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XCOM 2 |OT| Be Aggressive! Be Be Aggressive!

Ehh... I have some bad news for you:
Yes, XCOM 2's RNG cheats--in your favour. (Essentially, all difficulties but Legend skew things in the player's favour.)

Firaxis in general goes to great lengths to try to prevent players from feeling cheated by the AI or RNG in general. I think they've talked about it a few times but I can't find the article I had in mind anymore.
 

Effect

Member
Watch someone do a couple of mission on youtube to get the idea what you're supposed to do. As a general rule, if enemies are taking shots at your squad, you did something wrong in the initiation or execution of your turn. Cover is not "100%", it adds 20 for half, and 40 defense for full cover. 60 and 70% shots are still going to miss often. You should not be setting off a half dozen enemies to fight at once. The average pod size is going to be like 3 aliens to take out. Use explosives extensively early to remove cover and give the rest of your squad higher percentage shots. If you don't think your shot will finish off the enemy, leaving you in a position to take return fire, then use another grenade for that guaranteed damage. High ground will give your squad a bonus to hit, and you should use flanking when you know you won't uncover new fog and possibly set off another pod.

Don't let your ego get in the way of dropping down the difficulty, either. I mean, that's what it's there for. I didn't know what the hell I was doing with Civ 5 when I got it, so I had to go to the easiest setting, and crank it up each playthrough until I found the one best for me.

Ehh... I have some bad news for you:
Yes, XCOM 2's RNG cheats--in your favour. (Essentially, all difficulties but Legend skew things in the player's favour.)

Firaxis in general goes to great lengths to try to prevent players from feeling cheated by the AI or RNG in general. I think they've talked about it a few times but I can't find the article I had in mind anymore.

Certainly didn't feel like it. I'm going to drop the difficulty down next time I play and take into account height more and see how it goes. I want to play the game and don't want to hate it so I'm hoping the experience is better next time.
 

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
This is only for the first haven at the very start of the game. Intel is incredibly important early on to spread your web, and you won't get enough engineers in the first month to do that.

Then go for 0 supply rebels. You're getting 0-20 supplies anyway, may aswell get more int.
 

Armaros

Member
Then go for 0 supply rebels. You're getting 0-20 supplies anyway, may aswell get more int.

the faceless stealing all of your supplies early in the game is gettting fixed.

They go from fixed supply steal to percent based. so you wont be losing 90% of your income anymore.
 
I need help. I want to get through Xcom 2 on veteran in iron man mode before I go installing the long war mod. I realize its suppose to be hard but I seem to be making bad choices that makes it impossible after taking out the first black site. I can't seem to keep people alive long enough to get up a few ranks. I'm either too cautious, and I end up taking too long and failing most missions. Or my best soldiers are taking out and I end up sending out waves of rookies only to get completely slaughtered.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
LW2 question. Do you get any XP for completing a mission without killing anyone? I just did a basically full stealth extraction mission, where the only enemy that wsaw me was a drone, and I simply outran it.

I need help. I want to get through Xcom 2 on veteran in iron man mode before I go installing the long war mod. I realize its suppose to be hard but I seem to be making bad choices that makes it impossible after taking out the first black site. I can't seem to keep people alive long enough to get up a few ranks. I'm either too cautious, and I end up taking too long and failing most missions. Or my best soldiers are taking out and I end up sending out waves of rookies only to get completely slaughtered.

I always delayed the main story missions for as long as humanly possible. Otherwise, use explosives and flashbangs well. Don't take a shot just because you have a shot. Sometimes it's better to hunker down.
 

Rockk

Member
LW2 question. Do you get any XP for completing a mission without killing anyone? I just did a basically full stealth extraction mission, where the only enemy that wsaw me was a drone, and I simply outran it.

Yes you get most of your XP from completing missions. You get far less XP from getting kills compared to the base game.
 

Vena

Member
LW2 question. Do you get any XP for completing a mission without killing anyone? I just did a basically full stealth extraction mission, where the only enemy that wsaw me was a drone, and I simply outran it.

Yup.

You still "lose" experience (though kills exp is much lower in LW2) but you can still level up a team well with just completions, and allows you to make "stealth squads" of only a few members with reduced detection that can run across maps to finish simple objectives or extract VIPs.

