Cover color chart : Green : good cover Yellow : mid cover White : no cover at all There are 3 colors on each obstacle : the front and 2 corners. Sometimes you get cover up front but none on diagonals
@@ChristopherOdd True enough! Anyway, you got a decent number of views on this one so hopefully that's a good indicator of interest in a longer series. It makes all the sense for you to play something that's so close to the original X-com.
@@alexisdeacon8727 Agreed, as a fan of the original XCOM and the new, it's great to see a resurgence of the brutal oldschool. I can't think of anyone better to tackle it than Odd.
I was talking about how you haven’t played this game yet and was worried you wouldn’t because you weren’t really into the very original XCOM but I can’t put into words how happy I am you are playing this game. I played it to the point of doing all I could in the early access. It is so so good! I truly hope you love it!!!
Chris, I highly highly recommend you focus on your air game. You need massive amounts of air superiority if you’re going to survive. I recommend getting at least two more jets up ASAP along with focusing any upgrades that improve your air firepower. You will want to constantly be added more jets when you have the funds available.
Ha, I've effectively lost my Xenonauts 1 campaign by stalling on airforce expansion. Also while classic X-COM motoric skills helped with everything else, aerial balance has been tuned so that you need to assemble different squadrons to deal with different enemies, not just replace old planes with new ufo-tech-powered ones.
@@SergMullerYes! It’s a lesson I learned very quickly. Even if you think you’re doing alright, that’s when the aliens throw a new ship at you that nothing you have can bring down effectively softlocking you depending on how the campaign was going. This game is insanely unforgiving and I’d hate to see Chris’s run cut short due to him getting slaughtered in the air.
@@spector7932 Not sure how XN2 plays out, I haven't seen past demo, but if XN1 and XC:UFO taught me anything, it's: 1) build new base on another continent as soon as you got the basics going - place at least a couple of hangars and a radar there. 2) Whenever you got new aircraft tech, try to buy at least 1 per each base and spread evenly - you never know what type and quantity of UFOs will pop up where and you got to shot down as many as possible even if you can't scavenge every crash site. 3) multiply as finances allow. You might do well enough with a single A-team of troops, but you need to cover every patch of land with radars and preferrably 2-3 aircraft ready to scramble over every continent at every moment.
@@SergMuller In the current patch, the Alien UFOs are actually very very easy to kill. A single angel, properly microed (the roll button is basically "dodge one shot for no cost, with a short cooldown), can take down a destroyer quite easily. The main reason to rush for phantoms is their 50% more speed and dramatically higher range. It's hard to even engage stuff with angels at 3 radar dish range from their own base, let alone go over and kill stuff that is spotted by some other base. Phantoms basically can engage anything on the planet.
I hope this game stays as one of main series - I struggle to find someone to playthrough it and I have no time to play it myself. Keep it up Chris! Feed us those sweet sweet episodes.
Odd severely underestimated the brutality of this game by not bothering to setup his squad and letting the random soldiers have random setups. You need to really pay attention to how good the cover is and account for how deadly the aliens are. That and configure the soldiers according to their strengths or they will under perform. Oh and Odd... look at the transport chopper. You can setup how your soldiers are lined up there and position them to cover all exits (yes there is more then one exit from the chopper) Definitely want to see Odd have a go with this.
Chris, I'm guessing you never got hands-on with the original UFO: Enemy Unknown but this is basically about as close of a spiritual successor as you can get, with a few quality of life improvements. Definitely worth your time for a series if you're willing ☺️
I feel like I've been waiting forever for this game. It launched on Kickstarter 5 years ago! However, it does look exactly like a modernised UFO: Enemy Unknown (AKA the original XCOM), which is exactly what was promised.
Theres a couple of times you hadn't rotated your people so that their cone of vision was pointing to where the aliens were - the LMG, and a shotgunner just after. The LMG might have got a shot off at the alien that killed him if he was rotated to the right
I love this idea of seeing the autoresolve result first. You could always 'save scum' -this just makes the option official and with how dodgy auto-resolves can be it's good. Spellforce Conquest of Eo does something towards this telling you which of your troops might die (when you're going to win)
At first, I thought this game was a complete ripoff of the original, but the more you played it, the more nostalgic I got. I've been really itching for more X-Com, and I think this will be a perfect replacement for the time being. I'd vote to continue this as a series, it looks like a lot of fun!
I would love to see a full blown series on this game. It is Brutal in a good way! This game makes you learn to play very tactical, and cautiously. Checking corners is essential as well as making sure you leave enough TUs for Crouching, and Overwatch. This game makes you play a lot slower than most other games out there. The original XCOM games were very similar in this regards, but they were a lot more brutal. Expect to lose soldiers, and the difficulty will ramp up quickly. Be Prepared! Research is essential, and expanding the number of Scientists, and Soldiers is a must.
"He looks dead. I don't know if that's bleeding, or just dead, ya know?" - it's been a full minute and I'm still chuckling. Man it's great to see you back in the X-Com RNG vibe. Vintage Odd.
OG X-COM is one of my most memorable games. I remember playing on a biege PC and CRT Monitor before custom cases and modding was a thing. Played the game so long without sleep that at times when I did go to bed I could still hear the background music from the game and would open my eyes in bed thinking I had left the game running only to find the computer was off and the music was just in my mind. Might have to give this a go.
Will you ever play Xcom UFO Defense? I'd love to see how the series all started, and as a bonus, name your troops after your favorite soldiers you used in the modern Xcom games.
The goal of base placement is to protect as much land area of the six regions (shown in the bottom-right-ish). The inner circle is with one radar, then two, and the largest circle is with three radars. Building more than three radars has no effect. The region is important, because you can see from the highlighted borders that Greenland doesn't count, so you'll benefit from covering Alaska, but not Greenland.
lol apparently you never played the original xcom, There was away you always had to deboard the landing plane. first to guys would take one step off and turn 45 degrees in each direction. the next 2 would leap frog over them and look towards the front of the plane. You had to do this like every single mission. Very rarely it would load you into a map in the very corner.
