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

[Zeriel]

Majority of aliens now have either AOE attack or ignore cover completely. Firaxis seem to be fixed on the idea of reducing cover importance or focring players to move around the map.
X-COM EU had too many aliens to deal with and moving around was a suicide, maybe they plan less but more powerful aliens for X-COM 2...

I think since it is so easy to kill all enemies before they get a turn to take actions, the idea is that if you don't kill an alien by that time you should (possibly) be punished for it.

The fuk?

I don't understand, what's wrong?

 

[veevoir]

Apparently in Xcom2 Codex is a female. And if damaged, but not killed during a turn - she splits into clones. Those clones split too if damaged and not killed in the turn.
Add to that big accuracy and teleporting.

All of them shout about decline and make the player cry blood from all orifices by shitposting.


Apparently someone at Firaxis reads Codex, as this is correct way of representing this site as an enemy.



Edit: also - customisation includes a monocle

 

[Ludo Lense]

I hate the art style.

Not because it is individually bad but because it is all over the place. You have the fantasy fiction floaters, you have the slick ipod texture like balls that have alien brains in them, you have the enemy soldiers that have hard geometry. There is no vision here, just shovelfuls of generic imagery but not quite familiar enough to warrant copy right claims.

 

[Zeriel]

This guy is okay (other than the HUGE fucking 3 pod mistake in the middle where he thought drones work differently than they actually do), but I agree

I had to stop the video midway because I was getting too angry at his callous disregard for cover

Yeah, but that's what I was talking about with the difficulty change. Beagle had guys stand out of cover and get missed on Legend, whereas on Impossible even full cover felt like you would get hit and crit more often than not.

 

[Zombra]

I hate the art style.

Not because it is individually bad but because it is all over the place. You have the fantasy fiction floaters, you have the slick ipod texture like balls that have alien brains in them, you have the enemy soldiers that have hard geometry. There is no vision here, just shovelfuls of generic imagery but not quite familiar enough to warrant copy right claims.

To be fair, this incoherence of style is not exactly new.

 

[Ludo Lense]

I hate the art style.

Not because it is individually bad but because it is all over the place. You have the fantasy fiction floaters, you have the slick ipod texture like balls that have alien brains in them, you have the enemy soldiers that have hard geometry. There is no vision here, just shovelfuls of generic imagery but not quite familiar enough to warrant copy right claims.

To be fair, this incoherence of style is not exactly new.

Links broken but if they are about the original then it isn't the same thing. X-com had a comic book art style and design. Goofy as it was at times it fit (The mutons looked straight out of a marvel comic).

 

[Zombra]

Links broken

Image link fixed

I think the incoherence was intentional, both in the original and in the new series. XCOM 2012 even has dialogue to the effect of "How crazy is it that these aliens are all so different from each other? Super weird!"

 

[sser]

X-Com's monster designs are scattered because the communications to develop them were atrocious. Mostly, it was just dudes who didn't know much of what was going on scribbling some monsters, and then the devs picking which ones they liked or shoe-horning 'narrative' into them.

 

[Bigg Boss]

X-Com's monster designs are scattered because the communications to develop them were atrocious. Mostly, it was just dudes who didn't know much of what was going on scribbling some monsters, and then the devs picking which ones they liked or shoe-horning 'narrative' into them.

Where did you learn this? I'm interested.

 

[sser]

X-Com's monster designs are scattered because the communications to develop them were atrocious. Mostly, it was just dudes who didn't know much of what was going on scribbling some monsters, and then the devs picking which ones they liked or shoe-horning 'narrative' into them.

Where did you learn this? I'm interested.

https://youtu.be/LP7VjbuNEzg?t=826

Notice what is in the line-up, not just the familiar stuff that was chosen, but the serious what the fuck options amongst them.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Thanks for that. It really is enlightening to see how little thought is put into some things people really care about.

 

[Roqua]

Is this really PC exclusive? If so, God bless them. I hope they have zero controller support. Fuck the monkeys, savages, and savage monkeys.

 

[spectre]

Is this really PC exclusive? If so, God bless them. I hope they have zero controller support. Fuck the monkeys, savages, and savage monkeys.

Don't hold your breath, from what I've seen of the gameplay videos, it's still pretty much the same atrocity as before with exactly the same problems, only now they can't justify it with console support.

