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

[Zombra]

I like the idea of a science fiction story in which aliens take over the world and use strange machines with side effects that include the corruption of time itself. I kind of hope they don't fix it.

 

[Zombra]

Wow. I watched some of this mission last night and have to say it killed my boner. The guy went through the whole mission not only without a scratch, but without ever being attacked once. There was no panache or flair in evidence, either; he just kind of plodded through. And then he was a dick about turning up the difficulty.

 

[Zeriel]

Wow. I watched some of this mission last night and have to say it killed my boner. The guy went through the whole mission not only without a scratch, but without ever being attacked once. There was no panache or flair in evidence, either; he just kind of plodded through. And then he was a dick about turning up the difficulty.

Casuals, casuals never change.

 

[Zeriel]

Wow. I watched some of this mission last night and have to say it killed my boner. The guy went through the whole mission not only without a scratch, but without ever being attacked once. There was no panache or flair in evidence, either; he just kind of plodded through. And then he was a dick about turning up the difficulty.

Casuals, casuals never change.

Pete was playing on veteran (the 2nd difficulty level), which one could interpret as being similar to normal in EU/EW i.e. the difficulty setting that cheats in favor of the player.

The first mission he played on the lowest, actually. He only increased it when Nauta called him out on it. I've always wondered how someone works at a strategy game company and sucks at strategy games, but the world is filled with mysteries.

 

[Zombra]

Wow. I watched some of this mission last night and have to say it killed my boner. The guy went through the whole mission not only without a scratch, but without ever being attacked once. There was no panache or flair in evidence, either; he just kind of plodded through. And then he was a dick about turning up the difficulty.

Pete was playing on veteran (the 2nd difficulty level), which one could interpret as being similar to normal in EU/EW i.e. the difficulty setting that cheats in favor of the player.

Informative. I feel better. I thought he was playing on the 2nd highest (Commander?).

 

[Mazisky]

Done. If I get any replies I will let you know.

You can also tweet @M_Nauta, IIRC he's the one that actually programmed the mission-to-geoscape time.

Nice advice. Also Nauta is the one who said "Avenger background time of day and missions time of day will match with GMT time", so he knows his stuff. Thank you

 

[Raghar]

First missions should be easy. You can't properly estimate the real difficulty of the game after first few missions. (Look for example at Vogel's game Avadon. The first missions were doable on hard with some thought, then the difficulty spiked up and stayed up. And if you wanted to play without reload and/or abuse you were screwed. Then again Vogel can optimize real difficulty where hard IS hard.)

 

[Alienman]

TFTD don't agree

 

[Raghar]

TFTD don't agree

I played it. The start was easy, the real bitches appeared MUCH later.

 

[Alienman]

Interesting. I felt the game was incredible tough from beginning to end. Every battle felt like a mini-Stalingrad hehe

 

[Zombra]

First missions should be easy. You can't properly estimate the real difficulty of the game after first few missions.

If you're talking about that video I mentioned above, the guy was using Captain-level (Rookie +3) abilities and modded weapons. So either they just added soldiers to an arbitrary mission, which I don't think they did, or he was a fair ways into the game.

Really if it's anything like XCOM 2012, I expect the game to get way easier after the beginning as equipment gets studlier and abilities get more ridiculous. I lost way more guys at the beginning than at the end.

 

[Zanzoken]

I'm not very knowledgeable about some of the game's finer points -- can somebody give a quick primer on "pod activation"? Like I get the gist of how it works, but why is it even a thing?

Why don't the aliens just patrol around the map or stand guard at important locations, and then if they see you on their turn they jump into cover and shoot? I don't understand why they need different mechanics than the player.

 

[Zombra]

I'm not very knowledgeable about some of the game's finer points -- can somebody give a quick primer on "pod activation"? Like I get the gist of how it works, but why is it even a thing?

Why don't the aliens just patrol around the map or stand guard at important locations, and then if they see you on their turn they jump into cover and shoot? I don't understand why they need different mechanics than the player.

It's just an easy way to ensure that most of the time the player is fighting an appropriate challenge. 4 soldiers vs. 3 aliens. But if he screws up or gets unlucky it becomes 6 aliens, so there's that little element of watch your ass. Otherwise it would either be a whole mapful of aliens dogpiling at once, or the player going around picking off guys juuuuuust as they came into line of sight and "activated" one by one.

 

[Save Versus Stupid]

I'm not very knowledgeable about some of the game's finer points -- can somebody give a quick primer on "pod activation"? Like I get the gist of how it works, but why is it even a thing?

Why don't the aliens just patrol around the map or stand guard at important locations, and then if they see you on their turn they jump into cover and shoot? I don't understand why they need different mechanics than the player.

