X-COM XCOM 2 + War of the Chosen Expansion Thread

[Spectacle]

So we're the rebel alliance fighting an evil alien government now? Ehhh. Not sure if want. I like the classic XCom premise of a united humanity fighting outside invaders, now it's just another game about plucky guerilla fighters vs evil tyranny.

We already have an awesome game about that topic; the original UFO Enemy Unknown. A guerilla war against alien occupiers is a different concept that I'm looking forward to seeing explored. Hopefully the alien government will have some depth and "alieness", not just be generic facists with weird heads.

 

[Zeriel]

At the end of new X-com the aliens implied a new threat was coming. I'm not sure if that was what defeated earth or if the new canon is that the earth lost to the first alien invaders.

Solomon already touched on this. Canon is that XCOM never got advanced tech or captured aliens, they got steamrolled. Basically what happened when every new player hit Impossible + Iron-Man and got gibbed right away.

If so, then there's no Volunteer, and the whole purpose of the invasion is defeated. Retconning that way just makes no sense.

The aliens wanted to get a better body to inhabit and eventually ascend, as far as I remember. The "Volunteer" as it turned out was very much not in their plans. They're shocked/pissed at the end when you kill them, not happy. Winning the battle for Earth and gradually changing the genetics of the human race suits their plans much more than dying out.

That's my take on it, anyway.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Y'all niggas is wrong, Aliens invaded because they wanted our wymminz.

 

[Riso]

No need, they have snake tits.

 

[Zeriel]

No need, they have snake tits.

Implying they didn't get snaketits by crossbreeding snakemen and Swedish women.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

No need, they have snake tits.

Like Zeriel points out, where do ya think they got them titties from.

 

[Riso]

They're simply misplaced buttocks.

 

[ArchAngel]

At the end of new X-com the aliens implied a new threat was coming. I'm not sure if that was what defeated earth or if the new canon is that the earth lost to the first alien invaders.

Solomon already touched on this. Canon is that XCOM never got advanced tech or captured aliens, they got steamrolled. Basically what happened when every new player hit Impossible + Iron-Man and got gibbed right away.

If so, then there's no Volunteer, and the whole purpose of the invasion is defeated. Retconning that way just makes no sense.

They can breed their own Volunteer now.
I bet you will find some psionic humans fighting for them at one point.

 

[Average Manatee]

The bad guys winning being canon is pretty rare in video games. Before this, the most prominent example I can think of is the first Warcraft. Orc victory is canon.

Any other examples?

EDIT: Well, Brood War and Frozen Throne, I guess, but you don't really have a "choice" there.

EDIT 2: Ooh, I know. The original Star Control.

Depends on how far you stretch "winning". Things like Diablo where you "beat" Diablo but then get screwed into being possessed by him, making him stronger?

Deus Ex and Daggerfall both did a "every ending choice somehow happened together" thing. But arguably no "bad" things going on, and the player's failure isn't canon.

And of course

Spoiler

Every WW2 game

More pertaining to X-Com, in UFO: Aftermath there are two options to end the game after getting diplomatic contact with the aliens:

Spoiler

They explain that earth is being terraformed into a gigantic supercomputer or something, you can agree to stop fighting and be exiled from the post-apocalyptic planet or to carry on the war and launch the final assault. The former is canon, with the next game in the series being your ship landing back on earth to discover the aliens were crazy stupid and fucked it all up.

 

[ArchAngel]

At the end of new X-com the aliens implied a new threat was coming. I'm not sure if that was what defeated earth or if the new canon is that the earth lost to the first alien invaders.

Solomon already touched on this. Canon is that XCOM never got advanced tech or captured aliens, they got steamrolled. Basically what happened when every new player hit Impossible + Iron-Man and got gibbed right away.

If so, then there's no Volunteer, and the whole purpose of the invasion is defeated. Retconning that way just makes no sense.

They can breed their own Volunteer now.
I bet you will find some psionic humans fighting for them at one point.

They could, but its the existence of the Volunteer and the success of XCOM that demonstrated humanity's potential in the first place, no? Defeating humans just means we're lower than sectoids, which are also psi-capable.

