Taken out of context, "Warspace Extension" sounds like the subject of a cheeky spam email to a military general. For XCOM: Enemy Unknown commanders, it's the name of a mod overhauling weapons, enemies, armor, squad performance, and practically everything else housed beneath Firaxis' turn-based Sectoid-slayer. Commence Operation: Righteous Replay.

Author BlackAlpha suggests enjoying Warspace on Classic difficulty, but before you reach for that laser wrist-cutter you just researched, he assures the mod's tweaks retains Normal mode's challenge for easier engagements. The sizable change notes display in full over at Warspace's Nexus entry, but we've snipped some of the more interesting adjustments for reading below:

Weapons

The Arc Thrower now goes in the pistol slot.
Pistols (except the Laser Pistol) need to be reloaded.
The sniper rifle's close-range accuracy penalty has been removed, but it still requires two actions to fire.
Environmental structures now withstand a few more hits before collapsing. This allows for better cover use and increased tactical play.

Enemies

Enemies have been changed in such a way that combat becomes more logical, resulting in more fluid battles.
When a Chryssalid kills a civilian offscreen, the civilian will now always turn into a zombie. (NOPENOPENOPE)
The AI will now always use more than five NPCs in combat instead of hiding when reaching the NPC limit.

Strategic map

Ignored missions no longer increases the overall panic level of a continent but only of specific countries at a larger penalty.
Satellites are much more likely to decrease panic levels of their assigned countries at the end of the month.
Increased research time of plasma weapons to make it harder to unlock them and make lasers more attractive.
Workshops are enabled from the start, allowing the player to begin the strategic game with a different starting move.



Soldiers

Armor plays a large role in how fast soldiers will panic: The higher the HP bonus, the smaller the panic chance becomes.
Panicking soldiers no longer shoots their teammates.
Injured soldiers require a significantly longer recovery time, especially for gravely injured squaddies.

Armors

Armors are now divided into Heavy and Light variants: Carapace, Titan, and Archangel for the former and Skeleton, Ghost, and Psi for the latter.
Heavy armors provide two item slots. Light armors provide only one slot.
Carapace reduces mobility by one square. Titan and Archangel reduces mobility by two squares. All Light armors increases mobility by three squares.
Light armors have special mobility abilities (except Psi armor) that allow them to move around the battlefield with more ease.

General

Normal, Classic, and Impossible difficulty levels should be the same now apart from hard-coded differences.
Second Wave is enabled. You'll need a completed Impossible campaign to unlock all the options.
Second Wave Marathon mode is fixed. You can build the Hyperwave Relay with just one Hyperwave Beacon.

You're near the end of an especially hairy XCOM: Enemy Unknown scenario. An alien has one health, and you have an Assault specialist in firing range. Should you use the Rapid Fire ability for two shots at a 15% reduced hit chance, or take one shot? You could make the decision with your gut, or you could do the math, as University of Kent Research Associate Neil Brown has done. In a blog post today, Brown answers that question and others with numbers and glowing probability graphs.

The result: If a normal shot has a hit chance between 34% and 96%, the alien only needs one shot to kill, and ammo isn't an issue, you should use Rapid Fire. If one shot isn't enough and you want to do as much damage as possible, you should use Rapid Fire only when your normal hit chance is above 30%.

I won't embarrass myself by attempting to explain Brown's math, but you can see the equations on his website. He also (almost definitely correctly) points out that Firaxis must have done the same math when arriving at the 15% Rapid Fire accuracy penalty. That's no surprise, of course, but a reminder that nothing in games is arbitrary. Though I tend to get lost in the surface-level war metaphor and make gut decisions, the best possible decision in any game comes down to the numbers at play—XCOM just puts them on the surface for us to poke at. And by "us," I mean people like Neil Brown, whose mathifying I can enjoy.

Join Evan, Omri, and T.J. for a descent into the frightening (and sometimes disappointingly not-so-frightening) world of horror games on this minimally-gimmicky, holiday-themed epsiode. Featuring SPOOKY news, SPOOKY discussion of upcoming DLC for some of our favorite games, and SPOOKY musing on whether Minecraft is still relevant. Listeners beware, you're in for... PC Gamer Podcast 334: Burger Commando

Have a SPOOKY question, comment, complaint, or observation? Leave a SPOOKY voicemail: 1-877-404-1337 ext 724 or email the mp3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com.

