Xcom 2

[Mightysword]

Would be interested to know how you have your Grenadiers configured & how they differ to mine.

My usual configuration is usually 1 ranger, 1 tech, 2 grenadiers and 2 sharpshooters. Depend on the map sometime one tech or one sharpshooter is replaced by another grenadier.

Except for Salvo (because hail of bullet is crap), my Grenadiers are exclusively Gunner. And with the EXO/WAR suit I only carry one grenade and use the other slot for special AMMO, usually AP or Bluescreen.

My 2 Sharpshooter are the same, they have Death From Above, Lighting Hand, Faceoff and Serial.

[GCU Grey Area]

Except for Salvo (because hail of bullet is crap), my Grenadiers are exclusively Gunner.

Wouldn't say Hail of Bullets is crap - in my last game one of my Specialists picked it up from AWC & it was a life saver on quite a few occasions. However, do think that putting it up against against Salvo makes it very hard to take HOB instead. Salvo is just so damn good.

My 2 Sharpshooter are the same, they have Death From Above, Lighting Hand, Faceoff and Serial.

Not so different from mine then, just Faceoff instead of Kill Zone. Can see it working if you keep your Sharpshooters close to the front, mine tend to hang back & do most of their work at squadsight ranges so Kill Zone works better for them. I also give them Lightning Hands (the only Gunslinger ability they normally take). Don't get to use it all that often, just really don't like Deadeye. -25% to hit is just too much. I'd have to fit a scope to compensate & I prefer my sniper rifles fitted with extended magazines & auto-loaders (pretty much essential IMO to get the best out of Kill Zone & Serial).

[Mightysword]

Shredder has great synergy with chain-shot, since it strip armor on both attack, it means a grenadier can strip the armor of just about every enemies. I usually give them Bluescreen and they can one shot most mech, and strip the armor + beat half to death a sectopod. Rupture achieves a similar effect, I think I hit a Ruptured Sectopod with my Sniper for like 31 damage before.

Faceoff is a great AOEr, it hits for more than the Grandier's grenade do, has no target limit and the enemies don't have to be clump together. Lighting Hand is a GREAT abilities as a buffer. For example:

- grenadier removed cover and did some damage+ strip some armor:
- First sniper lighting hand to bring HP down further - kill with sniper - trigger death from above - Faceoff - debuff enemies down even further.
-Second Sniper lighting hand to bring the highest HP down - pop Serial, kill as much as you can - pop Faceoff on the last attack.
- Mob up the rest with remaining squad member (rarely get to this point).

It's a pretty safe tactic, and the great thing is its effectiveness isn't tied to the # of enemies or how spread out they are. Toward late game I prefer to pop more than one pod when I can, since Serial + faceoff scale up with the amount of enemies you have to face. Minus the ability to remove some armor, faceoff is a better AOE then grenade IMO (just lack the fanfair).

I remember when the game came out so many people on the steam forum was cussing left and right about how cheesy Codex is and I didn't understand why. With 2 sniper Faceoff I can't just have enough Codex to shoot at, later I realize it seems most people picked Killzone over faceoff.

[GCU Grey Area]

Shredder has great synergy with chain-shot, since it strip armor on both attack, it means a grenadier can strip the armor of just about every enemies.

Problem for me with Chain Shot is it's up against another ability I really like so rarely take it (useful ability though if AWC gives it to a different class). +1 grenade radius for Volatile Mix may not sound like much, but it can make all the difference whether a single grenade can hit an entire pod, or if I'm going to have to choose which enemies are on the receiving end. +2 grenade damage is also quite nice.

Minus the ability to remove some armor, faceoff is a better AOE then grenade IMO (just lack the fanfair).

When I was trying Faceoff the biggest issue I had (in comparison to grenades) was it's not guaranteed damage & doesn't destroy cover. Also Volatile Mix does shift the balance a bit with respect to damage dealt by grenades vs Faceoff pistol shots (c.f. the difference between a Blademaster's sword attacks vs Phantom's).

I remember when the game came out so many people on the steam forum was cussing left and right about how cheesy Codex is and I didn't understand why. With 2 sniper Faceoff I can't just have enough Codex to shoot at, later I realize it seems most people picked Killzone over faceoff.

People are having difficulties with the Codex? Thought they were pretty weak enemies. Not many hp & always seem to prefer to use Psionic Rift as their first action rather than shooting. Can get a bit annoying if they clone & teleport to heavy cover. However eliminating heavy cover is precisely why I carry so many grenades, so it's not exactly a difficult problem to solve.

