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LTTP: XCOM 2: This is almost not fair
- Thread starter AnansiThePersona
- Start date
In a very weird way. It's not very important to know the story of the first.
I'm not great at XCOM 2 so it may be different for the OP and in general for XCOM veterans or for players looking for a challenge, but imo it's very recommended to not go beyond normal difficulty for the first playthrough. The sequel is much much harder than the first game and you can fail the campaign really quick, it's not like there's a typical introductionary phase that will allow you to learn the basics in a safe environment. You get a short prologue mission, introduction to geoscape and that's it.
Great game but yeh if you arent familiar with the type of games it can be intimidating, beating the first new xcom on impossible+ironman took me a while, while on xcom 2 I played it first with classic+ironman and ended up beating it on legend on 3rd try, the expansion makes it even greater btw!
higher the difficulty gets, the less you want to end up turns in a way where the enemy has an opportunity to take a shot at you
higher the difficulty gets, the less you want to end up turns in a way where the enemy has an opportunity to take a shot at you
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Fun game but the constant distractions really destroy the pace, the percentages are annoying when the enemies seem to hit consistently, and losing takes too long.
Does anybody here play WotC on PS4? Is it really still unplayable? I really wanna try it after I'm done with vanilla, but not if it's crashing all the time and corupting saves.
The story of this one basically assumes that you fucked up and lost to the aliens after a few missions, so it's not massively important to play the original. Still would though, the original is a great game, especially with the Enemy Within expansion.
I just started this on Ps4 Pro and this performance isn't too great...but I really enjoyed first mission. I might have to buy on PC.
Interesting. Any idea if the 360 or PS3 version is better on the original?
It's hard not to play this without save scumming sometimes. I mean, I've done Iron Man a few times, but only when I'm feeling particularly masochistic.
Edit: Btw, anyone not playing on the PC is missing out on some incredible mods. I can't even play without MJOLNIR Armor Variants anymore:
Edit: Btw, anyone not playing on the PC is missing out on some incredible mods. I can't even play without MJOLNIR Armor Variants anymore:
Never played on 360, PS3 version was fine at the time when I played it, though it's been a while and I'm used to the PC version now.
I like the doomsday clock. It forces you to focus on the big picture while also handling other missions that can help build your strength. Without a timer, you could end up in a Darkest Dungeon situation where the end game simply becomes a grind to eventually beat the game regardless of losses or setbacks. That being said, I understand why someone would choose to mod the doomsday clock out of the game. Not everyone wants to start over from scratch after 20+ hours in a campaign.
Still, that isn't something I'd recommend to a new player. Playing XCOM with no loss condition definitely isn't what the devs had in mind. A huge part of the draw for me and plenty of other players is the tension that comes in not knowing if you are going to succeed, with that tension lasting for hours of gameplay. There have been plenty of times where I've spent a good 10-20 minutes analyzing a proper turn because it is so important to the outcome of the campaign. Making correct decisions, turn after turn, hour after hour, without being certain that you will ultimately prevail is the heart of the XCOM games.
In a typical XCOM 2 run, you can easily get through the initial few missions, then have a good 15-20+ hours of gameplay where it is very much up in the air whether you will ultimately succeed or fail. Very few strategic games can replicate that type of tension over that many hours of gameplay.
To be fair though, liberal use of grenades makes that map a little easier.
That, and firing no matter what the percentages are.
You made a mistake ,and frankly an unnecessary one. As I already said, the "doomclock" is there mostly to keep you from fucking around TOO long but it's more than forgiving enough.
Your next mistake will be disable turn limits in missions, I bet. Or activate the new option that doubles them (which is functionally basically the same thing).
Could you elaborate? I've never heard of this phrase, and on a first glance it doesnt seem to have anything to do with homosexuality.
I won't enter in the merit of finding it offensive or not, but it's not that hard to see a connection with sexuality, really. "Pushing your shit in" implies that someone is fucking you in the ass.
I started playing it yesterday and I love it.
Question though: should I play it with the expansion? Or can I finish it vanilla and then just play through the expansion if I want? Not entirely sure how the expansion works.
That seems like a stretch to say that has anything to do with homosexuality or not. Everyone has an ass, and it's 'uncomfortable' as a rule of thumb.
like, I'm an old ass man and have heard plenty of homophobic shit just due to when I grew up and thought nothing of it due to the times (saying that's how common it was), but I've never heard anyone say 'pushing your shit in' or 'fucked in the ass' as any gay slur or anything in the slightest.
