XCOM 2

[Dog Pants]

Is released on Friday. I'm preparing to lose a large chunk of my life to it for the next few months. I've started this thread to avoid hijacking this thread from XCOM. Alas, I have no claim to fame this time.

[Mr. Johnson]

I want this! But I've never finished the first xcom despite trying many times so maybe I'll give it a miss for now. I did like that the game wasn't trying to mollycoddle me though.

[buzzmong]

Interestingly, the Long War guys are going to have a small collection of 0 day mods out for it, seemingly done in collaboration with Firaxis (or at least, they've played them), one of them is adding sub machine guns to the game.
I know Firaxis talked about modding a lot in the preview vids, but it's pretty impressive level of stuff that can be changed if entire new weapon families can be added from the get-go and bodes well for the modding scene.

[Dog Pants]

I hope it's easy enough for me to mod out the silly ranks. That always annoyed me in the original. Or, y'know, just not have silly ranks in the first place.

[Dog Pants]

Oh look! It's... wait, what?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJWWsVXZutY[/youtube]

[buzzmong]

Edit: Double Preload is 25GB, for what looks to be a 33GB install

[Dog Pants]

After creating many 5punkers to die in my game, I have some observations:

The faces look quite similar.
All the American accents are indistinguishable, either generic white guy or generic black guy. Seems like a wasted opportunity. In fact there are about 12 different voices per language, and I can only tell the difference between the four British ones.
Why all the long hair for dudes? If you want short hair you get about five choices.

[friznit]

Commander is give the reins cos he's a "tactical genius"....who lost XCOM 1 after only two weeks. Right.

[Dog Pants]

Given the decisions from the tutorial, it's a low bar that's been set.

[Dog Pants]

I've put my 5punkers character group in the 5punky dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p7xpurg45fbiv ... s.bin?dl=0

Import it by copying it to C:\Users\[username]\Documents\My Games\XCOM2\XComGame\CharacterPool\Importable

[Dog Pants]

I feel like we should be sharing tactics. The only decent one I've used so far, which also worked in XCOM but wasn't really necessary, is destroying cover with grenades. Rushing the objective under stealth seems like a good idea but when I tried it left me surrounded. I've a mate who's playing on Veteran so I've tried to pick his brains.

[buzzmong]

So, I'm enjoying this, but I can forsee some changes in the next patches, which are echoed by a lot of reviews:

1) Timed missions.
They need an extra couple of turns. Some are just damn near impossible.

2) Vipers/Snakemen are OP as hell currently against my current troops. They can move seemingly quite far but their Scorpion-esque "Get over here" attack has a stupidly long range, and unless the Viper is solo, then it pretty much means certain death for the hapless soldier involved.

[shot2bits]

I've not had any problems with the timed missions feeling too short so far, Ive failed to complete the objective on one of them once and that was by 1 turn and it was my own fault for deciding to trigger a story event right at the start of the mission which took up 2 or 3 turns before id even made a vague plan on how to get to the actual objective, every other time i have had a couple of turns to spare and i haven't really found myself stressing over the timer unless it gets to the last 3 turns and central wont shut up about it.

I'm undecided on if the Snakemen need balancing or i need to figure out a better way to fight them, the tongue is very long and if they catch a soldier off at a distance with that tongue it might take you a couple of turns to get into position to even attempt to hit it and usually your going to find them with at least 1 other enemy to make that even more challenging to do quickly. I guess the flip side to that being once they have a soldier bound the Snakemen cant do anything but damage that one soldier and i think they lose their natural dodge bonus,so if you've not spread them too thin it and with a bit of luck on movement around the terrain it shouldn't be too difficult to flank them and take them out with some easy shots.

Also gremlins with a heal can heal dudes bound by Snakemen which can buy a turn or two for maneuvering.

[Joose]

A handy thing I found with snaekmen (entirely by accident) is that the tongue grab triggers the sniper (I think its the sniper, could have been the ranger. It was late last night when I found this) reaction shot ability, but does so *after* the sniper has been moved out position. This resulted in a snaekman getting shot in the head from my now adjacent dood, which was nice.

Not exactly a tactical thing, but something that isnt made clear at all and is drastically different to how XCOM 1 worked: When you research and build a new tier weapon/armour, all your guys get it. You dont have to build them one each when it is a straight upgrade. Im sure most of you know that already, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise and may have caused me to pooch my current ironman playthrough.

EDIT: Oh, and timed missions; They are fucking tight, and I have been caught short a couple times now. Both times I felt like it wasn't impossible though, I just needed to be a *little* less cautious at the start of the mission.

[buzzmong]

Also, they've basically kept a form of the Satellite mechcanic from the first game with the radio towers. I'm having to restart a campaign as it wasn't made apparent just how important it was (again) to get the first few down, but they're not quite as painful this time as you get something just for making contact with a new region regardless.

[Dog Pants]

I've found the timers on missions to be damn hard, but possibly because on my first playthrough I persevered long past the stage I should have restarted. A nice compromise would be to start the timer when you're detected, which would also make more sense within the setting. There's a mod for it called True Concealment. As it stands I don't really like it, but I do think it fits the theme of guerilla hit-and-runs, and also helps make the game different from its predecessor.

Ref snakewomen (I swear they have lumpy chest armour), the tongue seems to be very inaccurate. Most of the time my troops are saved by cover.

[Dog Pants]

Just read a bit of a twitter conversation between Jake Solomon (of XCOM 2) and Dan Marshall (of Ben There, Dan That) regarding difficulty of timed missions. To paraphrase, it's expected that you'll occasionally fail, and if you hope to get 100% mission success you'll get the rage. Which is good to know, because it means you don't have to worry about bugging out or missing objectives occasionally.

[FatherJack]

If you want 5punkers on XCOM 1, here's a list https://www.dropbox.com/s/kufu5xj32vz5d ... t.ini?dl=0 place it in:
\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\XComGame\Config for Enema Unknown and
\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\XCom-Enemy-Unknown\XEW\XComGame\Config for Enema Within

I didn't do anything as fancy as pants as I don't think you can, just did a list of names. The genders are random as well, to add to the fun.

Oops

[Dog Pants]

Looks about right.

[Mr. Johnson]

Can't argue with that.