NFL-Era XCOM2 - Mission 1 - Operation Gatecrasher
A quick intro for those not familiar with the series: XCOM is a turn-based, tactical combat series where you control an elite military organization to defend Earth from alien invaders. In the previous game (XCOM: Enemy Unknown or its expansion Enemy Within), you played as the Commander - a faceless, nameless avatar for the player that is basically the brains behind XCOM. You fight off the alien invasion...or so you think. When XCOM2 starts, it turns out the Commander has been captured by the aliens, and the aliens have taken over Earth. They've offered a taste of their vastly superior technology to the humans and this, combined with their utter domination of Earth's militaries, has allowed them to occupy the planet. The human population has largely been moved into new city centers that the aliens (and their human-facing front, ADVENT) have set up. XCOM is now a guerilla resistance faction, fighting against an opponent that outnumbers and outguns them, and is turning the very people XCOM is trying to free against them. Finally, XCOM is trying to get the Commander back to help them fight the war.
Now, for the opening mission. If you want to see the opening cinematics, watch
this.
Full disclosure: I was kinda drunk while getting this going and still figuring out how to get this streaming thing working. So the first time I tried this, I was a bit reckless and everyone died horribly. I restarted with a more cautious mindset and things went well. However, I forgot to take screenshots as I went through the first mission because I was still messing with stream settings. Oops. I'll give you a brief overview of what happened, but future posts will be much more detailed/screenshot-laden.
Our opening mission's objective is to plant an explosive on an ADVENT monument, blow it up to send a message, and eliminate all hostile contacts in the area.
We started here:
Our target was just ahead of us, here:
Our plan was to take the roof of the building to the left of us, and then slowly push towards the monument.
We wanted to move forward slowly and in a controlled manner, so as not to draw too much attention. The enemies travel in packs/pods, and we want to handle those one at a time if at all possible. Long story short, we did. We moved around the back of the building, got up to the roof, eliminated the first pod at the foot of the building immediately, and then moved forward cautiously to eliminate the rest on the way to the monument.
Our four soldiers on this mission (randomly selected out of the character pool I put together) were:
Note that we're only really going to see the characters' first names if we go into their profiles, so I kinda just filled in something there just to have it populated. Most of the time we'll be seeing their nickname and their "last name". Also, their rank is Squaddie in this picture, which they got promoted to after the mission. They were Rookies beforehand.
Here's a closer look at each of them and what they got promoted to:
DMczaf
DM got promoted to Grenadier. He's going to be our heavy weapons guy, carrying both a large, rapid fire cannon you can see there (which can shred armor eventually) and a grenade launcher. He's basically going to destroy cover and shred armor to make targets softer for our other troops.
foppy79
Foppy got promoted to Sharpshooter. These are your snipers, but they can also be built as "Gunslingers", who specialize in the pistol they also carry.
Pepiope
Pep got promoted to Ranger. These are our close combat specialists, using shotguns and swords. They get in, kill shit, and then get out.
And finally,
Bronx-Man
Bronx is a Specialist. These are our support troops. They act as medics and as hackers (hacking enemy terminals/mechs to give us advantages).
Finally, here's the rest of the initial character pool we start off with. We will definitely be adding a lot more as we go along, though. I have something like 49 characters in this pool.
This is already pretty long so I'll end it here by reposting this for if you want to get into the character pool/customize your character:
Gonna do an NFL-Era XCOM2 character pool. If you want to be in it, please PM me (either here or on Discord) with some details on what you want for your character - I won't be doing any super-crazy customization, but I'll try and tailor your character to your preferences with the available customization options if it's not too time-intensive. I'll be posting updates with screenshots after each mission. If you've already talked to me about it in Discord, you're probably already in, so no further action needed (unless you want some particular appearance-related stuff). If you don't provide or want any customization preferences, I'll probably just leave it as whatever the random character generator gave me to start off with. I reserve the right to change your character's nickname to something busting your balls at any time (and in fact some of you already have such a nickname). I can also change your appearance at any time, so if you don't like what the character generator gave you I can change it whenever.
You can customize your appearance in various ways (hair style/color, race, cosmetic props like sunglasses and cigars, etc.) and also
choose a class if you want - if you don't choose a class, you'll just get randomly assigned one when you get your first promotion. The four base classes (Ranger, Specialist, Grenadier, Sharpshooter) will be the most common on an average playthrough's roster, so choosing one of those may increase your chance of getting picked out of the pool. Psi Ops don't really become a thing until late game. You can also choose to be one of the special classes (Reaper, Skirmisher, Templar) but this will drastically decrease your chances of showing up (and may limit your customization options appearance-wise) - I probably won't have more than 2 of each of these, maybe 3 if the campaign goes really long, and the first one is always a specific character provided by the game.
I'll be playing on the hardest difficulty setting, but I will be playing Bronzeman mode, which basically gives me the option to restart missions if they get really bad - otherwise I'll try to roll with the punches. I'm kinda iffy on not restarting if someone dies right off the bat, especially if they were about to get promoted, but we'll see how it goes.
I'll probably start the campaign next week. You don't have to be in the pool when I start though, I'll be pulling in new characters as the campaign goes along.
I promise I'll have more screenshots and give a much better rough play-by-play of the actual mission next time. I'll be out of town most of the weekend, so the next one will probably be Sunday night. I'd just restart it and get screenshots, but the opening mission went too well to throw it away :P
