SallyNasty's Game Club — XCOM 2 (Mar. 2019)

I like the additional feedback and experience points as well as the additional narrative. I very much like the additional classes and chosen missions. It makes everything about the game better.

I am a bad person. I have broken my Ironman rule. Instead of sticking it through, I force quit, deleted the local save, and restored from my cloud backup.

My whole team was getting wiped out attacking the Blacksite. That cloud save was from halfway through the mission, when everyone was still alive. Both my specialist and ranger were already wounded, but at least they were still alive. Knowing what was coming, I used smarter tactics to keep my squad together, make sure they moved forward slower under full cover, and was able to successfully complete the mission with no losses.

I know I cheated. But, lesson learned! Since that mission I have had 2 further deployments with no soldiers killed.

Speaking on vanilla XCOM2 vs WOTC, I think it's a matter of iterations. XCOM2 is a great game, and I'm really enjoying playing through the vanilla campaign. But WOTC is just cleaner. The UI is just slightly tweaked and cleaner. The story has minor changes that make it more complete. The soldiers, abilities, and Avenger facilities are all just better thought out and implemented.

If you have only played and loved the vanilla XCOM2, you'll probably be fine and not miss anything. But if you're not loving it, and feel like it's just missing something or it's not quite clicking, then go get WOTC. Because those extra pieces just take that game from a solid 8 to a bloody 11.

I will finish this vanilla campaign run as part of this club, because I love challenging myself and trying something new as I have only played WOTC before. But this is the last time I'll play vanilla, because all those little things just make WOTC a better game and experience to me.

Restarting again...

At work I have to do math and crunch numbers... I want a relaxed game while taking risks is awarding.
I have to switch to Rookie... call me whatever you want, but I have a job that demands, and this game is too hard for me to play on a chess-level.

God, I HATE these codex-golden clone teleport things...

Making good progress, myself - After a few more fatalities and losses, I've turned the tables and defeated the second Chosen (the mouthy sniper dude). Everyone has power armour and plasma weaponry and I'm closing in on chosen no 3 (The Warlock - although he's pretty much at full strength now, so he'll probably be more of a challenge).

Still not actually built the chamber i need to build to progress the main story though. I should probably get on that.

Overall though, things are going well!

Re: WOTC vs vanilla.

I actually don't remember a huge amount of how this plays without WOTC installed, but yeah it definitely makes a difference having the added narrative stuff. The wider variety of missions and things that can happen doesn't hurt either. There's also a BUNCH more maps that i don't recognise from my last play-through...i'm guessing those were maybe added by that recent big free DLC patch they added?

ALSO...i didn't even notice that you could pick the reworked versions of the original Enemy Within soundtrack from the options menu :O So good!

And that's the third chosen defeated! That was a fun fight. Close though, one dead Psi-user and everyone else was hanging on by a thread. The Warlock was at full strength so he was zipping around the room with his teleport ability each time he gets wounded which was making it a deadly game of whack-a-mole, but I got there in the end!

Now to FINALLY get some peace to build that danged special chamber in the Avenger and move on with the main 'story'!

Did I say I like to play on Rookie level? Drinking pink champagne, watching some football on the tv while blasting my way through missions as a breeze?

Forget that. Just had the first average mission to turn back the clock on the AVATAR project and three of my studs survived, by one point.... gravely wounded. One shaken and seriously wounded.

Prepping up some Rookies now, Tipsy gaming is most definitely NOT for me and XCom...

pyxistyx wrote:

And that's the third chosen defeated! That was a fun fight. Close though, one dead Psi-user and everyone else was hanging on by a thread. The Warlock was at full strength so he was zipping around the room with his teleport ability each time he gets wounded which was making it a deadly game of whack-a-mole, but I got there in the end!

Now to FINALLY get some peace to build that danged special chamber in the Avenger and move on with the main 'story'!

Planewalker (the teleport) is a very annoying ability they can get. I think it is much worse on the Hunter because once you engage him, he puts out more damage than the other two and can do so from some extreme ranges.

Just popped the last cheev in the game. This was such a good game, probably the best I have played since Witcher 3. I loved this game.

Well, I'm officially very, very bad. I went on a marathon play session of about 8 hours. Multiple missions, multiple soldiers sacrificed in our broad war to push the aliens back out of our world. Until I reached an incredibly difficult mission to extract an Advent VIP. Slowly, carefully, we made our way across the map. Cover 2 formation, always keeping troops on overwatch to prevent a surprise attack. When we arrived at the VIP, I suddenly realized this was a timed mission, and I had 3 turns left to extract the team. With the extraction point more than 3 dashing turns away, there was no way I could complete the mission.

In anger and rage I screamed at the console! I performed a force quit and immediately deleted my local save so that I could trick the Ironman system into letting me try again with a better result! But, to my great shame, the last cloud backup was from a week ago. The same cloud backup I had restored on the blacksite mission. I literally lost a week of successful missions and progress.

On the bright side, I'm going to do so much better this week. But maybe I've learned Ironman just isn't for me.

closing in on the end-game. I think I have one more thing to research in the shadow chamber and then it's time for the final mission!

Which is good...'cause I really need that 70gig back

Finished! Aliens defeated once again!

Only lost one person on the final mission (unfortunately it was me! :O )
54 missions won, 4 lost, 6 flawless - total of 840 dead aliens and 34 soldiers lost. They will probably not be remembered 'cause i just uninstalled the game to free up the disk space again

Tjeezz... I somehow do feel stupid now.