I am so happy you are doing a Xenonauts 2 campaign!! Also you should at least do a quick read of the aliens' authopsies since they seem to give you clues on how they behave and on their strengths and weaknesses. That Secton authopsy said that they were pretty "weak" alone but that when they group together their accuracy tends to improve drastically (probably a psionic thingy if I had to guess). And it mentioned also that they seem pretty fast as they could cover a lot of ground.
Would love to see a series. I am currently at 150 day of the first campaign, so can share some tips, if you are interested. You should start developing your base. I suggest adding more radars (can be up to 3 per base, that will give you bigger area), 1-2 hospitals and maybe training center. Probably another hangar for the 3rd interceptor. Then you should start thinking about adding new bases (you can have up to 6, so plan the locations for maximum overall radar coverage of the ground surface - the oceans are not essential). Also I suggest to pay a closer look on equipping your solders. Basically you want all of them having as much stuff as they can carry - that way you'll have more options on the battlefield and they are getting their STR stat improving while moving with over 80% of max weight. They way I play it - I use the loadout roles as a baseline and adjust every single soldier on top of that. Oh, and note that you actually have some initial armor available right at the start of the game, but most of your soldiers just don't wear it by default. Definetely should start wearing it more, it will help a lot with survivability. You should have about 2-3 times more soldiers than your aircraft can carry because wounds are very common and heal times are long - especially without hospitals. Lastly, grenades are very usefull. Flashbangs are necesity for supression because overwathces are brutal. I ended up running them on everyone. Smoke is very life-saving when there is little cover and you can't kill all the visible targets. Usual grenades are good for damage, but almost ineffective against cover, so I personally rarely use them. Note that there are special exploive packs, that have smaller area of effect, but destroy most objects (including walls) and strip a lot of armor from the enemies. I prefer using that. Any non-lethal damage from the explosions won't destroy alien equipment so you idealy should softening targets with grenades while exposing them for killing shots.
I remember playing Xenonauts 1 - moving one to three tiles every turn, from cover to cover, and never long runs in the open, going into the fog of war was scary! And wait till you actually charge into an alien ship! The shields were literally life-savers. One thing about leaving the ship though - you have two doors on the sides, you don’t need to go out the main open hatch in the back. Those doors give you some cover and it’s good to scout the terrain through them before embarking.
This one looked really interesting!!! I really liked how you can loose units at any moment by oneshot kills. It just gives a different layer of risk that feels really unique compared to other games I've seen on the channel. Nice job reviewing new ones for us to check, thanks!!! 😁
Odd, you're finally playing Xenonauts 2!! Tip for overwatch, it's affected by the Reflex stats that you can check in the Barracks, and to have a better chance of taking overwatch shots, well, would be facing where the threat is 35:38 . Remember you can always rotate your soldiers without moving. Also, Machine Gun has an inherently bad accuracy, but they fire in big bursts. Additionally, if you happen to miss a lot of shots, any humans or aliens can be suppressed too, so Machine Gun is a great tool to use it apart from Flashbangs (if you're not in range to throw it, or simply run out of it). 41:57 in the Autopsy screen you can hover to the Attributes on the top right (next to the base stats of the alien), and you can read the summary and detailed stats of their Buffs / Debuffs, basically the TL; DR version of the long text.
Hoping you do a series on this one. Might want to knock the difficulty down for gameplay purposes. Or have it brutal - your choice! But if you do a full series I'll definitely be watching each episode
I know that I am looking forward to this one ^^ I'm definitely digging those nostalgia vibes. Exiting the deployment ship is always going to be super high-risk event, due to that challenging fog-of-war, if the old MicroProse dynamics hold true. Good luck, commander!
Some advice for early game: 1) The most important members of your team are shield people. In the game every movement of your soldiers in the operation area is extremely risky because the unspent action points are used for overwatch and the many of your soldiers have almost no armor at first. With a shield man to be sent to the front, this risk can be relatively avoided for a few shots because shields cover only a 180-degree angle and have limited hit points. 2) Flashbang and smoke bombs are life savers. They provide great convenience in disabling overwatch of aliens or hiding the movement route from aliens. However, smoke only decreases hit chance greatly and gives stun(decreasing action points for next turn) for anybody passing inside. 3) You should have added an extra lab and workshop to your base from day one. More researchers and engineers can increase the speed of both research and production. They also make a small amount of money per hour for the organization when they are idle.
they actually only compensate you about 75% of the upkeep of the scientists. if you aren't going to use them, having excess researchers is a negative money proposition. I like going up to 3 research labs asap (it's costly, but it lets you get high tech everything quite quickly), and only goin up to a second engineering workshop one I am ready to start building my own aircraft. (phantoms and a dragonfly).
Soo many people doing jagged alliance, I would like to see xenonaughts, XCOM UFO defense is my number 1 PC game of all time. It's the first game when I was 11 years old. I played for like 24 hours I still remember the day, My dad came out and was like are you still awake? OMG What I have created. That was the start to my 40+ year gaming addiction. This looks just like it. Xcom was super hard in the start. taking regular guns against aliens with laser weapons. Not till you get armor / alien weapons could you even stand a chance to not loose troops every round. Plus now you got mars, You can have mars leave the ship first.
I played demo before, I used smoke grenades to stun enemies and before I sent my plane, I put my soldiers with shield in the front, some on sides and turn them around so they see outside. Hope it will be a series as so far no Xcom2 or 3. Tip - those 3 circles around base, before you build it, display range of your 1,2 and 3 radars Tip2 - certain building, build to next each other, will give bonuses so some is better to build next to each other
I had a question about that adjacency. Is it just when adjacent to other buildings of the same type, or next to any building that has adjacency bonues. For example, it seems the storeroom gets an adjacency bonus by being next to the hangar. Does the hangar just provide adjacency all around, or specifically to the storeroom? If so how would we know that?
