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Rob Zacny

Episode 412: XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

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Three Moves Ahead 412:

Three Moves Ahead 412


XCOM 2: War of the Chosen
Rob, Rowan, and David Heron take a deep dive on XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. XCOM 2 received a tepid welcome from the Three Moves Ahead panel when it first came out in early 2016, and Three Moves Ahead gave its expansion a good long time to simmer before diving in. War of the Chosen adds more of almost everything, but is that a good thing? The crew also discusses ubermod The Long War.

XCOM 2, XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, The Long War

 

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Great podcast- really enjoyed it. 

 

I'd have to take a small issue with one thing though- Rob mentions a couple of times that he felt the classes in vanilla XCOM 2 lacked flexibility and in many cases really only had one viable build for the most part, and in particular mentioned the pistol abilities of the Sharpshooter class as not being particularly useful. I've just finished my first Ironman Commander run of vanilla XCOM 2 so this is fresh in my mind- personally I found that with the possible exception of the Blademaster Ranger skills pretty much every class has multiple viable builds with different strengths in different portions of the game or different situations. 

The Sharpshooter pistol abilities in particular I found absolutely invaluable and for the last third of the game ended up taking a gunslinger in preference to a sniper on most missions- a Gunslinger with Bluescreen rounds (+5 damage vs mech enemies) is capable of pretty much taking out a Sectopod or Gatekeeper solo in one turn on Commander (or at the very least reducing it to almost no health) if you use Quickdraw (Fire your pistol without ending your turn), Lightning Hands (free pistol shot) and then Fan Fire (3 consecutive pistol shots) for a total of 5 consecutive hits with +5 damage each (and with  100% hit chance most of the time). That's pretty much the highest per-round damage output in the game.   

Additionally there are quite a lot of situations where you're faced with multiple enemies which you can reduce to a small amount of health but not quite kill, and the ability to fire the pistol at each visible enemy is invaluable sometimes- the most extreme example was on the final mission I was faced with I believe 4 Codexes and 2 Archons, who then split into 8 Codexes once I'd fired an AoE psychic ability at them. My gunslinger was able to move into a position with line of sight to all of them and take out all 10 enemies with one move. Saved my bacon! 

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A great episode! I did play and mostly enjoy War of the Chosen, but I'm fairly critical towards it. It is more fun than vanilla, but I really can't see myself playing it again. It's just too much of a mess, with not enough pull without the fascination of the new things.

 

I would love to watch Rob tackle Long War (2)!

 

My own approach to Long War was to bypass a lot of the a lot of the initial confusion by watching beaglerush play. I suspect that instead of going through a few campaigns that would fail in a few hours I watched probably a comparable time of youtubed streams. LW2 especially is fairly complex, and it really would need a good, up to date, thick manual. Unfortunately none exists. But I do think learning Long War, or Long War 2 by bashing your head against the wall that is the difficulty is not a good way to go about it. Because many of the things are so obtuse or clunky, it is very difficult to understand what you're doing wrong.

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Very good episode!

 

One thing which I did loved about xcom 2 and found that war of the chosen, plus mod support helped a lot was the customization - I found myself, even before war of the chosen, already creating several unique (and very anime like and I really mean it, at one point slipped  out of control, and there was a bit of everything, from senpais to idols to magical girls*) characters, giving each one a personality, backgrounds, ect... and even go so far as giving each one a tarot-themed (both major and minor arcana) nickname. With war of the Chosen, I could push this even further, with bonds I could now do in-game OTP (one true pairs) with many of my OCs, the photobooth I could even spend more time that would be reasonable - taking photos of their missions, pairs and upgrades (when ever I changed their armor I would upgrade their photo).

 

* When I figured how to get the Madoka Magica Mod working.

 

One the previous games, doing all of this was much possible, on xcom 1 due models begin very limited I could never flesh it out the way I did now, in fact I even looked at my old xcom 1 screenshots and find out that I most run with whatever character I had. Meanwhile the original xcom, you often end with all characters looking the same.

 

Another aspect of the Resistence Ring, is that it give you a way to get back on track even you start to fall behind, since there is some missions (and cards), which help reduce the avatar progress, something that helped me a lot when I need time for a break (due character begin wounded and tired).

 

Also I would agree, that I would love the options of sending your character to the factions, so they could become the newer classes, since I had a lot of original character I never used the factions here very much.

 

Spoiler

At the end of the game, there is lot of hints something else coming - don´t know if is just fluff or hinting a dlc or new game.

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well, I must confess I approached this episode with some trepidation after the original XCOM 2 podcast, after which I was fairly certain I'd been playing a completely different game to everyone else on that show. 550 hours later (give or take) including several successful Commander Ironman runs, several failed (some slightly more progressed than others) Legend Ironman runs and one save scummed to the hilt Long War 2 campaign later I got to War of the Chosen thinking there wasn't much more the game could teach me. 

 

And, to some extent, I think I was right. I do like WofC, and it does add a lot to the game - but it's chocolate sauce and multi-coloured sprinkles at the end of day, rather than several new scoops of delicious ice cream. Fundamentally the core game is the same and despite adding the new Factions, the Chosen and the Lost, WotC doesn't really deviate from what made XCOM2 my favourite game. (Not the best game I've ever played to be sure, but certainly the one I've had most enjoyment out of in the modern era). 

