XCOM: Enemy Within is an expansion pack for the turn-based tacticalvideo gameXCOM: Enemy Unknown. The expansion pack primarily adds new gameplay elements to the base game, as well as introducing new themes of transhumanism via aggressive gene therapy.
XCOM: Enemy Within was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 in November 2013. In June 2014, Feral released both XCOM: Enemy Within and its base game XCOM: Enemy Unknown for Linux. The game also came to the iOS App Store and Google Play Store a year after the initial release, on November 12, 2014. On March 22, 2016, the game was released on the PlayStation Store for PlayStation Vita.
The Windows, OS X and Linux editions require XCOM: Enemy Unknown to play; Enemy Within was released for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as part of the Commander Edition bundle with Enemy Unknown. The iOS and Android versions were released as stand-alone apps not requiring the original mobile port of Enemy Unknown to play. The PlayStation Vita version is only available bundled with Enemy Unknown under the title, XCOM: Enemy Unknown Plus.
Gameplay[edit]
The gameplay and plot of XCOM: Enemy Within largely remains the same as XCOM: Enemy Unknown with some additional features. The player manages the XCOM headquarters in almost real time progress, but much of the gameplay consists of turn-based battles against the invading aliens and some with the rogue human faction EXALT across the globe. Similar to the numerous expansions of the Civilization series, the pack retains the core storyline but adds a broad variety of content.
New features[edit]
Development and release[edit]
XCOM: Enemy Within was originally announced with a scheduled release date of November 15, 2013.[9]XCOM: Enemy Within was released in stores on November 12, 2013 in the US, and November 15, 2013 internationally. The game was released for digital distribution via Steam on November 11, 2013.[10]
Mods[edit]
Long War is a partial conversion mod originally developed for XCOM: Enemy Unknown. After the release of Enemy Within, development of the mod switched to Enemy Within.[11] The mod makes changes to many of the game's existing features, adds entirely new features, and brings back concepts from UFO: Enemy Unknown.[12] Changes include the ability to send a larger number of soldiers into battle, additional soldier classes, psionic abilities, weapons, and items, and an expanded technology tree. In the mod aliens and EXALT conduct their own research and get stronger over the course of the game, a process that speeds up or slows down based on the player's success in stopping missions launched by the hostile forces.[13][14][15][16] The mod was heavily praised by Enemy Unknown lead designer Jake Solomon and producer Garth DeAngelis.[17]
Reception[edit]
XCOM: Enemy Within received generally favorable reviews from critics. Ben Reeves of Game Informer lauded the game, advising that 'anyone who loves an intense firefight should test their mettle on Enemy Within,' although also noting that 'Despite Firaxis’ improvements, the developer wasn't able to fix the line-of-sight issues' of the main game and that 'acquiring new squad members still feels unbalanced; since you can't assign your soldiers' roles, and they only learn their specialty once they've ranked up, it's easy to end up with holes in your squad'.[24]Eurogamer's Stace Harman echoed similar statements, stating that despite its flaws, 'Enemy Within is an improvement on an already excellent game,'[23]Destructoid's Chris Carter proffered similar praise, headlining his review with 'It almost feels like a sequel.' Regarding all the new content, he thought that it was 'a really weird way' to approach an expansion due to its blending of old and new content, but summarized his review by saying, 'If you haven't played the newest XCOM yet, now is a perfect time to do so with the Enemy Within package.'[22] Matt Lees of VideoGamer.com similarly summarized his review with, 'The best game of 2012 is back, and it might be the best game of 2013.'[28]
IGN's Dan Stapleton criticized the late-game, stating that all the new content and unlockables make the later half of the game too easy; however, Stapleton still ultimately awarded the game a 9/10, calling it 'an amazing expansion to a brilliant tactical game', and that it 'is best enjoyed in Iron Man mode on Classic difficulty to enhance the emotional highs and lows of victory and permanent defeat.'[27] Conversely, GamesRadar's Ryan Taljonick argued that 'Enemy Within's new additions don't make the experience any easier [because] the added benefit of having access to gene mods and MEC Troopers is offset by new alien types and a whole new faction of fanatical humans. If anything, saving the world is harder than ever.'[26] Although GameSpot's Leif Johnson applauded the game, he was critical of the expansion pack's pricing disparity between PC and consoles: 'All of [its content] is certainly enough for PC players to fork out the $20 for the upgrade, but unfortunately, console players face the more daunting task of buying Firaxis' new creation for almost the price of a new game.'[25]
References[edit]
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=XCOM:_Enemy_Within&oldid=875541555'
XCOM 2‘s tech tree is as sophisticated as the one in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM: Enemy Within. It’s similar, but don’t bank on mastering XCOM 2‘s tech trees based on your knowledge of the previous games.
