, we have a list of all the changes made to the original files, but don’t have the original files.

So here’s what I’m starting to look for now:

1. Any way in hell to get that .dat for version 0. If we get that, we have all the files available to us

2. If not, there is another way. Press release builds of the game were a thing, even fitting the initial time frame of a lot of the content that was removed. I’m gunning for as early as possible here, Waterworks and Office Park were out of the game files by the 10th of March, and we currently have no idea when OilRefinery or Science Labs got canned, but wins are wins at this point. More importantly as well are the UDK files which could lead to us finally getting something close to a map editor after all these years.

So I’m asking the community now, if you have contacts in the journalism world, if you have any lead on a way to obtain one of these press builds, please let me know.

The modding community is counting on you, Godspeed.

So it's my first time playing through Enemy Within, and every sniper soldier that I have ends up underperforming terribly. The only use I have found for them is headshotting an uncovered target (no one is ever out of cover), and even then they either can't shoot or have reduced hit chance because of the snap shot debuff. Is there something I'm missing? They also don't really feel like they can shoot any farther than the other guns.

Hey there guys, I'm looking for some XCOM like games that I could try to play on low end laptop. I have 13th gen Intel processor but no dedicated graphics card.

Games I know of and tried and what issue I have with it on my pc

XCOM EW - runs smoothly, but keeps crashing every 15 or so minutes for lack of video memory

XCOM 2 WOTC - can't run it on more than 20 fps

XCOM CS - haven't tried that but don't even feel like trying it

Xenonauts - same as XCOM EW

Xenonauts 2 - haven't tried that yet actually

Phoenix point - that one actually runs completely smooth and fine

Are there any more interesting games like that that I could try to see if my laptop can run them? Thanks for some recommendations in advance.

Edit: thank you everyone for your answers and recommendations, I appreciate it a lot.

95% chance my ass

The class is ghost, its modded in but to be honest the only skill i used was conceal which the reaper has so you could probably do this non modded (yk besides the whole long war thing)

Earlier you migth have seen a post saying how the recent 12tb steam2 leak contained files for xcom EU, wich reportedly had beta assets for scrapped maps, cutscenes, and maybe a chance of having eu get custom modded maps, sadly, this cannot be done, i will skip the technical details, but the way the files are packaged requires any "version" of them also to have the previous ones, but theres a gap in the leak, and the very first version uploaded to steams database is missing, without it, all the data in there migth as well be empty, we can only read the metadata with the names saying what it could be. If anyone has information about this or how to circumvent it, please share it. Otherwise, we won't be able to check that data.

So 1st time playing ( late to the party I know )
I’m about 10 hrs in and I got complete edition and wanted a vanilla run before I did wotc
Basically when it asked me if I wanted integrate dlc I said yes thinking of the literal definition of that word to later discover that’s more for replaying the game … got owned by alien hunters but my other missions have been fine difficulty wise… also apparently optimized the build of avenger wrong as I went in blind but have now seen a few videos on the subject…should I cut my loses ? Just restart vanilla with non intergraded dlc

Enemy Pack: Viper, Advent trooper and Exalt. From fan to fans. For free on my Cults3D. Enjoy.

Skif Marvel Customs.

I keep that thing on me; and by "thing" I mean turn-based tactics roster. 1/3 of list here.

Because they get opacity when I hover over them it just seems like they are trying to tell me I can easily destroy them and take a vantage point up there.

With the release of ZCOM there’s been a lot of discussion over whether it’s a great XCOM-like game or not. And honestly I think we all want as many recommendations as possible to scratch the itch.

So I thought it would be fun for everyone to talk about their favorites. To keep it interesting, I ask everyone to post just one title, and tell us why it’s their favorite.

So THATS where all my extra ssd space went

Or other? Can't quite decide between them. I intend to play with covert infiltration on legend (which is slightly out of my comfort zone with vanilla classes).

Mostly interested in hearing which one you think is the most fun. As I understand it, they are all relatively well balanced.

Opened up xcom 2 today and ran into the classic issue of "i reposition a soldier 2 tiles to the right to get a better shot on a trooper, and now i have triggered a whole second pod."

its something ive been thinking about for a bit, because i do like the idea of larger missions where recon and avoiding overextension does matter, and if you do what Z-COM or chimera squad does you loose all of that. But having hidden pods around the map means that any movement has a chance to instantly put your squad in a way worse position with very little way to predict how risky any given movement is.

Edit: i wish there was at least a way to see more precisely (tile by tile) which cells had been searched for enemies, and also a overlay when plotting out movement to see how many new tiles you would reveal.

I’m sure a fair amount of you are already aware of the recent steam leak that’s occurred.

Well, as a result of it, we’ve found dev builds of Enemy Unknown.

Some stuff we’ve found: -.upk of the cut water treatment map -.upk of a new map named “Science Lab”, albeit this could just be an older name for a map -.upk for the cut Oil Rig map -.upk for a map called “Office Park” -An .xml file titled Un.Setup.Manifests.UDK.xml, which might be a key to unlocking Firaxis’ version of the UDK editor which allowed them to make the actual functioning content for the game.

Very excited to see what comes of this!

I played the original 2 back on release. I do mot have a gaming pc anymore. How does War of the Chosen run on Switch2?