XCOM Enemy Unknown Review and beginner tips

As of today, I've put in a solid 31 hours of this wonderful game I've picked up on Steam. For those that are not familiar with XCOM: enemy unknown, this is a reimagined copy of the early 90's tactical shooter also named XCOM. The original game is a game I have never played, but it is a well known title among gamers for being one of the greatest yet hardest games around.

XCOM is a turn-based tactical shooter game with an overarching strategy game component. The highlight of the game is definitely the shooter aspect though. To be completely honest, until 3 weeks ago I was unfamiliar with the genre myself. I knew of other games like this one, such as Jagged Alliance, but had never played them. It encompasses a turn-based game where you have multiple units that you must strategically position and use their skills to destroy the opposing units. In XCOM you will control between 4-6 infantry units that can be of one of four roles. They can be of the following types:

• Heavy - Tough units that use a LMG (Light machine gun) as well as a rocket launcher.
• Sniper - The name says it all. They are great at shooting enemies from a distance with sniper rifles. These units are critical in this game since taking damage, especially early in the game, is something you need to avoid. It is not uncommon to lose a unit with full health in one turn. This is definitely a game where mistakes have high cost.
• Assault -  One of my favorite classes, they are the sturdiest units and the only class that allows you to chose a main weapon. You can use an assault rifle which gives you a little bit more range, or a shotgun which can be very useful in close range combat. As I mentioned, this is a game that rewards safe strategies, however a well timed move by an assault unit can be devastating to a team already crippled. I sometimes also use assaults to initiate a fight. Once my entire squad is in a safe firing squad position, you can send in the assault unit, obliterate one of their units right of the getgo and then pick off the others with your more ranged units.
• Support  - Arguably the most versatile class in the game. They can be fairly mobile, they have abilities that make them strong healbots and just overall offer great utility as well due to their extra inventory spot. I tend to take 2 supports when I can with my team.

Overall, I highly recommend this game to anyone that enjoys a good strategy game. It's a 2K game, so there is an extra incentive to try it from Civilization fans. This game does seem to have some of the same appeals as Civ games does to me. Another cool aspect of this game and other games of this genre is the RPG element of building up your squad that develops as you use individual soldiers. You actually start to get pretty attached to your soldiers, which can make the permadeath from a mistake a fairly traumatic event to the player.

Lastly, here are some of my tips for this game from my first 30 hours of play:

• Don't focus on training up only a handful of soldiers. Expand your team and make sure you always have a backup. Soldiers can get hurt in a mission and be out of comission quite often. I've been in situation where I literaly had 10 soldiers hurt and only had 5 rookies to chose from, which is something you really want to avoid.
• In terms of the non-tactical part of the game, make sure to do your research and try to focus on building up your technologies. Especially the satelite/interceptor related ones.
• Don't overspend, only buy things you need now or soon.
• Try to get more satellites up as soon as you possibly can, I promise you will regret not doing that.
• In terms of research, research laser weapons early as well. They are much better than the standard weapons. Aside from that focusing on armor is also important. I try to get the skeleton armor early if possible since it has nice stats and allows for great mobility.
• Any research that tells you it's urgent or priority is only priority if you want the game to move forward. With only a few exceptions, not doing those things right away is actually a good way to slow down the pace of the game. This can make the game a bit easier since the aliens don't get too difficult too quickly and you have time to do more research and get more money before things get too tough. One exception for me so far was the skeleton key research to be able to invade the alien base. At that point in the game you will not have very many satellites up, so your fear levels will slowly get out of hand even if you are completing missions every time. So my advice is to basically do the research and build the skeleton key, but then hold off on actually going to their base until you have a country on the RED. Once you beat the alien base invasion you will get rid of a lot of the heat around the world. Of course, you need to beat that mission for this to work.
• Dig and build before you need them. While it's important to not overspend in this game, you also don't want to be waiting 20-30 days on something you need today. So plan ahead when you know you will need to dig deeper to expand or build another power plant.
• In terms of office training, I don't tend to bother with wet work until I have a lot of cashflow, it's not a big deal. Just try to get to 6 member squads and get the iron will quickly since those are very useful. Heaving the quicker turn around in terms of healing your units is also very nice.
• More engineers is always useful for progressing, more scientists is nice but I never need to build labs for that reason. So when it comes to chosing missions, I'll pick engineers first, unless I need the money. Sometimes you may want the soldier if it's a class you need.
• In terms of squad composition, I tend to use:

