XCOM 2 Catch-All

*facepalm* aka Tales From the Modded Up and Miclick'n Side

After another round of mod tweaking I decide to take the playable candidate out for a campaign run. Gatecrasher went flawless, so I decide to sit out all the promo'd soldiers except my "nerd" - "electrician" (think picked ~perks from first rank up; the meaty skills won't kick in till their 2nd promo) and my skirmisher -- the skirmisher is one kill short so still a 'rookie hero', I suppose. I want to hit the ground running on the first post-GC mission and elevate another squad past rookie; I have covert infiltration in the mix, as such I'll need to field multiple teams, Long War2 style, very soon.

So, it's my hacker-path soldier with a vektor rifle, an arc thrower and a gremlin, my unpromo'd skirmisher, and two rookies. First mission after GC and we need to hack the terminal in a small advent facility.

The hacker is perched at an elevated position atop a nearby highway, south of the building. One roof turret in sight. I see an officer with troopers patrolling around, they just walked northbound up from the SW corner -- barely out of sight now but I know they are RIGHT THERE around the corner.

My three ground level soldiers are (mostly) in position. I remind myself to watch those red, holo, sensor fences as they are modded to trigger an alarm/blow concealment. One of the rooks has explosives instead of a grenade in his utility slot.

The plan: blow a chunk out of the south wall, everyone else on overwatch -- with luck, possibly taking down some enemies between the explosion and the fire fight while clearing objective LOS for the hacker up on the highway. I've burned some of my timer getting into position on the SW corner. I'm locking down this turn with the intent for final setup and to spring the plan next turn [edit: once I can get eyes on the pod that just went around the corner].

Skirmisher is the last one left to set this turn. Planning ahead, I decide to check my grappling angles on the skirmisher; there are some reachable spots on the roof and it may prove handy once I grenade the turret and finish it off. Heck, with any luck between the explosives and the grenade it'll be done for as it's near the corner that the enemies just rounded away from.

Committed to my plan, I grapple to the roof. WAIT.. I -what- ?!? A mouse misclick, the bane of all well laid XCOM strategies.. There goes my chance to thin the herd during the concealment phase.

Also, surprise, from my new rooftop oopsie position I realize there's a second turret on the far side of the roof. They each have three armor pips. I've also revealed two sectoid pods in the distance, mostly troopers (as it's still too early for mixed pod modding to change much in the campaign). Anyways, the nearby office and his pod will be happy to jump in on this as well, no doubt. I grunt dissatisfaction and prepare to, at the very least, lose the skirmisher as the new round starts.

To my surprise, and perhaps due to an extra health PIP from some modified ~point-based, distributed, not created equal-ish setup, my skirmisher survives. This is (also) , in part I attribute, to the inexplicable choice of one of the two turrets to take the far shot on my highway-perched, vektor-toting, aforementioned hacker. That first turret shot misses and gave the skirmisher his chance to limp away [and off the roof] from the first combat round only mostly dead after the second turret opens up. I'm going to need one of 'Miracle Max's' pills before this is over.

The enemies flood in, they're AI modded to use [more often] overwatch fire when it's sensible; I pull too far away from this wall and I'm almost certainly toast between that and the one near-edge turret.

My highway-perched hacker fires on the turret with the vektor, it's a hit -- a whopping 1 damage due to the armor. I decide to burn through explosives and obliterate the whole corner of the roof that turret is on. Success -- mostly, but immediately after one of my rookies takes a sectoid shot and is killed out of their high cover.

The other sectoid panicks my highway-perched hacker. With my current AI tweaks have it where the enemy will prioritize up, instead of down, soldiers that are panicked (they also don't downthrottle any engagement rules). As such, the hacker jump of the highway and dies out in open ground below while running around. Oh well, at least they contributed that initial 1 damage to the turret.. two soldiers of four dead and we're just getting started.

