ysbreker

XCOM 2

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But you're an underground organisation, so it's not like you can take it to the dry cleaners between owners.

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Even though I have sung the games praises and will continue to do singing, I still have about a rage quit per night I play. It's the very last mission where I'm tired and I'm in a good place and I click that button to try and squeak 2 more days out and get some supplies and there's a terror missions it won't let me go back to after the supplies, and I squad wipe and I rage quit and go to bed because I was tired and careless.

 

This might be a positive for some but the game doesn't feel brutal or overwhelming, it feels brutal and overwhelming. I'll grant that at least part of it is borne of ignorance of the game's systems, but a lot of the time it feels less like the intended path of not being able to do everything you want and more like you can't do anything you want because as you're trying to make contact with a territory to get to the next blacksite base so you can push the doomsday counter down, you have to deal with two terror missions and a VIP extraction and now everyone is hurt and instead of pushing forward you have to go heal, just in time to start over.

 

What I'm saying is the game is taking advantage of my inability to say no in video games because it's trained me it's always good when in fact in XCOM it's always bad.

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Just fought my first Codex, and I've managed to never say no to a mission. Unfortunately, this means I haven't been pursuing the blacksites as fast as I probably should, so I imagine next time I play is going to be pretty rough as I try to catch up. 

 

I heard on a podcast someone mention that the initial few missions are much easier with the tutorial off, I'd tend to agree, with how many times I had to play through the first couple of missions in the tutorial, versus having 2-3 flawless missions every time I've restarted without tutorial. It seems like an interesting choice. Are they just trying to make the beginning hard to teach you to get used to losing soldiers, or do you get some bigger benefit by playing those missions, or maybe just a balance mistake?

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With the caveat that it is still early impressions for me, but I think XCOM 2 still suffers from the way the difficulty is tuned at the strategic level. i want the version of XCOM where squad wipes are gonna happen, and that's just part of the game, but the way the strategy layer works if you get more than one squad wipe, or a single squad wipe at an inopportune time you're basically dead but walking.

 

Thankfully mods will probably fix this.

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So I got a Workshop built the last time I played, and had I realized what that did, I would have prioritized it as one of the earliest buildings I got up.  If you haven't built one, it lets one or two engineers staff it to control two or four drones who can act as engineers in any of the four connected rooms.  This includes digging out other rooms.  I'm thinking about a future Ironman playthrough as I learn on normal, and I can see where an early Workshop with three uncleared rooms on each side would let you clear rooms, gain supplies from clearing and have space to expand much, much faster.  Low power usage and its cheaper than buying a new Engineer from the base, so it should be the cheapest and fastest way to get new engineers working early on, and you should have plenty of time to pick up a couple of new human engineers before the downside of limited placement with the drones comes into play. 

 

 

 

Edited to add:  Another thematic element of 2 that I'm liking is feeling like the Resistance is out there doing shit without me.  Feeding us tips, gathering intel, sabotaging trains, etc.  In EU, it always felt like the rest of the world was just like "fuck it, we have XCOM, don't need to do shit."  It's mostly flavor rather than mechanical, but it makes it feel more cohesive as a world to me.

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Does this game seem shorter and small to anyone else? I feel like I am at the end game a lot faster than I was in xcom 1.

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According to Steam, I've played ~15 hours (probably more like 12-13 actual playtime), and I haven't even got my first continent bonus yet.  I'm assuming this run will take in the 30-40 hour range, which feels about right I think.

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I lost my first campaign without really knowing how far I got, but I'm okay with the game being shorter and more replayable. I thought the first game dragged on a bit towards the end.

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I finished it today after binging on it hard, took 34 hours according to Steam. It may be a little bit shorter overall, but I figure that's mainly a function of the endgame being less dragged out. In the first game you sort of reached this point where there was nothing left to do but wait for something bad to happen so you'll have an opportunity to train your psi operatives and collect resources to build the stuff you need for accessing the final mission.

 

Even though in XCOM 2 you still push the story along through missions and even optional objectives in missions, at least now you usually already have a mission available to you when you're raring to go thanks to all the Avatar facilities you want to blow up.

 

Also, did anyone else ever get caught by the UFOs that sometimes chase you? I had avoided that for most of the game, apparently it triggers a special mission. At the stage I was at, it sure didn't end up being as dramatic as the game tried to make it sound, but I super appreciate the idea of having something that's similar to the base defense mission from Enemy Within, but happens dynamically.

