Poor Stardock, their expansion releases have been fast and furious considering the amount of work and content that has been added. Yet we still chew threw it like a hot chainsaw through butter. I agree though more Elemental plz.

Enjoying it so far.

Definitely liking the 'disturbing factor' of the transformation process.

In vanilla EU, the game repeatedly spouts its nonsense dialog about corruption and whatnot, whining about the 'dark paths' our studies into alien tech may take us down. By and large, this was baseless nonsense and annoyed me. We were gaining tech, big deal.

Now though, there's a practical example for that dialog. First, we have soldiers literally being torn apart, becoming more machine than man and second, we have genetic manipulation altering our soldiers to the point where one would hesitate to even define them as human anymore.

These two things are much better support for the already present theme of "we may win the war, but lose our humanity." This consistency of theme has much improved my experience. 

Yeah, I am enjoying the new maps. And I've totally stopped customizing people or naming them after friends or family. This apparently marks them for death. I'm pretty sure it's hard coded.  

On my Steam WInter sale list.

I bought it on release day. It is awesome and classic is rough. Pre-Enemy within most of my games got pretty far on classic. I'm now celebrating the first game where mutons are turning up in the rotation. The exhalt missions are pretty rough at the level of gear you generally have when the french convoy appears. I'm starting to value beam weapons more. Just the first upgrade for pistols and rifles. With the seekers appearing as early as they do (same time floaters appear) the extra damage is required. It's more important than ever to move crazy slow through maps. 

Well, its definitely a lot harder than the original, which is good (classic was too easy originally).  Some of the missions can get pretty rough.  Not to spoil anything, but there is a mission in Newfoundland that involves a whale that gets...rough.  I drew that one on classic when I didn't have all laser weapons.  It did not go well.

I'm not having too much of a problem with EXALT missions since they don't do much damage.

did they patch the vanilla with fixes now that the expansion is out?? i read the 4 gig update is mostly if not all just vids...

Loving Enemy Within. I'm on the game's last mission again on the temple ship. It's a shame they didn't tweak the ending a little to accommodate the new content from EW. Honestly, with all the content in EW, it really feels the way this iteration of XCOM should have felt from launch. Great expansion though, but I still can't shake the feeling half of this was done before the game even launched and they cut it up into a expansion to milk the game (and our wallets) for some more cash. Is it worth it? Overall yes, yes it is. It makes the new XCOM way more complete and much more awesome.

Welp, I saw the game in the store and picked it up.  Curse my impulsive gamer brain.

with meld, there's finally a reason not to just spend 1 hour on each mission by advancing slowly

they didn't fix anything else though

the balance is still horrible. satellites pay for themselves way too soon. research requires 0 adaptation

it seems like no matter what you do, there's just a simple recipe to playing optimally that you follow every game

the game just needs a more realistic choice between buffing troops and the rest of your expenditures instead of 'do both' all the time

it was so close to a decent game... but the expansion didn't seem to fix any of the core problems

After playing maybe 50-60 hours into a Classic Ironman game, I think I've had enough.  There were many false starts and crushing defeats, but slowly I got the hang of things.  They slowed down research times considerably more or less forcing you to invest in a lab or two.  The DLC missions of Slingshot and Progeny no longer come back up if you skip or fail them.  This is something many people have been clamoring for on the 2K forums.  But........

It's a buggy mess (on PS3 atleast).  I ass-umed it would be less buggy than EU, but I was very wrong.

I won't go into it, but with EU I never ever, ever, ever had to scrap an Ironman game because it froze.  I could just reboot and continue from where I left off.  Not true on EW.  I've had two soul crushing game breaking bugs appear that forced me to start over.

Just today I was at the end of the Temple Ship run and the Uber-Ethereal started his cutscene.  When it was over all was dark except I could see still see lifebars of the newly appeared Ethereals and Muton Elites.  I saved and rebooted, but it was to no avail.  The save file was corrupted.

 My advice: don't even attempt an Ironman game until the game gets patched.

Battleships with lots of Sectopods are tough.  There was like three of them in the fusion core room when I played.  Sectopods now divide their incoming damage by 2.

That being said, MECs are kickass against regular enemies.  Less than twelve HP?  Say hello to my kinetic fist o' doom.

Genetically modified soldiers are even more awesome.  Neural Damping makes psionic enemies really useless.  I went into the alien base mission and captured the Sectoid Commander without getting anybody mind-controlled.  Secondary Heart?  Yes I'd like to not lose 20 Will when a soldier gets critically wounded.

The training roulette creates some interesting (some might say overpowered) combinations.

I have an Assault soldier that can fire three times in one round.

The only thing the aliens have going for them is that they field a lot more mechanised units e.g. Mechtoids.  However I actually found EXALT operatives to be more of a challenge, though I still wiped those guys off the map.