The good news, several rounds later my near-dead-from-the-start skirmisher and my standing rookie put down the enemies and hack the objective on the last turn of the timer. All things considered, a win is a win I suppose. "That's XCOM, baby" (?) Admittedly, this isn't the first time playing XCOM (and won't be the last time -- I'm certain) where the grapple hook has gotten me into trouble.

edit: as aside, feel free to toss out any of your memorable 'oops' moments. I know someone here has to have some juicy overwatch + unintended chain explosion recollections

Yup, I started up another Xcom 2 play through :p

I don't know what happened. XCOM Enemy Unknown is among my beloved games of the last decade.

I've tried to get into XCOM 2 / WotC a couple times now and... it's falling flat for me. Trying to pinpoint what it is about it. Perhaps it's because they've layered on so much more stuff without addressing some of the fundamental issues I had with the first one. And they've almost double-downed on those aspects.

Missions feel more like a puzzle game instead of squad tactics. Again, not sure if its the increased amount of scripting combined with the design of the objectives and their reliance on the punishing enemy squad alert system.

I did have fun seeing my real-life friends naturally bond after a couple of missions together, then making a super goofy & juvenile poster of them to commemorate the event!

^ may not speak to your other, unspecified, issues, but seeing as you mention the alert aspect and doubling down on too much other stuff (from the angle that I've probably outed myself as a Workshop mod nut at this point)

adjustable things via simple mods (ie, without going too mod crazy) :

more pods
more pods scaling against force level or continental heat
pod activation rules
yellow alert status rules
fully podless all enemies alerted from start
AI aggression
engagement up/down throttling
get rid of the concealment entirely (fairly certain I saw some mods that tackle that ; have never tried myself)
buff concealment related rules

too much other stuff (multi section):
change the lost, attributes -- etc etc
lost headshots
spawning frequency
response to noise
entirely get rid of the lost
-
weapon attachment -- changes to reduce the cheese or, heck, you can dbl down on more
timer tweaking
-
ruler changes -- stats etc
ruler regen rules
ruler reactions -- reflex only, no extra turn on defensive actions, 2 vs 3 actions
rulers using regular unit game rules entirely
-
chosen tweaks akin to ruler changes (both harder or easier)
aside note for other folks: I can not recommend buffing up the chosen enough; you can make them truly menacing

Personally, I like to buff the game to the point that most missions will probably require evac (with evac changes) and more concealment is viable but that can be a tricky balance. This is not to say that you are likely to ghost missions. More likely that you will end up with a 6 man team vs three pods before most engagements wrap vs the squad juggling puzzle game of activation.

On the other hand, I've done enough WoTC now that I'd be totally down for a mod run where concealment was gutted and it's right down to the business of landing into a hotzone. Anyways, I can entirely see your POV of the game getting borderline puzzle-like at stock settings.

Wow, Recreational: thanks for the suggestions and putting so much thought into your message. Unfortunately... I've been on the PS4 version of XCOM2 this whole time.

I know, I know. I don't get all those beautiful mods. I don't get to try out Long War. I played through EU entirely on the Xbox 360 back in the day and loved the elegance of the controller scheme. And these days I'm trying to do more gaming in the living room.

Yeah, that whole concealment stuff is... well, I don't think I have too much new to add to that discussion except to say I don't like it, hah.

Maclintok wrote:

Wow, Recreational: thanks for the suggestions and putting so much thought into your message. Unfortunately... I've been on the PS4 version of XCOM2 this whole time.

I know, I know. I don't get all those beautiful mods. I don't get to try out Long War. I played through EU entirely on the Xbox 360 back in the day and loved the elegance of the controller scheme. And these days I'm trying to do more gaming in the living room.

Yeah, that whole concealment stuff is... well, I don't think I have too much new to add to that discussion except to say I don't like it, hah.

Speaking quite plainly, the concealment for me only cuts down on the initial encounter phase and not much else. In vanilla XCOM, you tend to inch your way forward regardless. In XCOM2, I'm a lot more reckless about moving my troops forward until the first pod shows up. And then I just let all hell break loose. And that's it.

The only other concealment thing I use is the Reaper for spotting pods, which is also for speeding up the game, not for optimizing encounters. You could have done the same thing with XCOM using Scanners and such. This was definitely the role of concealment-enabled mutants in Enemy Within.