Having a total of 12 assorted munitions on my grenadiers (current mix is 3 rockets, 3 plasma, 2 incendiary, 2 acid, 2 EMP) means I can be fairly liberal in their use & afford to drop multiple grenades on every pod - think of WW1 rolling barrage tactics if you want to envision how most of my missions go. It's not a particularly subtle approach but it is effective.

[Olterin]

Hm, I suspect my limited use of grenades and other explosives is due to my prior experience with the Long War mod - where you also had a fairly liberal amount of explosives, but the sheer number of enemies you would face and the damage falloff on all explosives meant you couldn't rely on them quite as heavily. I have to wonder how you guys would change your tactics if there were more enemies on missions (say, by the time you have a 6-man group you'd be meeting 5-man pods, and 5-ish pods per mission), along with that explosive falloff thing (pretend it's dmg/r^2, with non-whole values representing percentage probabilities to deal x or y damage) - and I wonder how I would change mine, if at all.

[GCU Grey Area]

Hm, I suspect my limited use of grenades and other explosives is due to my prior experience with the Long War mod - where you also had a fairly liberal amount of explosives, but the sheer number of enemies you would face and the damage falloff on all explosives meant you couldn't rely on them quite as heavily. I have to wonder how you guys would change your tactics if there were more enemies on missions (say, by the time you have a 6-man group you'd be meeting 5-man pods, and 5-ish pods per mission), along with that explosive falloff thing (pretend it's dmg/r^2, with non-whole values representing percentage probabilities to deal x or y damage) - and I wonder how I would change mine, if at all.

Would probably still use a fair amount of grenades for cover destruction & to clear sight lines for the rest of the squad, even if the damage to enemies was reduced. A lot of my liberal use of grenades in XCom 2 is due to Long War. Just got used to my troops being able to carry more than in vanilla.

One thing Long War taught me is that the damage caused by explosives is often less important than making sure everyone else in the squad has the best possible chance of hitting their targets - particularly on LW Exalt missions due to the numbers involved. Easy to get overwhelmed if you're not efficiently dispatching enemies as they arrive. Found they became significantly easier when I started taking enough ordnance along to demolish wide areas of the map, so when the chumps ran for the objective they had nothing to hide behind when they got there.

[Mightysword]

Started an Ironman Legend last week and also wanted to try something new. I tried to slingslot a few critical research early. It's the same tactic that I found worked great in game like Galactic Civilization, i.e give up eveything to build a super ship early, then send it out and cripple all your opponent.

So, 24 turn for modular weapon? No problem. 30 turns for Gauss? Floor it. In previous game numbers like those turned me off, so I usually went for a cheaper research that takes like 5-7 turns to finish. Than I found that usually after 2-3 lesser research doesn't give me as big of a bang for the bug than slingslot a weapon tech. So no scanner, no mimic, no medkit, no whats so ever early toy you can get from earlier research. In return? Even my rockies were rocking mag weapon when the advent soldiers was still only has 4HP, I have a full tier 2 complement of weapon before the 2nd retaliation attack. Even when I rotate them in my Rockies have no problem of lolfacestorm the AI into the ground.

It's so one-sided it feels like watching a movie where Alexander army is trying to charge down a line of Napoleon troop. I just finished the 2nd tier armor research now and probably gonna sling slot the plasma tier, at this point the advent only have the first armor unit show up. Who need gimmick devices/equipments when you can just have a very big stick.

[GCU Grey Area]

Can see value in that approach - definite advantage having guns which do minimum 5 damage when many enemies still have only 4hp.

However, on the other hand, do like an early Psi rush. The sooner I can field a Psi Op with Domination the happier I am. Particularly want at least one available before Chryssalids start appearing - hate those bastards - if they're going to run across the entire map, melee attack & poison I want them doing it to one of their guys, not one of mine. Also a big fan of all those Psi abilities which completely ignore cover, armour & line of sight. Not sure I'd want to delay all of that just for better guns.

[silenced]

Early Weapon/Armor rush is definitely worth it, together with a Psi rush. Though, the Mimic Beacon is worth the short "off track" time. It almost feels like cheating.

Something I loved to see once in a mission was an enraged berserker, it simply killed the Muton next to him, that was fun.

[GCU Grey Area]

Though, the Mimic Beacon is worth the short "off track" time. It almost feels like cheating.

