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

[Zdzisiu]

Bad news. 1.1 has a nasty bug where reinforcements will get a attack after they appear. 1.1 was supposed to fix an instance of that bug that would happen rarely but they made it appear more often now. 1.1 hotfix is coming sometime today.

To be honest, doesnt seem to happen that often. It happened maybe once for me in around 10 missions. Maybe it happens more on higher difficulty settings since I play on veteran because I am a pussy.

 

[ArchAngel]

So after playing Commander/Ironman for a while, I got no clue what I am doing on the strategic layer
I am kind of trucking through tactical layer, losing troops sometimes, sometimes just getting them hurt.

But I am lacking resources, I had two raid mission that I had to skip due to super short infiltration time and lack of available soldiers to send.
I made contact with two additional regions, I have no clue if I should be also attempting missions there, for now I got everyone on Supply on bonus regions while on starting one I got most on Intel.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i had my first taste of long war 2.
it's cool and complex and interesting and all but daaaaamn it loves to drag on and on. my first real mission lasted (is this correct? i remembered it was "to last / last / last") over a whole hour and it took place along a road on one side of the map.

 

[sser]

So after playing Commander/Ironman for a while, I got no clue what I am doing on the strategic layer
I am kind of trucking through tactical layer, losing troops sometimes, sometimes just getting them hurt.

But I am lacking resources, I had two raid mission that I had to skip due to super short infiltration time and lack of available soldiers to send.
I made contact with two additional regions, I have no clue if I should be also attempting missions there, for now I got everyone on Supply on bonus regions while on starting one I got most on Intel.

My route is to buy an Engineer from the Black Market when the game starts and then use him to clear out the ship for money. A second early Engineer from a mission and you're pretty set on the money front.

 

[ArchAngel]

So after playing Commander/Ironman for a while, I got no clue what I am doing on the strategic layer
I am kind of trucking through tactical layer, losing troops sometimes, sometimes just getting them hurt.

But I am lacking resources, I had two raid mission that I had to skip due to super short infiltration time and lack of available soldiers to send.
I made contact with two additional regions, I have no clue if I should be also attempting missions there, for now I got everyone on Supply on bonus regions while on starting one I got most on Intel.

You're doing better than I am. I'm barely getting by with LW2 V/I. I didn't juggle resources carefully enough, so it took me a while to get a full size 8 set of lasers, and now I have to assault my first advent regional base at strength 5 swarming.

Beating a light-moderate supply raid with a size 5 squad and only the prototype laser felt pretty amazing though.

I just got my lasers, just before my 4th supply drop so I am not sure I am doing well. I have been battling Vipers, Stun Lancers and first MECs with standard weapons. Now I was able to send my first squad partly equipped with lasers into a mission. But now I can also be expecting Mutons to show up. I tried doing the regional network tower mission just before supply drop to avoid Mutons, mission said Very Light enemy but in the end you have to kill them all and there was 23 of them lol (ok, last 5 were stunned for 2 turns but still...), and there was a fucking Muton on that mission anyways. And although you don't need to escape from this mission you don't get alien bodies from it

Note to anyone doing Network tower/broadcast mission, bring your best equipped troops to this mission and infiltrate until 200%, you will thank me later (I only infiltrated to 150% and took no lasers with me).

 

[ArchAngel]

I have been reading a bit how the game works and such and this is a whole new game now. I would argue this is the most complex Strategic layer in an Xcom game yet (although I have not played LW1 enough to be 100% sure) but this is now more complex than original UFO and 5x more complex than nuXcom and Xcom 2 vanilla.

EDIT: A tip based on my (painful) experience: Don't let snakes live and not be disoriented. When snakes pull your guy from cover with their tongue and bind them, other enemy troops will shoot at that soldier and kill him 9/10 times.

Stun lancers will do some damage, and maybe stun. Drones will maybe stun, Sectoids can fuck your troops for 1 round (and can be easily blocked with a flashbang even after their round) but snakes will cause a death of your troops so make them a priority. Only bigger priority is a muton and their grenade.

Advent Engineers are also pretty irritating if you let them do their thing. They will flashbang half your team making those soldiers useless for 1 turn.

 

[ArchAngel]

So after playing Commander/Ironman for a while, I got no clue what I am doing on the strategic layer
I am kind of trucking through tactical layer, losing troops sometimes, sometimes just getting them hurt.

But I am lacking resources, I had two raid mission that I had to skip due to super short infiltration time and lack of available soldiers to send.
I made contact with two additional regions, I have no clue if I should be also attempting missions there, for now I got everyone on Supply on bonus regions while on starting one I got most on Intel.

You're doing better than I am. I'm barely getting by with LW2 V/I. I didn't juggle resources carefully enough, so it took me a while to get a full size 8 set of lasers, and now I have to assault my first advent regional base at strength 5 swarming.

