So this happened. I needed that cover, too.
Xcom Barracks has some fun characters you can download. I did a pretty good cast of Predator but someone else already had one up there. Ah well. The L4D cast is surprisingly good. And of course you didn’t know you needed Macho Man in your squad.
Hooray for bugs. My internet was down for several hours tonight, and it seems like XCOM 2 gets a bit buggy in that situation. I had to restart twice because it was having problems loading textures and decided it would never show me the quit menu. Then, once that went away, I completed a mission and the game got stuck right before the casualty report. I had to quit and reload; it gave my soldiers their XP and promotions from the mission, but otherwise acted like I had skipped the guerilla op. Avatar progress, no reward, warning that I shouldn’t skip ops. Dandy. And then a retaliation mission right afterwards. This may only be a Veteran Ironman but with all this crap, it’s feeling more like Commander.
So I’m playing through commander and knocking down Avatar facilities only pulls back Avatar progress by 1. I thought it was supposed to undo any progress made by that facility? The two facilities were up during the Avatar Project climb to the top, so they have to be worth more than 1.
I’m extremely late to build a proving grounds (and a skulljack to advance the main story) - does that relate to it, or do facilities just eliminate on progress when you take them down? At that rate I’ll have a very difficult time stopping the Avatar project, since I have to contact 2-3 new sectors for each facility, and that only grants me -1. I guess I need to haul ass on the main storyline.
The top tier medic talent restoration doesn’t actually do what it says it does.
“The Gremlin flies to each squad member, healing or reviving them as needed”
I have 2 panicked guys, one is unconcious, and one (the medic) is hurt a bit. Perfect situation for restoration, right? So I hit it. And… the medic heals himself for 2 hp. That’s it. Doesn’t do anything for the panicked people (which revive fixes, he even has the revive talent, not that it says he needs it) or the guy bleeding out.
If it worked here, the mission would be saved, easily. Without it I may end up losing 3 guys.
You can tell how much an avatar facility is contributing to the project by the little squares under the location. If there’s only one square, it’s only worth one point of progress. There’s also a monument thing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (or at least that’s where it was in my game) that builds up, but you can’t attack it. That’s where progress from dark events goes. When you complete story missions, you reduce the progress from that place.
Aha, I didn’t notice the little square things, that definitely helps.
I was able to set back the ocean HQ a bit by catching up on some story quests.
The game has been getting rougher in a way that it typically doesn’t. Usually you have a very tough early game, but if you manage to keep a core group of troops alive, by the time they’ve got a few ranks under your belt they become easier to keep alive and the game becomes easier. But if you take a major loss, and have to resort to lower quality troops, then suddenly the game is much harder. It’s unusual in that way - if they design the curve to assume you’ll keep all your troops, it becomes way too hard if you take losses. But if they design it to assume you’ll have trouble keeping veterans alive, it becomes too easy. People often say that the game is too easy later on - but that’s only if you’ve had early success and kept it all together.
On this run, though, I’m having the opposite scenario. I had a very successful early game with very few losses, and now I’ve got a tough squad, but I’m having trouble keeping up with the escalating alien powers and I’m losing high ranking guys fairly frequently, which is making the whole thing hard to hold together.
I just had the best bug happen to me. I hacked the tower to disable the enemies. Disable was supposed to last for two turns. Instead, it lasted for the entire mission. So, all the enemies just sat their like lemons while I shot them to pieces.
One of them was a sectopod.
It was great.
I had that happen to me, it carried over to the next mission too. I had to restart the game to fix it.
I had this bug happen to me as well. Restarting the game fixed it for me too.
I had that issue until I caught up on tech - I prioritized power armor over plasma weapons, and it was tough to kill enemies fast enough. Once I managed to get plasma weapons AND power armor, I felt like things evened out again. Getting a couple of effective Psi’s in there who could do some effective stuff made a big difference as well.
My current playthrough I was in really rough shape in the mid-game - I got to the 21 day counter twice before taking out a facility each time - but now I’m close to the end game and I’ve managed to knock the Avatar counter all the way back down to 2 blocks (this is on Veteran difficulty)
PSI guys seem too powerful. You can train them up without combat, and you can end up loading them with a ton of abilities.