@@mehdilacombe7241 some buildings provide bonus but not all. For example two Living quarters next to each other provide extra 4 living space. Hangars provide no bonus I think. And it should be same building. Buildings with bonuses are Living quarters, Storeroom, Training Centre, Generator, Workshop, Laboratory and Missile battery.
The game: "Commander, the future of the human race depends on the success of this organization under your leadership." The commander: "I don't know if that's bleeding so much as dead."
They Chris! This game I recommend you play as defensive as possible while also super aggressive on destroying covers and buildings that belongs to the enemies with Free Aim, breach charges or Grenadier unit before engaging directly. The aiming in this game is very unforgiving indeed! Also be sure to keep your units packed up. One extra modules and grenades or so can change the course entirely.
I would love to see you grind your face on this for a full series :P. Iv already played X-1 and around 40 hours of X-2, i can tell you its a lot more hands on that X-COM modern ever was. I'll even let you have a do over for the series ;P. Good Luck.
Your dropship has side doors. Those are usable as cover that you can pop out of. 35:20 For overwatch, you need to look at the enemy or be hit by the enemy and survive it. 47:55 Indeed we are.
Dont know if anybody tells you yet, the cover, flash & smokes are key. Always left some TU to make reaction fire(overwatch) high accuracy units are suited for this. In Xenonauts 1 stats are improve by combat accuracy improve by shooting/hitting, reaction ( the stat that govern over reaction fire chance) improve by doing reaction shots. Keeping soldiers alive is key in this game because they cannot get new abilities or skills with class/ranks. So use grenades,shield , smoke and flash. Crouching shield guy act as a cover and other soldier can fire behind him and crouch back.
really hype for this series. Super nice to jump from Aliens Dark Descent to this. Here's hoping we get a whole series! :D woooo!!! stay rad Odd Oh and I'm also interested in the Baldur's Gate 3 series personally too. Would definitely watch. ok peace
This looks really cool. I have tried the original Xcom only for a little bit (basically only installed the game), so I can't comment on that. This gives me Jagged Alliance 2 vibes with the fluid action points and the crouching mechanic. I like the vision cones; that's one of my favourite features of Project Zomboid.
I understand if you don't want to play a whole campaign just yet. However, I would love if you did one more episode so we can see what the air game look like!
In Xenonaughts 1 hovering over a particular region let you know how much money that region provides initially the regions covered by your radar and in range to be 'protected' tend to gain $ while everything outside of your region of protection tends to lose money. This Incentivized building more bases as the 'IDEA' of protection was better than actually being successful in shooting down all UFOs. The exception is Terror attacks of course. You HAVE to go to those to be seen to be 'doing the job' even if you don't have a successful mission it still counts. I believe they continue with the same principle in this Second one. So far it looks like it.
Hey chris, while its funny to watch a firaxis xcom player suffer in xenonauts heres a tip on cover thats going to need some brain rewiring for this game: xenonaut cover isnt x - y based like it is with xcom where youre only flanked when someone crosses your x axis. Just because youre behind cover doesnt mean it covers all frontal angles. Each obstacle has 3 cover indicators when you put a guy behind it which indicate its cover strength for shots coming in from the front as well as left and right diagonals. Green means its area is well covered, yellow means partial, white means its exposed and red means its fully covered (blocks line of sight as well as shots). So be aware of the actual protection given by any given cover. For example a one tile sized cover may only provide green coverage for directly in front of it (it will show white, green, white indicator). if you are trying to block shots from an enemy at your 2 o clock you will actually be exposed. In this case the best place to go is the "corner" of the cover, the 8 o clock, if that makes sense. Also final tip - you dont have to be right behind cover to receive "cover". You may have noticed your shots getting 40% acc penalty because of a random rock between you and your target thats standing naked in the open. This works in your favor as well so keep this in mind when thinking about a safe place to end turns!
I had a lot of fun with the first Xenonauts and in my personal opinion it was superior to Enemy Unknown/Within from a strictly mechanical POV. Although, Jagged Alliance 3 deserves also a lot of attention for being a suprisingly well made sequel to the brilliant JA 2. If Commander Odd never played the JA Games I would love to see how you manage the strategy and tactic layers of this game.
This definitely seems to play like the OG xcom UFO defense. Specifically the fact that on the first turn all enemies have all their time units, meaning they can and will wipe your squad through overwatch. In the original game players learned pretty quickly you had to pop smoke then wait a turn before exiting the transport.
I've wanted an original x-com play through for a long time now. I SO much enjoy hearing you learn things. like, Oh, they can one shot me. Oh, fog of war matters. Oh, looking takes TUs. Oh, this feels bad. Yyyyesss, now you begin to understand....
Looking forward to seeing more of this! Classic X-Com and Xenonauts 1 were great, and will be fun to see how you handle things having not played the classic series. Hopefully we'll get more even if it's after EA is done
The reason the original XCOM was so much more brutal and paranoia inducing. Was because the aliens had a different fog of war than you and could shoot you out of the darkness and you would have to crawl around the map trying to find out who was killing you. The new XCOM, Players just creep around the map and pop pods one at a time, You always see your enemy before they see you. Not real scary. Just imagine, You're getting yourselves out of the sky, Ranger, And suddenly, out of the darkness, one of your soldiers gets shot. That was the paranoia of XCOM.
