#xcom

[purple-nautilus]

[anheliotrope]

Let me explain what happened. I'm going to work through events one by one, ending with the state you see in the screenshot.

I am playing Ironman (basically no saving or loading except as needed to restore the game state after program shutdown).

I am playing on Genius difficulty (4/5, I didn't want to get my ass turned inside out by Superhuman difficulty)

I am besieging the enemy UFO.

I am 90% convinced the map is empty of aliens, save for the UFO.

I carelessly explore the map with the XCOM soldier seen at the bottom.

At 1 TU left, the XCOM soldier makes Line of Sight with an alien.

My reaction: Oh shit, oh fuck, uhhh.

1 TU is not enough for the XCOM soldier to scratch their fucking ass, let alone retreat or fire.

On the next turn that alien is going to turn around and without fail obliterate my soldier.

Nobody else has LOS on the alien and nobody, even if they spent their entire turn's worth of TUs could not possibly move into a position that can allow them to shoot the alien.

I select the XCOM that you see still selected in the screenshot -- Jungo Chiba.

I contort all of my brain muscles to try to find a way to save my beloved anti-xeno legionnaire.

Jungo Chiba has exactly enough moves to face up against the wall on a trajectory towards the alien.

I use ctrl+click to force Jungo to shoot in the direction of the wall in 3x Auto mode.

The first shot destroys a section of yellow-brownish brick wall.

The second shot destroys a section of wooden wall.

The third shot destroys a wooden door and the same shot hits the alien in the side, obliterating them immediately.

I pog so ungraciously and take this ugly ass screenshot.

(I move him one tile away from the hole he just shot for no reason.)

What a fucking legend.

Thank you for your service, Jungo Chiba.

[tokay-blog]

[ryunumber]

Does Bradford from Xcom have a Ryu number?

John Bradford has a Ryu Number of 3.

(explanation below)

There's a handful of names when inputted as soldier names in Enemy Unknown that change the soldier into an XCOM Hero that is very powerful (and therefore disables achievements). One of them is Sid Meier.

Meier can also be seen in a civilization leader context in Civilization IV; it's easiest to see (and hear) him as part of the base game's tutorial.

[beewitched-monday]

Well, autism be damned, my boys can throw grenades!

[ionjuno]

Extraterrestrial Combat unit He remains a psionic and xenohunter even in crossover

[never-obsolete]

X-COM: UFO Defense (1994)

[1stprototype]

You know what the Illuminate military really needs? Some snakes with human traits.

[frogblast-the-ventcore]

art by EthrkArt

[forsaire]

I don't know if I posted this already, and if I did, Tumblr is hiding it from me, but my delusions for those military war criminals are so strong it transcends games

Here are my xcom 2 characters just for the fun of it. Very "we have modern warfare at home" vibes.

Ghost

Fuck I didn't notice he blinked! Why did you blink?! bRO. He stunning brown eyes were just too powerful.

Soap

Like a little brownie on his head 😌

Price

Honestly? The closest of all the characters.

Gaz

My pretty boy... where has he gone... 😔

Laswell

She's taking no shit in whatever games she's in.

Alejandro

I completely forgot I had made his suit hot pink. Slay.

Rudy

This feels disrespectful to my boy. Justice for Rudy. Still not an operator???

Farah

Thank you for your service.

Valeria

Step on me.

Konig

Probably the funniest because of how absolutely cursed it looks.

And yes, I did take into account their classes and who I can special mate them to. And yes, I will be creating them again every time I play. They've saved the world twice now. Looking forward to a third.

[monstersmashorpass]

SMASH OR PASS: Torque, XCOM

[pyrousred]

Welp, I had another XCOM 2 kick and enjoyed the hell out of that character customizer. Here are but a few Blorbos From My Army, immortalized in sketches. I may boot it back up just to draw some more... there were a lot of designs I was proud of.

[nilobunny]

commission for Doshy of my Hamster and their Samantha being the unstoppable attorney duo! SNEK ATTORNEY

please follow me! bluesky || itaku || twitter || furaffinity || patreon

[austinramsaygames]

God. Imagine all the wild shit the make up industry is getting up to in the world of original XCOM where you're just selling alien corpses by the pallet to anyone with a forklift.

[samueldays]

I got out the original X-COM and started a game for a refresher on what it's like, turned difficulty level to 2/5 with OpenXCOM bugfixes, started by getting extra soldiers for the Skyranger and

boy am I glad I got extra bodies!

The first (very small) UFO escaped interception, this is the second one to show up, a Large Scout, which was landed so it had its full complement of crew and loot, and it was a night-time mission. Ow.

I think a lot of the sequels, reboots, remakes, and general xcom-genre-games have a problem that they didn't want to be churning through cannon fodder like this, so they reduced lethality and scaled squad size down with the best intentions, and that had serious knock-on effects.

Once you're running a 4-man team instead of 12, taking 1 casualty and going down to 3 is a much bigger proportional loss in firepower, so the devs have to reduce lethality some more and ensure the aliens deal carefully-controlled amounts of damage and don't show up in large groups, thus the 'pods' spawning system, the weirdly nonlethal headshots, and so on.

And when you only get 4 shots a turn, RNG impact is larger, so the player has to be given tools to mitigate RNG, like autohit grenades. But wait, if grenades autohit, why wouldn't the player simply 'nade everything? So the 'nades get nerfed into low-damage effects to finish off wounded enemies, and the devs impose a rule that a soldier in XCOM:EU can only carry 1 grenade, and grenades cannot be passed from person to person. Upon promotion to Major, an officer receives permission to carry a second grenade. WTF?

[badroyarts]

Torque is a cool snake.