I recently did a 3-man extraction on a VIP with two Shinobi running ahead and scouting out all of the safe paths to lead the VIP to the extraction point. Works great when you are stretched thin.
 

Armaros

Member
Yup.

You still "lose" experience (though kills exp is much lower in LW2) but you can still level up a team well with just completions, and allows you to make "stealth squads" of only a few members with reduced detection that can run across maps to finish simple objectives or extract VIPs.

I recently did a 3-man extraction on a VIP with two Shinobi running ahead and scouting out all of the safe paths to lead the VIP to the extraction point. Works great when you are stretched thin.

two full stealth line shinobis are amazing for those small man groups.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
two full stealth line shinobis are amazing for those small man groups.


Yeah, I've done it a few times now. An escort mission pops up with like a 3 day lead. My Stealth squad is a set of 3 Shinobi, but 1 is on another mission or in training, so I send 2 Shinobi and whatever else I can fit within the time limit.

So far it's worked well for the VIP escort, and resistance escort missions. Haven't tried it for a hostile VIP, or any hacking yet.
 

Armaros

Member
Yeah, I've done it a few times now. An escort mission pops up with like a 3 day lead. My Stealth squad is a set of 3 Shinobi, but 1 is on another mission or in training, so I send 2 Shinobi and whatever else I can fit within the time limit.

So far it's worked well for the VIP escort, and resistance escort missions. Haven't tried it for a hostile VIP, or any hacking yet.

I use a sharpshooter and hacking specialist respectivly.

And use the shinobi to scout for a squad sight or a long range good hacking position.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
I use a sharpshooter and hacking specialist respectivly.

And use the shinobi to scout for a squad sight or a long range good hacking position.

I have sharpshooters and hackers I could pull in if needed. I should probably add 1 of each to the squad so they can start building up proficiency with a leader.
 
This game performs like Skyrim. The further into the campaign I go, the longer the loading times are, even sporting a black screen post mission, then another long load time unless I do the caps lock thing. This is on a SSD. I love this game, but the technical issues are still pathetic.
 

Vena

Member
So I got a weird ass glitch in LW2 that forced me to reset a few saves where my target and what my unit was shooting at were not the same. It was the weirdest thing.
 
Victory! Finally finished X-Com2 vanilla that I got on the Steam Winter Sale. I know that some of you guys are breezing through LW2, but for me this is an achievement ;)

Phenomenal game! Everything said about the first one dialed up is true. I figured since I actually managed to beat the first game a couple of times, I would dive into this one totally blind and on Ironman from the beginning. What a rush! This was my first campaign and I honestly thought I was going to lose, and I had to bury quite a bit of high ranking soldiers along the way. Some highlights that stood out:


  • My only combat hacker on the squad dying from a first-time encountered Andromedon acid grenade.
  • My killboard leading ranger discovering the hard way not to melee Muton's.
  • His even better performing replacement learning that not only do Andromedons come back to life (surprise!), they get an action right away. Which meant even though you pulled the squad out of the fire with your fancy sword, you were about to chow down on a giant steel fist as your reward: RIP.
  • First encounter with a Gatekeeper, and while wondering what it could do, it annihilated my wounded grenadier with a psychic vortex and raised her back as a zombie all in one move... she had to give her life twice to liberate the Earth.
  • My only medic getting captured by aliens trying to get to a VIP; I thought he was lost to us for sure, but I was very surprised to rescue him on a mission many weeks later! He stayed with the squad the rest of the way until the end, and often it was thanks only to him that we didn't lose more soldiers than we did.
Many more fell along they way, but we never gave up, pulled back and sent new recruits out into the field to keep bringing the fight back to the aliens.

I finished the game with the same type of squad as the first X-Com, with a pair of double long range snipers (both from Germany, same as in my X-Com 1 coincidentally enough). These two ladies dominated the killboards and put down more aliens than the rest of the squad combined.