Subscribe to the SPOOKY podcast RSS feed.

Follow us on Twitter:
@ELahti (Evan Lahti)
@omripetitte (Omri Petitte)
@AsaTJ (T.J. Hafer)
@belsaas (Erik Belsaas, podcast producer)

Firaxis hit the deployment hangar for its DLC plans rather fast with its announcement of the Slingshot mission pack yesterday, but it's yet to give a go-ahead for full modding support. Speaking to Joystiq, Firaxis Producer Garth DeAngelis stated modding wasn't one of their "core pillars" during development.

"It's something that we'd like to resolve going forward, but we still have quite a few things on our plate that have been planned for a while," he said. That predictably entails an established DLC release schedule in the short-term, though the departure in attitude from Firaxis' mod-happy Civilization franchise is still surprising.

Dark0ne of the XCOM Nexus modding network offered a terse response, writing, "If you're cynical, like me, that reads as 'We'll maybe talk about mods after we've milked the DLC for all their worth.' Not that you can hold it against Firaxis. After all, they're a business. But for people who care more about mods than they do about lackluster DLC, it's a blow." Meanwhile, savvy INI tweaks such as difficulty adjustments and the re-enabling of Second Wave options continue piling up.

Yesterday we let our speculation over XCOM's inevitable DLC run as rampantly as a panicked Sectoid, but 2K and Firaxis have their own vision for XCOM's post-release content. Today they announce the impending deployment of Slingshot, a tri-Council-mission campaign set in a besieged China featuring a new playable squad character, enhanced customization options, and a couple research shortcuts.

While in China, the XCOM organization encounters a lone Triad VIP sporting a unique look and voice for escort in the first mission, after which he dons the bulky armor and rock-and-roll cannons of a Heavy and joins your squad with increased stats. GameSpy's report carries further details on Slingshot's aesthetic—for one, China looks appropriately Asian-themed instead of Urban Ruins Template 12-A. The remaining two missions involve a UFO boarding action in the skies above Asia.

Completing all three of Slingshot's missions unlocks a research shortcut to the almighty Blaster Launcher and Fusion Lance weapons, both normally end-game technologies with significant R&D time for acquisition. Alternative appearances for Titan, Ghost, Archangel, and Psi armors, as well as more hairstyles and helmets round out Slingshot's increased customization options for your soldiers. At the same time, Slingshot misses its 20 percent opportunity for brand new aliens, equipment, and abilities—content many commanders clamored for since XCOM's launch but somehow missing from Firaxis' first DLC offering.

Slingshot lacks a release date yet beyond a cryptic "soon" from Firaxis. In the meantime, the rest of humanity still needs saving. Get to it, commander!

Now that mysterious hidden achievements on Steam have all-but-confirmed that a DLC release is imminent for XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it got us wondering--what kind of DLC would we like to see? Judging by what’s already been revealed, it seems like a good bet that the first pack will include six new missions (Confounding Light, Deluge, Furies, Friends in Low Places, Gangplank, and Portent) and at least one new “ally” character (Soldier? Civilian? ...Alien?) that can be taken into battle. Read on to see what else we’d like to see in upcoming DLC for XCOM.

Turn the tables
 


Alternate campaigns are my single greatest wish, as tough and replayable as the default one is. How about a campaign where we take the fight to the aliens? After establishing a hidden base on their homeworld, we could send out our spy satellites to locate key installations to cut off their infrastructure and production. Special missions could be unlocked to cause panic in their cities and make them lose funding. Special mission types would have you repelling attacks on your base. This would be a great campaign for a veteran squad, and a perfect context to add more ranks, more weapons, and tougher aliens to match them. --T.J.

Fire and flamethrowers
 


Fire’s actually an existing but underdeveloped mechanic in Enemy Unknown—the description for Titan Armor mentions that it “confers immunity to fire and poison,” when in actuality stepping into a raging flame won’t singe any of your soldiers in XCOM.

This hints that fire was cut as a combat feature sometime during development. Flames still erode buildings between turn phases, but we’d love to see it weaponized—none of XCOM’s guns let you attack more than one target. A flamethrower could inflict harm on multiple tiles on a single shot, dealing low initial damage but causing fiery pain over time. As a point of balance, a flanked flamethrower-er might be vulnerable to having his flame tank asploded. --Evan

Location diversity
 


XCOM's boards are good-looking and well-designed, but they're not especially diverse. Outside of office buildings, convenience stores, and similarly Western structures, all you get are generic forests. How about some desert? Snow? And why does Egypt look sort of like the American Midwest?

