#HOW TO MOD XCOM ENEMY WITHIN FULL#
#HOW TO MOD XCOM ENEMY WITHIN ANDROID#
#HOW TO MOD XCOM ENEMY WITHIN PC#

This latter is what's most complicating things - keeping nations and their precious funding onboard the XCOM project is now more about shooting down any UFOs with approach them than it is throwing up satellites or the Terror Mission roulette wheel. Not that XCOM was ever a short war, but I've put hours into this mod and am still making do with mostly entry-level gear and abilities, am still facing off against primarily Sectoids and Drones, have a dozen people in hospital and have lost five Interceptors.

And then survive the experience, of course. So giving someone a shotgun is less about their being the right class, and more about whether their stats and other equipped gear gives them enough movement bonus to reliably get up close to xenos, for instance. On top of that, everyone winds up being a little different, thanks to hybridising of the classes and more scope to equip people with a wider range of weapons than XCOM's mostly class-locked arsenal.

#HOW TO MOD XCOM ENEMY WITHIN FULL#

Perhaps a couple of cast-iron favourites will emerge over the full length of the campaign, as was the case with X-COM. The downside of this is that I feel I don't know my team as well - there's a bit more squinting at stats and thinking 'what did you do again?' when someone returns to duty. A C-team too, to be honest - you don't want to be left with a handful of fragile, easily-spooked rookies because everyone else is either in hospital or sleeping it off. While smart players tended to have a b-team in vanilla XCOM anyway, here it's absolutely mandatory. They also get pretty badly chewed up out there - not only the inevitable woundings (which result in far longer recovery times) and deaths, but also left fatigued by missions and thus hamstrung if they go back out immediately. Your squad evolve in less predictable ways, with sub-classes and wildly varying stats as well as a raft of new tech and more equipment slots. But where the changes really focus is on soldier management. It's an extremely different game - perhaps a little less in the missions themselves, although squad sizes up to eight, more variability in accuracy, damage, movement and morale, and tweaks like Sectoids having psychic powers from the off and Outsiders capable of health regeneration, definitely means a remix. It's not at all accurate to say it's X-COM remade within XCOM, but it does reinstate some of the Gollop game's core values - more stats, more specialisms, the need for a B-team, more ways to both piss off and mollify funding nations, more brittle aircraft and the need for far more Interceptors, soldier fatigue, more enemies with earlier access to more devastating abilities, satellites focused on global coverage rather than global happiness, terror missions freed from the arbitrary choice of which nation to cheer up and which to annoy. I'd figured previously that The Long War was focused primarily on more random numbers and more unforgiving difficulty, but what it really does is both re-introduce a number of discarded-in-translation X-COM elements and expand upon XCOM's own variety.

I regret it because it is so good, which means I have been sucked into yet another full-length XCOM campaign, and the attendant consequences on both my work and personal lives. While my eye was off the ball, a beta Enemy Within version was released (with several updates since), and hearing that it got even further into the game's innards than before, I decided now was the time to investigate it despite my reservations. That it didn't work with Enemy Within, requiring instead that XCOM was manually rolled back to an earlier patch, had only put me off more. I've been keeping a remote eye on the Long War mod for a while, but to be perfectly honest I'd written it off as joyless ultra-hardcore tweaks for a very particular type of strategy gonk. A rather more Gollopy experience, one might say. Only this time, I switched things up, and have had a completely different experience.

#HOW TO MOD XCOM ENEMY WITHIN PC#

Much as it's a surprisingly natural fit for phone play, the combination of camera control issues, not being able to change the colours of my soldiers' armour and no Enemy Within expansion drew me to firing up the PC version yet again instead.

#HOW TO MOD XCOM ENEMY WITHIN ANDROID#

One of the answers to that question is that the game just had a belated Android release, so I found my way to it in waiting rooms and bathroom breaks. There are so many other games I should and would like to play, yet I find myself once again knee-deep in something I by this point know every aspect of. 'Why am I playing XCOM through for the sixth time?' is a question I've asked myself several times over the last week.

How to mod xcom enemy within