1. Heavy (mainly focused on suppression skills and holo-targeting), he serves as my first move in a turn usually to weaken opponents or last move if I need to shut an enemy off a bit. (Fire Rocket -> Holo Target -> Suppression -> Heat Ammo -> Danger Zoone -> Will to survive -> Mayhen, although Rocketeer can be good if you like the granade launcher build better). This character will usually carry a granade or maybe a scope if I don't need the granade.
2. Shotgun assault (Mobile and heavily armored, with the idea he will be deadly when enemies get close). My build usually is Run and Gun -> Tactical Sense -> Ligthning Reflexes -> Rapid Fire -> Close Combat Specialist -> Extra Conditioning -> Killer Instinct. I tend to wear a vest on this character for the extra hit points
3. Sniper, always with a scope and a laser pistol once I get them. My built is Headshot -> Squad Sight -> Damn Good Ground -> Disabling Shot (i love this one in tough situations, works to prevent mind control even) -> Opportunist -> Low Profile -> Double Tap
4. Support, I often carry the healing pads on this guy and maybe the stun gun if no one else has it. My build is Smoke Granade -> Sprinter (good for scouting)-> Field Medic -> Revive (although this is not necessarily the best) -> Combat Drugs -> Deep Pockets -> Savior
5. Rifle Assault, this guys will be more of a ranged class which will carry either a granade, stun gun or scope. It's more of a flexible role I suppose, not a substitute for the other build unless you are playing on a big open map. Run and Gun -> Tactical Sense -> Ligthning Reflexes -> Flush (great for first moves) -> Close Combat Specialist -> Extra Conditioning -> Resilience
6. The sixth position can either be for a rookie you want to take along, another sniper if the map is open and large or a support which can always be useful
7. Another worthy mention is the alternative build for a sniper I use. This is for a mobile sniper, perhaps not as deadly as the other one, but useful in crash maps and maps with a lot of indoor fights.  Headshot -> Snap shot -> Gunslinger -> Disabling Shot -> Executioner -> Low Profile ->In the zone

Crusader Kings 2: Starting moves with Leon

 After some time distracted from this wonderful game, I decided to give it another go. Unfortunately I didn't get as far as I wanted with my Danish dynasty game. This time around I will be playing the kingdom of Leon in the Iberic Peninsola. To start, I thought it may be a good idea to lay out what my initial moves in this game are. Just a sort of rough guide of what I have to remember to do when I start a new game of CK2. This will be useful in the future when I decide to return to this game again and maybe other people may also find this useful when they are starting to learn the game or getting back to it. Let's face it, while this game is incredible, it has a pretty unfriendly interface. Maybe it's just me, but paradox tends to make games that to me are very far from intuitive when you first start, and their interfaces are fine for when you know your way around the game, but not so fine if you don't. Anyway, here are my first actions in Crusader Kings 2 when I start a new game.

    1. Make sure you don't unpause the game before doing a couple of things. These are some of the aspects you need to consider.
    2. Are you married? In my new game I am not married so I made sure to find a suitable wife. I must say I'm not an expert in this game so if I do things that aren't necessarily super efficient, please leave it in a comment. In terms of what I looked for, I wanted a wife with good stats and traits to compliment my own. Using the ruler creator DLC, I made my King Sebastian I of Leon to be strong in stewartship (14) and diplomacy (9). I wanted decent Learning (7) as well. I picked a Norwegian lady with 17 intrigue and 11 Martial. She was a really nice girl who managed balance me out. She was pretty cute too, which should go well with my "attractive" king.
    3. Make sure your council is filled and fill it with the best possible people for the job.
    4. Once your council is filled, give them jobs.
    5. Your chancellor should likely either help you ensure good relations around your territory however in some cases if you feel your guy will be ready for a fight soon, might not hurt to start fabricating claims to lands that may be easy first targets.
    6. For my Marshall, I tend to put him on research duty unless there is any reason not to at this point.
    7. My Stewart tends to also work on reasearch for the most part. If I have extra cash and decide to build an improvement right away, perhaps he can help with that, otherwise research is likely your best bet.
    8. Spymasters are also quite important, but at first I tend to leave him to do research as well since it may take me a little bit of understanding the political situation before I can either send him/her on a defensive or offensive mission.
    9. Lastly, my religious dude tends to go first to any duchies that I need to improve relationships with bishops and so forth. Read point 10 to understand why.
    10. Make religious vassals like you better than the pope, otherwise they don't pay you taxes. Basically if they like the pope better than you they tend to give everything away to the pope which means less money for us.
    11. In fact, try to make all your vassals as happy as you can. Ensures you will wake up the next day and has the added benefit of increasing your income and levy capabilities. Considering this game is about maintaining a dynasty, keeping your vassals happy will be a big part of what you do in CK2.
    12. I often also try to marry my council with people with good traits. My thinking that may produce good traited council folk, which can be very useful in the long term.
    13. Find suitable mates for children. Perhaps will help ensure a legitimacy claim in the future.
    14. I also like to bring in some new people to my court. I do that usually to bring in talent near me. In the case of males, they can later be used as councilors when your dies or if they suck. In the case of females they may not be as useful right away, but they can be used to marry other people around you in the attempt to produce children with good stats and traits. The way to get people to join your court is a bit crude. There may be a nice and simple way to do this but I either basically sort people through the people finder, which is really not very efficient, even if you only show people with no holdings, or you can surf around different duchies and click on "claimants". You can look through the list and see if anyone has a "small green thumbs up" icon next to their photo. This means that the person is indeed willing to join. This method is much better than the people finder simply because it takes less clicks to find who's available to join you. One word of caution however, avoid inviting people that really dislike you, especially if they have high intrigue. This could easily turn into an assassination given the right conditions.