In the dream department: UFO boarding. Instead of waiting for extraterrestrial saucers to land, a new air vehicle lets us board them in-flight and struggle to reach the control room. Imagine the risk: capture the ship and you can take it back to base to study, or even deploy against enemy UFOs. Fail, and it goes down with your squad on board—a dice roll determines who survives. --Tyler

Abduction 2.0
 


“More victimization” feels like a weird thing to request from DLC, but hey, XCOM isn’t just about getting what we want, is it? Here’s a devious campaign event I came up with: mid-mission, what if one of your soldiers was unexpectedly stolen from you? They’d be abducted and indoctrinated into the alien force, reappearing in a later story mission as a particularly powerful human-alien hybrid that you’d have to kill.

Having one of your soldiers switch sides plays into XCOM’s theme of turning your enemy’s resources against them. Chryssalids provide a similar threat in the context of a single mission, but it’s a concept we’d like to see expanded upon: there’s something especially heartbreaking about having to kill a soldier you spent time developing. --Evan

Going bump in the night
 


Sure, your Heavy barely flinches over acing a Sectoid squad with a laser chaingun, but that’s probably because he underappreciates his predecessors’ fear of the night. The much-venerated XCOM: UFO Defense utilized dusk as a curtain: it penalized your field of view and increased your reliance on flares and the illuminating power of incendiary ammo. Darkness used to be a true mechanic in XCOM, not an aesthetic elment, and the nail-biting challenge of fighting aliens with perfect vision hiding invisibly in shadowy corners was wonderful.

Enemy Unknown needs meaningful night combat, and a potential DLC mission pack could embellish what UFO Defense started with night-vision goggles, a boost to panic chance, or new nocturnal aliens with Predator-like vision. --Omri

More character customization options
 


I can’t make a soldier who looks anything like Dana Scully with the current character creator. That makes me terribly sad, because Mulder and Scully were going to be my lead team. Instead, my crew is all hulking monster-men and women with straight hair and unnaturally puckered lips.

They don’t all look awful, but it’s very hard to create a decent likeness (my Riker up there is OK, I guess, though I wish I could change his country of origin). I understand Firaxis chose an aesthetic and stuck with it, but character creation isn’t about what Firaxis wants -- it’s about what I want: Dave Lister, John Carter, Tony Stark, Ellen Ripley. Just dump a file full of new hairstyles, faces, and body types on us and we’ll sort out the rest. --Tyler

More multiplayer options
 


Though some players may have welcomed multiplayer to XCOM with the same enthusiasm Earth’s nations showed to its alien invaders, the unobtrusive two-player mode is simple and…okay, maybe it’s too simple. Two-player deathmatch between mixed-species teams is fun and all, but I’d love to see more options, such as map objectives (say, first player to recover the downed spaceship gets an advantage), matches designed for humans versus aliens, a practice mode against the AI, and some modes other than pure deathmatch. In fact, let’s go crazy and add support for a third player! Don’t worry… with a small team and a strict time cap on moves, you probably won’t fall asleep between turns. Probably. --Chuck

What's at the top of your wishlist for XCOM's future?

Evan, Chuck, T.J. and Omri convene to collate this week's news, recently-released games, and take a moment to talk about an XCOM mod. Along the way, we talk about the League of Legends Season Two Championship and surge in eSports popularity and raise the notion that 2012 is one of PC gaming's best years evar.

Download PC Gamer Podcast 333: No-scope Cornshot

Have a question, comment, complaint, or observation? Leave a voicemail: 1-877-404-1337 ext 724 or email the mp3 to pcgamerpodcast@gmail.com.

Subscribe to the podcast RSS feed.

Follow us on Twitter:
@ELahti (Evan Lahti)
@ChuckOnGames (Chuck Osborn)
@omripetitte (Omri Petitte)
@AsaTJ (T.J. Hafer)
@belsaas (Erik Belsaas, podcast producer)

When helplessly watching your squad of veterans get disemboweled for the umpteenth time feels like a dull affair in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it's time for a psi-blast of extra variety with Second Wave. First scoped by hawk-eyed gamers on the Nexus modding network forums, Second Wave was a planned feature by Firaxis to furnish extra gameplay options and tweaks for commanders starting a new single-player campaign after completing it once. And most of it is recoverable.

