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

[Mozg]

Like 90% of the benefit of Long War for the mid-late game is being willing to have 9 alien super pods with 3 skilled up officer aliens that you literally cannot kill in one turn after you activate it. You can kill the key aliens that make the pod dangerous, you can use tricks to effectively nullify them, etc. but they're active, their AI is turned on, you can't kill them all. That's what it takes when you give the player tons of super skills and gear. If you can kill every pod the turn you spot it, almost all the mechanics go out the window - and a crappy compromise mechanic, the activation system, ends up becoming a load-bearing wall too.

LW actually makes month 1-2 easier to equalize the campaign, too.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Like 90% of the benefit of Long War for the mid-late game is being willing to have 9 alien super pods with 3 skilled up officer aliens that you literally cannot kill in one turn after you activate it. You can kill the key aliens that make the pod dangerous, you can use tricks to effectively nullify them, etc. but they're active, their AI is turned on, you can't kill them all. That's what it takes when you give the player tons of super skills and gear. If you can kill every pod the turn you spot it, almost all the mechanics go out the window - and a crappy compromise mechanic, the activation system, ends up becoming a load-bearing wall too.

LW actually makes month 1-2 easier to equalize the campaign, too.

This has its own problems though. Once the map becomes too saturated with super pods it means anything other than hyper conservative movement risks activating way more than you can handle, which can be its own kind of boring/frustrating. Of course this is partially due to Long war having to make do with maps designed for vanilla's smaller numbers, but if maps were designed to be large enough for higher alien numbers, they would be too empty for lower level missions.

 

[Zeriel]

Like 90% of the benefit of Long War for the mid-late game is being willing to have 9 alien super pods with 3 skilled up officer aliens that you literally cannot kill in one turn after you activate it. You can kill the key aliens that make the pod dangerous, you can use tricks to effectively nullify them, etc. but they're active, their AI is turned on, you can't kill them all. That's what it takes when you give the player tons of super skills and gear. If you can kill every pod the turn you spot it, almost all the mechanics go out the window - and a crappy compromise mechanic, the activation system, ends up becoming a load-bearing wall too.

LW actually makes month 1-2 easier to equalize the campaign, too.

This has it's own problems though. Once the map becomes too saturated with super pods it means anything other than hyper conservative movement risks activating way more than you can handle, which can be it's own kind of boring/frustrating. Of course this is partially due to Long war having to make do with maps designed for vanilla's smaller numbers, but if maps were designed to be large enough for higher alien numbers, they would be too empty for lower level missions.

This was one of my big hopes for XCOM 2: that their procedurally generated system which they said is highly customizable can easily have its size variables tweaked (i.e we can have Long War enemy numbers, but on a map twice or three times as big).

 

[Average Manatee]

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.

I know Afterlight had a level-scaled system where the tougher enemies appeared based on your average team experience level. On one hand level scaling kind of ruins x-com, on the other hand since Afterlight was a territory-control game where you can proactively rush through lots of missions to get lots of resources and power early, its kind of needed. Aftershock didn't have this and if you played well you had most of the earth under your control before even the 2nd tier of enemies unlocked.

 

[Zombra]

Informative. Big fan of Afterlight here, I didn't know it worked like that. But it makes sense. Was very well done as I recall.

 

[Average Manatee]

I thought it was a bit heavyhanded. Afterlight already had a fairly good mechanic to limit growth in that you couldn't get more scientists/engineers, so you couldn't really turn tons of territory into a tech rush and you couldn't rush faster than engineers built bullets (which then took away from building guns and armor). Aftershock's biggest problem was that more territory directly converted to resources, research, and manufacturing. Even still it was still a good idea to move at a brisk pace simply because the default drone enemies were always pretty weak and it was better to fight them for territory than Beastmen, so I guess I can't fault it too much.

 

[Zeriel]

Well, Beagle is using 20 soldiers right now with only ini edits, so it looks like they weren't exaggerating about modding potential.

 

[Zanzoken]

Level scaling basically neuters the strategy layer though, right? That was one of the big criticisms of vanilla XCOM -- the aliens really wouldn't improve themselves until you made plot-critical advancements, like researching the shard, building the Arc Thrower, etc. Even the designers knew how shitty that system was, because they hilariously resorted to placing a big "PRIORITY" label on the crit path tasks, just to try to urge players forward.

Anyway, I think one thing that would help is a shallower power curve on XCOM soldiers. Rookies get pea shooters and tee shirts and fight like it's their first time picking up a gun -- yet top tier soldiers and armor are nearly invincible. I know some people like it this way -- especially the part where Rookies are shit -- but I'm not one of them. Of course it feels good to make tangible progress but I think there are other gameplay considerations that matter much more.