When you have so open area around chopper it's good to use smoke grenades to make it safely into cover Basic grenades are free, so make your angles, make your cover
Haha, welcome to the world of Xenonauts. I've only played the first one, but that game punishes you for each and every oversight. It's painfully unforgiving. To be fair, it's already relatively challenging on the easiest level, so you're in for a treat on Veteran level. But I suppose you've already realized that by now ;) The maps certainly don't make it any easier as there are _so many_ spots you need to (dis)cover because there could be an enemy anywhere. Not to mention that if you look away from a spot it becomes a fog of war again, meaning aliens could move towards a spot you considered safe after clearing it. It's a really nice game of tactics. I'm wondering how much they kept from the first game. One of the biggest challenges early on was that the airplane interceptors had a limited range, so if you'd built a base in the UK you couldn't intercept UFOs in Canada because they didn't have the fuel to go there. The dropship could go there, but you had to shoot down the ship before you could use troops to investigate. Therefore the most advantageous location used to be somewhere around Greece, where you could cover Europe, the majority of Africa, but also parts of Russia and Asia. That's also where the majority of alien activities took place from my experience. I'm curious to see how your base location will (dis)advantage you if that limitation is still used in this game, because it would limit your activities pretty much to North America. Enjoy your play! :) Even if you can't slot it in at this time, please consider playing it at some point. It _should_ be right up your alley, I believe.
Would really enjoy a series of this game. Very like xcom ufo defense which is one of the most influential game of the early ninetys. Please Play it, looks incredibly difficult and yet like an enormous amount of fun.
It is kinda funny to see you play this because I keep forgetting you aren't super familiar with OG xcom mechanics, including things like bullet trajectory :D But yeah welcome to veteran or "feeling nostalgic for 90s strategy games" difficulty I guess xP
I would love to see you tackle a Xenonauts Campaign. Since Xenonauts 2 is still in Early Access, you could whet your and our whistle with the first Game. It's quite similar and, as far as I know, complete already.
I had this game on my steam wishlist for years I think. Completed my game about a week ago (as much content was there). It's super weird that you haven't played the original, the new xcoms are indeed a simplified, 'consolified' remake of those, kind of what Sid Meier's Railroads was to original railroad games - rr tycoon or ttd. Xenonauts is a lot closer to the original, and as such a more complex gameplay, both strategic and tactical layer. May not be worth now, in 9 months hopefully they'll be ready for release or when they said.
Hey just as a quick thing, the placement of your bases is VERY improtantz those 3 circles you saw when you were setting up shop showed you the radar ranges with 1, 2 and 3 the best way to set up bases is for them to cover the most terrain with little need for overlap, and plan with exansions i radar in mind Edit: also read autopsy reports!!! Very important!
Watch those corners! taking cover at a corner only gives you cover to 45. After that you are essentially out in the open. Tactically this isn't Xcom2 run and gun. It's best to set up fireteams (at least one with a healthkit) and carefully bound, knowing the aliens can hit you from any direction.
41:30 Electrons move at light speed. Even in the form of electricity where we model that they're moving from atom to atom, they move at light speed (in a vaccuum). I wish games makers would at least get the basics right.
A few months ago I played a little in Early Acces/beta, and right after I started my 3. mission I did a rage quit. My first move was to go out the chopper with one of my man and after he moved 1 meter he was shot dead by an alien. I really like this game, but sometimes it is so unfair.
yes, do more of this. If not a whole series, at least a good chunk to get some emergent story and a feel for how the game progresses, 10 or so? I mean, I'd also watch a series.
It can be worth it to fire the LMG's 10 round burst just for the suppression even if the chance isn't great. The Secton's Psionic Triangulation(in the xenopedia) give them a big accuracy bonus if another Sectonnis close(I forget the exact distance)
This game gives me some real XCom UFO Defense vibes. Very nostalgic. Depending on how well they did with it, this could be a great playthrough to watch.
Good video as always, Chris. Didn't realize you were a fellow Montrealer. Go Habs, go! Lol This looks cool, especially for people who never played the original XCOM from way back when. I'm also looking forward to BG3. I have a shadow monk/assassin rogue Dark Urge character I'm looking forward to trying. :) How about you, got anything in particular in mind?
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I vote for keeping a body count of your troops in the top left corner. I played for several hours and lost a lot of soldiers. This game is brutal.
game needs a memorial like in xcom2 for fallen units, pilots included
@@keithsinter5611 In Xenonauts you shouldn't get attached to units and expect them to die, thats the 1 major difference between Xenonauts and XCOM
Cover color chart :
Green : good cover
Yellow : mid cover
White : no cover at all
There are 3 colors on each obstacle : the front and 2 corners. Sometimes you get cover up front but none on diagonals
Nothing says "Not your Firaxis' X-Com" like a soldier immediately dying to an Overwatch shot.
Would love to see you playing this long term.
I feel like it would make a better series when it releases from EA and is complete.
@@ChristopherOdd True enough! Anyway, you got a decent number of views on this one so hopefully that's a good indicator of interest in a longer series. It makes all the sense for you to play something that's so close to the original X-com.
@@alexisdeacon8727 Agreed, as a fan of the original XCOM and the new, it's great to see a resurgence of the brutal oldschool. I can't think of anyone better to tackle it than Odd.
@@ChristopherOdd for complete game, there's also Xenonauts 1... but you don't seem to have done lets play on it?
I was talking about how you haven’t played this game yet and was worried you wouldn’t because you weren’t really into the very original XCOM but I can’t put into words how happy I am you are playing this game. I played it to the point of doing all I could in the early access. It is so so good! I truly hope you love it!!!
Didn't Odd play like 10,000 hours of Long war?
It would still be even better if Odd played the original.
Yes this is incredibly similiar to UFO. The nostalgia hits hard ❤
Nope. I didn't enjoy long war very much as it felt too tedious for my liking.
What does Long War have to do with the original XCom?
Chris, I highly highly recommend you focus on your air game. You need massive amounts of air superiority if you’re going to survive. I recommend getting at least two more jets up ASAP along with focusing any upgrades that improve your air firepower. You will want to constantly be added more jets when you have the funds available.
Ha, I've effectively lost my Xenonauts 1 campaign by stalling on airforce expansion. Also while classic X-COM motoric skills helped with everything else, aerial balance has been tuned so that you need to assemble different squadrons to deal with different enemies, not just replace old planes with new ufo-tech-powered ones.