Concealment is also really useful for rescue missions -- keep your reaper concealed, break the person out, re-conceal and head for the exit.

If you still want to try and get into XCOM2 then I would suggest first playing the vanilla version without any of the DLC or War of the Chosen active. I’d agree all that is probably overwhelming and WotC especially is An expansion that expects you to have a good understanding of the base game to be able to spot the changes it makes and adjust how you play the game accordingly.

There are also a couple of quality of life mods I’d recommend. They don’t impact the game play but do help with clarity of information (like where you can stand to spot and hack things, and where moving somewhere will break concealment). I’ll go back through this thread and see if I can find where I’ve posted those recommendations before.

Edit. Didn’t find it in this thread but did find it on reddit: Try these.

Thanks for all the qol mods listed above.
And I've added The Hive and Hive Extras for this run.

A flawless Gatecrasher seems a very auspicious start

Every time I see a new post in this thread I get a little frisson of excitement and hope for a XCOM 3 announced!!! post.

Gonna have to keep waiting I see.

It'll happen.

Also, just finished an ironman, legendary campaign by July 15th and using the legacy pack. So a nice little boost of 4 achievements done and dusted. Never again though. Immediately started a new campaign on Normal. It was cool to get the achievements, but it wasn't a fun way to play. I much prefer the more chilled approach and just enjoying the game rather than that level of pain!

But, bring on Xcom 3!!!!

Sorbicol wrote:

Every time I see a new post in this thread I get a little frisson of excitement and hope for a XCOM 3 announced!!! post.

Gonna have to keep waiting I see.

XCOM 3 would deserve it's own thread, sir!

BlackSabre wrote:

It'll happen.

Also, just finished an ironman, legendary campaign by July 15th and using the legacy pack.

How hard is that? It seems like that is not enough time to do anything to me. Did you complete key squad upgrades? Did you need to get lucky with some placements of things like the codex coordinates in a zone you could reach without having to extend your network there?

It's hard. Not fun hard. I only had 5 squad members (6 including avatar in final mission). Got very lucky with the facilities and got a couple of on the map upgrades which gave me extra resistance contacts as well as the covert actions gave me another. I stuffed up a little in the beginning not having enough power to build the Proving ground for a few days. But I got a breakthrough which gave me instant excavation of the next spot which was one of those 3 engineer one exposed power coil so that saved me huuuuuuge amount of time. Shadow chamber on the exposed power coil means it was free power and just pushed from there.

Final critical path missions were really straight forward and only lost one to a burrowed chryssalid as I'd ran out of med charges to remove the poison. Feel like the covert actions and the bonuses on the map really made it for me. If I didn't get lucky with those then I'd say I wouldn't have made it in time. Difficulty in mission is also pretty extreme and you really need to pick and choose which mission you do. I had the extended timers option on which again, I probably would have failed if that wasn't on.

Would I recommend it? No. I didn't enjoy it. My level of enjoyment has sky rocketed since going back to normal. That being said, I still kinda treat it like Ironman and don't save since I'm kinda used to Ironman now. Though I also think I could put it back to commander difficulty and still enjoy it too. Does kinda feel a wee bit too easy now.

Sorbicol wrote:

Every time I see a new post in this thread I get a little frisson of excitement and hope for a XCOM 3 announced!!! post.

Gonna have to keep waiting I see.

Ugh you got me with that one. I had that little spark of hope when my eyes went to those bolded words. Then I read the post and my heart broke.

I'd be willing to bet it's coming out this year.

Jonman wrote:
Sorbicol wrote:

Every time I see a new post in this thread I get a little frisson of excitement and hope for a XCOM 3 announced!!! post.

Gonna have to keep waiting I see.

XCOM 3 would deserve it's own thread, sir!

Really tempted to start an XCOM3 thread, "for when XCOM3 is announced" then sustain myself through the power of collective hate directed my way.

kazooka wrote:

Really tempted to start an XCOM3 thread, "for when XCOM3 is announced" then sustain myself through the power of collective hate directed my way.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/6q6zl7q.png)

I spoke too soon.
3rd mission out and the hive straight out murderised my squad of rookies.