You’ll acquire new technology through the installation of new facilities and researching your acquisition and salvage of items and aliens.
A fan of the game, u/menhirmike on reddit, has put together a detailed tech tree of all the technology you can research, acquire, and build for your squad’s use. It also includes the missions some research lines will unlock and everything else they may offer. The only thing he hasn’t listed, at least in this version of the tech tree, are perks you can research at the Guerrilla Training School.
Main quest items are all listed, though they’re free-floating as the triggers for these missions are often random and therefore difficult to predict.
Be sure to click on the image below for the full tech tree.
For more of XCOM 2, be sure to check out our XCOM 2 .ini Modifications & Cheats Guide. You’ll be able to modify the damage, difficulty, and just about every other element of the game to make it easier or more difficult. If you’re a modder, you should take a look at that anyway as it’ll give you an idea of every aspect you can modify in the game. You could even make your own Puppy Gun.
XCOM 2 is currently available as a PC-exclusive title on Steam. There’s no word on when it’s headed to consoles, if ever.
I find myself constantly wishing I had some idea what the research tree looked like. For example, if I want to unlock plasma weapons, do I have to go down the laser weapon path first to unlock it, or am I going in completely in the wrong direction?If I want to get a satellite nexus, what do I need for it? How do I get this stealth armor I've heard about?
I have so many questions like this, and some sort of research tree with related manufacturing items would be of immense help.
SternoSterno
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2 Answers
Here is an alternative research tree that you might find userful
Zommuter
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LaurenceLaurence
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Here's a chart, with neat colors:
(Click to expand)
Previous versions:
This is only from a couple of sources, (here and here) so it could probably use some verification. Reddit provided some input as well. Feedback is welcome.
agent86agent86
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Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged xcom-enemy-unknown or ask your own question.
In most cases, new research projects are unlocked after getting a new alien artifact (weapons, pieces of UFOs construction, alien bodies or living aliens), but some of them, such as the armor for soldiers, require the invention of the items. The following tech tree has been divided into several groups to facilitate the reading:
General and story-related technology
Weapons![]()
Armor
Fighters
Interrogations and autopsies
Foundry
I’ve been playing unfinished code for major XCOM expansion Enemy Within.Here are some early impressions for you.
XCOM has a confession to make. All this time it’s been carrying on like it’s a militaristic strategy game (albeit with aliens and robots and psychics), but really, really it’s been a superhero game all along. With major expansion Enemy Within, it proudly rips open its shirt, throws its spectacles to the wind and brazenly displays the lurid spandex beneath. My current squad, for instance, is led by a Mexican in a bright pink mech suit, wearing a matching tribly. He can spray flames from his hands. He can leap over small buildings. He can seep healing gas from whatever’s replaced his pores. He is, in short, about as far away as soldiers get from the mopey-looking, meandering dudes in overalls who characterised X-COM.
With Enemy Within, XCOM and X-COM almost entirely part company. While that’s a statement that would have seen 2011 me immediately take my seat in the Angry Tank, here’s why 2013 me is absolutely convinced this accentuated divergence is only a good thing.
Despite what I just said about Enemy Within taking XCOM on a magical mystery tour into over-the-top superheroics starring Mexicans with metal legs, what it also does it transform XCOM into something that’s rather more clearly a Firaxis game. It’s become really rather statty. Making an efficient soldier, one who can confidently thin the ranks of what’s seemed on a few of the ‘new’ missions I’ve experienced so far to be a raised enemy headcount, means choosing and tracking many numbers. Even more so, if you decide to augment a given soldier’s genes rather than slice their limbs off and stick them inside a Transformer: Deus Ex-style implants confer an array of bonuses to Aim, Crit and whatnot.
