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

[ArchAngel]

Long war 2 mod of course. It does not degenerate into 8 sectopods but they added lots of stronger versions of existing aliens to challenge you.

Last time i played long war 2 it had 60+ enemies on missions, sometimes 80. Talk about not swarming you with shit.

Then you played badly because you should not be doing such missions.
At most I fought 30 enemies in area Liberation mission where you assault their regional HQ.
Also those enemies were spread all over the map in 3 to 8 man packs.

 

[Zero Credibility]

I always have around 50 enemies on Liberation missions, and similar numbers can happen on Facility missions. Just now I'm defending against a counterattack on one of my liberated regions, and it's going to be 60+ easily by the time I finish it. If I finish it, as I'm starting to wonder why the hell do I bother with this. The game has long stopped being fun.

 

[Space Satan]

As Infiltration goes up, number of enemies goes down to a common Xcom2 numers. But even with that LW2 is a horrible unfun mess

 

[ArchAngel]

I always have around 50 enemies on Liberation missions, and similar numbers can happen on Facility missions. Just now I'm defending against a counterattack on one of my liberated regions, and it's going to be 60+ easily by the time I finish it. If I finish it, as I'm starting to wonder why the hell do I bother with this. The game has long stopped being fun.

Then you are trying to Liberate regions with too much advent strength or you didn't infiltrate for long enough.
Also those missions let you send a lot of troops so for any challenge it needs more enemies.
As for defending their attack, just let then have it. Then you can liberate it again for more corpses and other resources.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Nah, I infiltrated enough (you can't even launch these missions under 100%), and as for advent strength, once you are liberating a region it's going to be moderate at least no matter what. Missions needed for liberation are going to make sure of that. Besides, numbers don't make those missions impossible, just tedious. Oh, and I just won that counterattack mission, 63 enemies in 13 turns, though last couple of turns were just clean up. It wasn't even very difficult as I had my top squad on it, just not even remotely fun. I'm done with it.

 

[ArchAngel]

You can infiltrate missions up to 200% if you use boost.

 

[mastroego]

Nah, I infiltrated enough (you can't even launch these missions under 100%), and as for advent strength, once you are liberating a region it's going to be moderate at least no matter what. Missions needed for liberation are going to make sure of that. Besides, numbers don't make those missions impossible, just tedious. Oh, and I just won that counterattack mission, 63 enemies in 13 turns, though last couple of turns were just clean up. It wasn't even very difficult as I had my top squad on it, just not even remotely fun. I'm done with it.

You might want to try modded WotC then.
I've had LOTS of fun with it even though I'm kind of burned out at this exact moment.

 

[lightbane]

The vanilla game sure is an unoptimized mess, with the game slowing down for no apparent reason, and conflicting with seemingly harmless mods, especially hating voicepacks for some reason, forcing me to uninstall many of them, or have the game crash isntead.

 

[ArchAngel]

And then fucking firaxis jews force you to buy the expansion to get engine improvements and bug fixes.

 

[lightbane]

Are the improvements that noticeable? If so, perhaps I'll consider abandoning the current campaign AGAIN (I had to do that after somehow a mod fucked up my Proving Ground projects and couldn't generate grenades, ammo or anything). That being said, I found 3 mods that seems to be a must-have for anyone wanting to play this:


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=642371502

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=921154022

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=756948560

Especially the last one.

 

[ArchAngel]

Very noticeable.

 

[lightbane]

Gotta say, whatever kind of insanely powerful rounds Grenadiers use to Supress targets, I wish they used in regular combat more often. Seriously, sometimes the screen shakes so hard, that I fucked up one move action due the cursor moving slightly due the vibrations. Is there a mod to reduce this "shaking" effect?

Also, the unnoficial launcher posted here some pages ago works like a charm and does improve performance a bit.

 

[Space Satan]

Suppression is shit. With demolition you will force enemy to move and grant yourself a critical hit

 

[ArchAngel]

Area suppression is not shit.

