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

[Thane Solus]

I can't eat this cake twice, so its not worth eating at all.

Enemy Within is quite superior to Enemy Unknown, and XCOM 2 is superior to both. Also you dont understand because u dint played them. Trying Enemy Uknown for a few missions, to be honest it will give you a mediocre impression, like it did to me at first.

Edgy Blaine...

Yes i played the original, almost every year since release.

 

[Thane Solus]

I don't get the reviews at all. 6.8? I mean yeah it probably sucks performance wise (even though I didn't see that), but what else is the problem? Is it too hard or something?

*Reading the reviews it seems that the timers are the biggest problem. Haha talk about getting people out of their comfort zone

They ratings suffer due to timers working even when concealment (retardo) and present on the first two tutorial mission (epic retardo) and the poor performance. While the game is fun, they deserve the shit for the spoting/firing mechanics and performance on day 1.

 

[an Administrator]

Had a Viper grab one of my troops through the ceiling+a wall, they should've baked this cake for a bit longer.

It's sitting at 74% on steam and that's dropping fairly quickly.

Damn! It happened!
Why so low ratings? Anyone played it here?

 

[Sjukob]

Haven't played the game , but from reading this topic I can already see bad design .

Why the fuck do you people praise the timer ?! How smart is it ?! It makes "Rush , rush , rush , no time for building strategy" kind of gameplay . So , you don't have to camp enemies , don't have time to flank , don't have time for careful approach . How is this a good thing ?

 

[Zombra]

Does it include the character that is Zombra or should I leave that in too?

The Zombra character is not included in Zombra's Army, I don't use him in my own game

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I don't get the reviews at all. 6.8? I mean yeah it probably sucks performance wise (even though I didn't see that), but what else is the problem? Is it too hard or something?

*Reading the reviews it seems that the timers are the biggest problem. Haha talk about getting people out of their comfort zone

So what you are saying is that they are suffering from

Yeah, the time limits are tough. So get good. This is a war, not a duck hunt. Gotta do the mission and gtfo.

The performance isn't great though, I'll give them that.

 

[vean]

Timers worked great in Frozen Synapse. They force you to play differently instead of just proceeding at the optimal snail's pace.

The game seems kinda dumb though from what I played, but not because of timers.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I don't get the reviews at all. 6.8? I mean yeah it probably sucks performance wise (even though I didn't see that), but what else is the problem? Is it too hard or something?

*Reading the reviews it seems that the timers are the biggest problem. Haha talk about getting people out of their comfort zone

They ratings suffer due to timers working even when concealment (retardo) and present on the first two tutorial mission (epic retardo) and the poor performance. While the game is fun, they deserve the shit for the spoting/firing mechanics and performance on day 1.

To be fair, you can move really fast in concealment, so you can get within a few turns of the objective pretty quickly.
And after getting the objective the timer disappears in some missions, so you can have all the time you want.

Which does beg the question - can one complete the objective without breaking concealment, or at least breaking concealment when right next to the objective?
I believe its doable, but difficult.

 

[Mr. Pink]

Haven't played the game , but from reading this topic I can already see bad design .

Why the fuck do you people praise the timer ?! How smart is it ?! It makes "Rush , rush , rush , no time for building strategy" kind of gameplay . So , you don't have to camp enemies , don't have time to flank , don't have time for careful approach . How is this a good thing ?

This game becomes trivial when given unlimited time. The only time I ever lost soldiers in EW ironman was due to my own impatience and the occasional fuckyou crit. Moving a few tiles at a time around the edges of the map with everyone on overwatch was the way you had to play if you couldn't afford losing soldiers. The addition of timed sub missions in EW made the game a lot more interesting to me.

I dislike the execution of timed missions I'm xcom 2 because they make no sense. The timer really shouldn't start until you break stealth, and many missions shouldn't be timed at all. VIP missions should definitely not be timed, and neither should terror missions. Instead, enemies should just keep spawning forever until you reach the evac.

 

[Disgruntled]

Having spent more time in the character pool than playing the campaign, I thought it'd be a waste not to share a few with the codex. Forgive any grammatical errors, there's bound to be a few.
https://filesend.co/moviechars.bin
This one includes Judge Dredd, Bishop, The Transporter, Kruger, Riddick, Johnny Mnemonic, The Jackal, Boris the Blade, Pinbacker and the dude from Event Horizon (who made for a particularly fun biography).

Spoiler

 

[Sjukob]

This game becomes trivial when given unlimited time. The only time I ever lost soldiers in EW ironman was due to my own impatience and the occasional fuckyou crit. Moving a few tiles at a time around the edges of the map with everyone on overwatch was the way you had to play if you couldn't afford losing soldiers. The addition of timed sub missions in EW made the game a lot more interesting to me.

I dislike the execution of timed missions I'm xcom 2 because they make no sense. The timer really shouldn't start until you break stealth, and many missions shouldn't be timed at all. VIP missions should definitely not be timed, and neither should terror missions. Instead, enemies should just keep spawning forever until you reach the evac.

But this timer seems like a pure artificial difficulty , I don't know the details , but I would rather pick an easy game than annoying one . Also if enemies do respawn , why not just remove the timer and make enemies just horde you if you stick around for too long , I think that makes sense in guerilla war .

 

[Mr. Pink]

This game becomes trivial when given unlimited time. The only time I ever lost soldiers in EW ironman was due to my own impatience and the occasional fuckyou crit. Moving a few tiles at a time around the edges of the map with everyone on overwatch was the way you had to play if you couldn't afford losing soldiers. The addition of timed sub missions in EW made the game a lot more interesting to me.