Flatten that curve out a bit and all of a sudden the early game is not so tedious and random, and the late game is still hard enough to make you think. It also helps players push past early fuck ups and get back in the fight -- I have seen this criticism particularly of Long War, in that if you make mistakes in the beginning it's nigh impossible to catch up.

The same principle applies to the aliens too. I think it would be cool if Sectoids remained a threat throughout the entire game, even to a fully leveled and equipped XCOM squad.

 

[Average Manatee]

Level scaling basically neuters the strategy layer though, right? That was one of the big criticisms of vanilla XCOM -- the aliens really wouldn't improve themselves until you made plot-critical advancements, like researching the shard, building the Arc Thrower, etc. Even the designers knew how shitty that system was, because they hilariously resorted to placing a big "PRIORITY" label on the crit path tasks, just to try to urge players forward.

That didn't really happen, the only plot-linked enemy was the Ethereal AFAIK. It's just that the arc thrower and other stuff was basically useless to research in terms of not dying in missions.

Anyway, I think one thing that would help is a shallower power curve on XCOM soldiers. Rookies get pea shooters and tee shirts and fight like it's their first time picking up a gun -- yet top tier soldiers and armor are nearly invincible. I know some people like it this way -- especially the part where Rookies are shit -- but I'm not one of them. Of course it feels good to make tangible progress but I think there are other gameplay considerations that matter much more.

Flatten that curve out a bit and all of a sudden the early game is not so tedious and random, and the late game is still hard enough to make you think. It also helps players push past early fuck ups and get back in the fight -- I have seen this criticism particularly of Long War, in that if you make mistakes in the beginning it's nigh impossible to catch up.

The same principle applies to the aliens too. I think it would be cool if Sectoids remained a threat throughout the entire game, even to a fully leveled and equipped XCOM squad.

Absolutely, this is what basically every other X-Com game does. nuX-Com has the problem of way too much power being in the soldier and very little power being in the equipment.

 

[Zombra]

Anyway, I think one thing that would help is a shallower power curve on XCOM soldiers.

I'm into it - we're not going to see that here though, not in the vanilla game.

It also helps players push past early fuck ups and get back in the fight -- I have seen this criticism particularly of Long War, in that if you make mistakes in the beginning it's nigh impossible to catch up.

I'll say it: Long War has a lot of great ideas, but ... it sucks. After I got clobbered (fairly, I thought) to the point where I couldn't continue, I read some forum posts about how to cope with its difficulty. Turns out the answer is, "You must research XX, then XA, then YA, in that exact order, and absolutely never research AA, AB, or BB because they are suboptimal. Oh, also never let your levelled soldiers die, reload a save if they do, you need them all." This was from the makers of LW. Playing XCOM with *a required walkthrough and *not rolling with failure? Fuck. That.

 

[Zeriel]

Anyway, I think one thing that would help is a shallower power curve on XCOM soldiers.

I'm into it - we're not going to see that here though, not in the vanilla game.

It also helps players push past early fuck ups and get back in the fight -- I have seen this criticism particularly of Long War, in that if you make mistakes in the beginning it's nigh impossible to catch up.

I'll say it: Long War has a lot of great ideas, but ... it sucks. After I got clobbered (fairly, I thought) to the point where I couldn't continue, I read some forum posts about how to cope with its difficulty. Turns out the answer is, "You must research XX, then XA, then YA, in that exact order, and absolutely never research AA, AB, or BB because they are suboptimal. Oh, also never let your levelled soldiers die, reload a save if they do, you need them all." This was from the makers of LW. Playing XCOM with *a required walkthrough and *not rolling with failure? Fuck. That.

Yeah, pretty much. I think my ideal mod of XCOM 2 would be one that dials up the difficulty but makes it hard to outright lose entirely. It's fine to get clobbered over and over again, but you should always have the chance to come back.

 

[Average Manatee]

LW on Normal + the Second Wave that buffs your interceptors is pretty casual really. You get tons of money and can do basically anything, anyone who says that rushing certain techs is required is a moron.

Without the interceptor boost you do need to rush the interceptor tech though, because of the recursive snowball effect of more air coverage -> more shoot downs -> more missions -> more experience and loot -> more tech and more everything.

If you get a full squad wipe or close to a full squad wipe, yeah you probably need to reload. That's just like Vanilla. A dead once in a while isn't a huge deal though.