The expansion is not designed as additional content in continuation of the vanilla game. It rather fuses seamlessly with the game changing how a lot of mechanics work (and adding content on top of that).
And yes, you should play with it. it improves vanilla by a wide margin, introducing even more mission variety and some design concepts that were sorely missing in both the Fireaxis XCOMs (like strong incentives to level up more than just ONE dream team and to make turn over between your soldiers).
All DLCs and expansions require a new game. But this is so replayable that I see no problem finishing the vanilla and then doing another campaign with the expansion.
War of the Chosen is one of the best expansions I have seen in any game, period. It adds 3 new classes (tho you'll be limited to one soldier of each for the most part), 3 new huge enemies who persist between missions and will torment you through the entire playthrough, it changes some rules for the better imo (a fatigue system for example that demands you to rotate your main team), new systems where you can acquire new skills... just so much stuff.
Otoh, if you are playing on PS4, people complain a lot about it being unstable and such, but I personally wouldn't know.
Very much this. Both games are massively better with the expansions, and they're not a 'play the base game first' type of expansion.
As I said, I don't particularly care about that discussion. I was just pointing what's the correlation between the figure of speech and sexuality.
XCom 2 gets a bit easy once you get how it works. You should see how many mods there is on PC to boost the difficulty. :p
As for tips :
As for tips :
- Grenades are life (less in WOTC, but Vanilla, it's god-mode). Blast the enemy and it's cover and it's open bar for your other soldiers.
- Only advance in the unknown with your first soldier at the start of a turn. NEVER with the last. And especially NEVER EVER with a dash. Triggering a enemy pod when you can't react isn't very healthy.
- Only trigger one pod at a time if you can.
- Alpha-strike said pod if you can. And if you can't, alpha-strike the most dangerous enemy instead. Like, if you trigger a pod with a big ass robot and a few soldiers, ignore the soldiers (well, stay in cover from them at least) and focus the robot.
- In short, the best way not to die is not to be fired upon (btw, the Sectoids and other mind-crontrolling enemies are actually the least dangerous stuff on the battlefield, raising zombies and controlling your dudes isn't THAT dangerous).
- Try to stay in high cover as much as you can.
- Having a soldier capable of staying concealed after the squad got revealed is VERY strong. With that, you can scout ahead, make sure to not trigger 2 pods instead of just one and also cheese the Squadsight ability of the snipers (ie, shoot at aliens not yet activated who'll stay that way unless they actually see one of your dudes, you can wipe entire pods that way if there is no timer to pressure you).
- Grenades are life. Have i said that already ? Well, grenades are life. Use them. Don't keep them all for an hyphotetic big enemy in the last pod. Just keep your last one for the last pod. Use the rest.
Once you get a roll on and upgrades (especially heroes) you will you find things easy, as long as you dont over proc pod reveals. However, the very last mission is so much harder IMO. Playing veteran ironman, I'm pretty sure the game auto saved for the very last encounter scenario, and not the beginning of the mission when you go to retry due to failure. This means you can screw yourself hard if youygo bad leading up to this part. I had to drop it down to normal from to finish it and even then it's pretty crazy (going in blind of course).
With all the tools WotC and the DLCs give, I usually am flawless on the last mission (icarus jump to enemy you need to kill with ranger, shoot twice with shotgun, lol)
But I remember having trouble with it on pure vanilla. This is the double edged sword of XCOM 2 expansions. On one hand it's: oh, cool, new toys. On the other hand new toys just wreck shit a bit too much.
But I remember having trouble with it on pure vanilla. This is the double edged sword of XCOM 2 expansions. On one hand it's: oh, cool, new toys. On the other hand new toys just wreck shit a bit too much.
It's homophobic in the same way people use gay as derogatory adjective, it implies a negative view that is undesirable/ humiliating. But anyway.
Ran into my first crash in vanilla last night, got most of the way through a facility attack and whenever it was a specific enemy turn, game would freeze on one of their units who wouldn't move. Reloaded a couple of autosaves but it would just crash in the same place. Had just nuked 3 Archons as well :(
Hopefully reloading an older save will fix it.
I agree. It really irritates me though, it doesn't amuse me anymore.
empty feat : War of the Chosen is still broken on console. Don't purchase it.