It's a mark (to me) of a really great game that after spending so many hours to finish it, my very first thought is to dive back in with a new squad. I'd love to try Psi Ops this time, I didn't even build the facility on my first playthrough... and I've heard really good things about Gunslinger snipers. Now that I've finished the vanilla game I'm also real excited to get back in there with some mods (I don't think I'm ready for LW2 just yet!) and maybe even get the Spark DLC.


So finally got this thanks to the humble bundle monthly and WTF!?!! The difficulty for this game makes no damn sense and I'm just on mission 2. I'm playing on the second option and for the life of me I can't make out what I'm doing wrong. The only conclusion I can come to is that the randomness of the attacks makes no sense or is completely in favor of the computer.


I need help. I want to get through Xcom 2 on veteran in iron man mode before I go installing the long war mod. I realize its suppose to be hard but I seem to be making bad choices that makes it impossible after taking out the first black site. I can't seem to keep people alive long enough to get up a few ranks. I'm either too cautious, and I end up taking too long and failing most missions. Or my best soldiers are taking out and I end up sending out waves of rookies only to get completely slaughtered.

My missions started going much better when I started following a few basic tenets:

1) When you encounter an enemy pod, freeze. Do not advance past your furthest soldier in any direction unless it is critical to do so. It is imperative to avoid activating any new enemies.

2) Respond to each encounter with maximum lethality: don't try and "save" consumables for when they are "needed". Unless you soldiers are in high cover and selecting from a pile of 90%+ shot chances, use those explosives. Don't try and kill aliens with them (that's just a bonus when you can do it), use them to destroy the aliens cover to give your squad the best shot chances they can get. The most important thing is making sure your soldiers don't take wounds.

3) Kill at least 1 alien a turn, more if you can. Don't spread out your damage, aliens hurt you just as badly if they have 10 hp left, or 1... if you have to use up a 14 damage sniper shot in a single health alien to take it out, do it. The only way to ensure your squads safety is to make sure nothing is alive to shoot back at them.

4) Flashbangs and Mimic Beacons are life savers, don't leave home without them. I disregarded flashbangs at the start because I thought it was better to do damage... the real power of the flashbangs is in removing enemy special abilities for a couple of turns.

5) Unless there is simply no other choice, don't take a shot that is under 70% (and even then... X-Com gonna X-Com). If you have a shot less than that, in my experience overwatch is a more successful strategy.
 
Was there ever a mod released that removed all of Bradford's voice acting? I use Quiet Bradford (of course), but I don't want to hear that idiot at all. "Advent came in hot, and so did.." SHUT THE FUCK UP, BRADFORD! GET IN THE CORNER! BAD BRADFORD, BAD! I've played this game a couple hundred damn hours, and I feel like he's going to be the death of me, rather than the aliens.

He's a faceless, isn't he? Come on...has to be.

Oh, baby.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=655124816

giphy.gif


Trying out A Better Advent, but I sure hope all extraction missions aren't going to just have enemies sit back, overwatching the evac point.

Eh, just going to uninstall the game for now. It isn't hard on commander difficulty, but ABA seems to have certain enemies able to take actions when the pod is activated. What a stupid way to attempt to make aliens more challenging.
 

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
Man LW2 is harsh.
I tear through vanilla I\I, but even V \ I is kicking my ass.
 

Vena

Member
1.1 Patch on LW2 made the first month considerably more manageable and you can move through the liberation quest quickly in your home region.

Before 1.1 it was an event every few hours and your Alert Level skyrocketed because you couldn't keep up with everything.
 

Sblargh

Banned
1.1 Patch on LW2 made the first month considerably more manageable and you can move through the liberation quest quickly in your home region.

Before 1.1 it was an event every few hours and your Alert Level skyrocketed because you couldn't keep up with everything.

My two first tries with LW were disaster. Now I came up with this notion that keeping enemy numbers low is more important than having more soldiers on the field, but I'm still too scared to try. :(
Maybe this patch will revitalize my coward self into something that resembles a person I am not ashamed to be.
 

Vena

Member
My two first tries with LW were disaster. Now I came up with this notion that keeping enemy numbers low is more important than having more soldiers on the field, but I'm still too scared to try. :(
Maybe this patch will revitalize my coward self into something that resembles a person I am not ashamed to be.