@@SergMullerYes! It’s a lesson I learned very quickly. Even if you think you’re doing alright, that’s when the aliens throw a new ship at you that nothing you have can bring down effectively softlocking you depending on how the campaign was going. This game is insanely unforgiving and I’d hate to see Chris’s run cut short due to him getting slaughtered in the air.
@@spector7932 Not sure how XN2 plays out, I haven't seen past demo, but if XN1 and XC:UFO taught me anything, it's: 1) build new base on another continent as soon as you got the basics going - place at least a couple of hangars and a radar there. 2) Whenever you got new aircraft tech, try to buy at least 1 per each base and spread evenly - you never know what type and quantity of UFOs will pop up where and you got to shot down as many as possible even if you can't scavenge every crash site. 3) multiply as finances allow. You might do well enough with a single A-team of troops, but you need to cover every patch of land with radars and preferrably 2-3 aircraft ready to scramble over every continent at every moment.
@@SergMuller In the current patch, the Alien UFOs are actually very very easy to kill. A single angel, properly microed (the roll button is basically "dodge one shot for no cost, with a short cooldown), can take down a destroyer quite easily.
The main reason to rush for phantoms is their 50% more speed and dramatically higher range. It's hard to even engage stuff with angels at 3 radar dish range from their own base, let alone go over and kill stuff that is spotted by some other base. Phantoms basically can engage anything on the planet.
I hope this game stays as one of main series - I struggle to find someone to playthrough it and I have no time to play it myself. Keep it up Chris! Feed us those sweet sweet episodes.
Odd severely underestimated the brutality of this game by not bothering to setup his squad and letting the random soldiers have random setups.
You need to really pay attention to how good the cover is and account for how deadly the aliens are. That and configure the soldiers according to their strengths or they will under perform.
Oh and Odd... look at the transport chopper. You can setup how your soldiers are lined up there and position them to cover all exits (yes there is more then one exit from the chopper)
Definitely want to see Odd have a go with this.
Chris, I'm guessing you never got hands-on with the original UFO: Enemy Unknown but this is basically about as close of a spiritual successor as you can get, with a few quality of life improvements. Definitely worth your time for a series if you're willing ☺️
When playing the original UFO: EU I just assumed rookies were tactical ablative armor until they proved otherwise.
@@nstrangways those poor poor rookies 🤣🤣🤣
X-Com: Apocalypse 🤔
Ok, so how many videos/series with Aliens do you wish to make?
Odd: "Yes"
This channel was basically founded on XCOM, squad-based tactics vs aliens are the M.O.
The game did you dirty with this first mission. Having the aliens basically expecting and ambushing your men. Welcome to Xenonauts, commander
I feel like I've been waiting forever for this game. It launched on Kickstarter 5 years ago! However, it does look exactly like a modernised UFO: Enemy Unknown (AKA the original XCOM), which is exactly what was promised.
Theres a couple of times you hadn't rotated your people so that their cone of vision was pointing to where the aliens were - the LMG, and a shotgunner just after. The LMG might have got a shot off at the alien that killed him if he was rotated to the right
That chief scientist is indeed a genius - he can research alone with same speed as 20 regular ones.
I love this idea of seeing the autoresolve result first. You could always 'save scum' -this just makes the option official and with how dodgy auto-resolves can be it's good.
Spellforce Conquest of Eo does something towards this telling you which of your troops might die (when you're going to win)
At first, I thought this game was a complete ripoff of the original, but the more you played it, the more nostalgic I got. I've been really itching for more X-Com, and I think this will be a perfect replacement for the time being. I'd vote to continue this as a series, it looks like a lot of fun!
I would love to see a full blown series on this game. It is Brutal in a good way! This game makes you learn to play very tactical, and cautiously. Checking corners is essential as well as making sure you leave enough TUs for Crouching, and Overwatch. This game makes you play a lot slower than most other games out there. The original XCOM games were very similar in this regards, but they were a lot more brutal. Expect to lose soldiers, and the difficulty will ramp up quickly. Be Prepared! Research is essential, and expanding the number of Scientists, and Soldiers is a must.
"He looks dead. I don't know if that's bleeding, or just dead, ya know?"
- it's been a full minute and I'm still chuckling. Man it's great to see you back in the X-Com RNG vibe. Vintage Odd.
OG X-COM is one of my most memorable games. I remember playing on a biege PC and CRT Monitor before custom cases and modding was a thing. Played the game so long without sleep that at times when I did go to bed I could still hear the background music from the game and would open my eyes in bed thinking I had left the game running only to find the computer was off and the music was just in my mind. Might have to give this a go.
Will you ever play Xcom UFO Defense? I'd love to see how the series all started, and as a bonus, name your troops after your favorite soldiers you used in the modern Xcom games.
The goal of base placement is to protect as much land area of the six regions (shown in the bottom-right-ish). The inner circle is with one radar, then two, and the largest circle is with three radars. Building more than three radars has no effect. The region is important, because you can see from the highlighted borders that Greenland doesn't count, so you'll benefit from covering Alaska, but not Greenland.
lol apparently you never played the original xcom, There was away you always had to deboard the landing plane. first to guys would take one step off and turn 45 degrees in each direction. the next 2 would leap frog over them and look towards the front of the plane. You had to do this like every single mission. Very rarely it would load you into a map in the very corner.
I am so happy you are doing a Xenonauts 2 campaign!!
Also you should at least do a quick read of the aliens' authopsies since they seem to give you clues on how they behave and on their strengths and weaknesses.
That Secton authopsy said that they were pretty "weak" alone but that when they group together their accuracy tends to improve drastically (probably a psionic thingy if I had to guess). And it mentioned also that they seem pretty fast as they could cover a lot of ground.
Would love to see a series.
I am currently at 150 day of the first campaign, so can share some tips, if you are interested.
You should start developing your base. I suggest adding more radars (can be up to 3 per base, that will give you bigger area), 1-2 hospitals and maybe training center. Probably another hangar for the 3rd interceptor. Then you should start thinking about adding new bases (you can have up to 6, so plan the locations for maximum overall radar coverage of the ground surface - the oceans are not essential).