True, I thought XCOM 2 was hard on default difficulty even when I am very familiar with the series. Also adding that Alien Hunter DLC, holy shit. Make one of the rulers pop up at the wrong time and you're in trouble. But yeah as you say, I do treat the game as "run based". Some runs can take twenty hours while some I restart after just a few. I don't see the ending as anything special, it's similar with Civ where I enjoy the early/mid stages more than the late game. As I really like the build up in both.
Goddammit still? Im never going to play it at this point.
Question is it much worse then launch XCom 2 ?
I played and finish pre-patch launch XCom 2 without much trouble, i could deal with load times and fps problems but bugs are my main problem.
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It is much worse.
The frame-rate is worse than the vanilla version has ever been, there are textures bugs (not appearing) everywhere, sometimes the models of the enemies disappear (and reappear during their turn), crashes, save corruptions...
I asked for a refund but they don't care.
The frame-rate is worse than the vanilla version has ever been, there are textures bugs (not appearing) everywhere, sometimes the models of the enemies disappear (and reappear during their turn), crashes, save corruptions...
I asked for a refund but they don't care.
Wow still that much, i guess then the last patch didn't do shit (what did it even fix then?).
Damn i was getting tempted to finally buy it and try to beat it in legend difficulty, but fuck that not like this.
You don't really need to, the Commander Avatar is already a overpowered psi soldier.
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I downloaded the base game from PSN and loved it so much I bought War of the Chosen immediately.
I'm enjoying it, but that enjoyment is somewhat hampered by what I'm guessing is a bug.
For some reason early on in the game I sold 2 Viper corpses to the black market (presumably as I was just short of the supplies I needed for something)
Since then I have been unable to upgrade my medkits because no matter how many Vipers I kill (and whose corpses drop in the kill feed) I never recover any. I'm guessing there's no way to fix that?
I'm enjoying it, but that enjoyment is somewhat hampered by what I'm guessing is a bug.
For some reason early on in the game I sold 2 Viper corpses to the black market (presumably as I was just short of the supplies I needed for something)
Since then I have been unable to upgrade my medkits because no matter how many Vipers I kill (and whose corpses drop in the kill feed) I never recover any. I'm guessing there's no way to fix that?
So I've been playing XCOM 2 on PS4 since last year when it went on sale. I don't have the DLC, but I'll download it for my second run.
I've been playing on rookie. I like that you can change the difficulty within the game options in case you think it's not tough enough. The description for Rookie is:
"Appropriate for players new to tactical games or XCOM in general." I'm new to XCOM.
The problem with XCOM is that even with Rookie difficulty, the game expects you to know all about XCOM. It bombards you with information where unimportant things are flashing in your face (like making missions "not recommended" to skip, forcing you to be on its case instead of learning the game in detail), and important things are hidden behind menus that pop up every half hour so you never get to experience it and think of it as 'another blip in the world'. Its when the enemies catch up to you that you feel overwhelmed as fuck.
I never invested heavily in recruiting rookie soldiers and making them captains. Each kill in the battlefield ranks them up, and unlock newer abilities to have a slight advantage against the enemy. And playing with a certain soldier too much makes you attached to them and their loss hurts even more when they have 10 missions under their belt, and a stupid or unexpected decision lead them to die.
I stopped playing halfway through when enemies got beyond reach. I never invested in getting an alien tech for my soldiers, and I never knew that its shared amongst all soldiers so invest in that and they'll all have better weapons. So I started XCOM 2 again in the past few weeks and done exactly that. The enemies are much easier to kill in one shot and combine that with weapon attachments that improve kill percentage, and you have a smoother game.
However, a lot of missions are designed like a pro chess game. Difficulty bar doesn't do shit. It should reduce enemy damage at least by half to give you a standing chance in a 6 on 14 battle, with additional reinforcements. For a game designed like a pro chess game, you're already at a disadvantage. With timers, you have to be very precise where you chess piece moves and when you attack (or not attack at all).
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The bittersweet silver lining? I've been stuck on this one mission for hours. Reloading my last 3 moves every 10 minutes. It got really frustrating but I was adamant that one reload will change the odds in my favor.
Then, the fairy goddamn-mother happened.
Apparently, at least on base PS4 from my experience, if you reload too much, the memory of the console gets overloaded, and the enemy A.I. gets cockblocked. They are not responding to attacks or moving at all. No matter how many hours I add to the game, it's stuck in this process. I've sadly taken full advantage of it and leveled up all my rookie soldiers, and finished every mission flawlessly while unlocking upgrades and being more relaxed in my plays.
But I've realized one thing with this: even with enemies not moving one bit, every mission timer comes down to the wire. So I cannot imagine one I shut off my console and restart it at how aggressive these last 5 missions would've been.