First two months should be manageable with squads of four to six, but you will eventually face missions where you WILL have to deal with Impenetrable missions and send in a solid squad of 8-10 units, this is especially crappy when its a major Dark Event or other resistance special. Also be sure to set up the extraction beacon early on because it will take 4-10 turns for the chopper to arrive depending on difficulty/status of the mission, do not wait to use it till the end because you can end up in a situation where you have ten turns to evac and every turn spawns in pods of 6-10 enemies.

You have to have at least three squads of six fully equipped and staffed, and all your rookies need to be trained into real units quickly. Also I think, early on, its best to put soldiers on Havens to keep Faceless numbers down. Keep your engineers and scientists on more important base-building and research tasks. Doing rescue ops on resistance members is a good way to get a haven staffed AND to get new recruits for free.

Build an AWC immediately, and train a unit in AWC abilities whenever possible, as it gives you free pistols shots/skills and some other nice perks. Try to get a Spark up and running early on because its nice to have your own MEC equivalent to tank hits with armor. Equally important, build a MEC/robotics counter unit to rotate into groups because there's a lot of Drones and MEC to deal with as time progresses, so why not make them your own and/or utterly useless!

Extract missions can be done with two shinobi and a grenadier/missiledude, just use the shinobi to scout out the clearest path and avoid pretty much all fights. If you do get into a fight use the grenadier/missiledude to blow up your enemies if they cluster or hit them with flashbands/stun rockets.

Get a Specialist and a squad set-up for any hacking/item missions, since you can usually reach these targets with a Gremlin from relative safety, so you don't need a huge squad. If these have bad timers on them, just ignore them because the 8-turn limit is a fucking nightmare on maps with more than Guarded status.

Assault and Shinobi (and grenades) utterly decimate the early goings of the game, but Shinobi will fall-off fast and fall into a weird niche. Shinobi become really good at dancing with melee mutons, berserkers, and crysalids because they can turn into dodge-tanks in melee but they have crap for firepower as the game progresses. Conversely, Sharpshooter is utter garbage early on and takes time to build into a very good unit.

Assault never falls off in my experience, and only gets better and better as you progress. They also have a range issue like Shinobi but they can deal some massive damage to just about anything, ad have solid survivability perks.
 

Sblargh

Banned
I'm glad about LW2 that it seems to have ressurected the modding community a bit. It was surprisingly dead given how much people were hyped about modding this game at launch.
 

Palmer_v1

Member
LW2 has gotten a bit tedious. The lack of universal upgrades would be fine if I wasn't micro-managing inventory for like 40 troops.
 
Lost my LW2 Veteran/Ironman campaign :(
Assaulted the regional HQ with Advent strength 7. "Swarming" enemy strength despite 200% infiltration.

I saw a pod of 8(!!!) advent and two other pods. Got flanked by a drone and it was over :(
 

Palmer_v1

Member
Lost my LW2 Veteran/Ironman campaign :(
Assaulted the regional HQ with Advent strength 7. "Swarming" enemy strength despite 200% infiltration.

I saw a pod of 8(!!!) advent and two other pods. Got flanked by a drone and it was over :(

Yeah, liberating the first sector was a rough mission. I've started doing fighting retreats, where I'm deliberately moving everyone back to break line of sight while I potshot them with Overwatch. If you can't start the battle with a Technical rocket, it can be a pain in the ass.
 

jtb

Banned
Wow. Just blew through this game after getting it on Humble over the weekend. Tons of fun, though it has one of the worst reverse difficulty curves I can remember. Now, ready for round 2.

Likely gonna dive into Long War 2, but first... curious if there are mods for vanilla that I should check out? Think I'm going to grab the DLC while it's on sale. Which ones are worthwhile? Shen's Last Gift... or should I just go ahead and grab all three at once?

Also, I really really like the idea of a loot mod on paper. 1. Is Grimy's good? 2. Does it play well with Long War 2, or should I not bother with trying to balance the juggling act?

(Meanwhile, just shoot mods at me that I should add.)
 

Palmer_v1

Member
Wow. Just blew through this game after getting it on Humble over the weekend. Tons of fun, though it has one of the worst reverse difficulty curves I can remember. Now, ready for round 2.

