Quote from frncsjhnhawaii;1171593:
Anything big that Enemy Within offers over just vanilla gameplay? Havent even finished Enemy Unknown yet...
Huge, the new additions are:
1. Medals, you can now earn medals for doing specific things in battle and choose one of the two passive bonus and award them to soldiers you want.
2. Meld, the big daddy change of this update, meld is a timed resources that appear in normal missions, if you manage to collect them, they are used for MEC troopers and gene mods
3. MEC Troopers are soldiers with limbs cutoff and outfitted with cybernetics (Like Adam Janson), he/she will then be able to operate a MEC suit, these suits are hulking metal armors that give them hp bonus and depend on your soldier class, special abilities, they also have specialized weapons and secondaries. There are three types of MEC suits with each one better than the last much like guns, new suit also has new abilities. The only downsides to MEC Troopers are the fact that they are too big for covers and they can't open doors quietly and must crush through the door like the fucking cool-aid man.
4.Gene mods are the alternative to MEC troopers, also using meld (Oh yeah forgot to say MEC troopers require meld to create). Gene mods enhance eyes/brain/body/legs, you can pick one of two options for each body parts and basically create your own super soldiers. Gene mods and MEC troopers are mutually exclusive, so you can't have a gene modded MEC trooper.
5. EXALT is a new faction added in enemy within, they are a faction of human who wish to use alien technology to take over the world (hence the name, enemy within). EXALT will appear in May and start screwing you over once a while like steal your money or equipment. They also lag a little behind you in term of technology. In enemy within you need to send operatives (which you need to recover later in missions) to uncover EXALT cells all over the world until you finally find their main base and wipe them out.
6. Two new enemy types, I haven't met the new mech alien yet, but I have met the stealth alien that looks like the squid from Matrix, these guys will appear beside your guys and try to strangle them (which cause them to fatigue and lost 1 action bar), they will also deal 1-2 damage? I think it's 1-2. You need to either overwatch and kill these right when they drop off their cloak, or shoot them off your chocking teammate.
7. New weapons, some changes to rank up bonus, (close and personal now instead of increase crit chance allow you an extra shot when you are within 4 tiles of enemy). Research time is now longer so you actually need to worry about scientists now.