 

[LizardWizard]

The stealth/activation system looks completely borked. Beagle blew up a fucking bus stop and the pod 4 tiles away upstairs don't notice the explosions I guess

 

[cvv]

What I'm reading sounds pretty fucking awful tbh.

I have this tingling feeling in my balls I'm gonna hate the autistic stealth system with a passion. Also, the cover mechanics was the best thing about XCOM 1. If they really gave in to the incessant bitching of players who didn't understand the pod activation system is a necessary part of a cover based game and dumbed down the whole thing I'm gonna flip the fuck out.

 

[ArchAngel]

This guy is okay (other than the HUGE fucking 3 pod mistake in the middle where he thought drones work differently than they actually do), but I agree

I had to stop the video midway because I was getting too angry at his callous disregard for cover

Yeah, but that's what I was talking about with the difficulty change. Beagle had guys stand out of cover and get missed on Legend, whereas on Impossible even full cover felt like you would get hit and crit more often than not.

Jake and the designer in charge of balancing Legend talk about the differences between Legend and Impossible in this video

Dear god, guy in charge of balancing Legend difficulty is terrible. I don't see him finishing Classic Ironman in Xcom: EW with such terrible plays. How can you give a terrible player the duty to balance hardest difficulty?!
This just means Legend will be a cakewalk for any serious player.

 

[ArchAngel]

The stealth/activation system looks completely borked. Beagle blew up a fucking bus stop and the pod 4 tiles away upstairs don't notice the explosions I guess

Not everyone has advanced sound system of Underrail

 

[mutonizer]

Jake and the designer in charge of balancing Legend talk about the differences between Legend and Impossible in this video

Spoiler

Hmmm, the guy balancing Legend doesn't seem to have a clue how to even play the game, lacked the rhythm and instincts of it I found. Probably "video chills" but within 10 mins starting up he managed to make cringe worthy mistakes pretty much every single turn and yet came out completely unscratched at 4 vs 5. Not very good PR wise but I can "see" what they mean by "Legend is different from Impossible". Never really played Impossible personally as I found anything above Classic just boring and forcing you to just abuse the system but some folks who lived by it might indeed find the whole thing a tad too simple. That said, "mod will fix it" I guess and it's still early.

More worrying (though it IS a month old preview build and these last couple months are where lots of balancing happen) is the remark Beagle made at some point about the entire thing snowballing hard and fast (on Legend with only the first couple month of the game playable), which apparently was why he kinda modded shit a bit.

Overall the entire thing look sleek though (obvious bugs aside, but there nonetheless). Aside the raw improvements you can expect from a sequel, tons of little shit I think are really cool (character pool, sight indicator, waypoints, queued overwatches, etc) and the more PC focused interface seems more fluid. I'm a sucker for character customization/progression and that bit looks quite nice from what I've seen.
The apparent new dynamic of the tactical layer seems to offer players a wider variety of worthwhile play-styles, the lack of which is what annoyed me the most with XCOM:EU as snipers/scanner were just too abusive and powerful (and the core of anyone playing above classic from what I've seen). I very early stopped using the sniper class due to that obvious abuse potential but that made even classic much harder, though more fun (for me that is). More available turn limitations also seem to push you constantly and restricts non-stop over-watch traps for hours, which is a good thing in my book as well. Feels like the new EU4 mechanic that locked troop movements half way, to prevent obvious abuse that everyone was somewhat forced to do as it was insanely powerful and yet annoyed everyone.
Dynamic maps look fine so far as well, should enhanced dynamic play and replay-ability a lot, especially since they'll probably release some "chunk" DLC/FLC as well.
Geoscape also looked more dynamic with constantly tons of shit to do, choices to make and whatnot, rather than just wait for stuff to complete and aliens to do something. Might allow for good specialization of a play-through, and allow to recover if something went to to shit or something. Also fits well with the story of being a resistance instead.

So far really looks like a good sequel to Firaxis XCOM:EU/EW. Still a Firaxis XCOM:EU/EW but once you accept what that means (and can find some fun in it), then it seems it's only improving and adding couple new twists on it. Even the preview appears polished and made with attention to detail as well and there should quite a bit of mods done on it which never hurts.

Clear buy so far, though not gonna pre-order or anything yet. Hundreds of hours in EU/EW and this looks only better so well worth the money.

 

[Zombra]

The stealth/activation system looks completely borked. Beagle blew up a fucking bus stop and the pod 4 tiles away upstairs don't notice the explosions I guess

Eh, they're aliens, I bet they blow up their oatmeal for breakfast, nothing to worry about. It's like car alarms in the US.