Likely gonna dive into Long War 2, but first... curious if there are mods for vanilla that I should check out? Think I'm going to grab the DLC while it's on sale. Which ones are worthwhile? Shen's Last Gift... or should I just go ahead and grab all three at once?

Also, I really really like the idea of a loot mod on paper. 1. Is Grimy's good? 2. Does it play well with Long War 2, or should I not bother with trying to balance the juggling act?

(Meanwhile, just shoot mods at me that I should add.)

Most of the mods I used to change gameplay are just part of LW2 mod now.

Most of the stop wasting my time stuff is useful, i.e. mass-overwatch with one click, extract all, etc.

I use a mod to give me a numeric health number, cause who wants to count the pips all day.

For DLC, you might as well grab them all at once. Shen's gift is like a single mission that adds a special recruit. The Alien Hunters one adds a few weapons immediately, plus a few special missions, and then some new enemy types on future missions.
 
So, I recently started the game, and have two questions.. (base game, no mods installed)

Is there a way to make it run faster? (not performance) but the actions/animations itself, like the AI takes a lot to do stuff (i7 and gtx1070) and then you have the animations, and the loading times before each missions are insane, I will move it to an ssd to see if that helps and overclock the cpu, and also, sometime the unit "teleports" at the end of its action, is that a normal glitch? it makes you feel like you're playing online, but nope, it's the SP campaign.

and 2nd, I'm always low on soldiers (they die a lot, and I don't like to load an old save too much), and resources, not sure if I'm doing something wrong at the beginning, also the game is telling me that I don't have space to contact resistance and I'm not getting what to upgrade, how do I enlarge that? (I will check the exact name when I'm at home).
 

Palmer_v1

Member
So, I recently started the game, and have two questions.. (base game, no mods installed)

Is there a way to make it run faster? (not performance) but the actions/animations itself, like the AI takes a lot to do stuff (i7 and gtx1070) and then you have the animations, and the loading times before each missions are insane, I will move it to an ssd to see if that helps and overclock the cpu, and also, sometime the unit "teleports" at the end of its action, is that a normal glitch? it makes you feel like you're playing online, but nope, it's the SP campaign.

and 2nd, I'm always low on soldiers (they die a lot, and I don't like to load an old save too much), and resources, not sure if I'm doing something wrong at the beginning, also the game is telling me that I don't have space to contact resistance and I'm not getting what to upgrade, how do I enlarge that? (I will check the exact name when I'm at home).

Stop Wasting My Time is a mod that will speed up a lot of things. Not sure about the rest of that part.

For resistance contacts, you need to build resistance comms, which can only be done after you've researched resistance comms, I think. For soldiers dying, try to make sure you're always in High Cover. Use flashbang to screw with alrge groups so they're inaccurate, and use grenades to blow up their cover. Move cautiously and avoid triggering multiple pods at once.
 
Thank you, that mod speeded up things a little.

Man, the game is so much better when you slightly know/understand what to do, I have to start a fresh campaign because the other one was already lost =p.

And now, I researched & developed armors and some guns first instead of focus on progress the "main" story. It's way more fun to not having soldiers killed with one shoot or make no damage.

Isn't the ranger a little OP? it looks like I almost kill everything with one meele attack.
 
Isn't the ranger a little OP? it looks like I almost kill everything with one meele attack.
In the base game? No, because going melee exposes them to tons of enemies if you can't kill fast enough/aren't finishing them off fast enough. With my Slink Master mod, they are kind of OP in the early game, because they get Implacable at the start of their skill tree, so they can move if they successfully kill an enemy.

Later in the game, they become way less useful unless they get good AWC perks and you build them for specific roles you know you'll need.
 
I'm not getting something about this game, I can't do most of the main mission because I didn't contacted those regions.

I'm suppose to build 2 o 3 communication centres to be able to make contact with each region in order to been able to the missions?

I currently have one communication centre with 2 engineers, but I can't make contact with any more regions due to that.

Is there a mod/cheat to change that? I'm 40hs in, and I'm start to getting tired of make no or really little progress.
 
I'm not getting something about this game, I can't do most of the main mission because I didn't contacted those regions.