Also I suggest to pay a closer look on equipping your solders. Basically you want all of them having as much stuff as they can carry - that way you'll have more options on the battlefield and they are getting their STR stat improving while moving with over 80% of max weight. They way I play it - I use the loadout roles as a baseline and adjust every single soldier on top of that.
Oh, and note that you actually have some initial armor available right at the start of the game, but most of your soldiers just don't wear it by default. Definetely should start wearing it more, it will help a lot with survivability. You should have about 2-3 times more soldiers than your aircraft can carry because wounds are very common and heal times are long - especially without hospitals.
Lastly, grenades are very usefull. Flashbangs are necesity for supression because overwathces are brutal. I ended up running them on everyone. Smoke is very life-saving when there is little cover and you can't kill all the visible targets. Usual grenades are good for damage, but almost ineffective against cover, so I personally rarely use them. Note that there are special exploive packs, that have smaller area of effect, but destroy most objects (including walls) and strip a lot of armor from the enemies. I prefer using that. Any non-lethal damage from the explosions won't destroy alien equipment so you idealy should softening targets with grenades while exposing them for killing shots.
Odd: More aliens?
Us: MORE ALIENS!
If you do decide to do a playthrough, wait till the full release, i would love to watch it all because this game is too much fun
I remember playing Xenonauts 1 - moving one to three tiles every turn, from cover to cover, and never long runs in the open, going into the fog of war was scary! And wait till you actually charge into an alien ship! The shields were literally life-savers.
One thing about leaving the ship though - you have two doors on the sides, you don’t need to go out the main open hatch in the back. Those doors give you some cover and it’s good to scout the terrain through them before embarking.
I played Xenonauts 1 and it was brutal. Very nice re-creation of old school X-Com back in the 80's and 90's.
This one looked really interesting!!! I really liked how you can loose units at any moment by oneshot kills. It just gives a different layer of risk that feels really unique compared to other games I've seen on the channel. Nice job reviewing new ones for us to check, thanks!!! 😁
The old xcom games where amazing. This is the only game that even comes close to reliving childhood memories.
Odd, you're finally playing Xenonauts 2!!
Tip for overwatch, it's affected by the Reflex stats that you can check in the Barracks, and to have a better chance of taking overwatch shots, well, would be facing where the threat is 35:38 . Remember you can always rotate your soldiers without moving.
Also, Machine Gun has an inherently bad accuracy, but they fire in big bursts. Additionally, if you happen to miss a lot of shots, any humans or aliens can be suppressed too, so Machine Gun is a great tool to use it apart from Flashbangs (if you're not in range to throw it, or simply run out of it).
41:57 in the Autopsy screen you can hover to the Attributes on the top right (next to the base stats of the alien), and you can read the summary and detailed stats of their Buffs / Debuffs, basically the TL; DR version of the long text.
Hoping you do a series on this one. Might want to knock the difficulty down for gameplay purposes. Or have it brutal - your choice! But if you do a full series I'll definitely be watching each episode
Support grenades and shields are your friends early game. Never leave an enemy in line of sight without at least smoke or suppression.
But have to be careful with grenade launcher bcs even in half cover we can get suicide by own grenade
@@star0794 ah I do miss the rocket suicides from the first game though. The launcher is cool, but rockets were more fun
5:53 I love that feature in Age of Wonders Planetfall.
Full play-through would be amazing, Commander!
I know that I am looking forward to this one ^^ I'm definitely digging those nostalgia vibes. Exiting the deployment ship is always going to be super high-risk event, due to that challenging fog-of-war, if the old MicroProse dynamics hold true. Good luck, commander!
U could try terra invicta
Finally we get to see how Odd deals with the REAL xcom ❤
Some advice for early game:
1) The most important members of your team are shield people. In the game every movement of your soldiers in the operation area is extremely risky because the unspent action points are used for overwatch and the many of your soldiers have almost no armor at first. With a shield man to be sent to the front, this risk can be relatively avoided for a few shots because shields cover only a 180-degree angle and have limited hit points.
2) Flashbang and smoke bombs are life savers. They provide great convenience in disabling overwatch of aliens or hiding the movement route from aliens. However, smoke only decreases hit chance greatly and gives stun(decreasing action points for next turn) for anybody passing inside.
3) You should have added an extra lab and workshop to your base from day one. More researchers and engineers can increase the speed of both research and production. They also make a small amount of money per hour for the organization when they are idle.
they actually only compensate you about 75% of the upkeep of the scientists. if you aren't going to use them, having excess researchers is a negative money proposition.
I like going up to 3 research labs asap (it's costly, but it lets you get high tech everything quite quickly), and only goin up to a second engineering workshop one I am ready to start building my own aircraft. (phantoms and a dragonfly).
Soo many people doing jagged alliance, I would like to see xenonaughts, XCOM UFO defense is my number 1 PC game of all time. It's the first game when I was 11 years old. I played for like 24 hours I still remember the day, My dad came out and was like are you still awake? OMG What I have created. That was the start to my 40+ year gaming addiction. This looks just like it. Xcom was super hard in the start. taking regular guns against aliens with laser weapons. Not till you get armor / alien weapons could you even stand a chance to not loose troops every round. Plus now you got mars, You can have mars leave the ship first.
I played demo before, I used smoke grenades to stun enemies and before I sent my plane, I put my soldiers with shield in the front, some on sides and turn them around so they see outside. Hope it will be a series as so far no Xcom2 or 3.
Tip - those 3 circles around base, before you build it, display range of your 1,2 and 3 radars
Tip2 - certain building, build to next each other, will give bonuses so some is better to build next to each other
I had a question about that adjacency. Is it just when adjacent to other buildings of the same type, or next to any building that has adjacency bonues. For example, it seems the storeroom gets an adjacency bonus by being next to the hangar. Does the hangar just provide adjacency all around, or specifically to the storeroom? If so how would we know that?