Don't tend to use Mimic Beacon in the early game, at least not until I've researched armour with 2 inventory slots. My usual research detour for the early game is Battle Scanners. It's only a couple of extra autopsies along the Biotech path to Psionics & I find them absolutely invaluable for checking whether advancing to get a flank is likely to trigger another pod, if rooftops are clear before sending my sniper up there & for revealing Faceless. They're also one of the items which my Phantom Rangers can use without breaking concealment.

[Mightysword]

The way my build order works I can't have a psi facility built early. First Building is always the Guerrilla school, followed by a Sat facility, third have to be a power station. So a Psi School at most will have to be the 4th building, given that Engineer is a far a few in between, it takes a long time to get there. Plus, it would only give 1 soldier, when the gun/armor upgrade affect the entire squad, more importantly it makes the rockies potent.

To make my approach work I have to spend generously on the blackmarket, buying research and material to build those guns so it doesn't leave a lot to buy additional engineers.

[GCU Grey Area]

To make my approach work I have to spend generously on the blackmarket, buying research and material to build those guns so it doesn't leave a lot to buy additional engineers.

Other way round for me - because my approach depends heavily on facilities, rather than equipment, a lot of my early resources are spent on buying every engineer I can get hold of to speed up construction & excavation, as well as staffing the facilities. Doesn't leave a lot for making new guns. Psi Lab tends to be 4th facility for me. Like to get GTS & AWC up & running first, then power is essential, followed by Psi Lab. Have contemplated swapping it with AWC but the effect that would have on wound timers has always put me off.

[Sir Crashalot]

Patch time and time to wave goodbye to the friendly neighbourhood Mimic Beacon.

[Mopy]

Is this stable enough to buy yet? I'm tempted. It looks like a fun challenge.

[Sir Crashalot]

It is still very buggy.

The bugs are fairly rare but when they hit they can kill your motivation to carry on.
So, if you want a guarantee then I'd suggest waiting another 3-6 months.

That said, it is perfectly possible to play from beginning to end without encountering one of the nastier bugs. Many people have.

[Mopy]

Thanks Cap'n Crash I'll wait for a while.

[muppetts]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/0 ... ore-424357

Free Long War mod here!

[Mightysword]

Only beat the first mission so far and doing the prep for before the 2nd mission and ... holy crap ... I may be overreacting but there are SO MUCH more to the game. The two features that stand out the most so far are:

- Now you can deploy multiple "strike group" on multiple mission at once. Even if this were just a basic function I think it already a wet dream for most XCOM fan since a long time. Except, it seems to be more than just a basic function. You actually put soldiers into named squad, I don't know if there will be some deeper function to it but just on the cosmetic it already expand the RP possibilities greatly. My two team using default names right now are team "Foxtrot" and team "Kiryu-Kai". With the character pool I have eventually I will name them team Metal Gear and team Full Metal. Each team can have up to 10 members (that can be deployed all at once). So basically after the first mission I'm managing 20 soldiers

- Each mission now have a period of "prep-work" to do to "reduce" the mission difficulty. Of course nothing prevent you from kicking down the front door with gun blazing ... but so far from the people talking on the forum it's not a smart idea.

[pjknibbs]

I don't actually like X-Com 2. There. I said it. The main problem is, it introduces the thing I hate above all else in video games--the arbitrary time limit. When I got to a mission where I'd literally got all but one of my soldiers to the end zone when I ran out of turns I thought "F this for a game of soldiers" and uninstalled it. If the time limit had just been "another 500 enemy troops land on the map at this point" then I'd have been OK with it, because I could probably have still got out, but when it's "No, you fail immediately, GG" is when it goes too far.

[Mightysword]

I'm not a fan of it either, I think that's why some patch back the dev unlock it in the .ini file and you can change it to some larger value or remove it altogether.

Edit: I don't think it's entirely albitrary, rather it's overdone. Most of the scenario with a timer make sense:

- You "hot drop" into the middle of an urban area, it makes sense you have a limited window for Evac.
- You're trying to stop a transmission, so you need to rush it before the transmission is completed.

I bet initially those are the missions that supposed to have a timer, but someone liked the idea so it's like "hey this is fun, let's slap it on every mission type!". I think the worst offender is the one where you have to retreive some gears or data from a vault, they don't know that you're coming (evidently you start those mission in concealment) so why are they rigging their own stuff to explode? For fun?