Xcom Enemy Within Tech Tree Stand
Add to that the new Medals system, in which you can choose to bestow a limited pool of awards with their own Aim, Crit and whatnot bonuses to your best, brightest and bloodiest. And new types of ammo. And energy fields from Mech units which confer… oh, you know. Point is, there’s a lot to juggle and it’s really ramped up the emphasis on right and wrong builds. It’s not so much about keeping tabs on what individual stat numbers are, and more about ensuring you’ve stacked matching things on relevant units in order to then turn them into the superhumans poor, besieged old Earth so desperately needs to protect it.
Xcom Enemy Within Cheats
Essentially, this comprises a bunch of smaller or even under the hood additions, but put together in a pot with the more overt new stuff – the soldier augmentation – what we’ve got is an add-on which, so far, has absolutely made what’s my fifth playthrough of XCOM feel fresh and different, gently forcing me to shed old habits and develop new strategies. If you’d asked me a couple a months ago what I most wanted from an XCOM add-on, I’m sure I would have banged on about a new campaign and loads of new enemies. Now, I realise that a remix was a much better idea.
Not that my experiences have all been good news. The game does feel a little cluttered now, in terms of the amount of things that need researching and building slow things down enormously – which wouldn’t be an issue if it wasn’t for the matter of keeping the XCOM project’s funding nations happy. With all my cash and efforts going into Mechs and gene-splicing, it’s much more tricky to raise the capital and staff needed to build more satellites and Interceptor kit. I had four nations back out in my second in-game month, which wasn’t because I’d fouled up any missions but because I couldn’t erect enough satellite dishes – which as you may remember also entails building enough relays and power generators and lifts and excavations – in time to offest their rising panic from the terror missions I wasn’t able to do. Still, it is feasible enough to get by, but my point is that all the new stuff – colourful and varied and silly and strategic – both steals focus from and really shows up weaknesses in the base-management aspect of XCOM.
Back to the new stuff, though. It makes its presence know almost immediately, which feels a little odd in that you can be fielding an eight-foot-tall cyborg long before you’ve worked out how to build laser pistols or armour made of something stronger than tissue paper. Still, I’d rather that than have to play through the earliest stages of vanilla XCOM yet again, and it means my focus is on building a new type of team than the usual rookie training and grisly trickle of alien autopsies.
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The Mechs essentially constitute a brand new class, with their own skill unlocks and choices, and their own weapon’n’armour tech tree (primarily unlocked via The Foundry and researching heavy weapon types). Whichever class a soldier was before having their limbs chopped off and replaced with Mecanno confers a different bonus power to their resultant semi-bot state, so with a bit of care you can wind up with a team of Mechs who all play a little differently despite a common appearance.
The main thing to know about Mech units, however, is that they’re bullet-sponges – they don’t and can’t use cover, which means they’re a little more vulnerable. This stops them, and their high damage output, from being overpowered, especially in the early game, but it also means you’ll approach missions in a slightly different way. Without having to forever think about whether a unit is safe in its turn-ending position, there’s much scope to focus on flanking enemies or attaining maximum line of sight – or, for the melee-focused Mechs, getting them right up in an alien’s fearsome maw in order to introduce it to the knuckliest end of a powerfist (12 damage before any upgrades! Hummuna hummuna).
My team has tended to be three mechs out in the field causing havoc, two snipers hanging back to pick off stragglers and one Support equipped with medkit and Arc Thrower. That’s right, two items, thanks to a new option in the officer training school, and another small thing that makes a huge difference. Now every non-Mech soldier has an emergency grenade in addition to their usual best-kit (scopes for snipers, arc throwers or chitin for assault and so forth), and to reflect that there are a host of new grenade types – Flashbang, Thin Man-derived poison, Chryssalid-derived Needle, invisibility… And that all ties into the fact that researching alien corpses now yields multiple benefits, as opposed to just the faintly boring air combat buffs of XCOM-unexpanded. In other words, behind the headline making giant robo-guys, some of the nuts and bolts of the game have been made more rewarding and added many new branches to what was formerly a slightly skeletal tech tree.