I think a good tweak that makes sense for both the player and aliens is that while you’re mind controlling a unit, you can’t do anything else but move. Or at least no other psi-abilities. Seems like enough of your attention would go to steering the guy you’re mind controlling that you couldn’t also act independently. It would still be a very powerful ability even with that restriction.
I just got my PSI guy completely leveled up. He’s now a permanent part of my team (replacing my blade ranger who got killed in an Advent facility raid). I agree they are super powerful. Especially once you get the alien psi amp.
Speaking of which, a blade ranger is probably the worst class. Reaper is nice, but the blade just doesn’t do enough damage to be effective. I’d like to see a future mod/DLC to change the blade ranger into some sort of stealth warrior. Like if you kill an alien with a blade it won’t break concealment if no one sees you. Maybe add a dart gun weapon that wouldn’t break concealment either, with different effects (sleep dart, poison dart, tracking dart, etc.)
A fully-trained Psi is intensely overpowered compared to anybody else, but that’s kinda their point. They cost about as much as a weapon tier to get going, and it takes half to two-thirds of a campaign to max one out. You’re only only ever going to have two, at most, whereas you can just outright buy a new veteran of any other class from the HQ or black market. Fielding your psi is a strategic risk well beyond the regular classes.
Also, they have a bit of an ability hole against pure robots, which is a major disadvantage in the mid-game if you’re investing in early psi.
Blade is speed, specifically turn advantage. High accuracy finishers every turn with no cooldown and no reloading, at all the way out to dash mobility range. Against melee enemies, you generate free attacks in the form of bladestorm, and Reaper is huge turn value. Sure, Serial does the same thing, or the bigger radius explosives, but they all have different enough strings attached to fit different niches.
I kept one blade ranger in my roster for all of my L/I run and got decent traction out of them. Damage is not really their problem, as nothing’s going to come close to the shotgun for damage anyway. My beef is with their base accuracy. Having to use an aim PCS or tracer rounds for reliable blade attacks undermines some of the value.
That’s a very good point, but I somewhat disagree about the mech ability hole. Null Lance does a tremendous amount of damage and ignores armor. It’s wonderful for any target, and I often find myself using it against sectopods. With the best amp, it knocks off half of their health in one shot. It’s true that psi op abilities are far more effective against organic targets, but they can still do loads of damage to mechs.
Blade Ranger is great if you pick the vastly superior rapid fire over reaper and stop thinking of the sword as your main weapon instead of just another tool. You should still be a shotgun ranger, but instead of getting two very good shots per mission (shadowstrike) with your shotgun and conceal you get run and gun every three turns, a slightly more effective sword for those times when you need to attack after a full dash and run and gun is down, immunity to overwatch (which synergies extremely well with the previous one), and an extremely effective chrysallid counter. Conceal rangers are also extremely good, but it is mostly because people think you have to take reaper if you go swords when rapid fire is the obvious choice either way. Nobody even thinks twice about taking untouchable over deep cover, another vastly superior obvious choice that runs the other way.
I really wish there was a way to step up a training schedule for the Psi Ops. It’s really annoying that you have to stop what you’re doing every couple days when you have two people training to pick their next skill.
Also, can we talk about how great the procedurally generated maps turned out? It could’ve been a disaster, but I think it made this game a lot more fun than EU/EW. I like started out each mission not really having any idea of what I’m going to be seeing.
I think the balance for this is it takes a long time to train them up, and they aren’t super effective until you can research and build the alien psi amp thingy. Also, the mind control is a one shot deal per mission…once that alien is dead it’s used up. So, I don’t agree it needs a rebalance as you suggest, though I do agree that once you fully train one up they are pretty awesome. But then, by the end of the game, my other guys are too. In my second play through, even on the hardest difficulty once my guys were fully leveled up and had the best armor and weapons they were pretty much unbeatable, even in the final 2 difficult missions. I wasn’t playing Ironman, but I still did the last two missions as if I was (no reloads regardless of what happened) and I managed to do them both without losing a single guy…though they were beat up quite a bit by the end.
I attacked a Gatekeeper (is that what they’re called? I usually just refer to them as the Super Happy Fun Ball or Super Happy Fun Ball of Death) and two archons with void rift. The two archons ended up disoriented, and the gatekeeper panicked and shot one of the archons.
That felt so, sooo good. I just sat there for a while clapping my hands with glee.