It's just an easy way to ensure that most of the time the player is fighting an appropriate challenge. 4 soldiers vs. 3 aliens. But if he screws up or gets unlucky it becomes 6 aliens, so there's that little element of watch your ass. Otherwise it would either be a whole mapful of aliens dogpiling at once, or the player going around picking off guys juuuuuust as they came into line of sight and "activated" one by one.

I'm still a little worried about the difficulty level on legend. After watching some of Beaglerush's streams where he upped alien HP and increased pod sizes, it's still extremely easy to "game" pod activations like in the first game. That sort of binary "on/off" was, I think the worst part of the game. Thankfully, the devs are apparently looking into some sort of solution for pod gaming and overwatch traps.

 

[Average Manatee]

I'm not very knowledgeable about some of the game's finer points -- can somebody give a quick primer on "pod activation"? Like I get the gist of how it works, but why is it even a thing?

Why don't the aliens just patrol around the map or stand guard at important locations, and then if they see you on their turn they jump into cover and shoot? I don't understand why they need different mechanics than the player.

Aliens patrol in groups out in the open and only get their full AI abilities once they've "activated" (by seeing one of your soldiers). On activation they get a free move (whether its in the middle of your turn or during theirs) to get into cover but they are unable to shoot or carry out most other special actions until their next turn (aliens that don't need cover can use the free action to overwatch).

Presumably the 2-action/cover/overwatch/unit abilities systems make it pretty much impossible to create an X-Com-like AI that is always active and independent. At least I can't think of a way that doesn't have gaping holes. But once the AI is active it operates under similar mechanics to the player (it still works like original X-Com though in that if it can see one of your soldiers it knows where all of them are).

Just think, if the AI wasn't in cover you'd kill it. How does it know what cover to take prior to battle, without cheating and reading the player's position? And even if you do solve this, does it just stand around overwatching? That makes it suicide for the early game and just forces players to use lightning reflexes to scout everywhere later.

 

[Average Manatee]

Don't know about XCOM 2 but I'm guessing that concealment trumps sight. But its how it works in XCOM 1, where you can't bait aliens into take cover that would leave themselves flanked (except with squadsight, they either don't seem to see that far or take into account its effect). But the aliens also doesn't "look ahead" in turns at all, you can always bait it into taking heavy cover that isn't currently flanked but which will be flanked if one of your units moves one tile towards it.

 

[Jasede]

Interesting. I felt the game was incredible tough from beginning to end. Every battle felt like a mini-Stalingrad hehe

Chances are he is a braggart. It's like when people are "actually, Dork Souls is easy" but they died as much as everyone else; only now they have become good at last, and don't remember dying.

TFTD is much more challenging than EU for various reasons, not in the least the difficulty bugs and the fact that some versions of EU fix your difficulty at Beginner, so you're in for a rude awakening, in addition to a more challenging base game. It has flying Chrysalids for god's sake.

 

[Average Manatee]

Not really, TFTD is actually significantly easier than X-Com in a number of ways, more difficult in others. If you are comparing it to X-Com with a non-glitched difficulty level then I'd say it starts out a bit easier and only gets harder with terror missions (land restrictions on good equipment) and the multi-part missions.

 

[Jasede]

You've got to be kidding me.

I've played both games for years. Every forum I go to people agree that TFTD is much, much more difficult. In fact, Microprose made it harder on purpose because due to the Beginner bug in EU, people demanded the game to be more difficult, so they obliged.

This is a severe case of trying too hard to look cool on the internet, which is sad since it's about a game older than most of our posters.

 

[Average Manatee]

TFTD's 50%-150% damage range instead of 0%-200% is HUGE. It makes armor massively more useful, and TFTD also has better (front) armor. Combined with the fact that alien weaponry doesn't have auto shot, it's literally impossible for a single alien to take down your end-game armored soldiers with sonic cannons. And when X-Com aliens would react with auto fire in horrible, horrible ways, TFTD's aliens can make max 1 snap shot. TFTD's starting tanks are nigh-invulnerable to the majority of alien starting weaponry.

Tentaculats appear way, way less often than Cryssalids did and never appear with civilians, so no instances of needing to fight 30 in a mission like you would if Cryssalids ate all the civvies. Flying was never really needed as a counter to Cryssalids, simply leveling the ground so they couldn't sneak up on you worked. Both are equally deadly in CQC missions inside the alien bases.

