I know it’s early yet, but what mods are we liking?
Stop wasting my time cleans up a lot of those random pauses you have when animations play. They’re not as bad as they were in EU, but there are lots of times where a 6 second animation really should’ve been a 2 second one. Also gets rid of some annoying Bradford messages.
Evac all
evacuates everyone in the evac zone. Doesn’t change gameplay, just stops you from clicking evac 7 times.
Okay, base defense missions are ridiculous. I’m on an ironman veteran playthrough and I’ve gone through my first 8 or 10 missions with only one rookie as a casualty - everyone else came out alive. I run a base defense mission, kill 35 enemies, and lose my best 7 guys - basically wiping me out. I have one corporal and a few squaddies.
If you only had to defend against the massive amount of shit they throw at you, it’d be hard enough. But you have to fight through it and destroy the spike. And reinforcements come every single turn.
Is it better to just wait it out until you’ve killed every original enemy on the map, and you’re only dealing with the reinforcements that come every turn? Or is it better to have one guy haul ass for the objective, destroy it with squadsight snipers, and book out of there? The latter was my plan - but I lost the two rangers and a medic I sent to make a run for it.
Also, valuable lesson: you can’t just pile up corpses on the loading bay to recover the weapons. You have to actually be carrying the guys on your back as you lift off.
I had this mission happen only once, but it was relatively painless. This was what I did on veteran difficulty.
First, make sure your battlefield hacker support, and your psychic, are both on this mission. Use mind control early, and blitz the first few turns.
Scratch that. First, make sure you always complete the “a UFO hunts the Avenger” red mission, prioritizing it above anything else, until you have a battlefield hacker with hacking skill above 100 (but more is better), and a psychic with mind control. Also, it’s a good idea to build the defense turret room (I forget what it’s called), and staff an engineer in there whenever you see a UFO on the map. That’s 4 extra shots a turn!
Use the mind controlled (or hacked) enemy to scout and pull other groups (hopefully one group at a time). Do this with the first move of the turn, without sending any of your people into overwatch. If the rest of your team all has full movement points when the enemies are revealed, you’re in a MUCH better position than if you had just clicked overwatch and gotten a few free shots with aim penalties. Overwatch (usually) sucks! Ignore the tutorial! It is absolutely counter-intuitive, but it’s true. Use grenadiers for your first shots, to break cover and armor with medium AOE damage. Seriously, grenadiers are so incredibly good.
If you manage to kill a group or two on the first couple of turns without suffering any losses, your advantage starts to steamroll as their numbers stay constant (one group dead, replaced by one reinforcement group that cant shoot the turn it lands) while your numbers keep going up with a new reinforcement every turn. If you don’t kill any enemies on the first couple of turns, or if there’s still an alien pack visible on the third or 4th turn, you’re gonna have a really bad time.
Anyway, with the defense turrets you get from having the correct room built, and with a bit more aggressive strategy (ideally everything should be dead before it gets to shoot, but of course that’s rarely how it works out), that mission ends up being much more manageable.
I’m getting ready to do my second base defense (whenever that UFO gets me). The last one forced me to restart my campaign. Hopefully this one goes better. I’ve got the turrets ready and staffed. Also, I think having a specialist with the “heal everyone” ability will help.
I’ve done the base defense twice now. I find two approaches work well.
1 - Get a concealed ranger with rapid fire in range of the object and blast it.
2 - Get a concealed range to viewing distance of the object, use two sharpshooters to destroy it.
I’m going to be starting a Legend campaign later today. I’m a more than a little scared even though my Commander campaign went very well (2 deaths total)
Base defenses may be easier later, although I suspect they’re never easy, because you have more tools to deal with them. I got one really early on when my best troop with a sergeant and I barely had any equipment upgrades at all. Just brutal.
It started a death spiral. I lost all my guys above squaddie rank, so I had to go into the next mission with a bunch of rookies. In the previous game, you could keep a SHIV or two around for this situation to help level up your rookies. And you could play very carefully and slowly. Neither option are true in this game - you have to throw your rookies aggressively at the target and there’s a good chance the whole thing wipes, which is what happened.
So I had to either concede defeat or make an exception to my ironman run to restart a couple of missions. It was either that or start a brand new campaign.
The one single thing I’m not sure I like yet as far as changes from EU/EW to xcom 2 is that it’s very hard to fail on the strategic layer. You can definitely fail on the strategic layer in xcom - countries drop out, things get worse for you, leading to more countries dropping out, and game over.
But the Avatar project is too slow, too reversible to give you that sort of loss state. You can wait until it’s full, get the 20 day countdown, and then just blow up a facility on the last day, and you’ll be fine. So your overall strategic loss state is actually a tactical death spiral. You lose good troops and your lower tier troops are incapable of conducting missions - at least without save scumming. That’s how you’ll lose now.
I’m not sure I dislike that yet, but it does make the strategic layer feel too easy, to not have a strategic fail state.
I can’t remember how early my first Avenger defense mission was but it was pretty early. In fact, I remember thinking “Uh oh, this is not going to be good.” On that one I had two sharpshooters and they made quick work of the device. I know the second one was very late. I had a couple of colonels on that one. I also tried to use two sharpshooters on that one but there was no way to get visibility on it as there was a big hill in the way. So on that one I used the ranger at point blank. It was more than a little hairy trying to get him back alive.
Overall, I think the best approach is try to clear that mission as quickly as possible. Granted, I only have two data points so not the best sample size. But when it again I definitely intend to run a concealed ranger up as quickly as possible and get some fire on it.
I prefer the strategic layer in XCOM 2 for the reasons you state. If you would happen to lose everybody you do have the hail mary opportunity to get back into it but succeeding at the tactical layer while at a big disadvantage. In XCOM 1, if the strategic layer got out of hand there was not much you could do at all. I realize though that this is just my own subjective opinion and not objectively true.
The head designer just tweeted to today that they’re working on tweaks to the Avatar counter.
Maybe they should have it to where hitting blacksites stops the counter, but the only way to really lower it is to work on story missions. Right now I really don’t feel any urgency to complete my quest tasks.
One thing I’d like to see them add to the game in an expansion (or maybe a mod) is the ability to manually plan ambushes. The ambush system is pretty fun, and great when it works out, but I want to be able to queue up multiple actions to launch simultaneously. Maybe I have two grenadiers watching two seperate groups of aliens - currently I can only have one of them launch a grenade and the other has to take a standard shot in overwatch - but it would be nice to have the ability to tell them both to launch grenades into both groups and have it be executed simultaneously. It’d make setting up an ambush more fun.
There’s a dark event that puts faceless on random missions. I think this actually works to your advantage - faceless typically aren’t too hard to kill, and you can farm those sweet sweet mimic beacons, which are probably the most powerful single item in the game.
The mimic beacon seems to act like a taunt - aliens will attack it even if it’s a poor target. I’ve seen aliens leave an exposed target in front of them to run back and attack the beacon. That’s what makes it overpowered.
What it should do is simply register to the alien as another x-com soldier, and they should apply whatever logic they use to decide who to attack to it. That way you can still use it in a tactically intelligent fashion - making it an easy target for the aliens you want to distract most - without being kind of a ridiculous “taunt everyone” command. That would still allow instances where you couldn’t use a beacon to save one of your guys that’s very exposed - the aliens would still attack the real guy if he was the easier target.
I couldn’t agree more. They cluster all around it making them a prime grenade target or even just for a series of flank shots since often they won’t even bother going for cover or good cover. It really puts the enemy into stupid mode. I try not to use them unless I’m in real serious trouble because it does diminish the fun a little.