Like I say, there’s a lot going on all of a sudden – a lot of choice, a lot of new toys, a lot of subtly or significantly different ways to play the game. Mostly, I enjoyed that, because frankly I have played XCOM to death. But if I hadn’t, I’d be more concerned about the effect on the game’s coherence. Everything seems well-balanced, but as I say it’s gone into full-on superheroics now, and the sense of being an all-too-human military force struggling to adapt to an enemy wielding impossible science is diminished.
It’s not been made easier for it, however – my fair share of hapless rookies still went through the grinder, and even a couple of Mechs met messy ends, all the more painful than losing standard soldiers. The enemy are quick to field Mechtoids, which is exactly what it sounds like in appearance and almost as deadly as a Sectopod in practice, as well as a new, invisible, flying tentacle thing that can pop out of nowhere to strangle soldiers. While they’re a deviation from the standard X-COM/XCOM roster, they do fit the game and they do require new strategies.
I’ll probably talk more about the gene mods, which add new abilities and skill buffs to ‘standard’ soldiers, when I’m Wot I Thinking Enemy Within; being primarily statistical they’re less interesting to both talk about and play with than the Mechs, but they do perform a useful function in terms of making soldiers more specialist and dealing with the issue of redundant or outdated kit – for instance, a suitably augmented sniper can now leap on to rooftops or turn invisible without having to wear Skeleton or Ghost armour. Options are good thing, but the trouble there is that there’s now little reason to ever research Skeleton Suits or Ghost armour. For the most part, Enemy Within has been fitted to Enemy Unknown in a way where the gaps don’t show, but that’s one of those instances where it’s a little more obvious that a whole load of new stuff has been crammed in wherever it will fit.
Then there’s EXALT, the new human enemy faction, who look like a bunch of 50s Feds (a callback to poor old The Bureau, perhaps?) and wield essentially the same weapons as you, plus some amped-up gene mods. They bring with them a new mission type, wherein you send in a lone operative who carries only a pistol and a jacket that looks like it came from Top Man to suspicious-looking areas from base mode, which a few in-game days later is followed up by an extraction mission in which you send your main squad in. You then play one of a several variations of XCOM’s escort mission, wherein you need to safely shuttle the operative around various enemy transmitters or prevent EXALT from holding your own transmitters for more than a couple of terms.
It’s not a massive remix of the standard game, but between the tweaked challenge and facing your own weapons – particularly sniper rifles – it does good work in terms of stopping missions from becoming repetitive. It also means an additional narrative arc of sorts, as successful missions slowly pin down the location of the EXALT base, which leads to outcomes I’m not to chat about yet. There is also – at last – an event involving your own base which I’ll keep shtum on for now, but will have much to say about come the WIT.
In fact, I’m at risking of splurging all I’ll have to say about Enemy Within now, so I’ll wind things up at this point. There’s a hard stop in the preview code, with the promise of further new stuff and campaign alteration to come, and I’m absolutely gagging to get to that. From which you might, accurately, extrapolate that Enemy Within is very much doing the trick for me – it’s making me obsessed with XCOM all over again, it’s making me approach familiar situations with new solutions and it’s making me further accept Firaxis’ title as its own game rather than worry about how it does or doesn’t honour the past. I’m happy.
Just a few smaller observations I want to add, actually:
– the belated inclusion of multiple spoken languages for soldiers makes a huge difference. Having chatter in French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Russian makes the XCOM project seem international at last, as opposed to the cheesy ‘merican action hero noise of before.
– a new button to unequip all items from all inactive soldiers is a time-saving Godsend. – there are so many hats now. What is this, Team Fortress? I do love fielding an all-Trilby squad, though. – This playthrough was the first time I tried the entirety of the earlier Slingshot DLC. Its trio of more scripted skirmishes makes a bit more sense now that the game as a whole has more setpiece missions, but the focus on a special character who even gets a couple of his own monologues is bizarre and inappropriate. – There’s an excellent new mission involving a whale. – Classic Iron Man or GTFO
Enemy Within will be released in about three weeks. You need to own XCOM to play it.
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