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

[Jick Magger]

I'm pleasantly surprised by the game so far. Only major complaint is with performance. I've only played for around three hours so far and the game has crashed on me at least four times.

 

[Roqua]

This game is impossible on the highest difficulty and ironman. I honestly don't see how anyone is able to have the supplies to buy new recruits to field for missions since it takes forever for them to heal. Unless you skip missions to build resources to improve your ship first? I would have a hard time skipping missions. It makes me feel like a big pussy. So, for me, the game is effectively over when a mission comes up and I have no recruits to field and no supplies to buy recruits.

I'm going to start over on normal difficulty and ironman. I like the difficulty specific games were designed for (usually) anyways, I was just having issues finding ironman so went stuck to full difficulty since it popped up ironman for me that way and figured I'd try my hand at it. Three failed attempts later and I am willing to admit I am not up for the challenge.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I have no idea what's up with the stun lancer guys, are they meant to have some form of down syndrome or something? They run into your entire squad, poke one of your guys for 3 damage and then get gunned down by everyone.

They are actually really dangerous, as they have a chance of stunning, disorientating or knocking out your soldiers.
They'll probably die anyway, but it'll really throw a spanner in the tactical planning.

Also, 3 damage? On Commander they tend to hit for something like 5 or 7.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Medical Specialists are the best things ever.
Their drone heals and revive have no range limt and the ranged hack is always nice to have.

On the other side, sniper based sharpshooters are garbage. Probably because due to the uneven procedural terrain. Pistol sharpshooters are great though. Rapes every idiot who shoot at him, shoot at everything with high accuracy and provide secondary cover destruction via grenades in case the grenadiers are too far to help.

I find it hard to justify bringing a medic, because unless I get lucky with stocks in loot, I rely on combat protocol (and grenades) for early game guaranteed damage, and haywire protocol for shutting down mechs, which are very common in reinforcements even if the shadowchamber says beforehand there are no mech units in the zone. While the conservative choice is to bring a medic in case a lancer dashes past your overwatch and knocks your guy unconscious, that extra spot for a medic could be the second grenadier or sharpshooter.

Gunslinger vs sniper, why not bring both? Gunslinger has higher damage output overall, but sniper is better against armored targets. Either build should have long watch to pull off the phantom spotting play properly, I find return fire not all that useful, though it certainly looks cool.

Yeah, return fire rarely procs. When it does proc it tends to do something useful, but long watch is the better choice, imo.
I generally never heal either; my soldiers tend not to take damage.
When they do take damage, they die.

Do medkits reduce the time a soldier takes in the infirmary? I know they didn't in EU, but has that mechanic changed?

 

[Moink]

I have no idea what's up with the stun lancer guys, are they meant to have some form of down syndrome or something? They run into your entire squad, poke one of your guys for 3 damage and then get gunned down by everyone.

They are actually really dangerous, as they have a chance of stunning, disorientating or knocking out your soldiers.
They'll probably die anyway, but it'll really throw a spanner in the tactical planning.

Also, 3 damage? On Commander they tend to hit for something like 5 or 7.

I restarted last night and so far I haven't been hit by one on commander, but on the normal difficulty they hit for 3ish damage.
This was the closest I've been to getting stun lanced so far, poor little guy just wanted to play with the Xcom Operatives;

 

[Luka-boy]

You guys sure are having a blast with character creation.

 

[Matalarata]

I just missed 7 times in a row. I almost came.

Spoiler

 

[Inspectah]

In the beggining it really was interesting how the lancers would sprint like crazy through the whole team, take out his awesome cyber-ninja-stun-sword and miss patheticaly.
Now however, thay are rape incarnate

 

[Alienman]

Panic is a broken mechanic. Maybe even worse this time around, because one mistake will probably cost you the game on commander. Anyway. I can take that a few men die, even officers, but when soldiers constantly panic it just gets tedious as hell. Firefights never really escalate. Start of battle. You take down one or two. An alien manage to flank and take out a man. Cool and all, but usually this means that you are down two men or more. One man dies, and then another panic. So when it's time for you to retaliate you are two man short... and yeah, if you are facing a sectoid one of your men will probably be mind-controlled as well. Happy times. You know what this reminds me off? Trying to PvP in WoW, in the good old days. You enter an arena but spend 75% stunned and unable to attack back.

