XCOM 2 Catch-All

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Just a heads up for anyone interested that this game is one of the game club picks for March, but we're starting early. Feel free to play along, read along, or snark along. I know that I'm pretty much new to XCOM, so I'll make an ass of myself and kill all my characters. It'll be great.

According to steam I have 724 hours logged. That includes one successful Long War campaign, and one successful Legendary campaign (although I admit that wasn't ironman) It is the best game I have played in the last decade, with the possible exception of The Witcher 3.

Any questions, ask away.

I have 4,203 hrs logged in, plus over 30 mods (cosmetic only) in the workshop. Glad to see more people jumping on this fantastic game.

Finished up the Tactical Legacy Pack mini-campaigns earlier this evening and...

Spoiler:

I laughed harder than I probably should have at Advent keeping Central's green sweater in a stasis chamber.

kexx wrote:

I have 4,203 hrs logged in, plus over 30 mods (cosmetic only) in the workshop. Glad to see more people jumping on this fantastic game.

I’m such an amateur at this game!

Next to Kexx, mate, we all are

Finished up my Veteran/Ironman game. It was great, though I'm conflicted about the last third of the game where the aliens never get the chance to fire a single shot. On the one hand, it's cool to be so unstoppable after spending the entire game up to that point struggling to get through missions without losing soldiers for big chunks of time. On the other hand, having played through and beaten the game years ago, I struggled with motivation to finish up at that point since I knew I had won.

Anyway -- I still wanted to shoot aliens so I installed both XCOM: EU/EW and Xenonauts. I've never actually played through an Enemy WIthin campaign, so I started that up first. It's weird going back and I don't know that I'll stick with it. Everything about the combat layer feels so much slower and the strategic layer is just a whole lot of waiting around. I might actually prefer that to what XCOM2 became except that the strategic layer in XCOM2 at least allowed you to augment your soldiers by getting loot or new guys or whatever.

Speaking of waiting around ... Xenonauts! This one seems pretty interesting, and a completely different game than the modern XCOMs. I might stick with it, if I can figure out what the hell I'm supposed to be doing.

Xenonauts v1 is real old school XCOM expanded. Plays just like the original, except everything is MORE. Larger squads, maps, and alien ships. More techs to research and shinys to build. They expanded the air game into a real time, top down mini-game, though you can auto-resolve if you like (I usually did - I sucked at the mini game!)

Xenonauts v2 is going to be more like the new school XCOM, with 3-D maps. Not sure what else, but would expect MORE of everything, just like v1.

EDIT: OK, I mispoke about Xenonauts 2. Looks like it's going to be more of the same only MOAR. Along with higher-res graphics. Just wishlisted it. Should be early access in March.

Xenonauts is the closest experience to the original XCOM games I've played over the years. It's quite good although there did seem to be an optimal research path to get your fighters strong enough to take down the larger UFOs once you got into the mid game. I could never work out the air game on manual and always always had to auto-resolve. I find it quite telling that they have got rid of it for Xenonauts 2.

I've backed both on kickstarter. The original game I spent hours play testing in the various release states, and provided a lot of feedback. That meant I've barely played the released version. There is a fan mod for it that basically fixes most of the issues it had at launch and beyond, which has the full backing of the devs.

I've stepped back quite a bit from the beta testing of Xenonauts 2 so I get that experience of playing a finished game.

For anyone who backed it, Phoenix Point developers Snapshot games have just announced they have agreed a deal with Epic to make it a game store exclusive for the first year of release.

The subreddit has gone into complete meltdown. I’m a fig backer and this feels like a really bad move - I really don’t want to install yet another games platform on my PC when I back it on the basis it would be available on Steam. Waiting an extra year for that to happen is penalising me so they can get an extra couple of million.

I’m distinctly unimpressed. If I were a fig investor I’d also be asking for my cut of Epic’s bribe.

Sorbicol wrote:

For anyone who backed it, Pheonix Point developers Snapshot games have just announced they have agreed a deal with Epic to make it a game store exclusive for the first year of release.

The subreddit has gone into complete meltdown. I’m a fig backer and this feels like a really bad move - I really don’t want to install yet another games platform on my PC when I back it on the basis it would be available on Steam. Waiting an extra year for that to happen is penalising me so they can get an extra couple of million.

I’m distinctly unimpressed. If I were a fig investor I’d also be asking for my cut of Epic’s bribe.

So ask for a refund.

If you read the note from the developer, they note that this may come as a surprise to some, and as a result, they'll happily refund your money if that's the case.

For what it's worth, I'm a backer too, and I couldn't care less about which platform it's arriving on - I've accepted the inevitable storefront fragmentation, largely as a result of the ongoing shower of freebies that I'm getting from Twitch Prime and Epic. I'm not gonna be commenting on that gift-horse's dental hygiene.

