Only in the missions where it’s required, so far. It’s nice that you can extract even after a double move.
There’s a bug which makes it impossible to pick up/carry your unconscious squad mates most of the time. This bug has made the stun-baton guys the highest priority kill targets for me, even though otherwise they would be somewhere in the bottom 2 or 3 of that list.
So far this is the only serious bug/glitch I have encountered. Pretty impressive for release day.
I’ve never had problems carrying my unconscious squad mates. I had a bug where the unconscious vip i was carrying died because he was on freaking fire the whole time and there was no indication of this.
Absolutely! That was a great discovery. I actually managed to complete my first sabotage mission without firing a shot. The squad snuck into position, I sent one guy in to set the charges, then everyone booked to the evac while the baddies were still waiting for their first turn.
Of course, nobody got any promotions, but it bought me precious time to regroup and build some proper armor. And it was cool that it was possible. I never thought I’d complete an XCOM mission using nothing but stealth.
I may have to abandon my first game. The Avatar project is fully in the red (somehow in less than a month it jumped up 5 squares) and I don’t have any intel, so I can’t open up any of the countries where Avatar facilities are in. I didn’t realize you needed intel and somehow I spent a bunch of it when I shouldn’t have, so now I think I’m screwed. 
Heh. XCOM2 has elements of rogue-like (FTL, anyone?).
That gain implies that there’s at least 4 working avatar buildings. If you could reach any of them, it’d make a huge difference - destroying the building removes ALL the progress that one has contributed. Also, you can just sit at Resistance HQ and earn intel. You’re right that you’re probably stuck on that playthrough, though.
It is actually best to wait until the bar is full to do anything about the avatar project because every time it fills up you get an extra amount of time to do something about it before you lose. Having a bunch of facilities ready to go and taking advantage of the extra time each time the bar fills extends the timer much more than knocking off facilities asap.
Are there supposed to be resistance links from New Mexico to South America? In my current game I started in New Mexico, and only have links to the Eastern and Western US from there. The only place I can expand is the New Arctic in Asia.
I finished my first campaign on Veteran on Saturday. I won’t post any story spoilers of course, but it was satisfying and a lot of fun.
Yesterday I started a campaign on Commander. So far I’ve had one fatality (bad bad bad dumb mistake) and a fair number of injuries. I’m just about to build the psi lab as I found the psi operative were quite effective in my last campaign.
If this Commander campaign goes well, I’ll have to try Legend (and likely get demolished). I don’t play on Ironman because I fear a glitch costing me, but I don’t reload for anything except a glitch. I only had to reload once due to a graphical glitch.
All in all, great game.
Enjoying it a lot so far, though I haven’t been able to resist “wait, wait, no, let’s try that again” reloads. I am ashamed of my own cowardliness. In my defense, I’ve mostly only reloaded to test out how the systems work, things like “Does the loot countdown go to 0? Nope, reload and grab it before it disappears.” or “If I move here will I be close enough to throw a grenade? Looks like not, reload.” I did just quit out of a mission that would have cost me a whole squad, though, which is definitely cowardly.
Hacking is neat, but it can be a little too swing-y. I had a mission where I had about even chance on a hack between replenishing my entire squads AP, which would have led to an easy victory, or calling in a squad of enemy reinforcements, which would have been certain defeat. That’s a bit too extreme for a single roll of the die, I think.
I also screwed myself over by not paying attention to the facility building rooms. I didn’t realize that the top row is a lot faster to clear, so I ended up taking way too long to get another facility slot.
Good to know that I can put off dealing with the Avatar project. It sounds like the best strategy would be to just ignore it until the track fills up, and then take out some black sites?
I kinda hope that someone makes a ‘casual’ mod. I love XCOM and I think it has the best tactical combat, but it can be very stressful to play. After a couple campaigns, I think I’d like a mod that lets you just build up squads and send them on missions without permadeath or a game over failure state.
Eh, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it. I’m not too concerned about that for my first playthrough, anyway. I try not to full-out save scum, but if a mission goes completely pear-shaped, I’ll reload from to the very start, or before the mission to get a fresh layout. I’ve also done the occasional save to test mechanics, as well. I don’t replay or reroll missions until I get them perfect, but I also avoid moving forward with a total party wipe, or the loss of major crew or assets. XCOM does a good job of making the missions difficult enough that you often can’t get them perfect, so I’ve endured my share of costly victories.
I’ll eventually do an Ironman playthrough, but I’m already playing on Commander, so things are challenging enough. It gives me something to work towards while preventing me from getting getting super frustrated as unfamiliar mechanics and bugs screw with my playthrough.
I had a hair raising mission last night. It was a retaliation mission. So I get my 5 troopers suited up. We land. I move my ranger (who is stealthed thanks to Phantom) forward. I detect 3 pods.