Panic is a cool gameplay thing otherwise, but I don't think with this small-scale skirmishes it works out well at all.

 

[Renegen]

Playing the game for 5 hours or so, I'm profoundly disappointed. I can't even complete a stupid supply drop that I get interrupted by 4 different "critical" mission items, it's infuriating. When I play video games, the last thing I want to do is be overwhelmed with deliverables and having to put out constant fires, I know the first game had some of that too but the pacing of it was perfect. The base building is meh, there's too much stuff that seems to unlock also adding to the mayhem.

The combat is like the first game, good but I have to play this stupid game of "kill the support" first and I can't even explore the map properly because the support gets aggro'd and then I have to deal with 2 crowd control/resurrection assholes instead of one. I agree that crowd control is a bit too common against you given the small scale of the skirmishes, I actually wiped on the 2nd mission of the game because my ranger got 2 shot right away and I had only 3 members and it cascaded from there.

Overall, Enemy Within was way better, better combat that had just the right amount of mini-games vs just straight shooting and maneuvering fun, and the overmap stuff had the perfect pacing.

 

[Zeriel]

Reposting what I wrote on Reddit re: performance problems because hey why not.

I don't think it's the graphics settings at all. You can turn off AA and it suffers the same problem.

I suspect they may have made the fatal mistake of using too much UEScript instead of shipping a finished product with most things done through functions. This was probably necessary to allow the game to be moddable, but really doesn't play well with performance. Why do I suspect this? Because the stutters always occur simultaneous with game logic being processed. Witness how the UI takes entire SECONDS to process you making a selection (backing out of building selection, cancelling a hack, etc). Notice how you can tell a movement you just selected is going to trigger a pod because the game suddenly stutters as your guy moves. Witness the game chugging hard at the end or beginning of a turn when destruction is being processed on the environment.

None of these things have anything to do with raw GPU power. The bottleneck is the scripting and how the engine handles that.

In any case, it is absolutely CERTAIN it is not GPU limited, since for the stuttering issues you can set every setting to the lowest setting and notice little difference in performance.

It's really too bad, it's a good game, but I guess it'll be hilariously ironic if pursuing moddability so hard led to the game running like shit no matter what.

In closing:

 

[Zeriel]

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?

User reviews always relate to technical performance first of all. It's pretty rare to see a game dinged for actual gameplay or decline, it's usually over bad optimization or something like that.

 

[bonescraper]

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?

User reviews always relate to technical performance first of all. It's pretty rare to see a game dinged for actual gameplay or decline, it's usually over bad optimization or something like that.

But most of that stuff is not about performance, but difficulty. Seriously, go read those user "reviews".

 

[Zanzoken]

Most of what I'm reading makes me glad I resisted the urge to D1P.

XCOM is a sweet concept but Firaxis just doesn't execute it in a way that feels satisfying to me. EU had a lot of strong points, but at the same time was marred by enough frustrating design flaws that it never really "clicked". EW added additional content but never really addressed the underlying issues -- now XCOM 2 looks like more of the same.

And I'm not at all judging it in comparison to the originals. Truth be told I have barely played them -- UFO Defense was before my time and I can't really be fucked to go back and deal with 90's gfx and UI design.

So yeah, FiraXCOM aren't bad games but they just aren't what I want them to be. Good on the devs for making mod support such a high priority, though. It will be very interesting to see what the modders can achieve with such a high level of accessibility.

 

[CrimsonAngel]

Man Psy powers are fun.
So i take this random rookie and jam her into the psymachine and out spits this instant damage super lady. She is amazing.