 

There were a couple of things I disagreed with however, one of which being Rob's complaints that the strategic layer is a mess. It's not, it just doesn't explain itself terribly way. XCOM:EU biggest problem was it's strategic progress. That progress was a strictly linear gated path from which any deviation was result in a failed campaign. Quite simply the aim of the game was to get to the Alien Base assault mission and win it before global panic overwhelmed you. It helped to have at least predator armour or laser weapons unlocked before you did (although not essential, both would be nice, but once you were through that landmark you'd win the game unless you really really messed things up. Not even XCOM:EW solved that although it did give you a lot more things to do in the meantime.  XCOM 2 solves that by basically giving you a lot more options on the strategic level, either by unlocking regions to find blacksites, or concentrating on the "golden path" missions to keep the avatar timer in check. Spending Intel and managing resources contributed to that as much as completing tactical missions, and it countered that main issue I think XCOM:EU had with it's optimal path.

 

By adding faction missions, WotC gives you yet more options to manage that avatar timer which you need to deal with the chosen, but it makes the strategic layer of the game much less focused, and a hell of a lot easier. My first WotC campaign (Commander difficulty) I tripped the avatar countdown at the beginning of November as the game did one of those "screw you" moments and added 5 pips to the timer seemingly out of nowhere. 3 missions and 1 faction missions later, I had completely zeroed it. 2 Blacksites (one with 4 pips), 1 "golden path" mission (the forge) and 1 faction "Decrease  avatar timer" completely wiped out all my pips and reset the campaign for me. After that point the game was a doodle to be honest, especially as I then went  on to take out the Assassin as my first chosen to defeat (also the hardest battle I had in that campaign by some distance) and obtained her weapons, which made things very easy indeed. What WotC does to XCOM is add a lot more character to the game, with a lot more distractions while you are playing it. It also really exacerbates one of XCOM 2's main issues, which is it's reverse difficultly curve - that the game is so much harder at the start than it is towards the end. By allowing each of your soldiers specialise in both paths of their skill trees (Seriously, is there no-one who plays WotC who doesn't take both the hacking perk and medical gremlin perk for their specialists?!?) it further reduces the games difficulty at the mid to late game, which you need to be able to deal with the chosen, but leaves the final stages of the game somewhat boring afterwards. If you have the alien hunters DLC pack with their armour and weapons as well, then the final battle is trivially easy. Apologies if you disagree with that seriously, that final mission is really dull with all the chosen weapons and the Alien ruler armour. Just target the avatars and you are done. 

 

I also find it slightly bemusing that for this podcast the Random Number Generator (RNG) really didn't get a mention. XCOM 2 is built on it's relationship with its RNG, and it's something that Long War 2 does address either. Ultimately both of Firaxis's XCOM games are about managing numbers and probability. At the lower difficulty levels the game gives you enough mulligans to get through when the RNG is being a dick (seriously, at times in XCOM it's Nuffle's older and angrier brother) but on Legend level difficulty progress in the game has nothing to do with your skill at the game, but entirely down to whatever number it is the RNG throws at you at critical stages. To be sure, the aim of playing XCOM well is being in a position at all times to ensure that when the RNG did roll consecutive "ones" (all those +95% shots missing for example) you could deal with the fallout, but on legend the fallout would inevitably be a total squad wipe and a finished campaign, it was, despite being able to complete Commander ironman campaigns more often than not something I have never learned to cope with on Legend difficulty levels, save scumming or not. I still want to get a Legend Ironman campaign completed one day, but it's still in the future for now. WotC adds so much to the game that it feels like you are juggling a lot more balls in the air now on Legend, with those early scripted missions coming to thick and fast to be able to deal with for now.

 

As for Long War 2 - well it's a mod I admire a very great deal, but towards the end of the campaign of LW2 I completed it felt much more like an endurance campaign rather than something I was actively enjoying. At this point I should say that I never completed an Long War campaign for XCOM:EU despite 4 or 5 attempts. Each of those campaigns lasted about 20-30 hours, as it was about that time I would realise that I had screwed up so badly 15 hours previously I'd left the game unwinnable. That's LWs issue, and it's not one that LW2 rectifies. The war long, brutal and it doesn't like telling you when you've failed until it's far too late. It's fair to say that I would never have completed by LW 2 campaign without watching xWynns youtube campaign of the version I played (LW2 version 1.2) 

 

(I'm going to finish this later, placeholder here so I don't lose this as I have to go and do something else now)

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Two main issues with XCOM stem from the flaws of having a micro-management Campaign, and RNG tactics.

 

1. Strategic Layer & Economy

-- The Economy of XCOM/2 has been one with resources that has very little room for waste or overflow. Admittedly, on normal mode, there MIGHT be some ability to 'waste' resources and still win, but there still isn't a lot of money for 'spare' items to allow the player to experiment within a single game. A lot of the items become superfluous or under-used. For buildings, each Base construction becomes MORE crucial, there is no room for builying a big or interesting base, because of the micro-scale of the economy - XCOM is like budgeting for the poor (buy food; cannot afford electricity) or a very small church.

 

2. Tactics and RNG

-- Because of the micro-managerial element of the tactics and combat layer (I.e the missions), the use of RNG can obviously mess up your game, but the problem is that there are not enough soldiers to mitigate the losing a Dice-roll in RNG - Every miss is MUCH more crucial than many other tactics games. Winning at XCOM relies on essentially breaking the RNG mechanic entirely, so that your actions almost always benefit in some way - guaranteed results; reminiscent a bit of Hand of Fate.

 

Additional Question - Do your think XCOM could benefit learning from & implementing some of the campaign elements from HAND OF FATE?

 

Smaller campaigns with random & replayable elements?

 

I mean... there's a similarity between the dealer and the ethereals...

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