They will only honour fig backers via the epic store, so you can’t even wait a year.

It’s not that big a deal in the great scheme of things I guess but it is a giant f*ck you to people who backed them. ‘Thanks for backing our game. We’ve now been offered millions you won’t see for a game that wouldn’t have existed if you hadn’t given us your money.’

There is no way this is going to end well.

Sorbicol wrote:

They will only honour fig backers via the epic store, so you can’t even wait a year.

It’s not that big a deal in the great scheme of things I guess but it is a giant f*ck you to people who backed them. ‘Thanks for backing our game. We’ve now been offered millions you won’t see for a game that wouldn’t have existed if you hadn’t given us your money.’

There is no way this is going to end well.

Is it a giant f*ck you though? "Hey we changed the terms under which you backed us, so if you don't like it we'll totally give you all of your money back, no questions asked" is quite the opposite of a f*ck-you.

There’s a Phoenix point thread? You live and learn.

Dude my pile is so huge this is such a non factor for me.

Fresh off my Veteran/Ironman campaign I've started a Commander/Ironman game and things are going surprisingly well. So much so that I booted the game up this morning just to check that the difficulty was actually set to Commander. I'm about 2 months in at this point and have only lost a single soldier. I have gotten lucky a few times though with soldiers bleeding out rather than dying. The first time I came across the Chosen Hunter, he had 3 of my 4 soldiers bleeding out when I finished him with a lucky crit. If I didn't get that crit, all 4 of my guys would have died or been captured.

Xcom2 is free this weekend on Steam, with most DLC 50% off. Might be a good time to grab War of the Chosen for those who haven't experienced it's brilliance yet!

pyxistyx wrote:

Xcom2 is free this weekend on Steam, with most DLC 50% off. Might be a good time to grab War of the Chosen for those who haven't experienced it's brilliance yet!

Came to post the same. Although it's been a smidgen cheaper before at GMG.

After playing vanilla XCOM 2 earlier this year, I'm now booting it up with WOTC installed. I'm only a few missions deep at this point, but basically everything is new already, and I'm already impressed by some of the stuff in the game. And after hearing for a couple of years now how good WOTC was, I'm looking forward to my time with it. Playing on Veteran, non-ironman. I may play ironman at some point, but I'm good with this for now.

The only advanced setting I used was the longer AVATAR project timer. It wasn't really a problem for me in the base game, and I hear it's easier to manage in this one, but I'd still rather have that out of the way. I actually enjoyed the stress/tension that the mission timers put in place to keep me from turtling, so I didn't really want to double those.

Looks like another weekend sale. WotC still $20, even though it was $17.50 that one time on GMG.

Sundown wrote:

After playing vanilla XCOM 2 earlier this year, I'm now booting it up with WOTC installed. I'm only a few missions deep at this point, but basically everything is new already, and I'm already impressed by some of the stuff in the game. And after hearing for a couple of years now how good WOTC was, I'm looking forward to my time with it. Playing on Veteran, non-ironman. I may play ironman at some point, but I'm good with this for now.

The only advanced setting I used was the longer AVATAR project timer. It wasn't really a problem for me in the base game, and I hear it's easier to manage in this one, but I'd still rather have that out of the way. I actually enjoyed the stress/tension that the mission timers put in place to keep me from turtling, so I didn't really want to double those.

Fooling around with the posters is some of the best fun I had in WOTC. Once you have a few favorites in your squad, it can be fun to have them ham it up for the propaganda.

Just finished another run.

I have loved this game since 1994 and this iteration is just so perfect for me. The WOTC is just so very good at adding drama and tension through the mid-game.

The very very best.

Does anyone know if there will be more expansions/sequels?

Nevin73 wrote:

Does anyone know if there will be more expansions/sequels?

Nothing announced yet. The Legacy Pack was released less than a year ago so I am guessing development continues.

Chances are work is being done for XCOM 3, rather than another expansion for this one. That'd be my guess.

Not even the same game, but I'm tempted by Phoenix Point... But it's still Early Access.

I doubt we'll see any more XCOM2

I'm fairly certain that Jake Solomon more or less indicated they were working on XCOM 3 a month or three back on Twitter. Problem is I can't find the link!

Phoenix Point looks so good I admit. That and Rebel Galaxy: Outlaw will probably be enough to get me to subcome to Epic's corporate dominion............

Here you go, Sorbicol.

Robear wrote:

Here you go, Sorbicol.

Nah it was something more solid than that. someone asked him straight up what the basis of XCOM3 was going to be, and he posted an old screenshot of X-COM: Apocalypse followed by the TftD loading screen. I'm sure.

I swear I saw it. Honest!

More X-COM is always welcome.

My only request is to have Ultrawide support. XCOM 2 works in Ultrawide, but the menus are standard size... kinda hoping that more and more developers start accommodating the Ultrawide monitors.