Beating a light-moderate supply raid with a size 5 squad and only the prototype laser felt pretty amazing though.

I just got my lasers, just before my 4th supply drop so I am not sure I am doing well. I have been battling Vipers, Stun Lancers and first MECs with standard weapons. Now I was able to send my first squad partly equipped with lasers into a mission. But now I can also be expecting Mutons to show up. I tried doing the regional network tower mission just before supply drop to avoid Mutons, mission said Very Light enemy but in the end you have to kill them all and there was 23 of them lol (ok, last 5 were stunned for 2 turns but still...), and there was a fucking Muton on that mission anyways. And although you don't need to escape from this mission you don't get alien bodies from it

Note to anyone doing Network tower/broadcast mission, bring your best equipped troops to this mission and infiltrate until 200%, you will thank me later (I only infiltrated to 150% and took no lasers with me).

But the longer you infiltrate, the higher the chance that the global force level and advent regional strength will increase while you're infiltrating. You can't stop every supply train.

Network Tower was my hardest mission yet, because you're limited to the standard 5 man squad and you need one of them to be a specialist who isn't really a heavy hitter (or risk not reaching the hack in time), and you gotta blitz through or you'll get swamped with reinforcements dropping in everywhere, but if you don't clear the pods before advancing you'll get attacked from both sides. Which is what happened to me and how I ended up losing one of my top troops and wounding the rest.

I wonder if the right strategy is to bring a high level shinobi with full concealment spec, stealth all the way through to the hack while leaving everyone else behind in a high cover building, and only start clearing the map after the hack.

Well don't do other mission in region while infiltrating this one :D
I read that for this mission advent strength is considered +3 (which would probably explain an early Muton).

What time limit are you talking about?
For me my shinobi that has best movement ended up activating the mission objective while others fended of reinforcements. Same shinobi was probably the MVP of the mission as she ended up with couple of crucial kills.

 

[MediantSamuel]

Do you guys use gunners much? I've only got a few low level ones but they just seem cack.

 

[Jaedar]

Do you guys use gunners much? I've only got a few low level ones but they just seem cack.

Invaluable even at squaddie level. Suppression prevents marking, grenades, rockets, poison, tongue grab etc. Afaik it doesn't affect psi, so don't bother suppressing sectoids. When you get hail of bullets at CPL, you've got a guaranteed 4-6 damage every 5 turns.

Personally, I tend to build them in the suppression tree, not even taking hail of bullets. Not sure its correct, however enemies like to run suppression, and getting to take 2-3 shots per turn is pretty great too. And you can do it every turn. And if the enemies don't run, they have a -40 to aim (I think) and can't use most of their special abilities.

Invaluable for missions where the objective is to actually kill the enemy.

 

[MediantSamuel]

Thanks guys, I think I'm going to try them as pure suppression bots and see how that goes.

 

[Zdzisiu]

Let me tell you about my first liberation mission. I had to kill 45 alien scum. 2 Berserkers, 4 Mutons, 10 sneks, some sectoids, a host of drones, and a whole lot of Advent grunts, and two of their robots. Even with 10 man squad, that took a god awful long time to infiltrate it still took me like 2h to do this mission. Admittedly, it was in part due to my very cautious approach, as this mission has no turn limit, so I waited a lot in ambush for various groups to get to my defensive position at the start of the mission.

The Advent general at the end had like 30hp and 2 armour. Had to murder his guards one by one and then gang bang him with shinobis, shotgun murderdudes and laser shots to the face.

All in all, it took me around 45-48 turns to do it.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

But was it fun?

 

[ArchAngel]

I find Gunners mostly useless. Their suppression is better done with flashbangs, they almost never hit anything, they get penalty to aim if you get close and only useful early game ability is Hail of Bullets which is not worth it just for that. Ok, Grazing fire is also useful but still I rather take another Ranger if I want one more shooting soldier.

They probably get more useful in late game like snipers when they got decent aim, and good mods on weapon and good aim PCS.

 

[ArchAngel]

If you like using Technicians like me this tip will be useful. From 1.1 you can do cool shit with flamethrower.
But you must know flames don't hit first square next to your guy, so don't move right next to enemy and expect to hit them. But you can do stuff like if enemy is behind a corner of a car or a wall at the edge, you move one square away from the edge on your side of the wall and flamer will be able to hit the enemy and even 1-2 squares behind him (I killed two advent troops hiding behind a car that way).

 

[belated]

I've noticed the trench gun skill doesn't hit the first square either, been burned by that a couple of times.