 

[Mazisky]

A little question, while vanilla Xcom 2 has a forgettable soundtrack, Wotc OST is a masterpiece. Anyone knows if the composer is the same?

 

[Stavrophore]

Yes its the same guy.

 

[mastroego]

Are you saying they kept deliberately out from vanilla both the working engine and the good music?

 

[Mazisky]

Are you saying they kept deliberately out from vanilla both the working engine and the good music?

Dunno if deliberately but yes.

Wotc have little to none loading times and all the new sound tracks (i've counted at least 5 of them) are absolutely awesome.

The best soundtrack i've heard in years. Here few examples:

 

[mastroego]

Yeah I half joked about that but overall I can't really fault the developers.
On balance the games are incline and are moddable for more incline (think about bioware games which are essentially un-moddable).

I have 690 hours on log with XCom 1 (Long War) and now 185 with XCom 2.
Even though I bought the full packages with little to no discount, I still don't feel robbed honestly.

 

[Mazisky]

Yeah I half joked about that but overall I can't really fault the developers.
On balance the games are incline and are moddable for more incline (think about bioware games which are essentially un-moddable).

I have 690 hours on log with XCom 1 (Long War) and now 185 with XCom 2.
Even though I bought the full packages with little to no discount, I still don't feel robbed honestly.

People seems to forget that, despite the hate for Firaxis, they raised from the dead the franchise and also they started a sort of turn based revolution by ispiring many other devs (and Gollop himself) to make Xcom -like games

 

[lightbane]

Alright then: After being close to the endgame with the vanilla game, I decided to reinstall it with the latest expansion hoping the game becomes less buggy: From randomly crashing mid-load, to have missions without enemies, have a soldier outside of the spawning point no matter what, or even having all of the pods in contact so that revealing one triggers ALL ENEMIES AT ONCE!!!
In fact, I'm not sure if the last one is a bug or a game feature starting from August, as I noticed maps started being reduced into a single, central building/bunch of buildings surrounded by enemies, ensuring "very difficult" battles. This becomes worse with Bigger Pods and equivalent mods installed, as that means you're surrounded by dozens of ayyliens in a moment.

This may have something to do that I wasn't able to use the Shadow Chamber until near July due how expensive it is (along with the Psi Chamber) and how far away these not-Steam Vents were in my playthrough, forcing me to wait a long time to start playing the story missions (to the point that a Gatekeeper spawned in a random battle, outside of his standard story mission). I also don't know if I should bother with mods that add more Maps and/or Additional Mission types. The former seem fine if it wasn't due the "sole building" thing mentioned above, while the latter I had bad experiences in the vanilla game but supposedly gets better in WOTC once again.

Lastly, is adding additional enemy factions with mods worth it? As in Raiders, MOCX and the like. I'm not sure if those guys replace one of the enemy pods used in a map, or if they use their own, potentially flooding a map with bad guys if it's the latter. I liked MOCX with the EXALT skin in vanilla, theoretically the mod works better in WOTC. Your thoughts?

Anyway, I'll check which mods are recommended for WOTC while the game takes forever to install.

 

[lightbane]

Finally, the mod's installation is complete and looks better and more fluid... Alas for some reason the alternate mod launcher is unable to detect the mods installed. I tried to edit the setting path to use the new exe from the WOTC version and try to force it to detect the mods manually, but no dice. Any ideas why this doesn't work?

I tried following this, but no deal: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/6wsrlp/fyi_workaround_to_get_the_alternative_mod/

EDIT: Nevermind, found the solution, yay!

I hope it will be less unstable than vanilla game

 

[Mazisky]

IF anyone cares, i can say at 97% that a new expansion will be announced within 2 months.

 

[Fedora Master]

That's surprising. I'm sure they'll find ways to ruin the XCOM IP even further.

 

[Mazisky]

That's surprising. I'm sure they'll find ways to ruin the XCOM IP even further.

Not at all. Xcom EW and Xcom 2 are the best turn based of the modern era, even with their flaws.

Plenty of butthurt threads with the same boring sentences for every game who's not published by poor and starving russian indie devs won't change that.