@@mehdilacombe7241 some buildings provide bonus but not all. For example two Living quarters next to each other provide extra 4 living space. Hangars provide no bonus I think. And it should be same building.
Buildings with bonuses are Living quarters, Storeroom, Training Centre, Generator, Workshop, Laboratory and Missile battery.
The game: "Commander, the future of the human race depends on the success of this organization under your leadership."
The commander: "I don't know if that's bleeding so much as dead."
They Chris!
This game I recommend you play as defensive as possible while also super aggressive on destroying covers and buildings that belongs to the enemies with Free Aim, breach charges or Grenadier unit before engaging directly.
The aiming in this game is very unforgiving indeed! Also be sure to keep your units packed up. One extra modules and grenades or so can change the course entirely.
Quite tense gameplay actually. Might get this one day. Thanks for sharing, Christopher.
Nice video about Chris reading EVERY tooltip
I would love to see you grind your face on this for a full series :P. Iv already played X-1 and around 40 hours of X-2, i can tell you its a lot more hands on that X-COM modern ever was. I'll even let you have a do over for the series ;P. Good Luck.
This game looks to be a great challenge for our Odd, and his hard wired X-COM skills. Would love to see more!
Your dropship has side doors. Those are usable as cover that you can pop out of.
35:20 For overwatch, you need to look at the enemy or be hit by the enemy and survive it.
47:55 Indeed we are.
Oh, I've been hoping you were going to play on tone of the classic style XCOM games. Looking forward to more, hopefully!
Dont know if anybody tells you yet, the cover, flash & smokes are key. Always left some TU to make reaction fire(overwatch) high accuracy units are suited for this. In Xenonauts 1 stats are improve by combat accuracy improve by shooting/hitting, reaction ( the stat that govern over reaction fire chance) improve by doing reaction shots. Keeping soldiers alive is key in this game because they cannot get new abilities or skills with class/ranks. So use grenades,shield , smoke and flash. Crouching shield guy act as a cover and other soldier can fire behind him and crouch back.
Jagged Alliance 3 is one of the best TPRG I have seen recently. Simply cannot put down once you start playing.
Xenonaut 2 is also a promising game.
I would love to see a whole series of this!
really hype for this series. Super nice to jump from Aliens Dark Descent to this. Here's hoping we get a whole series! :D woooo!!! stay rad Odd
Oh and I'm also interested in the Baldur's Gate 3 series personally too. Would definitely watch. ok peace
This looks really cool. I have tried the original Xcom only for a little bit (basically only installed the game), so I can't comment on that. This gives me Jagged Alliance 2 vibes with the fluid action points and the crouching mechanic. I like the vision cones; that's one of my favourite features of Project Zomboid.
I understand if you don't want to play a whole campaign just yet. However, I would love if you did one more episode so we can see what the air game look like!
I like how literally his first move triggered reaction fire
I hope this becomes a series.
In Xenonaughts 1 hovering over a particular region let you know how much money that region provides initially the regions covered by your radar and in range to be 'protected' tend to gain $ while everything outside of your region of protection tends to lose money. This Incentivized building more bases as the 'IDEA' of protection was better than actually being successful in shooting down all UFOs. The exception is Terror attacks of course. You HAVE to go to those to be seen to be 'doing the job' even if you don't have a successful mission it still counts. I believe they continue with the same principle in this Second one. So far it looks like it.
Hey chris, while its funny to watch a firaxis xcom player suffer in xenonauts heres a tip on cover thats going to need some brain rewiring for this game: xenonaut cover isnt x - y based like it is with xcom where youre only flanked when someone crosses your x axis. Just because youre behind cover doesnt mean it covers all frontal angles. Each obstacle has 3 cover indicators when you put a guy behind it which indicate its cover strength for shots coming in from the front as well as left and right diagonals. Green means its area is well covered, yellow means partial, white means its exposed and red means its fully covered (blocks line of sight as well as shots).
So be aware of the actual protection given by any given cover. For example a one tile sized cover may only provide green coverage for directly in front of it (it will show white, green, white indicator). if you are trying to block shots from an enemy at your 2 o clock you will actually be exposed. In this case the best place to go is the "corner" of the cover, the 8 o clock, if that makes sense.
Also final tip - you dont have to be right behind cover to receive "cover". You may have noticed your shots getting 40% acc penalty because of a random rock between you and your target thats standing naked in the open. This works in your favor as well so keep this in mind when thinking about a safe place to end turns!
I had a lot of fun with the first Xenonauts and in my personal opinion it was superior to Enemy Unknown/Within from a strictly mechanical POV. Although, Jagged Alliance 3 deserves also a lot of attention for being a suprisingly well made sequel to the brilliant JA 2. If Commander Odd never played the JA Games I would love to see how you manage the strategy and tactic layers of this game.
This definitely seems to play like the OG xcom UFO defense. Specifically the fact that on the first turn all enemies have all their time units, meaning they can and will wipe your squad through overwatch. In the original game players learned pretty quickly you had to pop smoke then wait a turn before exiting the transport.
Puts me in mind of tftd,first guy nearly always died or the tank would get melted.
I'd personally love to see more as your schedule allows. Thanks
I've wanted an original x-com play through for a long time now. I SO much enjoy hearing you learn things. like, Oh, they can one shot me. Oh, fog of war matters. Oh, looking takes TUs. Oh, this feels bad. Yyyyesss, now you begin to understand....
We need more of this Chris!!!
Looking forward to seeing more of this! Classic X-Com and Xenonauts 1 were great, and will be fun to see how you handle things having not played the classic series. Hopefully we'll get more even if it's after EA is done
Damn. This is just like the original X-Com, complete with Aliens camping your landing site and killing your soldiers just as they leave the plane.
I played a lot of TFTD, so this has my attention! Big QoL improvement, that the devs switched in the TU preview for the old Reserve TU toggle.