 

[Jaedar]

If you like using Technicians like me this tip will be useful. From 1.1 you can do cool shit with flamethrower.
But you must know flames don't hit first square next to your guy, so don't move right next to enemy and expect to hit them. But you can do stuff like if enemy is behind a corner of a car or a wall at the edge, you move one square away from the edge on your side of the wall and flamer will be able to hit the enemy and even 1-2 squares behind him (I killed two advent troops hiding behind a car that way).

The issue with flamethrower now is that it does very little damage, especially when enemies start packing armor. In 1.0 I used to wipe entire pods from concealment with a well placed techie flammenwerfer, that doesn't work now.

 

[vmar]

I usually just stick my gunners in the haven advisor spot. They have their uses after a couple ranks but I'd prefer to bring any other class to missions.

 

[Jaedar]

I usually just stick my gunners in the haven advisor spot. They have their uses after a couple ranks but I'd prefer to bring any other class to missions.

That's where I put my sharpshooters, useless as they are...

 

[ArchAngel]

OK, I have to admit I am a dirty savescummer now. My Commander Honestman campaign turned really bad in one mission so I had to restart the mission 2 times lol.
It is first mission in the liberation chain where you need to destroy a relay (not a network tower mission). I did my best to make sure I could do this mission. I infiltrated with 6 men with laser weapons, almost my top people, got enemy strength down to Very Light. But the mission is designed to kill you it seems due to Reinforcements coming every 2 turns with such fun units like 2 MECs.... The classification of Very Light has nothing to do with reality
And the mission was full of fucking snakes (on the mothe... plane :D), 2 snakes + Muton and 3 snakes + stun lancer.... fuck you game!
6 men even with lasers cannot kill the fucking snakes fast enough. My ranger managed to miss the 100% shot on a snake lol (I assume I rolled the 10% graze from that shot and snake rolled its dodge which turns a hit into a miss which was double hilarious since the ranger is supposed to have a PCS that reduces enemy dodge if ranger is on higher ground which he was), Assault 100% shotgun shot got Graze on snake and so on....
Anyways in a fucking VEry Light mission I only lived on 3rd try because I sneaked my whole fucking 6 man team not made for sneaking all around the edge of the map to behind the objective with my back to edge of map so I cannot get flanked again by reinforcements like in last two attempts.

I guess I will keep playing mostly honestman from now on, try to learn what I can before I restart on new honestman run. I think the campaign is screwed anyways, I should have attempted supply raids in earlier months, I lack both bodies for research and alloys/elerium for crafting weapons and armor. I wasted so much time Rendering stuff for basic resources, wasting both supply I could have got for selling them and research time. Also needing to have a scientist in AWC for most of first 2-3 months due to getting hurt too often cost me a lot of research time as well. Now it feels like I am lagging behind, I should already have better body armor and be on my way to better support items for different classes.
Seems you must attempt supply raid missions and if you fail restart the campaign until you do succeed... LW2 is much harder to get stuff for research and crafting than before basically making it a binary option in the start (you either succeed or you fail and stuff snowballs from there until months later you hit a wall).

In tactical parts, RNG is much more prominent than before. Grenades are unreliable, you cannot kill enemies as fast as in vanilla Xcom 2 or blow their cover. Also blowing up bodies hurts more than before. And due to alert and sound system I have a feeling enemies come sooner to your positions often making you fight vs 2 or even 3 groups at once.
Also I think they added too many reinforcements in some missions, which combined with not knowing where they are landing makes them mission enders.

And I think Commander difficulty on LW2 is about same or tougher than Legendary in vanilla Xcom 2.

 

[Raghar]

Considering XCOM2 has primitive combat system, and rather badly working. It's not that big honor to play it well.

 

[Jimmious]

For me, LW2 has been crashing like crazy, always after the first mission or before the second one. I guess I have to delete every XCOM2 file I have and make a clean install of everything. Did anyone face this kind of problems?

 

[Mazisky]

For me, LW2 has been crashing like crazy, always after the first mission or before the second one. I guess I have to delete every XCOM2 file I have and make a clean install of everything. Did anyone face this kind of problems?

try with deleting Xcom 2 folder on "my documents\my games" first

 

[krafa]

Hello,

XCOM 2 is even better.
Not only are customization options far more varied even than the expanded XCOM, the game is simply deeper, more challenging, and more fun in almost every way.
Still, it's not without its problems. We'll take a look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Firaxis' ambitious sequel below.
I love this game and I play it when I have much time with my pro gamer friend "Gustavo Woltmann".
This is the reasons why I love this game most:

# Customization of XCOM 2
# Enemy Variety
# More Tactical Than Ever
# More Strategic Depth
# Most importantly for its Graphics
# Swords Are Awesome

Have a nice day

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Damnable bots.

 

[Zep Zepo]

What's the deal with the civilians standing around, messing up my advancement through cover? Any way to make them move without blowing cover?

Zep--