Former Community Manager "2K Greg" revealed Firaxis' intent to implement the extra bay of options, but time constraints caused the feature to be scrapped. The majority of Second Wave's files remain intact within XCOM, however, and a salvo of INI and profile tweaks -- all packaged neatly in a handy walkthrough over at XCOM's Nexus hub -- enables (mostly working) toggles for various mutations to weapon performance, soldier stats, and even guaranteeing critical hits while flanking.

Here's the full list of options Second Wave provides:

Damage Roulette: Weapons have a much wider range of damage
New Economy: The funding offered by individual council members is randomized
Not Created Equally: Rookies will have random starting stats
Hidden Potential: As a soldier is promoted, his or her stats increase randomly
(Bugged) Red Fog: Any wounds taken in combat will degrade a soldier's stats for that mission
Absolutely Critical: A flanking shot guarantees a critical hit
The Greater Good: The secret of psionics can only be learned from interrogating a psionic alien
(Bugged) Marathon: The game takes considerably longer to complete
Results Driven: A country offers less funding as its panic level increases
High Stakes: The rewards granted for stopping alien abductions are randomized
Diminishing Returns: The cost of satellites increases per construction
The Blitz: Aliens target a larger set of cities during abduction attacks
More Than Human: The psionic gift is extremely rare

The enemies in XCOM: Enemy Unknown may be very well known at this point, but until now, we've known considerably less about Firaxis' DLC plans. By taking a look at some Steam achievements, however, our research teams down in the labs have been able to extract some potential details.

While you can view the names of the achievements right on the game's achievements page in Steam, you won't be able to see the description text for how to unlock them. The image below, posted by user TheSpaceMushroom on the 2K forums, reveals the text to lend some additional guidance to our speculation:



"Confounding Light," "Deluge," "Friends in Low Places," "Gangplank," "Portent," and "Furies" all sound like DLCish names. The question is whether these will be separate campaigns, mini-challenges, or missions that integrate into the existing game. We can glean a bit of insight from their related achievements as well: Confounding Light will involve a turn timer, which we've seen before in the bomb squad missions.

Deluge seems to involve activating valves which, based on the name, probably involves lowering the water level. A mission that takes place in some sort of downed submarine where your whole squad dies if you take too long would certainly be a new and interesting challenge. Friends in Low Places hints at a new, unique squad member of some kind. We'll keep interrogating our extraterrestrial captives for more concrete info. What are your hopes for XCOM DLC? (You'll be hearing about ours later in the week.)

My favourite XCOM cutscene is the one that triggers the first time you shoot down a UFO. The camera switches to the control room where your officers jump up from their banks of computers and whoop in a display of joy fondly known as the "NASA Clap." I reckon NASA have been hamming up their control room applause ever since Apollo 13 hit cinemas in 1995 but that scene is still imprinted on our collective consciousness, and now you can enjoy that imprint in XCOM at shiny 1080p resolutions thanks to the patch that landed this weekend.

The update also contains a few fixes according to the Steam patch notes. The sniper's "squad sight" ability that lets him pick targets based on allied sight lines has been optimised, apparently. Which might make that a much more appealing skill tree pick. There's good news too for XCOM's robots. "SHIVs that are damaged will no longer become unusable."

There is a bug in XCOM that afflicts dying soldiers with sudden baldness. It's as though their hair has been shot off, which in the case of the retro XCOM haircut, is no bad thing. It doesn't look like that has been resolved but a bug in which haircuts penetrate dense fog. This is essential stuff, Commander. We must maintain optimal fashion levels in the face of the poorly coiffeured alien menace.

• Various visibility/hiding optimizations
• Multiplayer text chat support (J to activate)
• Mouse 4/5 will switch soldiers in the Barracks
• ESC hides the movement grid if you do not want to commit to a move while it is activated
• Squad Sight ability optimization
• Fixed issue when equipping two grenades with Deep Pockets.
• Fixed Rapid Fire sometimes consuming too much ammo.
• SHIVs that are damaged will no longer become unusable.
• Fixed some hangs/soft crashes in tactical combat.
• Replaced software cursor with the operating system cursor to reduce lag and framerate dependence.
• Fixed rendering bug which causes some soldier’s hair to appear as if it is rendering on top of environment fog.
• 1080p movies are now used at all times on the PC.