The last two things that happened in the run was that he did a Manor, which he won with 4 out of 16 people still alive at the end, 3 of which badly wounded. Really close and thus exciting to watch.
Most of the fight looks like what you would usually expect, except that at the end he loses troops left and right. Looks either under-prepared or B-AI is much better at endspiel.
His reasoning for the first restart was that he was too far behind in progress of what he thought he was supposed to have by that point.
Usually you'll have promotion 3 (defeating one of the cults), and weaponry outlined below. In normal game it's not required for battling aliens per se, but I guess you'll need more options against B-AI.
I'm not sure whether the mission against the aliens was representative of what to expect a few more months down the line.
I'm assuming you're talking about that Downed UFO after manor?
Even with Normal-AI, you can expect to be shredded by aliens if you just try to outshoot them early. With right gear\tactics however, you can complete Downed UFO semi-flawlessly as early as 1997.
That being said, getting inside that UFO with 5 B-AI sectoids seemed really tough, period. Have to either sacrifice a few assaults, or fill the inside of UFO with incendiaries - they go through the shield.
What I also wonder is how much more powerful he could theoretically have gotten before 1999.
Normally, by 1999 you'd get craft for 12-16 troops, increasing amount of possible sacrifices (:.
Weaponry wise - something like a basic vanilla gear - e.g. rockets, cannons. PROXIMITY GRENADES. Better grenade launcher. Maybe lasers, with good RNG. Against sectoids, melee and grenades will remain one of best options.
Armor - there's better ballistic armor. Also you'll get personal armor or slightly better. It gives OK chance to survive plasma blasts, while being knocked down and on fire. Thus requiring squaddie with extinguisher to spend his turn rescuing the victim, possibly just standing there like a dolt.
Early 99, with a bit of luck, you can loot a couple of power suits from specific tough enemies, which give pretty good protection, but will go away if you're not careful. To manufacture good armor you'll need quite a few alien engineers = surviving quite a few UFOs.
It seems like the stats go up way more quickly and also reach significantly higher values.
Stats increase in same way they do in vanilla, but there are many easy missions to boost them. This is the main difference, as you have good chance to bounce back if you lost your A-team. Regarding how
caps are different I dunno. There's also many researchable one-time trainings that increase stats down the line.
Another big difference was that the ratio of health to damage was so that most hits resulted in injuries rather than death, meaning that agents often could be saved.
Yes, common firearms rarely one-shot agents, especially those in armored vests. There's still grenades, rockets, melee critters and gimmicky units though.
So having to replace 20 veterans with rookies is a massive reduction in overall combat-strength.
It depends on equipment. E.g., most players prefer to play around snipers. Sniper rifles have long range and cannon-level damage but very quickly dwindle in accuracy bellow 100 firing, thus require veterans to use. But there are ways to make most of the rookies.
Playing Superhuman on XCF is pure ego, IMO. Adding extra enemies to the missions does very little to fill them out since they're already pretty populated already.
It increases enemy stats, too. Not that much compared to veteran, but still.
And XCF is very forgiving of failure, since past a point you stop having to worry about money, and you can definitely play money-efficient if you know what you're doing before that point. You can 100% play it out in almost every circumstance; the penalties for not completing cults "on time" are minimal, and even with really good RNG and strategic-layer play, you weren't going to be prepared for the impending alien invasion.
Yep, fully agree. That wasn't always the case, though...