 

[Jaedar]

I'll say it: Long War has a lot of great ideas, but ... it sucks. After I got clobbered (fairly, I thought) to the point where I couldn't continue, I read some forum posts about how to cope with its difficulty. Turns out the answer is, "You must research XX, then XA, then YA, in that exact order, and absolutely never research AA, AB, or BB because they are suboptimal. Oh, also never let your levelled soldiers die, reload a save if they do, you need them all." This was from the makers of LW. Playing XCOM with *a required walkthrough and *not rolling with failure? Fuck. That.

Git gud.

While LW does require some optimization of research, it is way exaggerated to say you have to follow ONE PATH. In general, as long as you get laser weapons and better armor fairly early on you're fine. And its perfectly fine to have a soldier die once in a while. It's here where I'd point to the oft mentioned Beaglerush, who during his long war campaign lost an entire squad of max level troops and mechs, including all their gear and still won the campaign.

Long War has plenty of issues, but its difficulty ain't one of them.

 

[ArchAngel]

Level scaling basically neuters the strategy layer though, right? That was one of the big criticisms of vanilla XCOM -- the aliens really wouldn't improve themselves until you made plot-critical advancements, like researching the shard, building the Arc Thrower, etc. Even the designers knew how shitty that system was, because they hilariously resorted to placing a big "PRIORITY" label on the crit path tasks, just to try to urge players forward.

That didn't really happen, the only plot-linked enemy was the Ethereal AFAIK. It's just that the arc thrower and other stuff was basically useless to research in terms of not dying in

Actually sectoid commanders were also locked to replace Outsiders only after alien base assault. In my playthrough I would put off that mission until I had plasma weapons and Titan armor.

 

[commie]

Yeah, pretty much. I think my ideal mod of XCOM 2 would be one that dials up the difficulty but makes it hard to outright lose entirely. It's fine to get clobbered over and over again, but you should always have the chance to come back.

This. An existential was of survival should not pretty much end based on a handful of units getting wiped out. Yes, it should make it harder and more desperate as you should indeed be punished for failures, the more you have in a short time, the more difficult it should be to recover, but should not be impossible. Look at WW2, with the Soviets in 1941 and to a lesser extent in 1942 or the Germans after the Winter offensive of 1941 still recovered to push on in 1942. Even the Brits getting beaten up 1940-42 and recovering.

The benefit of this approach is it actually makes it more realistic with less gamey save scumming to avoid a good unit dying or focusing on the less optimal research path...yes, it should be harder until you recover, but shouldn't stop you from enjoying the chance to do so rather than restarting a mission because you know that failure is impossible to recover from.

 

[not an artichoke]

... and that's usually what happens unless you get a particularly bad string of luck causing a fatigue/wound spiral. You can lose multiple countries to the aliens and/or have multiple sats shot down but still come back as long as you manage resources well and don't try to overextend early. The most common problem I see people making is thinking you should sat rush in LW like vanilla.

 

[Average Manatee]

... and that's usually what happens unless you get a particularly bad string of luck causing a fatigue/wound spiral. You can lose multiple countries to the aliens and/or have multiple sats shot down but still come back as long as you manage resources well and don't try to overextend early. The most common problem I see people making is thinking you should sat rush in LW like vanilla.

You absolutely should sat rush in LW. Shooting down UFOs to get more missions is pretty much the game, especially since it not only speeds your development but also retards the aliens (though impossible difficulty in LW basically just cheats so that you can't slow down the aliens noticeably). If you aren't making uplinks soon after getting the requisite engineers you are falling behind.

 

[Jaedar]

... and that's usually what happens unless you get a particularly bad string of luck causing a fatigue/wound spiral. You can lose multiple countries to the aliens and/or have multiple sats shot down but still come back as long as you manage resources well and don't try to overextend early. The most common problem I see people making is thinking you should sat rush in LW like vanilla.

You absolutely should sat rush in LW. Shooting down UFOs to get more missions is pretty much the game, especially since it not only speeds your development but also retards the aliens (though impossible difficulty in LW basically just cheats so that you can't slow down the aliens noticeably). If you aren't making uplinks soon after getting the requisite engineers you are falling behind.

You have some points, but it should be noted that there's no point shooting down more ufos than you have soldiers to go to, and its REALLY expensive to get interceptor and sat coverage over a new continent. So its not like vanilla where sat coverage is the end all(or so I'm told). In LW you need to pace yourself, getting a single country on a new continent can very well cost you more money than it brings in due to interceptor and upkeep costs. Especially when you weigh that against the opportunity cost of getting more workshops or gear.