1 - Muton, Shieldbearer, Zerker
2 - Officer, Lancer, Trooper
3 - Sectoid, Sectoid, Shieldbearer
One pod to my left, one pod to my right, one pod directly in front.
All three are within 17 squares.
So I move my first guy, and yup, all of them activate. At the end of my first turn, all explosives and a mimic beacon (very OP) a faceless spawns. I’m can’t help but laugh. And the fourth pod is just past the pod in front me. They could stumble into the fight at any time. Ultimately, the fourth pod did show up literally on the turn after I killed the first three.
I honestly, don’t know how I didn’t lose anybody. On the first turn I focused on the mutons (killed one), killed the trooper and the faceless (he was next to the mutons). The zerker and a muton go after the mimic beacon. It was then killed by the officer. Sectoid rezzes the trooper. The other sectoid mind controls one of my grenadier (yeah that’s not good). Shieldbearer drops his shield. Lancer MISSES, praise Hypnos!
2nd turn, take out the shieldbearer that dropped the shield, kill the mind controlling sectoid and through a bit of dumb luck kill the muton. We take heavy damage from the remaining pods, as they start to flank us. The remaining sectoid mind controls another one of my guys (argh!!!). Other shieldbearer drops his shield.
3rd turn, kill everything left. The next group pops in, 2 mutons and a zerker. I sob a little.
4th turn, I kill the zerker. One of the mutons shoots a civilian (yay!!) and the other shoots and hits.
5th turn, kill one muton. The other lives from a string of fair misses (RNG happens). Sharpshooter missing the 91% makes me weep a little. He hits one of my guys and brings him to 1 health! Yikes.
6th, kill the remaining muton. Another Faceless pops up. We gun him down no problem.
I ended up with 5 injuries, 4 of them gravely. What a blast.
Not entirely - you want to at least have access to them, in case of a big surge in advancement. (and contacted regions increase your income & whole continents give you bonuses.) You just don’t need to kill them off as soon as you can access them. Taking out 1 that has 4 pips on it is as good as taking out 3-4 1 pips.
There’s already some of that:
- increase or eliminate the time limits
- or rework the timers, so they don’t start until concealment is removed.
- increase the length of the Avatar track on lower difficulties
- or remove it entirely
Upon further experimentation, I believe one of my previous assumptions was wrong - this game does use fixed random number seeds in the same way the previous game did.
Under the standard settings, the game generates a string of d100 rolls at the beginning of every mission which are used to answer hit/miss rolls, in linear order, and this string is retained on reload. If you have a 90% chance to hit a target, and the next roll in order is 91, you will always miss that shot no matter how many times you reload and retry it, unless you take a different shot first and it happens that the next number in line is 89.
I hated that in the first game, and I loved that there was a Second Wave option to disable it. It’s ostensibly an anti-save-scumming measure, but it really just encourages a different kind of save-scumming; I know that Squaddie X can’t hit on a 67% chance no matter what, so if I can move Squaddie Y into a position where they have a 75% chance to hit, then I’ll likely be able to have X take a shot at a 57% chance in the hopes that the next roll is a better one, or if there’s an enemy on overwatch, I can force them to take the shot that’s doomed to miss so that I can get a better roll on the next shot.
This whole thing sounds like a hell of your own creation man.
I would suggest playing ironman mode instead, drop the difficulty by a step if you want. It’s likely to be a more enjoyable experience than jumping through all these hoops, and arguably, it’s the purest way to experience the game. You’re supposed to suffer losses. You’re supposed to cry out in anger: “AAAAADDDDVVVEEENNNNTT”.
It is precisely because of that trial by fire, that bringing people back alive, flawlessly beating a mission, etc means so much, and feels so good.
You can’t have light without the darkness, and you won’t care about your soldiers unless you experience the loss of having your favorite cut down by a muton.
No, a hell of my own creation would be having to repeat 8-10 hours of gameplay because I clicked on a tile that was one over from the one I wanted to click on, and in so doing popped an enemy cluster that wiped my team before I could react. 
But that’s Xcom baby!! 
Eh. If the Commander could spend 20 years wired into a computer being forced to replay war simulations over and over again until the optimal result is achieved, then I can reload 3 or 4 times in a round in order to get the most bang out of my guys. I’ve finished campaigns in the first game where I didn’t lose any soldiers besides the ones that die in the tutorial and I’m darn proud of that. 
Ironman is pretty risky. A bug that keeps you from reloading your saves stops the whole thing dead. There was such a bug when there were Chrysalid burrowers on a map, I’m not sure if they fixed it.
You can get all the benefits of ironman (except maybe an achievement if there is one) by just manually only saving sometimes, but then you need the discipline to actually stick with it.