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With the caveat that it is still early impressions for me, but I think XCOM 2 still suffers from the way the difficulty is tuned at the strategic level. i want the version of XCOM where squad wipes are gonna happen, and that's just part of the game, but the way the strategy layer works if you get more than one squad wipe, or a single squad wipe at an inopportune time you're basically dead but walking.

 

Yeah, they've also made a few changes to the way that health works that makes it too easy to get an entire squad benched, if not wiped, with a bad mission. In-mission healing does not reduce a soldier's wound level at the end of a mission; the game either records the soldier's lowest hitpoint level or adds up damage received to calculate whether they're lightly wounded, wounded, gravely wounded, etc. Also, better armor is no longer factored as a buffer that prevents the first few points of in-mission damage from affecting a soldier's wound level; now, it's calculated on a sliding scale, so that two damage on the base armor and three damage on the predator armor causes the same wound level at the end of a mission. I understand it, as an effort to make tactical battles be more consequential at the strategic level, but it's very annoying that a soldier in elerium armor can get a point of poison damage at the beginning of a mission, have her static vest heal it immediately, never take damage again, and still be "lightly wounded" for three days.

 

A change that I dolike a lot is that grenades don't destroy corpses like in the first game! I avoided using them for most of the early game because I was worried about starving myself of research materials, but now that I know (and now that I have one Grenadier with the extra grenade uses, the advanced launcher, the plasma upgrade, and that skill that gives grenades +2 damage and a 50% larger radius) I'm using it to level buildings that block my snipers' shots. It's really and truly great.

 

Another thematic element of 2 that I'm liking is feeling like the Resistance is out there doing shit without me.  Feeding us tips, gathering intel, sabotaging trains, etc.  In EU, it always felt like the rest of the world was just like "fuck it, we have XCOM, don't need to do shit."  It's mostly flavor rather than mechanical, but it makes it feel more cohesive as a world to me.

 

I agree, the theme works a lot better in the second game. The justification in the first that you don't have the confidence of the various world governments and they're looking for an excuse to pull out is tenuous and does not really correlate with my experienced reality (look, for example, at international cooperation in the various examples of specious military adventurism in the Middle East). The notion that they'd pull their funding if you weren't protecting them properly is bizarre, especially when a lack of funding is almost exclusively the thing holding you back from protecting them.

 

Here, you're poor because you're living off the land, you can only do one mission at a time because you can't be everywhere, and you're a team of two dozen soldiers and half that in support staff because you're rebelling against a semi-legitimate world government. It makes sense and it makes a lot of the dumb actions in the previous game feel less dumb now.

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I finished it today after binging on it hard, took 34 hours according to Steam. It may be a little bit shorter overall, but I figure that's mainly a function of the endgame being less dragged out. In the first game you sort of reached this point where there was nothing left to do but wait for something bad to happen so you'll have an opportunity to train your psi operatives and collect resources to build the stuff you need for accessing the final mission.

 

Even though in XCOM 2 you still push the story along through missions and even optional objectives in missions, at least now you usually already have a mission available to you when you're raring to go thanks to all the Avatar facilities you want to blow up.

 

Also, did anyone else ever get caught by the UFOs that sometimes chase you? I had avoided that for most of the game, apparently it triggers a special mission. At the stage I was at, it sure didn't end up being as dramatic as the game tried to make it sound, but I super appreciate the idea of having something that's similar to the base defense mission from Enemy Within, but happens dynamically.

 

I had that mission right after a full squad wipe, its pretty fun, defend the ship and destroy a jammer. Kind of silly that there is a room you can build just for that mission.

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A change that I dolike a lot is that grenades don't destroy corpses like in the first game! I avoided using them for most of the early game because I was worried about starving myself of research materials, but now that I know (and now that I have one Grenadier with the extra grenade uses, the advanced launcher, the plasma upgrade, and that skill that gives grenades +2 damage and a 50% larger radius) I'm using it to level buildings that block my snipers' shots. It's really and truly great.

 

It does, however, destroy any look that corpse would drop. Loot drops happen seldom enough that I don't sweat it too much, but I tend to open with a grenade and then finish enemies off with weapons if possible.

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It does, however, destroy any look that corpse would drop. Loot drops happen seldom enough that I don't sweat it too much, but I tend to open with a grenade and then finish enemies off with weapons if possible.