Now in the start the timers where a bit of a problem for me, but they have kind of grown on me. They keep me moving and not sitting in overwatch kill zones 90% of the time, plus with all the tools you have you can easy enough move most fights into your favor. Mimic and flash grandes are especially potent.

 

[Psquit]

The struggle is real in this game. That's a good thing.

The real problem is the shitty optimization of the game.

 

[Jasede]

Panic is a broken mechanic. Maybe even worse this time around, because one mistake will probably cost you the game on commander. Anyway. I can take that a few men die, even officers, but when soldiers constantly panic it just gets tedious as hell. Firefights never really escalate. Start of battle. You take down one or two. An alien manage to flank and take out a man. Cool and all, but usually this means that you are down two men or more. One man dies, and then another panic. So when it's time for you to retaliate you are two man short... and yeah, if you are facing a sectoid one of your men will probably be mind-controlled as well. Happy times. You know what this reminds me off? Trying to PvP in WoW, in the good old days. You enter an arena but spend 75% stunned and unable to attack back.

Panic is a cool gameplay thing otherwise, but I don't think with this small-scale skirmishes it works out well at all.

Wut? There's way, way less panic than in the first game. (Playing on Impossible/Legendary.)
That's why Legendary is so much easier than Impossible. In Impossible there's a really good chance that if someone dies, the entire squad panic chains. This never happens in this. Maybe you are just getting unlucky.
Also the sectoids are 100% harmless this time around, wasting their turns mind controlling and raising zombies, leaving them open to be killed with ease. The generic ADVENT are more of a threat.

This game is such a big improvement on the first one, I've got to say. It amuses me how everyone is complaining about the difficulty when the game is clearly easier than Impossible used to be. Even our HARDKOR codexers are complaining about the timers and the difficulty and "too many fires to put out|! You guys are terrible! Whining about how they wand difficult games with a lot of complexity, and then failing at a game that's easier than it's predecessor, which they made fun of for being dumbed down and easy. Don't cut yourself with that edge. This is probably modern Firaxis' best release yet, knocking the latest Civilization out of the park. Well, for me.

 

[Blackmill]

To those who've played the game, is the combat hard and complex enough to warrant playing vanilla, or should I wait for some mods to come out before buying?

 

[Jasede]

What, aren't you reading the thread? 60% of the Codex is complaining it's too difficult/stressful/complex. If that's not an endorsement I don't know what is.

 

[Psquit]

The game don't fuck around anymore, they throw heavy shit at you and the ai is more competent.

The xcom 2 ending

Spoiler

Terror from the deep confirmed?

 

[Lyre Mors]

I've found it quite challenging most of the time. There were a few missions that were a bit of a cakewalk, but they seem pretty few and far between.

Honestly, I'm having a wonderful time. A lot of the bitching about the timer mechanic is unwarranted in my opinion. They are not used for every mission, and they really do put the pressure on in a good way. People complained about how easy XCOM EW got because of the overwatch abuse, and llo and behold, they listened and amended it. Sure, they certainly could have come up with a little more of an original mechanic, but it still keeps things fresh from mission to mission.

 

[Talby]

My issue with the timers isn't the difficulty, it's how it affects the pacing of the missions in a way I don't enjoy. Add to that the 5 rounds of setup and dodging the red squares minigame and it's just very tedious to play.

 

[Lyre Mors]

I guess my response would be that the timer is there to force you to be a little more bold in your first few turns and deal with the consequences of being a small resistance force. It made me pretty uncomfortable at first too, but I learned to put my soldiers out there a little more quickly and effectively before too long.

I'm not going to be some champion for the game or anything. I'm just saying I think it's fun the way it is.

 

[Zeriel]

Well, Firaxis confirmed for Codexers.

Spoiler

 

[Korgan 2.0]

^ That's why a strong hacker is mandatory.