For now, I've recouped with my first half of the game where I was not heavily investing in alien tech or never knew how to really since it only pops up (at least to my knowledge) when you are picking your squad.
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TL;DR: XCOM 2 is a pro chess game, and you have to know all rules from day one. Lucky for me, my opponent is AFK for the past 5 matches, and it has helped me learn a lot.
I've been playing on rookie. I like that you can change the difficulty within the game options in case you think it's not tough enough. The description for Rookie is:
"Appropriate for players new to tactical games or XCOM in general." I'm new to XCOM.
The problem with XCOM is that even with Rookie difficulty, the game expects you to know all about XCOM. It bombards you with information where unimportant things are flashing in your face (like making missions "not recommended" to skip, forcing you to be on its case instead of learning the game in detail), and important things are hidden behind menus that pop up every half hour so you never get to experience it and think of it as 'another blip in the world'. Its when the enemies catch up to you that you feel overwhelmed as fuck.
I never invested heavily in recruiting rookie soldiers and making them captains. Each kill in the battlefield ranks them up, and unlock newer abilities to have a slight advantage against the enemy. And playing with a certain soldier too much makes you attached to them and their loss hurts even more when they have 10 missions under their belt, and a stupid or unexpected decision lead them to die.
I stopped playing halfway through when enemies got beyond reach. I never invested in getting an alien tech for my soldiers, and I never knew that its shared amongst all soldiers so invest in that and they'll all have better weapons. So I started XCOM 2 again in the past few weeks and done exactly that. The enemies are much easier to kill in one shot and combine that with weapon attachments that improve kill percentage, and you have a smoother game.
However, a lot of missions are designed like a pro chess game. Difficulty bar doesn't do shit. It should reduce enemy damage at least by half to give you a standing chance in a 6 on 14 battle, with additional reinforcements. For a game designed like a pro chess game, you're already at a disadvantage. With timers, you have to be very precise where you chess piece moves and when you attack (or not attack at all).
-----
The bittersweet silver lining? I've been stuck on this one mission for hours. Reloading my last 3 moves every 10 minutes. It got really frustrating but I was adamant that one reload will change the odds in my favor.
Then, the fairy goddamn-mother happened.
Apparently, at least on base PS4 from my experience, if you reload too much, the memory of the console gets overloaded, and the enemy A.I. gets cockblocked. They are not responding to attacks or moving at all. No matter how many hours I add to the game, it's stuck in this process. I've sadly taken full advantage of it and leveled up all my rookie soldiers, and finished every mission flawlessly while unlocking upgrades and being more relaxed in my plays.
But I've realized one thing with this: even with enemies not moving one bit, every mission timer comes down to the wire. So I cannot imagine one I shut off my console and restart it at how aggressive these last 5 missions would've been.
For now, I've recouped with my first half of the game where I was not heavily investing in alien tech or never knew how to really since it only pops up (at least to my knowledge) when you are picking your squad.
----------
TL;DR: XCOM 2 is a pro chess game, and you have to know all rules from day one. Lucky for me, my opponent is AFK for the past 5 matches, and it has helped me learn a lot.
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I just got my first "low profile" mission that limits your squad to low-ranking soldiers only...That badass loadout music kicked in to a completely empty hangar since I don't have a single living soldier below sergeant. I cracked the hell up.
With War of the Chosen, there is an option to double the mission and campaign timers. That's how I'm playing it.
Now I have to buy it fuck. Does it effect trophies or achievements
Nope; it doesn't seem it's had any effect on me gaining Steam achievements, at least.
Is WOTC an expansion with a brand new storyline/missions or is just a re-release of XCOM2 with new abilities/balance but the same storyline/missions as vanilla?
same-ish storyline with added missions, content, skills, soldier types and mechanics. the core xcom2 campaign is there, but greatly expanded. if you know the differences between xcom enemy unknown and enemy within, its like that, but one step further
Like Enemy Within, it's an expansion that integrates new missions, classes, and various changes into the same campaign. Also like Enemy Within, the new content shows up in the campaign straight away. So to answer your question, it's a mixture of both, but mostly the former.
Unlike EU and EW though the new mechanics in WotC are kinda overwhelming so there's still a lot of value playing vanilla and then WotC
Me, for example, i don't like many of the new stuff introduced in WotC. I still play vanilla while only beaten WotC once. Different from EW which was straight up EU but better in every sense.