 

[Mozg]

Looks like the vanilla problem where they refuse to make single pods get Long War big, which means it's way too easy to exploit massed firepower to kill enemies before they get any chances to kill you.

 

[Zanzoken]

Majority of aliens now have either AOE attack or ignore cover completely. Firaxis seem to be fixed on the idea of reducing cover importance or focring players to move around the map.
X-COM EU had too many aliens to deal with and moving around was a suicide, maybe they plan less but more powerful aliens for X-COM 2...

It seems to me like if you want the player to move around, cover importance should actually be increased. It sounds counter-intuitive but if cover presents an obstacle that can't just be overwhelmed via focused fire, then it forces the player to come up with more complex strategies to win. It makes things like explosives, flanking shots, suppression, flushing, etc actually matter.

Sure the player can sit back and play passively, but if the AI is well-designed then it will have strategies and abilities of its own. At the very least, the AI should be able to crush players who are content to just park behind cover and take pot shots.

 

[Zeriel]

Looks like the vanilla problem where they refuse to make single pods get Long War big, which means it's way too easy to exploit massed firepower to kill enemies before they get any chances to kill you.

You can see this problem in the Avenger defense video highlighted very well. Once multiple packs are dealt with there is never again any threat. Reinforcement system I particularly don't get--it seems like a "lose more" mechanic to borrow a phrase from the card game community. It only has an effect once you're already getting fucked, if you don't have pods active reinforcements never do anything but die instantly.

My only guess is they are balancing the entire game around bads who struggle to kill 1 or 2 aliens per turn.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Looks like the vanilla problem where they refuse to make single pods get Long War big, which means it's way too easy to exploit massed firepower to kill enemies before they get any chances to kill you.

You can see this problem in the Avenger defense video highlighted very well. Once multiple packs are dealt with there is never again any threat. Reinforcement system I particularly don't get--it seems like a "lose more" mechanic to borrow a phrase from the card game community. It only has an effect once you're already getting fucked, if you don't have pods active reinforcements never do anything but die instantly.

My only guess is they are balancing the entire game around bads who struggle to kill 1 or 2 aliens per turn.

I think it's more likely that they still haven't figured out a solution to the three month/late game difficulty problem, where the conditions they tweak to increase difficulty make the first 3 months more difficult, but are irrelevant after you've managed to tech up and rank up. Basically anything they do to make the game more difficult seems to have a disproportionate effect on the first three months, so a balanced late game means an impossible early game and a balanced early game means a trivial late-game.

Even Long War only kinda-sorta addressed this problem by (1) making it harder to tech up and rank up by increasing the time, material and xp costs of improvements reducing the durability of soldiers and assets so xp and materials had to be spread out among more units and (2) giving enemies increasing hp and defense stats.

I love Long War, but (1) came at the cost of a tediously long campaign and (2) came at the cost of late game tediousness like 65% THC on flanked mutons or robot DR eating all of your damage.

So I wonder if it's just baked into the game mechanics that a fully developed XCom squad can choose between facerolling and wars of attrition.

 

[Zeriel]

I never understood why they took an "across the board" approach to increasing alien stats with difficulty level. It seems more rational to have the stats increase more on later aliens and less on earlier ones to address that reverse difficulty curve.

Ah well, soon enough we'll be able to dig into the game and start testing out difficulty modding to see if we can do better than they did.

So I wonder if it's just baked into the game mechanics that a fully developed XCom squad can choose between facerolling and wars of attrition.

I think it's definitely gotta be balanced on a razor's edge. The difference between "we kill the aliens instantly and they never get a chance to retaliate" and "the aliens are killing too many of our soldiers without sufficient effort" is a pretty thin line I think. You can see with Long War how quickly people vacillate from "the game is too easy" to "oh no everything is unfair because the alien tech is too strong, this mod is shit". And of course that's not touching the elephant in the room which is that the majority of players find the games brutally difficult on Normal and Easy (HEH).

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

I never understood why they took an "across the board" approach to increasing alien stats with difficulty level. It seems more rational to have the stats increase more on later aliens and less on earlier ones to address that reverse difficulty curve.

It's a good question. The only reason I can think of is that while alien difficulty ramps up over time, XCom's power (tech and xp levels) ramps up at different rates for different kinds of players. Still they could come up with some algorithm tying alien power increases to your research/squad level.