Just another piece of advice, which I wanted to add but really isn't so much something you need to take care of in the beginning of a game. That is, once you have to give away a duchy due to your vassals being jealous or whatever, one good way to do it is to find a vassal of yours with only a city, temple or castle and give it to that vassal. I go even further and try to find someone that doesn't have kids and is likely to be too old to have them still. This way you can have the holding back once this character dies, which gives you once again control of who's going to be running that piece of your kingdom.

DotA 2 : It's mostly a numbers game

As I previously mentioned, I'm a big fan of using numbers as a way to understand things. For that I have been collecting a lot of numbers from the games I play, mostly all pubs. After gathering enough that I feel that I may be able to draw some conclusions or at least some patterns.

The first aspect I compared in my games was to see whether gold collection or XP collection actually produce a good indicator of which team will win a game. I used the total gold accumulated to make a ratio where I divide gold accumulated by the winning team by the gold accumulated by the losing team. A ratio of 1 means both teams accumulated the same, anything above one represents the winning team having more gold than the losing team.

All the data below is based on my last 131 matches. As you can see it appears pretty obvious from looking at these ratios that both are indicators on average to what team will win, and it is obvious that the team to get the most will tend to win. However looking at the individual numbers, I do see that there are 8 out of the 131 matches where a team with less XP actually managed to win. Most of them are quite close to 1, however there is a 0.84 and a 0.86, which sort of suggest that in general the rule works but there are circumstances where the cumulative XP isn't the only indicator.

Interestingly however, is the fact that the gold ratio is a much much better predictor. Only one game in my records has a 0.99 ratio, which is basically 1. While it does appear that gold might be the more important number here, it did make me wonder what kind of effect towers have in this. How much of this gold is actually coming from towers, in which case the late game, especially when the other team is doomed in their fountain, produces large amounts of gold, that are hardly useful for the purpose of predicting a winner. I suppose it would be much more useful to look at numbers excluding tower gold, or numbers up to the last 5-10 minutes. Another option which is probably more verifiable is to look at last hits, since this will potentially be less biased, however the late game can offer a large amount of creep killing as well.




Another cool little graph I produced was looking at the same gold ratio vs the duration of a game. I figured that games that last longer will generally have a more even gold distribution as teams are probably more balanced. From plotting these 131 games, it is pretty clear that this trend is accurate. For the most part games with a gold ratio close to 1 tended to last 45-65 minutes. As an aside, the average duration of my 131 games was 40.6 minutes.

My last comparison involves looking at my performance and how much I contribute to team gold in my wins and losses. Basically I divide my total accumulated gold by the gold accumulated by my team. Initially this sounded like a good comparison and I have a 20.7 ± 0.6 % during my losses, and a 19.0 ± 0.4 % participation during my wins. While there may even be a statistical difference suggesting that I do seem to be less important of a player during games I lose, I think not accounting for my role adds a lot of noise to the data. I mean this is an obvious stat to look at, but I wanted to see how much of an impact I actually have. A much more meaninful comparison would be to isolate only the gold I contribute in games I play a particular hero or a particular role.

So that's what I did. If I make the same graph but only look at my Furion games this is what it looks like. I did 22.3 ± 0.7 % of my team's gold during my losses and did 19.7 ± 0.8 % during my victories. Showing a slightly less noisy graph despite it having less than a quarter of the data points.

Anyway, I just wanted to post some interesting graphs for now, even if they are not terribly insightful. I will be looking to post more impactful graphs and information later on, as I learn more about this deliciously complex game.