 

[Average Manatee]

If you don't have soldiers to go on missions then you need more soldiers, pretty simple. SHIVs are a pretty good and cheap replacement if you fall a bit behind. Do understand how to exploit the fatigue system btw. A soldier that already has 4-5 days of fatigue and goes on a mission comes back with a wound for 6-7 days, which is only a 2 days increase and lets you do more missions on less soldiers.

The income from more UFO shootdowns is immense and quickly pays off the cost of interceptors (satellites of course pay themselves off fairly quickly if you protect them). A small shootdown can be worth $200-$300 alone if you sell all of the materials and just having more satellites up increases your chance of detecting landed UFOs (those landed large UFOs are worth like $1000 or more). Usually its ideal to coincide your new continents with interceptor upgrades, since you can split up your old interceptor force to cover new ground. e.g. you'll have 6 interceptors on your home continent then when you get lasers you can have 2 continents of 3-4 interceptors.

Used to be that the "pro" strat was actually to start in Euro/Asia, lose your own satellite and then put your next 3 satellites in NA to get the all-powerful cheap airforce bonus.

Level scaling basically neuters the strategy layer though, right? That was one of the big criticisms of vanilla XCOM -- the aliens really wouldn't improve themselves until you made plot-critical advancements, like researching the shard, building the Arc Thrower, etc. Even the designers knew how shitty that system was, because they hilariously resorted to placing a big "PRIORITY" label on the crit path tasks, just to try to urge players forward.

That didn't really happen, the only plot-linked enemy was the Ethereal AFAIK. It's just that the arc thrower and other stuff was basically useless to research in terms of not dying in

Actually sectoid commanders were also locked to replace Outsiders only after alien base assault. In my playthrough I would put off that mission until I had plasma weapons and Titan armor.

Yeah OK, forgot those. But in general the Outsider replacements are easy because the guaranteed spawn place of them and low numbers make them effortless to dispatch, same with the outsiders themselves. The real difficulty of missions comes from the other pods on the map which upgrade to mutons/heavy floaters/etc based on time. One of the impossible strats for keeping all countries alive involves rushing the alien base mission since it lowers global panic, its not a terribly hard mission.

 

[Jaedar]

If you don't have soldiers to go on missions then you need more soldiers, pretty simple. SHIVs are a pretty good and cheap replacement if you fall a bit behind. Do understand how to exploit the fatigue system btw. A soldier that already has 4-5 days of fatigue and goes on a mission comes back with a wound for 6-7 days, which is only a 2 days increase and lets you do more missions on less soldiers.

I mean sure, but its not like you can recruit 7 rookies and pretend like that's enough. It takes time to increase your roster, and the combo of diverting cash into geoscape while also bringing more rookies and low rankers to increase your roster places some strain on your battlescaping.

The income from more UFO shootdowns is immense and quickly pays off the cost of interceptors (satellites of course pay themselves off fairly quickly if you protect them). A small shootdown can be worth $200-$300 alone if you sell all of the materials and just having more satellites up increases your chance of detecting landed UFOs (those landed large UFOs are worth like $1000 or more).

Sure, but large landed aren't anything you'll be dealing with early on. And a small ufo being worth 200, lets say you shoot down 2 or 3 per month if you have 5 interceptors (200 each to buy, 70 upkeep or something?), that takes some time to pay for itself. Not to mention adding laser cannons and/or satellite replacements due to ufos hunting them.

Used to be that the "pro" strat was actually to start in Euro/Asia, lose your own satellite and then put your next 3 satellites in NA to get the all-powerful cheap airforce bonus.

Yeah, but this isn't sat rushing, this is just taking 2 continent bonuses at the cost of 1.

Your points are all legit, but none of them apply to the strategy of "sat rush". You clearly should at some point have full coverage, but pretending like you should try and take 2 continents in the first month is MADNESS!

 

[not an artichoke]

Of course you want more coverage & UFOs destroyed ASAP, but the cost of attempting to cover more than one continent early is prohibitive and makes it very easy for one bad mission to send you into a defeat spiral. Early on you typically get more than enough missions to keep your men busy even with only 1-2 countries covered, and it allows you to spend resources on gear instead of that 10th interceptor so that you're strong enough to handle multiple missions and bad luck when it hits.

 

[mutonizer]

Hadn't check Beagle's 2nd vanilla run (just changed building construction time, which of course somewhat matters) but man, I see what he meant by snowballing. With all the upgrades and whatnot, his basic 4 dudes were tearing up everything on sight non stop, usually never actually being shot at (nothing lived long enough really). That was even before the first weapon upgrade. After that, it was getting silly and looked more like some Hollywood superhero movie (think Avengers invasion scenes) than XCOM...