It was never said they only test species through combat. They might just be as happy if a planet rolls over and let them do their experiments in peace.

 

[Perkel]

New interview about modding of Xcom:

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2015/06/08/xcom-2s-exciting-modding-potential-ign-first

Some quotes:

“We're going all-out with modding on XCOM 2,” declared Creative Director Jake Solomon.

Firaxis intends to release a full suite of modding tools – an Unreal Development Kit (UDK) and the editor the developers use to create content – that will enable modders to run wild with XCOM 2. “It's yours now; do with it what you want.”

“People will see the gameplay source, all the scripting,” he promised. “This is the code that makes the game what the game is. Here's the editor and all the assets that went into this game.”

The proof of the potential is in The Long War mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within.
“It's unbelievable what they did,” said DeAngelis. “The Long War was my go-to recommendation when our hardcore fans would come up to us at shows and would say, ‘I beat Impossible Iron Man three times. I want more.’ There's absolutely an awesome challenge there for you.”

“We're basically a 20-hour tutorial for The Long War, and that's okay,” admitted Solomon. “I think Long War was cool, because I think that there is – especially in strategy games – there's always this desire to see more. They did this awesome job of adding a lot more. People will be sharing stories of XCOM and I'll be like ‘I don't even know what they're talking about, this game has changed so much!’ And that, to me, is cool."

“We don’t have free-aiming. That will be one of the first mods, and that certainly will be fine,” said Solomon. “Maybe somebody will bring back time units,” he mused. “I'd be fine with that.”

IN SUMMARY:

- they will be releasing everything what hey have to moders, udktools, their custom devkit, all assets and every script used in making Xcom2
- everything in game will be modable more or less. Don't like 2 phase system ? Change it to time units ala UFO
- Long War is their go to mod for them and recomendation.

Looks like they learned lesson well and i can't wait for Long War 2.

If i didn't like nuxcom 1, will this be salvageable?

Did you try Long War mod for it ? If not then go back and play it. It is one of the best tactical turn based games with this mod. It makes XCOM absolutely awesome game and changes almost everything in game.

Watch it:

 

[Thane Solus]

LONG WAR its ok, brings a new features to fix the limitations of the vanilla EW, but its unplayable. I like to play classic Iron Man in EW, in LW, on normal iron man from month 3 or 4, everything goes overboard, due to a huge number of aliens and exalt, and HP Bloat. So no thanks, still, love many of the features, but just to fight a huge number of aliens with XXX hp, its just no fun for me. And those Exalt missions? yeah.

Dont care about pressure and making more aliens more powerful, make them more smart, not increase the number and go for the cheapest HP bloat route.

Its gets this much praise, due to inventory optimization, extra soldiers and classes, fatique, random spawn on maps, country base asssault and few others nice things, but the tactical needs a lot of work.

 

[agris]

Thane Solus is echoing what I've heard: that LW falls apart in the endgame due to really poor balancing. I guess this is still the case?

 

[Zeriel]

I don't think the tactical game has any problem in LW, if you have serious issues with it you probably didn't master the original XCOM tactical game as much as you thought you did. The only thing that's pretty dumb in LW from my perspective is the economic and interception game, it basically forces failure (interception more than economic) to make the rest of the game more "interesting".

 

[agris]

I don't think the tactical game has any problem in LW, if you have serious issues with it you probably didn't master the original XCOM tactical game as much as you thought you did. The only thing that's pretty dumb in LW from my perspective is the economic and interception game, it basically forces failure (interception more than economic) to make the rest of the game more "interesting".

So the strategic layer is still screwed in LW? IIRC, the complaints were of endless grinding and poorly balanced resource costs / gains.

 

[Zeriel]

I don't think the tactical game has any problem in LW, if you have serious issues with it you probably didn't master the original XCOM tactical game as much as you thought you did. The only thing that's pretty dumb in LW from my perspective is the economic and interception game, it basically forces failure (interception more than economic) to make the rest of the game more "interesting".

So the strategic layer is still screwed in LW? IIRC, the complaints were of endless grinding and poorly balanced resource costs / gains.

