ysbreker

XCOM 2

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Yeah, sometimes even sober this game is bad enough. I've been doing well with my current ironman campaign, but yesterday I had a squad wipe that made me rage quit. It was right after the ship invasion mission so I had a lot of injuries so it was only a B or C squad wipe, so the campaign is completely recoverable, but still it was so aggravating that I needed to step away for a bit.

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On my first playthrough and I had to go from Veteran to Rookie after 5-6 hours of play. I figure I'll play on "easy" (scoff) and learn about what's available to me, what sort of events happen, etc. before I go punishing myself. 

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The Alien Hunters DLC makes the game significantly more difficult in my opinion. Kinda struggling to get through the campaign because anytime one of the boss aliens show up I'm definitely going to be taking some casualties it's just a question of am I losing a rookie or two or something more significant.

 

Civ 6 can't come out soon enough. I think I need a strategy game to play that isn't so stressful.

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The alien hunters DLC makes the early to mid game significantly more difficult - and circumstantial. An alien ruler in a non-timed mission or terror mission is relatively easier to deal with. Get one on a timed council mission though and it's a total nightmare. You will lose people, either because the alien ruler gets them or you can't evacuate them in time. Forget rescuing / taking the VIP hostage though.

However, if you get through it OK and retain the new weapons, it makes the rest of the game significantly easier. A sniper in the Icarus suit makes a mockery of the final mission.

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The problem with both modern XCOM games for me is that the early game is too difficult relative to the late game. You'd hope they'd make that better with the expansions, not worse. I wonder if any mods address the issue?

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Yeah I'm amazed I got through Shen's Last Gift without any casualties because I dragged my feet through certain sections of that level, and also one time I misclicked and put one of my XCOM peoples in a horribly bad position.

 

I'm finally starting to get the hang of a good approach to taking on the alien bosses. It is still possible to get totally fucked though if some other bullshit enemy squad shows up at the same time. Like, I wonder if they changed the enemy distribution system for this game because I don't remember running into so many Codex when I was first playing the game, but now I regularly will run into two of them in any given mission, and if I have to deal with that and an alien boss that means I'm fucked, I never have enough tactical bandwidth to deal with both of them.

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How has the patch support been for this game, specifically for mission scripting bugfixes?

I had an Ironman game going back at launch where my a-squad got wiped because of a bug where the VIP I had to rescue didn't spawn, and I didn't realize I was encountering a bug until I'd wasted too much time trying to figure out what was going on to recover. I kept the campaign going on life-support for another 5 hours or something, but eventually wiped for good - it was too much to recover from.

Was loving the game up until then & want to revisit it, but *really* don't want to have that happen again...

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I can't answer your question, but I just started playing again and have encountered at least one bug involving the game not correctly returning player control following the viper king's reaction turn in certain circumstances.

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7 minutes ago, Moosferatu said:

I can't answer your question, but I just started playing again and have encountered at least one bug involving the game not correctly returning player control following the viper king's reaction turn in certain circumstances.

 

believe that that Viper King bug has existed since the DLC's release. It's really puzzling that it's not fixed by now.

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Too bad! Seems to be great for Civ, but not as good for XCOM.

 

Luckily(?) I don't have any DLC, so the one bug you guys mention won't be an issue for now. Still, if I were to lose another a-squad to some other bug I think I might cry...

 

Whelp, here goes!

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Going through this, I may need to look into that bug. The DLC for this game seems wild, I picked up some legendary gear which is really kind of...game breaking early on hah,

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The Long War 2 mod is out! Haven't played it yet, but it looks great.

 

Also the timing is kind of funny because I started up a game of Civ 6 last night in the first time like since the first two weeks of that game's release, but it looks like that will be on hold...

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I swear I got back into XCOM2 just a few days ago, independently of knowing anything about Long War 2. Go figure.

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7 hours ago, sclpls said:

The Long War 2 mod is out! Haven't played it yet, but it looks great.

 

Also the timing is kind of funny because I started up a game of Civ 6 last night in the first time like since the first two weeks of that game's release, but it looks like that will be on hold...

 

 

Just started a new campaign and I've already borked the first mission not really understanding what it is I'm meant to be doing (i.e if you achieve your goal and need to get out then call that skyranger, because otherwise Advent will not play fair)   

 

Got some very interesting concepts in it, but you worry it's going to be a lot of busy work on the strategic screen later in the game. 

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XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is really good. It improves every aspect of the game in an additive way, so the first few hours of a new campaign feel overfull and underexplained, but it settles into a great rhythm soon enough. I've stayed up way past my bedtime playing it for two nights running now, and I'm excited to do it tonight, too. I hope to have more thoughts once I've actually sunk my teeth further into the game, so stay tuned!

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I've mostly only watched Twitch streamers play War of the Chosen (including before the release date). One thing which does seem to be changed is the difficulty - the early game seems harder, despite all the Cool New Things, although that's possibly just that everyone hasn't learnt all the new systems as well yet. (It's a contrast to some of the complaining about the brokenness of some ability combinations possible in the late game...)