The reason the original XCOM was so much more brutal and paranoia inducing. Was because the aliens had a different fog of war than you and could shoot you out of the darkness and you would have to crawl around the map trying to find out who was killing you. The new XCOM, Players just creep around the map and pop pods one at a time, You always see your enemy before they see you. Not real scary. Just imagine, You're getting yourselves out of the sky, Ranger, And suddenly, out of the darkness, one of your soldiers gets shot. That was the paranoia of XCOM.
More please Mr Odd! i'd love to see you play this as far as possible, how do i sign up for cannon fodder duty? :)
Please, odd, do a series of this.
When in base, you can go to aircrahts, pick your transport and place your soldiers in positions, I like having soldier at side door
Hope this becomes an actual series
Defiantly want you to play more of this!
When you have so open area around chopper it's good to use smoke grenades to make it safely into cover
Basic grenades are free, so make your angles, make your cover
Haha, welcome to the world of Xenonauts. I've only played the first one, but that game punishes you for each and every oversight. It's painfully unforgiving. To be fair, it's already relatively challenging on the easiest level, so you're in for a treat on Veteran level. But I suppose you've already realized that by now ;)
The maps certainly don't make it any easier as there are _so many_ spots you need to (dis)cover because there could be an enemy anywhere. Not to mention that if you look away from a spot it becomes a fog of war again, meaning aliens could move towards a spot you considered safe after clearing it. It's a really nice game of tactics.
I'm wondering how much they kept from the first game. One of the biggest challenges early on was that the airplane interceptors had a limited range, so if you'd built a base in the UK you couldn't intercept UFOs in Canada because they didn't have the fuel to go there. The dropship could go there, but you had to shoot down the ship before you could use troops to investigate.
Therefore the most advantageous location used to be somewhere around Greece, where you could cover Europe, the majority of Africa, but also parts of Russia and Asia. That's also where the majority of alien activities took place from my experience. I'm curious to see how your base location will (dis)advantage you if that limitation is still used in this game, because it would limit your activities pretty much to North America.
Enjoy your play! :) Even if you can't slot it in at this time, please consider playing it at some point. It _should_ be right up your alley, I believe.
Would really enjoy a series of this game. Very like xcom ufo defense which is one of the most influential game of the early ninetys.
Please Play it, looks incredibly difficult and yet like an enormous amount of fun.
Reminds me a lot of old school XCOM. Love this !!
1:51
Oh yeah! The Algorithm is gonna be the final boss, baby B) ...what do you mean no--aliens are a thing?!
It is kinda funny to see you play this because I keep forgetting you aren't super familiar with OG xcom mechanics, including things like bullet trajectory :D
But yeah welcome to veteran or "feeling nostalgic for 90s strategy games" difficulty I guess xP
This playthrough is going to be rough 15 mins in and Odd is already killing off soldiers
I would love to see you tackle a Xenonauts Campaign. Since Xenonauts 2 is still in Early Access, you could whet your and our whistle with the first Game. It's quite similar and, as far as I know, complete already.
I had this game on my steam wishlist for years I think. Completed my game about a week ago (as much content was there).
It's super weird that you haven't played the original, the new xcoms are indeed a simplified, 'consolified' remake of those, kind of what Sid Meier's Railroads was to original railroad games - rr tycoon or ttd. Xenonauts is a lot closer to the original, and as such a more complex gameplay, both strategic and tactical layer.
May not be worth now, in 9 months hopefully they'll be ready for release or when they said.
If I'm not mistaken, Xenonauts are based on the old Xcom: Apocalypse model from '97.
Oh yes please for a series of this!
Hey just as a quick thing, the placement of your bases is VERY improtantz those 3 circles you saw when you were setting up shop showed you the radar ranges with 1, 2 and 3 the best way to set up bases is for them to cover the most terrain with little need for overlap, and plan with exansions i radar in mind
Edit: also read autopsy reports!!! Very important!
i was hoping u would play this!! very excited and hope u can make it a series :)
Yup, just like old XCOM, you can count on the first unit to leave the transport to be killed instantly by ambush. Old XCOM was not fair by any means.
I think you will love this game if you see it through Mr.Odd! Would love to see more
Watch those corners! taking cover at a corner only gives you cover to 45. After that you are essentially out in the open.
Tactically this isn't Xcom2 run and gun. It's best to set up fireteams (at least one with a healthkit) and carefully bound, knowing the aliens can hit you from any direction.
Would love a series on this game :)
41:30 Electrons move at light speed. Even in the form of electricity where we model that they're moving from atom to atom, they move at light speed (in a vaccuum). I wish games makers would at least get the basics right.
A few months ago I played a little in Early Acces/beta, and right after I started my 3. mission I did a rage quit. My first move was to go out the chopper with one of my man and after he moved 1 meter he was shot dead by an alien. I really like this game, but sometimes it is so unfair.
yes, do more of this. If not a whole series, at least a good chunk to get some emergent story and a feel for how the game progresses, 10 or so? I mean, I'd also watch a series.
It can be worth it to fire the LMG's 10 round burst just for the suppression even if the chance isn't great.
The Secton's Psionic Triangulation(in the xenopedia) give them a big accuracy bonus if another Sectonnis close(I forget the exact distance)
Remembering I didn't have this much trouble with the first mission, me also remembering I cranked the diff down and savescum...
This is old school XCOM, the over-watch is automatic.
This game gives me some real XCom UFO Defense vibes. Very nostalgic. Depending on how well they did with it, this could be a great playthrough to watch.
Good video as always, Chris. Didn't realize you were a fellow Montrealer. Go Habs, go! Lol
This looks cool, especially for people who never played the original XCOM from way back when. I'm also looking forward to BG3. I have a shadow monk/assassin rogue Dark Urge character I'm looking forward to trying. :)
How about you, got anything in particular in mind?
Also, Showgunners just got free DLC released.
waited for this, this the OG xcom feel
glad you started this instead of the lacker dark descent :)