The costs of all manufacturing are super high. But the biggest issue (at least the last time I played) is that the interception game has nonsensical changes that are a legitimate case of "artificial difficulty". Interceptors taking days to fuel just to force you to let UFOs through. Vanilla XCOM on higher difficulties very much had a "right way" to play, but LW elevates that to truly autistic levels. I can't help but feel like people who complain about the missions themselves are just really bad at games, though, I never had any significant problems with LW combat missions on Classic difficulty.

Overall it makes a lot of mechanical changes that are for the better, but there are a few areas that should be tweaked down. Like most mod authors they have their vision of the intended difficulty, however, and I can't even argue with that. If you bother to do that much work on a game as an amateur, you have the right to tell other people to fuck off when they want you to change your work.

There's nothing "impossible" about it, though, just some things that seem "dumb" and non-intuitive.

 

[agris]

Are the devs still working on LW, and are these strategic balance / interception issues acknowledged by them?

 

[Thane Solus]

I don't think the tactical game has any problem in LW, if you have serious issues with it you probably didn't master the original XCOM tactical game as much as you thought you did. The only thing that's pretty dumb in LW from my perspective is the economic and interception game, it basically forces failure (interception more than economic) to make the rest of the game more "interesting".

Its my opinion mate... dont need to come with cheap replies. Poor tactical design is poor, but on their defense they didn't had much to work with. On that matter i finished UFO 1 once almost every year since its release on Ironman (self imposed).

Do you play on Ironman? Since most of the LW praisers. i noticed they play with save scumming... which is totally another game, which i dont want to play.

 

[Average Manatee]

When I played LW it was balanced so that if you don't know exactly what techs to hit to upgrade your interceptors properly, you'll die horribly. If you hit them early you can attain total air superiority fairly quickly and the whole game becomes a cakewalk.

The Tactical part isn't too bad, it's just that its still saddled with vanilla maps which become insanely repetitive, along with higher enemy group numbers making smaller maps murder zones while larger maps aren't really any more difficult, which can make losses feel like it was because the map generator fucked you over rather than do to your own fuckups. And the endgame is way too stretched out, it would be fine if it was like Original X-Com where in the end game you could just shoot down all UFOs and ignore 90% of missions, but in Long War even if you reach the "shoot down everything" point early in the game you still have to do pretty much 100% of missions because tech and buildings and upgrade and fucking everything scales to be exorbitantly expensive. Not to mention the tedium of being forced to level up a psi specialist, god forbid he die and force you to spend another half a year just to train a new one.

 

[Elim]

But the biggest issue (at least the last time I played) is that the interception game has nonsensical changes that are a legitimate case of "artificial difficulty". Interceptors taking days to fuel just to force you to let UFOs through.

First thing I modded was making the default interceptor really overpowered, like machine-gun missile fire and all that jazz. Honestly, I like difficult games. But the interception game was just a tacked on mechanic and LW made it even more shit.
Now it is at least enjoyable. You do not need a million interceptors per continent.

 

[agris]

Average Manatee It sounds like the Xenonaught concept of bombing sites where UFOs have been shot down to receive some resources would be useful in LW.

 

[Average Manatee]

Average Manatee It sounds like the Xenonaught concept of bombing sites where UFOs have been shot down to receive some resources would be useful in LW.

It would help, but would also need to give elerium/weapon fragments/etc, because those are the real problem.

Fuck fucking plasma fucking weapon research requiring ~1500 fucking weapon fragments. 6 months in to LW you'll have dozens of plasma weapons in storage from all the captures yet figuring out how to research the ability to pull the trigger on them requires every weapon fragment you find for the next 30 missions.

 

[Zeriel]

I don't think the tactical game has any problem in LW, if you have serious issues with it you probably didn't master the original XCOM tactical game as much as you thought you did. The only thing that's pretty dumb in LW from my perspective is the economic and interception game, it basically forces failure (interception more than economic) to make the rest of the game more "interesting".