Cyberdisks, probably the #1 cause of early game mission failures in terror missions/base assaults, are gone (terror drones are cyberdisks 2.0 but are far later and rarer). In their place the terror troops for sectoids are arguably weaker than sectoids. The other ruiner of early games, alien PSI, is far weaker in TFTD aliends stat-wise, meaning far more soldiers can resist it well (instead its used slightly more often by weaker sectoid ranks, but in fact they are so weak that they can hardly affect anyone and it turns out to be good for psi-testing soldiers). It's also far weaker on the lizardmen compared to ethereals, and lizardmen are present in much smaller numbers since most of the end game is mixed aliens, so instead of 10+ psi attacks per round you'll have 5 or so.

Lobstermen, the one truly new and impressive alien, has a critical weakness to the Thermal Shock Launcher. And they really aren't that tough to sonic cannons either, they only really shine in CQC.

Far stronger alien grenades help players way more than aliens.

The TFTD's Triton is 100000000x better than the Skyranger. Skyranger is literally designed to kill soldiers from aliens shooting at their feet and costing tons of extra TU's to walk down the sloped surface. The Triton has a door. A motherfucking door, a marvel of modern engineering. I've cleaned half a terror map in TFTD just by peeking out with a tank, spotting something, throwing a grenade, then hiding behind the door again with everything before the alien turn. It's amazing glorious shit, to have 15+ aliens dead that have never had a chance to see you.

That said, the things that are legitimately harder in TFTD:

- Everything to do with multi-part missions, especially since they have lengthy CQC segments (fuck cruise ships especially). Arguably better to just abort the two part terror missions and wait till you have blaster bombs/psi for the bases.
- Larger levels in general require you to spread out more and be picked off easier.
- Far harder to level terrain in general (either through stronger objects or just plain hills instead of plains), compared to how easily barns blew up in X-Com.
- Rocket Launcher and Motion Tracker not being available above water hurts a lot. Blaster Bombs are arguably a toss up since the aliens can't use them either.
- Gauss being pretty gimped compared to lasers. But then Sonics were gimped far more for the aliens than you, and you can just rush Sonics.
- Alien sub and base layouts being very confusing and having way more blind corners to be shot at from.
- Strategically you can't cover most of the funding areas with just 3 bases like in X-Com (America/Euro/Asia).

 

[Jasede]

I don't know if I am convinced. But you do make some good points. But you don't really give lobstermen the credit they deserve. They have ungodly armor, are accurate, move a ton and murder you in melee. Good point about the Shock Launcher, though - I admit I had forgotten about that.

In my experience, 1 is just a lot easier than 2; maybe I just play differently and in a way that makes 2 harder. From what I can tell on my (brief) internet research, most people do agree with me in general, but that doesn't mean anything. Most people aren't that good at games.

 

[Average Manatee]

I definitely wouldn't say that TFTD is altogether easier (the larger levels that you can't demolish with rocket launcher snipers is a big thing, and no motion tracker for above ground stuff sucks), but if we're talking things that end games then base defenses are way worse in X-Com. If the game rolls early Sectoids with psi and cyberdisks or late ethereals with a billion psi attempts then you are going to have a higher chance of disaster than anything TFTD will do (which is usually sectoids/aquamen or mixed crew, and mixed crew is way easier than pure harder aliens).

Shock launcher is amazing, I use it all the time (in breaching UFOs in both TFTD and X-Com I give them to everyone, even a bad reaction shot works). Lobstermen ARE really scary in CQC, but like I said, don't try base attacks early and you won't have much opportunity to fight them. When you roll in with psi and hovertanks its a cakewalk.

 

[Jimmious]

Done. If I get any replies I will let you know.

You can also tweet @M_Nauta, IIRC he's the one that actually programmed the mission-to-geoscape time.

Nice advice. Also Nauta is the one who said "Avenger background time of day and missions time of day will match with GMT time", so he knows his stuff. Thank you

I'll try that, the others didn't answer so far

 

[Galdred]

I'm not very knowledgeable about some of the game's finer points -- can somebody give a quick primer on "pod activation"? Like I get the gist of how it works, but why is it even a thing?

Why don't the aliens just patrol around the map or stand guard at important locations, and then if they see you on their turn they jump into cover and shoot? I don't understand why they need different mechanics than the player.

It's just an easy way to ensure that most of the time the player is fighting an appropriate challenge. 4 soldiers vs. 3 aliens. But if he screws up or gets unlucky it becomes 6 aliens, so there's that little element of watch your ass. Otherwise it would either be a whole mapful of aliens dogpiling at once, or the player going around picking off guys juuuuuust as they came into line of sight and "activated" one by one.

The proper way to handle that would have been with all aliens dogpiling on the player, but most aliens arriving later as reinforcements.

 

[Mazisky]

A little update (for those folks interested in) about the game time calculation.

Seems like they abandoned the GMT system (seen in almost all previews) and gone for a more straight actual time, so that the clock timer (on the bottom right) will be always recalculated to reflect the Actual position of the avenger, always.

I like it, it's more clear