That said, since it seems to be more moddable (at least lot of the data seems very exposed), they might just want "normal" people to finally beat the default game somehow, even if that means snowballing them into it, and let the vocal minority of bit more dedicated players to "figure it out via mods". Just going by steam stats (whatever that's worth) but only 25% of people actually finished a EU/EW game at all, less than 5% did on Classic and just forget about Ironman and whatnot.

 

[Jimmious]

It's highly possible that the current difficulty is not representative of the final game.
Also all the preview stops at around 10hrs in, which might be when a difficulty spike kicks in.
It's all speculative now to be honest..

 

[Average Manatee]

If you don't have soldiers to go on missions then you need more soldiers, pretty simple. SHIVs are a pretty good and cheap replacement if you fall a bit behind. Do understand how to exploit the fatigue system btw. A soldier that already has 4-5 days of fatigue and goes on a mission comes back with a wound for 6-7 days, which is only a 2 days increase and lets you do more missions on less soldiers.

I mean sure, but its not like you can recruit 7 rookies and pretend like that's enough. It takes time to increase your roster, and the combo of diverting cash into geoscape while also bringing more rookies and low rankers to increase your roster places some strain on your battlescaping.

Yes, it's something that you have to do ahead of time since you can't just send full rookie teams. But that's just how you need to play. For the most part the starting roster size is enough for a long time as long as you game the fatigue system, use SHIVs for 1 spot after expanded deployments, and replace losses as they happen.

The income from more UFO shootdowns is immense and quickly pays off the cost of interceptors (satellites of course pay themselves off fairly quickly if you protect them). A small shootdown can be worth $200-$300 alone if you sell all of the materials and just having more satellites up increases your chance of detecting landed UFOs (those landed large UFOs are worth like $1000 or more).

Sure, but large landed aren't anything you'll be dealing with early on. And a small ufo being worth 200, lets say you shoot down 2 or 3 per month if you have 5 interceptors (200 each to buy, 70 upkeep or something?), that takes some time to pay for itself. Not to mention adding laser cannons and/or satellite replacements due to ufos hunting them.

Large landed are relatively easy once you learn how to exploit the outsider AI (stand where they can't see you and can't flank you without being flanked, they'll just group up out of sight while you nail them with a sniper). I've done them in month 1 with starting equipment.

You should be able to shoot down 2-3 small ufos a month with 3 laser cannon interceptors, if all 3 get damaged then cycle one from your home continent to guard against satellite hunters. Count in the fact that you'll probably get 1 landed UFO of some size and that's an investment paying itself off in one month and getting huge payoffs everywhere (team experience/materials/alien setbacks) for later months. 5 laser interceptors is probably overkill early game unless/until you intend to shoot down mediums.

Used to be that the "pro" strat was actually to start in Euro/Asia, lose your own satellite and then put your next 3 satellites in NA to get the all-powerful cheap airforce bonus.

Yeah, but this isn't sat rushing, this is just taking 2 continent bonuses at the cost of 1.

Your points are all legit, but none of them apply to the strategy of "sat rush". You clearly should at some point have full coverage, but pretending like you should try and take 2 continents in the first month is MADNESS!

Well, it's rushing satellites as fast as you can get engineers and cash for them. It's not as fast in LW as vanilla because LW isn't as fast as vanilla. Past the first built uplink you should be pretty much ordering new sats and uplinks the moment you hit a 10x engineer cutoff to run them (or rather, order them around the 5th-10th of a month since you only need them before the 1st of the next month). It's not like you can buy engineers through workshops in LW, so this is as close to a "rush" as you can get.

 

[Average Manatee]

That said, since it seems to be more moddable (at least lot of the data seems very exposed), they might just want "normal" people to finally beat the default game somehow, even if that means snowballing them into it, and let the vocal minority of bit more dedicated players to "figure it out via mods". Just going by steam stats (whatever that's worth) but only 25% of people actually finished a EU/EW game at all, less than 5% did on Classic and just forget about Ironman and whatnot.

I think 25% is a pretty high number nowadays. Supposedly the average is in the 10-20% range for most games.

I can definitely see why the difficulty curve in X-Com 1 (more like a difficulty slide) was designed the way it was considering it was an AAA game. Nowadays the idea of forcing players to start over from the beginning when they are more than an hour or two in is basically a non-starter, hence why the game's difficulty is highest for about that amount of time and the rest of the game is "lets show off cool aliens and cool equipment".