Its my opinion mate... dont need to come with cheap replies. Poor tactical design is poor, but on their defense they didn't had much to work with. On that matter i finished UFO 1 once almost every year since its release on Ironman (self imposed).

Do you play on Ironman? Since most of the LW praisers. i noticed they play with save scumming... which is totally another game, which i dont want to play.

Like I said, yes, I played LW on Iron-Man. One playthrough was enough for me, game was already pretty damn repetitive after two playthroughs on vanilla, LW only dialed that up to 10 by having exponentially more missions per playthrough. The only thing I felt was out of line from that playthrough was the economic/interceptor aspect of the game. Of course, by the time I started Long War I could do Classic + Iron-Man or even Impossible + Iron-Man vanilla in my sleep, and I consider that the target audience of Long War. If people go in with the idea that it's just an improved version of Normal, I can understand the complaints.

The main thing I took away from LW was the various mechanical improvements (more classes, more perks, more soldiers per mission). If I criticized it as a commercial product I'd probably give it a C- or something, it's more useful as an illustration of all the ways XCOM could be improved. Really disappointed Firaxis didn't include at least the 8 soldier cap in XCOM 2. I guess that'll be the first mod everyone makes.

Average Manatee It sounds like the Xenonaught concept of bombing sites where UFOs have been shot down to receive some resources would be useful in LW.

It would help, but would also need to give elerium/weapon fragments/etc, because those are the real problem.

Fuck fucking plasma fucking weapon research requiring ~1500 fucking weapon fragments. 6 months in to LW you'll have dozens of plasma weapons in storage from all the captures yet figuring out how to research the ability to pull the trigger on them requires every weapon fragment you find for the next 30 missions.

It's funny, I seem to recall the mod authors saying you don't have to intercept every UFO/or visit every crash-site, but the economic side of things really encourages you to do every mission ever until the very end, which amounts to dozens of missions per month. I don't even want to know how many missions I had done in a single playthrough of LW. At the time the "shorter war" second wave option was bugged for LW, maybe its better now.

 

[agris]

It's funny, I seem to recall the mod authors saying you don't have to intercept every UFO/or visit every crash-site, but the economic side of things really encourages you to do every mission ever until the very end, which amounts to dozens of missions per month. I don't even want to know how many missions I had done in a single playthrough of LW. At the time the "shorter war" second wave option was bugged for LW, maybe its better now.

It is funny, sounds like the mod could learn from Xenonaught's bombing of crash sites. Bombed crash sites give a fraction of the resources that a successful ground mission would give, but a fraction none the less.

 

[Average Manatee]

I don't remember Xenonaut's bombing giving any significant amount of materials. For it to work in LW it would have to.

The difference between the two is that Xenonauts simply didn't give the the capability to do every mission on the globe. Buying a 2nd fully-equipped base and squad to launch missions from was cost prohibitive, so shooting down stuff on other continents and getting only a "small" reward was more than enough because the alternative was none. But in LW with full equipment sharing, instant transportation across the globe, and 50+ soldiers in the barracks there's basically no in-universe explanation of why X-Com couldn't respond to every alien threat, so any bombing missions would need to return resources based on the fact that X-Com was expected to complete them, not to ignore them like in Xenonauts.

It's funny, I seem to recall the mod authors saying you don't have to intercept every UFO/or visit every crash-site, but the economic side of things really encourages you to do every mission ever until the very end, which amounts to dozens of missions per month. I don't even want to know how many missions I had done in a single playthrough of LW. At the time the "shorter war" second wave option was bugged for LW, maybe its better now.

I think his point is that it's not immediately game over if you can't do a mission or two early on (due to too many injuries or fatigue or interceptor damage), which is true. But once you are on top of the game any mission you skip is another mission you are going to have to do later (and against harder aliens to boot), so there's no point.

Weapon Fragments in particular are the worst, because the amount you get per mission is essentially constant over time (or even goes down) while enemies are always getting harder. At least for Elerium/Alloy you can economize your time by skipping small scouts that give 10 of each and doing big ship assaults that give hundreds (for only a moderate increase in the number of aliens you need to kill). Not so for Weapon Fragments, its just a pure grind through numbers.