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3 hours ago, aoanla said:

I've mostly only watched Twitch streamers play War of the Chosen (including before the release date). One thing which does seem to be changed is the difficulty - the early game seems harder, despite all the Cool New Things, although that's possibly just that everyone hasn't learnt all the new systems as well yet. (It's a contrast to some of the complaining about the brokenness of some ability combinations possible in the late game...)

 

The only difficulty spike for me was running into the first Chosen, mostly because I didn't know it was coming. Otherwise, the old tactics of using grenades to demolish cover and give free "flanking" still works great for the first half-dozen missions — even better, actually, since ability points are now awarded for flanking. Getting in contact with all the factions as early as possible, since their soldiers are quite powerful from level one, and building the Alien Hunters weapons, which are cheap and effective, is a good way to get an early boost.

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2 hours ago, Gormongous said:

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is really good. It improves every aspect of the game in an additive way, so the first few hours of a new campaign feel overfull and underexplained, but it settles into a great rhythm soon enough. I've stayed up way past my bedtime playing it for two nights running now, and I'm excited to do it tonight, too. I hope to have more thoughts once I've actually sunk my teeth further into the game, so stay tuned!

 

For the first Firaxis XCOM I ended up not liking the expansion despite the intial excitement because the game ended up feeling very bloated to me, and I rarely felt like investing in the new gadgets was worth the expense over tried and tested strategies. Do you have a sense for whether the game feels rebalanced, or is it just XCOM 2 with more stuff?

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1 hour ago, sclpls said:

For the first Firaxis XCOM I ended up not liking the expansion despite the intial excitement because the game ended up feeling very bloated to me, and I rarely felt like investing in the new gadgets was worth the expense over tried and tested strategies. Do you have a sense for whether the game feels rebalanced, or is it just XCOM 2 with more stuff?

 

The initial waft is of bloat, when the game first kicks you out to the strategy map and you're getting interrupted every ten seconds by crap popping up all over the map. That said, they've added and overhauled a lot of systems that make engaging with the new content more natural. You curry favor with the factions by sending soldiers on auto-resolved "covert missions," which combines with the new fatigue/stress/illness system to force you to rotate soldiers in and out of your active roster more frequently, but there's also now a super-powerful "bond" system that two soldiers can get, as well as ability points to spend for non-class skills, and meanwhile you're researching the Chosen's weaknesses and dealing with them ambushing you on missions...

 

Unlike Enemy Within, which made the odd choice of making it possible (even desirable) to miss out on much of the new content and systems by not choosing to adapt your playstyle to optimize for Meld, the systems in War of the Chosen are integral (if sometimes outsized) additions to preexisting systems and playstyles, and engaging most of them is as simple as taking an extra step when you're leveling your character and adding mods to your guns. The ones that aren't (the Chosen, the factions, the Lost) are generally fun and interesting, and give a sense of added depth rather than a mechanics "fix" to an already-functioning game.

 

That said, there is a ton of new stuff and I shiver to think of someone going straight into it having never played an XCOM before.

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Thanks for the explanation. When the expansion was first announced I was super skeptical about what they were trying to do, but you've convinced me that its worth checking out at some point. Normally I'd just wait for the 3MA verdict but ahh... honestly I'd rather they just skip it hahaha.

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15 minutes ago, sclpls said:

Thanks for the explanation. When the expansion was first announced I was super skeptical about what they were trying to do, but you've convinced me that its worth checking out at some point. Normally I'd just wait for the 3MA verdict but ahh... honestly I'd rather they just skip it hahaha.

 

Yeah, I've already heard grumblings from Rob on Waypoint Radio when Austin's talking about it, so I'm not sure that the weird grudge against that game is going to get dispelled by anything, let alone an expansion that doubles down on the majority of the base game's design decisions in fairly ambitious ways.

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The larger variety of mission types has been a huge bonus for me. Lots of different goals that have to be accomplished in different ways, then chosen ambushes on top. As someone who gave up on getting through XCOM 2 on veteran and turned it down to easy, I've found the difficulty curve to me a bit more steady this time around. Not saying there aren't spikes, but they seem less extreme and less often.

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XCom 2 WotC to me, is the anime version of Ufo/Xcom formula. It does work pretty well, but ideally I'd like the opposite direction.

 

I do like the variety in mission objectives and terrain a lot, but miss the puzzle aspect of 2012 Xcom. Xcom 2 already was a bit too often straightforward in having too many overpowered abilities as obvious, guaranteed solutions to tactical dilemmas. WotC takes this to eleven, which makes it more fun, and arguably works better than the vanilla.

 

I feel the game is now balanced towards it being likely to complete the game without thorough prior knowledge. Which is probably a good thing, but not my ideal tactical combat game.

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