I'm suppose to build 2 o 3 communication centres to be able to make contact with each region in order to been able to the missions?

I currently have one communication centre with 2 engineers, but I can't make contact with any more regions due to that.

Is there a mod/cheat to change that? I'm 40hs in, and I'm start to getting tired of make no or really little progress.
Have you actually bought the upgrades to Resistance comms and setup the relays (the radio towers on the map)? Because at a certain point, the plain old Resistance comm stuff doesn't cut it and you need to upgrade in order to contact more regions.

Also, IIRC, there's certain continent bonuses that give you extra region capacity and stuff like that.
 
Have you actually bought the upgrades to Resistance comms and setup the relays (the radio towers on the map)? Because at a certain point, the plain old Resistance comm stuff doesn't cut it and you need to upgrade in order to contact more regions.

Also, IIRC, there's certain continent bonuses that give you extra region capacity and stuff like that.

I did upgrade the Resistance comms (that's why I have two engineers on it, I think that's the max?), and set only one radio for now. Does building the radio increase the amount of contacts you can made? I've only made one for now.
 
I did upgrade the Resistance comms (that's why I have two engineers on it, I think that's the max?), and set only one radio for now. Does building the radio increase the amount of contacts you can made? I've only made one for now.
Okay, I double checked the wiki and the relays just lower contact cost and up supplies each region gives you.

So yeah, I'm guessing you got super unlucky with the RNG and got all the major missions in distant regions, so you'd need multiple Resistance comms to get there.
 

Rex_DX

Gold Member
Have you actually bought the upgrades to Resistance comms and setup the relays (the radio towers on the map)? Because at a certain point, the plain old Resistance comm stuff doesn't cut it and you need to upgrade in order to contact more regions.

Also, IIRC, there's certain continent bonuses that give you extra region capacity and stuff like that.

Call me crazy but why don't you just build a second resistance comm?

Barring an extremely lucky RNG roll, you'll need a second one to beat the game anyway. This is also why pursuing engineers is a must.
 
So, I recently started the game, and have two questions.. (base game, no mods installed)

Is there a way to make it run faster? (not performance) but the actions/animations itself, like the AI takes a lot to do stuff (i7 and gtx1070) and then you have the animations, and the loading times before each missions are insane, I will move it to an ssd to see if that helps and overclock the cpu, and also, sometime the unit "teleports" at the end of its action, is that a normal glitch? it makes you feel like you're playing online, but nope, it's the SP campaign.

There's a mod that speeds up the animations.
 
About to start my first LW2 campaign, what difficultly should I go with given that I beat the vanilla game on Legend, is it still normal/veteran just like how in LW1 where even if you beat the vanilla game on Impossible you still went with normal ?

I also have all the DLCs except the MECH one, should I get or does it not add much ?
 

NandoGip

Member
Just got this game last week and I am so pumped to play the shit out of it. I put some time in but got horror flash backs to my time with LW on the last one that came out. I decided this time around I'm going to get some mods to put things in my favor and just play this game frustration-free.

Another thing, I spent the last few days downloading and reviewing 200~ mods, and I've whittled it down to about 140~ that (should) work with each other. I've played about 10 hours so far and it's pretty dope.

I want to avoid LW2 even though it looks sweet, so I kind of created a mish-mash of mods and made my own overhaul. If anyone is interested I'll post my mods and thoughts.
 

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
About to start my first LW2 campaign, what difficultly should I go with given that I beat the vanilla game on Legend, is it still normal/veteran just like how in LW1 where even if you beat the vanilla game on Impossible you still went with normal ?

I also have all the DLCs except the MECH one, should I get or does it not add much ?

I had beaten countless runs of L\I Vanilla, and LW2 Commander raked my ass over the coals.
The Veteran did the same. I restarted a lot.
If you wanna go ironman, go Rookie. Trust me on that one.
 

Evolved1

make sure the pudding isn't too soggy but that just ruins everything
So does boost mode do anything for this game? Never got the Pro patch, right?
 
General consensus of this game seems to be "keep waiting"

I know Long War is supposed to be awesome...there was no word of it coming to console right? Could have sworn I heard it was coming to console.
 
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