I dislike the execution of timed missions I'm xcom 2 because they make no sense. The timer really shouldn't start until you break stealth, and many missions shouldn't be timed at all. VIP missions should definitely not be timed, and neither should terror missions. Instead, enemies should just keep spawning forever until you reach the evac.

But this timer seems like a pure artificial difficulty , I don't know the details , but I would rather pick an easy game than annoying one . Also if enemies do respawn , why not just remove the timer and make enemies just horde you if you stick around for too long , I think that makes sense in guerilla war .

The timer is less annoying than it looks on paper. There are already mods that do away with it on the workshop, but I don't really feel compelled to get them. I usually reach my timers a few turns early since I plan which route I have to take by getting map intel as soon as possible and try to avoid conflict until I get close enough to the objective.

I agree that superhard alien cops should start spawning instead of just a mission failure. This makes the most logical sense and I wonder why Firaxis would pass on such an obvious sounding idea.

 

[Zombra]

The timer works fine; it's a board game, not a simulation. Respawning anything would turn missions into xp farms.

 

[Morgoth]

From the little I've played from the uh "Demo" version, there's too much hand-holding, too much chatting/cutscenes, and too much rushing.

Don't think I'll spend my Euroshekels on that game. It feels like Commandos 3 of the Commandos series.

 

[orcinator]

Oh fuck this shit I have to wait for someone to mod in simple shit like aiming angles.

 

[Jasede]

What are aiming angles?

You are aware of the marker that shows you if you are going to have a shot in the square you want to move to, right? I find it amusing how many people are not, and then complain. Or are you talking about the Second Wave option, Aiming Angles?


Morgoth
What hand-holding? I didn't notice any chatting or forced cutscenes (which you can't ESC) on Legendary / skip tutorial / no beginner VO.

 

[Alienman]

Lost my first game. I have nothing against losing, and maybe I just suck badly at this game, but I feel the difficulty increases a bit too quick. I don't want to lower it from commander, because from what I have read anything lower will be too easy. It could be that I went for lore stuff on research instead of weapons, and that fucked me up. I just got the impression that normal weapons would last longer since you could upgrade them? Oh well, time to restart.

All you that are passed the first say 10 missions, did you rush for armor and weapons?

 

[Raghar]

Lost my first game. I have nothing against losing, and maybe I just suck badly at this game, but I feel the difficulty increases a bit too quick. I don't want to lower it from commander, because from what I have read anything lower will be too easy. It could be that I went for lore stuff on research instead of weapons, and that fucked me up. I just got the impression that normal weapons would last longer since you could upgrade them? Oh well, time to restart.

All you that are passed the first say 10 missions, did you rush for armor and weapons?

So I was right that veteran ironman is the most enjoyable.

 

[orcinator]

What are aiming angles?

You are aware of the marker that shows you if you are going to have a shot in the square you want to move to, right? I find it amusing how many people are not, and then complain.

Aiming Angles was a EW second wave option that gave you a bonus hit chance if you were close to flanking


made the visual representation of the battlefield slightly less retarded since being at an angle where there is nothing shielding the alien's body but you're like one degree away from properly flanking them didn't give them a full cover bonus.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Turn limits are more than enough if you stop overwatch+hunker each step. And most timed maps are piss small and/or have little number of enemies. Also not every mission has limits, probably %50 of them at most.
And if you're really that bad as a player(seriously 8-12 turns are more than enough for commander difficulty), there are day 1 mods that raises/disables turn limits.

Difficulty curve is a bit strange imo, game got too easy after 6 man squad with gauss/particle weapons and plate armor. Then I met "the beholder" near portal.... Also fuck faceless D:
Avatar project seems to upgrade a bit quick which forced me to rush for base missions all around the globe.


Alienman
Check Black Market time to time man, you can buy first weapon and armor upgrades from there cheap with intel, helped me a lot.

Edit: I found myself using specialsts and rangers mostly. Snipers feels limited in most maps unless you go pistols and heavy is just there for armor pierce, grenade duty.

 

[Talby]

I find the stealth mode more annoying than the timers. It turns out spending the first 5 rounds of every mission getting my soldiers into position isn't actually that fun. In XCOM 1 you had to fight enemies as soon as you encountered them, so the action gets going quickly after starting. There's just too much pointless setup in XCOM 2 at the beginning.

Also, question for those who have played far. Do you even shoot down UFOs in this game? That's one of the most fun parts of the previous games, (the infiltrating part at least) but I'm guessing since you don't have interceptors in this game it doesn't have them.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Not every mission starts with stealth also, but yeah I too think it's a bit pointless just like the friggin melee...

 

[Jimmious]

The timer works fine; it's a board game, not a simulation. Respawning anything would turn missions into xp farms.

Yeah exactly. I'm enjoying the game immensely so far generally.
Btw Zombra, Bugs is my favorite assault/ninja so far. She is murdering everything that comes in her way

 

[SmartCheetah]

After playing for 15-20hours I must say it's better than XCOM EU and EW by a big margin, but at the same time it still fails at balancing, optimization and difficulty curve.
What I like the most is the fact that your people are actually dying pretty often (which wasn't the case in vanilla EW) and every error is punishing. Too bad RNG is punishing too, not mentioning hordes of annoying bugs (getting "GET OVER HERE" by Viper from behind the wall? Classic)

With few patches, DLC's and mods it might become a really good game for 2016 standards. As for now, it's rather mediocre.

 

[PhantasmaNL]

Agreed with others above, great game sofar, really dont get the negative vibe on metacritic. Restart 3 will be later today, after losing my complete ace team due to rng bullshit (or my own tactical incompetence) and bloody reinforcements.
Slowly starting to Consider lowering the difficulty to Veteran IM for this first pt..but probably will continue to soldier on on Commander IM, dammit.