Then again, after work I'm in the throes of the war at home, and if I am lucky and not too tired, I can do one mission an evening. Rookie level is my place, still fighting with snakes and faceless foes...

Successfully completed a ton of missions and I'm back to where I was before I had to restore my cloud backup. The Avatar project is moving forward at an alarming pace, and I have no Advent facilities I can attack within my current resistance contacts. With WOTC, I always run at least one resistance ring mission to reduce Avatar progress each month. Without that option, it seems to push the player to really aggressively expand the resistance communication so that you can hit those Advent facilities. Meanwhile, I'm very concerned about my research, as the team do not yet all have magnetic weaponry and we're starting to not do enough damage against the alien troops that are being sent against us. I'm at that point in the game where the difficulty is spiking and I need to get my troops up to snuff ASAP, or this is going to be a lost campaign.

I wasn't content just to play XCOM 2 for some reason, so I went on and played Enemy Within first. Game totally holds up. Probably not a good idea to play shortly after the sequel though. Now I'm on the Tactical Missions.

Walked into my first chryssalid last night.

Came just creeping out of the ground to poison my most advanced grenadier.

Beginning to wonder if I should use some Rookies as Cannon Fodder as a recon / bait

I am WFH today. You know what that means? XCOM2, baby!

I have just launched a resistance mission in between my work conference calls. Let's see if I can execute a successful mission while multi-tasking with work.

That was fun! Decided to sent my sharpshooter forward as some fresh meat-lure

chryssalids all over the place, shredding him to bits.

With his last leg he was able to strumble out of the chryssalid-circle, giving each of them a free faceoff load of his magnetic gun.

Somewhat softened, my Grenadiers soldiered in and blasted them to smithereens with a double wave of grenaders.

Somehow the pickup team was able to collect pieces of chryssalid -meat, which will give me some much needed cash on the black market!

That was no fun...

Avenger got attacked, while my dream team was recovering from previous missions. Got roasted pretty bad. Seems I have to alter my playing style.. again... starting over!

Anyone knows? I get plenty of hair pin and scopes, but my newer soldiers can't use them or install them? I can sell them on the black market, though??

Peoj Snamreh wrote:

That was no fun...

Avenger got attacked, while my dream team was recovering from previous missions. Got roasted pretty bad. Seems I have to alter my playing style.. again... starting over!

Anyone knows? I get plenty of hair pin and scopes, but my newer soldiers can't use them or install them? I can sell them on the black market, though??

You place the upgrades on weapons and they stay on the specific weapon but that weapon can be lost if a soldier carrying it dies and you don’t recover the corpse.

So say you equip soldier A with an assault rifle that has a scope mod and soldier B with an assault rifle that had a hair trigger.

Soldiers C and D go out on the mission with regular weapons.

You go on mission and soldier B dies because hair triggers are awful at low levels.

You complete the mission but have to leave soldier B’s corpse.

Soldiers A and C can now equip the scope rifle BUT only if you unequip Soldier A at the barracks.

Soldier B’s rifle is lost forever.

(Soldier D was left to die because before he started bleeding out, he panicked and ran into a gas cloud and also caught on fire.)

Edit: this assumes you have researched weapon upgrades.

Reaper81 wrote:

Edit: this assumes you have researched weapon upgrades.

O boy...

Played a ton more this week and I'm moving the plot slowly but surely forward. Unfortunately that plot is moving in the Alien's favor.

Lost my best soldier this week, and most of my "A" squad are badly injured. I have no money to recruit rookies, the Avatar project is nearly complete, the Avenger is out of power, and I'm full up on resistance contacts with no ability to expand to hit an Avatar site that is outside of my range. The only good news is that I've completed all the magnetic weapon research; too bad I have no supplies to actually buy the equipment for the team.

Finally "won" my attack on the Avenger... that is: I survived.

Avatar is clicking and I have to get to these new regions for communications to be in time, for that I need a ton of stuff I don't have - and as with the old X-com the 'always one step behind'-feeling is really getting on me.

I have fun with this game, but after a job it is sometimes just too damn hard... feels like work.

ThatGuy42 wrote:

Played a ton more this week and I'm moving the plot slowly but surely forward. Unfortunately that plot is moving in the Alien's favor.

Lost my best soldier this week, and most of my "A" squad are badly injured. I have no money to recruit rookies, the Avatar project is nearly complete, the Avenger is out of power, and I'm full up on resistance contacts with no ability to expand to hit an Avatar site that is outside of my range. The only good news is that I've completed all the magnetic weapon research; too bad I have no supplies to actually buy the equipment for the team.

Can you sell things to the Black Market?

Not a bad idea, I haven't actually scanned at the Black Market to unlock it yet. In fact, I don't know that I've ever interacted with the Black Market in any of my previous campaigns.

ThatGuy42 wrote:

Not a bad idea, I haven't actually scanned at the Black Market to unlock it yet. In fact, I don't know that I've ever interacted with the Black Market in any of my previous campaigns.

Oooooh. You are in for a treat!

Almost ready, but then again a long long way off...

Could brake into some news-feed to uncover the fake news, and after that only one mission was left... somehow I know I am not ready for 33 or more enemies without me having so much as a psi-training centre.

Seems I had to built up and strengthen my squad... but... Somehow I am done with the game.

It was a good ride and it is a great game, but just a tad too long for my liking.