By the way, on my first (and only) play-through I insisted on playing on normal with Ironman on. I thought I was doing quite well and had a little crew of very tough elite warriors. Then I attacked the alien base...

You might want to delay the main objectives until you research beam weapons and carapace armor at least.

Maybe try marathon mode, it lengthens the game by making research slower and attacks more frequent, but you'll accumulate a lot of raw materials and cash that way.

Also, I love this game.

I haven't played enemy within yet, so I'm not watching this either. When i got enemy unknown i was able to beat the game with only a couple restarts. Then I upped the difficulty and turned on "ironman", needless to say i never lasted long.

The trick to Ironman is perseverance and speed. You need to put everything you can into getting more satellites up ASAP to get your income secured. Go for continent bonus quick, the the South American one that only takes two more satellites and negates wait times for researcher credits, which in turn severely reduces research time and costs. Always take engineer rewards to accommodate more relays to accommodate more satellites. Don't even bother getting attached to troops, they are all meat until your economy is established and optimized, and then don't get too attached to your top guys. Always take a rookie on missions to be an understudy to replace your best guys if they die, or to be an extra target to draw fire away from your core team. Don't give up if you wipe. DO give up if you lose a country.

Get plasma before assaulting the alien base. Never use rush, ever. Be patient. You can do it.

If you wait until plasma to assault the alien based then you have FAILED as a man. Carapace armor and beam weapons are plenty.

I think I had carapace armor. Not sure about beam weapons though. They fucking kicked my ass really bad.

So what, With the research credits, you can actually get to Plasma fairly quickly and it'll make the base way easier. I don't know about you, but I'm not letting my pride get in the way of the fate of the Earth. You're dangerous, Maverick.

The important thing is that these were things *I* discovered, as the player, out of a practically limitless field of options, not some binary choice between one thing or the other.

Also I still *do* like the new one for its tactical combat

Actually the difficulty of the new one is all weird, I found you either play through without anything bad happening and its really easy all the time or else you lose your elite team and its impossible to recover. In the original you lose whole teams fairly often and can lose bases, you certainly have a constant attrition rate of soidiers. But you expect this and you can recover as you will have multiple teams anyway. This also makes thee game really seem like a grim battle to the death. I would specifically have green cannon fodder soldiers in each team that would regurlarly die but the few who survive get to make it to veteranhood and earn better armour.

Yeah, I agree. The remake has a lot of restrictions, and seems to guide you quite a bit. For example, Enemy Within adds two more storyline elements, so you are basically playing a linear progression of story missions until you're ready to take on the mothership.

It's a fun game, and I'm loving it, but it's just not quite as rich as the original.

I played the original a lot as a kid. The main thing i remember about it is getting cheap shotted from the cover of darkness, then having one of your squaddies go berzerk and kill the rest of your team. All the cool overworld stuff you got to do was, in my opinion, over shadowed by how unforgiving the actual combat was, so i was pretty open to the new version.

I've gone back and tried to play ufo defense recently, and couldn't get by how shit the interface is by today's standards. While there are some things missing from the new version, i give firaxis a big thumbs up for not completely ruining the series.

I got x-com when I was about 13: it was sitting in a 9.99 bin and the guy at the shop warned me that kids were taking the game back because it was too hard. What a condescending prick.

I've only had two missions directly vs. EXALT so far, but yeah, they haven't been particularly amazing as a new enemy. The fact that they use rocket launchers is cool in theory, but they'll only do it if they can kill three or more guys at once, at which point, well, I'm probably reloading my last save.

I did like how they jab themselves in the neck with a needle if you taser them. BURY ME WITH MY BITCOINS

I got fuuucking destroyed at the end of this mission.

Here's my last three turns:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJy4AGbtnqQ

The tactical combat portion kicked ass though. Turn based squad combat so needed a kick in the pants to eliminate slow paced micromanagement.

Is everyone saying assault class sucked though? They fucking rocked! No reason at all to ever want another class except for maybe a medic (who was frustratingly useless the first couple ranks).

The Assault class sucked in Enemy Unknown. Their only use was making a sectopod waste it's auto-overwatch. I would drop Assaults completely once I got Ghost Armors and go with 2 Support scouts/spotters, 2 Squad Sight Snipers and 2 Rocket Heavies and I would completely dominate all missions.

But now that Assaults got a new god-like ability giving them a completely free shot at anything within 4 meters letting you easily set up 3 shot turns for assaults(4 shots against berserkers) I've changed my opinion of them.

Also, both Heavies and Snipers got their damage output nerfed so Assaults moved up. With Heavies' HEAT ammo getting slashed in half and Squad Sight snipers being unable to critical squad sighted targets unless you use headshot. Oh and Sectopods got buffed up with a crazy 50% damage reduction so you now need Assaults around to wreck them quick before the Sectopods do their thing.

I tried all sorts of skill combos with snipers and could never get them to work. No clue why everyone says they were the best.

Heavies? They started off good but fell behind and soon became obsolete. Had to research 2 separate, specialized tech lines for them to keep pace and it just never felt worth it when....

...I could just use assaults! Super sprint up to enemies, auto-dodge overwatch shots, double shotgun blast point blank to the face? Nothing could stand up to that. For half the effort of fully researching heavies, I could just research the ultimate shotgun (alloy cannon?) which blew apart even sectopods in one turn.

It got to the point where I classified my team as "assaults, and the guys who heal them".

I looked it up. It was Necromunda.