Edit:
And then again. 5th mission was retaliation (as it usually is) and there are just too many units to deal with, including rippers that get to reveal, move and attack on the same turn. TPK again and I think I need to drop down the difficulty to see this mod. Early on you just have to make too many ~70% shots and eventually you will miss a couple in a row and you are toast.

Bruce, no shame in taking the difficulty down a notch while you learn the new ropes.

And rippers rocked my world to the tune of TPK plenty of times when I was relearning the dance. As did, at first, sectoid abductors, and muton changes, or better advent AI, then regearing advent to be more like XCOM, or all enemies activated from the start/yellow alert/scamper changes/etc then making the chosen more like rulers -- as will many of the better mods out there that shake things up on the tactical layer.

A combination of stick-with-it, and sometimes small counterbalance mods, can see you through. For example, when I buffed up the lost with pseudo bladestorm and had them start raising more losts, zombie-style on kills, I was up against a wall. Now, I'll often pack a few molotovs (mod) instead of grenades. Sometimes you need just a bit to claw back the win.

At the end of the day, have fun with it brother! If you aren't feeling it, then it simply might not be your cup of tea. As second disclosure, with the mods I have running that are core to my XCOM experience now, I typically keep something in the mix for a wide roster or that reduces the cost of hiring rooks. Currently covert infiltration (still kicking the tires, not on workshop yet last I checked) is my go-to.

ps. to the last paragraph: if you (universal you/anyone) haven't had to nail bite about hiring rooks to stay in the fight then, then IMHO you (again: universal you/anyone) has lost the core of that XCOM feeling ;-P

Musings about the right level of masochism to inject into XCOM aside: if you mod, have fun with it amigos. Challenges should be enjoyable challenges at the end of the day.

4 rippers early can be highly destructive. Poor accuracy from rookies, plus the 50% chance to not kill them with a single shot means they can ruin your day in single pod. A full squad overwatch is probably not enough to tilt the fight.

^ oh yeah, even of the mods I have running they're one of the trickier things to deal with if you are fiielding rooks still. I recently ran into a ~terror chryssalid mission with buffed up Warlock chosen on my third (counting gatecrasher as one of the three) mission. Between rippers, the Warlock having juiced up mind wrecking abilities and PSIops like powers plus summoning in ~psi phantom stun baton advent it was rough. Mission success, but lost half of the rooks.

@Bruce -- thinking on your comments from earlier, instead of changing the difficulty you might consider running "WotC: robojumper's Squad Select". As attested by Sorbicol on a prior/recent page it's "damn near essential". Not only does it jazz up squad select UI, but it has an ini setting for squad size, and also MCM (mod configuration menu, for in game settings) support.

With the Hive/Hive MORE (plus any other chryssalid changes you might be running) a squad size of 5, as the baseline, might be in order. Anyways, just a thought on balance without having to go mod-crazy.

Thanks mate.

I dropped back to Veteran and I'm yet to be over-run by Chrysallids.

^ ROCK !

Bruce wrote:

Thanks mate.

I dropped back to Veteran and I'm yet to be over-run by Chrysallids.

I love how XCOM vets always leave room for the possibility of a catastrophic mission.

I spy with my little XCOM-y eye...
... new stuff by Kexx on the workshop!

Back into this.

Doing a Commander/Ironman run. I think my problem is that I get too impatient and make dumb moves and I don't really know how to not do that. I just love playing the game and so I will play for a lot longer than I should and the longer I play the more impatient I get and then things spiral out of control and I'm restarting.

Weird thing happened yesterday, I didn't have any scanning options pop up on the map. I had picked up a supply drop, and nothing else popped up. Ended up doing a region contact cause there was nothing else to do.

Downloaded Xcom Enemy Unknown on the mobile and it's amazing how different it is from 2. That and the fact that it's on the mobile

I tried the mobile version on my tablet a couple years back and it was so slow, I had to give up. The PC version has really spoiled me.