 

Eek. I wondered why the drops I was getting had started to taper off. I figured it was something to do with how late I was in the game!

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It tells you when it happens.  So if you haven't been seeing notifications pop, then you likely haven't missed anything (or not much).

 

At least I assume that wasn't a one time popup.  I've only seen it once, but I generally don't blow up enemies, just soften them up like Dewar.

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yeah generally I'm opening with explosives to shred armor and cover. You should probably ignore everything I say because I'm bad, but it seems reasonable.

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yeah generally I'm opening with explosives to shred armor and cover. You should probably ignore everything I say because I'm bad, but it seems reasonable.

At least I assume that wasn't a one time popup.  I've only seen it once, but I generally don't blow up enemies, just soften them up like Dewar.

 

A good combo for taking out a pod is the Grenadier's grenade launcher and the Sniper's multi-shot pistol ability. That finished off two groups of Chryssalids in my last terror mission.

 

I also mostly open with grenades, too, but sometimes there's a soldier out of position and you need something that's guaranteed to do four points of damage to the closest enemy. The fact that it doesn't destroy corpses makes me much more liable to just throw the grenade now.

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It tells you when it happens.  So if you haven't been seeing notifications pop, then you likely haven't missed anything (or not much).

 

At least I assume that wasn't a one time popup.  I've only seen it once, but I generally don't blow up enemies, just soften them up like Dewar.

 

It says the loot was destroyed in the ticker on the right hand side, though it's pretty easy to miss, especially if you're getting a lot of kills as only 3-ish items show up there at any time.

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A good combo for taking out a pod is the Grenadier's grenade launcher and the Sniper's multi-shot pistol ability. That finished off two groups of Chryssalids in my last terror mission.

 

I also mostly open with grenades, too, but sometimes there's a soldier out of position and you need something that's guaranteed to do four points of damage to the closest enemy. The fact that it doesn't destroy corpses makes me much more liable to just throw the grenade now.

 

Haha, you have given me the credit that I have gotten to the point where I've seen a chryssalid or sectopod.

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99% of the time if I am killing an enemy with a grenade it is because I need that enemy to be dead so I'm not gonna risk taking a shot. So I can live with no loot from that situation.

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99% of the time I am killing an enemy with a grenade it is because I need that enemy to be dead so I'm not gonna risk taking a shot. So I can live with no loot from that situation.

 

Very true. Watching BeagleRush's Live and Impossible series, I learned the value of a unmissable grenade over a 90% accuracy rifle shot.

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I decided to restart using our collective knowledge. Didn't get to the blacksite yet but I feel like I'm in quite a good position overall. Skipping the tutorial is actually a pretty big deal. While I love it as a story mission, as a starting scenario it's pretty bad vs. the ability to take what you've learned and have a flawless first mission via ambush and collecting 4 squaddies in one shot.

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I personally open engagements with explosives, follow up with some explosives, and usually finish up with a few clean-up explosives. Mind-control and hacking lets me use enemy explosives! 

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I just had my first flawless mission, no one taking any damage. It was an Avatar facility sabotage: one round of positioning, one round where a grenade paired with my top sniper's Killzone ability wiped out the enemy patrol between my team and the facility, one round blowing open the wall of the facility with a rocket and running in my fastest Ranger, and one round for extraction. It was perfect and the best note ever to end on.

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Wow, I waited way to long to research plate armor.  I just bumblefucked my way through a mission without even really meaning to.  I was going to quit for the night, but wanted to play with all the new toys I just built to load into the second utility slot at least once (mimic, flash bang, viral rounds and battle scanner).   The new Battle Scanner is rad.  In EU it was pretty much trash due to it's limited throwing range and size.  I just spent the first round that I found aliens throwing all my new toys on the ground to see what they do, and by the time it was done the pod was dead and no one was so much as scratched (even though I finished half my people's turns out of cover just to have the range to throw stuff out).  Just went ahead and finished it after that. 

 

ProTip: Viral Rounds on a sniper applies to her pistol as well.  With up to 3 shots a round, that means that she can put out 12-15 damage plus any poison damage the next round on anything not dead.  I hadn't checked, do the weapon upgrades on the sniper rifle apply to the pistol?  It wouldn't make sense for them to, but that doesn't really mean much in this game.  It also says they can't ever be removed from a gun, then they get automatically transferred between guns when you upgrade weapons. 

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