XCOM Road to Ironman: What did we learn?

Back to the drawing board

So when we last left off on this grand adventure of 'journey to the centre of the earth', I expressed how I was terrified of moving onto month 2 because I knew it was going to turn out poorly for me. Well guess what; it did and that's another timeline burned, I suppose thems the breaks of your average XCOM game, baby. But whereas this should be a demoralising event that makes one rethink their entire approach to a stupid blog series where I smash my face up against a game I clearly suck at, instead I'm going to try and turn this around into a teachable lesson about how I'm going to win this eventually no matter what, dammit. Also, I think I've come up with a new definer for where I'm going to draw the line just to make sure that I'm keeping forever in control of the campaign and not spiralling into failure with nothing to show for it, because as much as it's 'going the whole way' to go down with the ship, I find that stuff super demoralising and think it'll just end up affecting my chances of continuing this series in general. So bare with me as I try to go over where everything went wrong.

One section in which I had set myself up to succeed with only one small trip-up was in the Metagame of building the XCOM network to cover the globe. I had executed my strategy of building a satellite at the start of each month completely successfully, the only problem being I'd forgotten (idiot that I am) how building Nexus' to accommodate those satellites comes with a set cost in engineers that raises substantially. (5 more engineers for each nexus) Of course, the solution to this is investing as much as possible in the engineer team whenever possible in order to build a small reward pool from the protected countries that'll keep you ever ahead of the curve; but given how early XCOM is so dangerous you can't really devote yourself to one side of development like that. Still, I'd leaned much heavier into research for that run when it would have really behoved me to hedge my bets a little, else I found myself spending money from which I'd never see benefit as all the Satellites in the world are useless if I can't launch them. One a bright side, however, I'd managed to invest in an Officer Training School before the end of month one, which I think is going to become the gold standard of every run; the importance of that milestone cannot be understated.

Of course, where it really fell to part was in the mission-to-mission gameplay in which I somehow managed to lose three people in the space of two missions, one of which being myself. I kept going at the time, but now I'm thinking that keeping myself alive might be standard I set myself to in as narcissistic a manner as that sounds. Because hey- I can't really be putting up with a team wipe at any single point in these runs, so if a match ever falls entirely out of my control to the point where even my personal pointman is in danger, I know to either pull back completely or go for broke. Does that sound stupid and illogical to you? Perhaps, but that's the hill that I'm lining up my gravestone for, so I guess we're doing it right now for certain. Oh, and just so we're clear this does not mean that I'm going to turn around and start trying to skip missions to keep 'virtual me' alive. No guts no glory, am I right?

Elsewhere there was the falling apart of my 'always lead enemies into ambushes' doctrine; but in my defence the game left me no choice in that regard. You're always up against it during UFO crash missions because it's impossible to say whether or not the hostiles are right next to you or bunched up by the crash. I've known roaming pods to literally jump me right out of spawn to devastating effect because I cannot set up a battleground. Well guess what- that's exactly what happened to me in this case. Roving enemy group ambush on turn one, despite me taking an aggressively conservative turtle formation on the first move to prevent that very thing from happening. But such is just the manner of RNG where you cannot control every aspect of the world, what happened next is just an example of tactical failure on my end.

So what we were looking at was a band of 'Thin Men', annoying to deal with due to the fact that they all posses a special ability that allows them to forgo all aiming chance and guarantee shooting a poison cloud on your squad. The only real counter to this is knowing that these enemies prefer to do this when your squad is bunched up and positioning people accordingly. We did that, and managed to push the 'Thin Men' out of spawn area which allowed me a little time to setup for their eventual return back into the fray. (I always hate the cat-and-mouse in such situations. Especially when they go running for several turns as though they genuinely expect me to chase them like an idiot. "Nah thanks, you come to me.") But then I fell for a bulletpoint of my own advice that, in a way I couldn't help, but I should have known better anyway. Because the thing is that I had activated that pod at spawn and setup my defence at spawn, when what I should have done is retreated.

Now again, it's kind of hard to retreat when you're literally pushed up against it at spawn, and thus was my excuse for skipping this part of my rules, but XCOM is ever there to remind you that the second you cut corners in any single fashion, they'll punish you for it. In this instance, I was punished with the same stupid crappy move I thought only Sectoids had the balls to pull off back in the day. Namely, an enemy charged into my line of sight from outside the fog of war (dodging 5 overwatches as he did, because XCOM hates me) and then sniped dead a rookie I'd brought into the mission before his turn was even up. It makes no sense how he'd be able to that considering he'd have no eyes on where anyone in my team was before moving and the rookie in question was even in cover against him, but thus was my punishment for taking a half measure. Never take half measures. Oh, and as you can see from the picture, my folly was completed by a horrifying missclick with my designated assault in the same mission. (So now you can see why that timeline is officially a bust)

It sucks to have to wrap things up so early in the run after losing one inconsequential person and three skilled ones, but the point to take away if that the first two months of XCOM are so very important that a single mistake will put you on the backfoot for a large swathe of the game; and I'd made three. The name of the game here is to push all the way to laser weaponry and carapace armour before the really terrifying units start showing up on the battlefield and if I'm looking like I'm not getting there I will cut myself off before getting too attached. I think that part of me feels I'm a little hair trigger on this, which is partially why I'm justifying myself so much. Perhaps this is coming from my 'Into the Breach' experience wherein you'd literally be encouraged to dip at the first sign of downturn. The only difference is that there it'd take a few minutes to be back into the action, whereas XCOM is notably slower paced. Still, I'm not sure if I'm being too harsh and should stick with my failures a bit longer, let me know what you think down in the comments.

So another day another timeline surrendered to the aliens, Oh well. At the end of the day it's not too bad of a loss, afterall it's the failure of XCOM one's campaign that canonically leads to the storyline of XCOM 2, so not everything is a bust, right? Still, I hope to make it considerably further before I'm back looking at the start screen next time, so I'm going to have to do a little relearning before I launch into the swing of things once more. (Also a little bit of confidence rebuilding. I know this was only month 2, but I always take my failures to heart) I know I can get further than this, it's just a matter of perseverance and ingenuity, two stats that I'd like to think I have some real-life investment into. (At least I hope so.) Alright, that's that, lessons officially learned; mistakes I won't make on the next run, right? (else the next report blog is going to be very embarrassing to write.)