They don’t take power if you build them on the conduits
Really?!.. Son of a bitch…
Yeah, but if you build power on it, they produce extra power. I’ve been doing that and tearing down the old ones I had built and replacing them with more useful stuff
yes but they produce 7 extra power. A shadow chamber cost 9 power fully upgraded so building a shadow chamber on a power conduit nets you +9 power instead of +7 so you are up by 2 over building a power plan on it. A fully upgraded Psi Lab costs 10 power.
Polygon updated the War of the Chosen review with a couple of paragraphs about the console versions.
XCOM 2: War of the Chosen landed on consoles this month, with a version available for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. After spending time with both, it’s clear that they are inferior to the product that was released for PC.
Bear in mind that the gameplay is identical, and that gameplay is superb. But the ports perform poorly on Microsoft and Sony devices alike.
How poorly? Dropped frames are common in these console ports. War of the Chosen is reduced to a slideshow at times, both during gameplay and cutscenes. The screen tearing I witnessed was unexpected and, frankly, difficult to watch. The load times between missions was also a major let down, as it regularly exceeded a full minute.
While War of the Chosen is an excellent game, we simply can’t recommend it on consoles at this time. Its failures make an already long game longer, and detract from Firaxis’ exceptional work.
Has anyone found any good class mods for WOTC? I dislike going back to the vanilla classes after using the Long War Perk Pack all through the base game.
Let’s talk about this game, as I have a series of complaints…
This game has one of the best ‘terrains’ in a tactical game. They are pretty varied, from cities to towns to wilderness to sewers or bases, and more. They are 3D, with good graphics, randomized (without looking like they are!) and everything? is destructible. So it’s like the holy grail for this type of game, it’s the first game I can remember of it has all these features.
But in the end it doesn’t matter. You can have a buildings of two stories in your path, a canal in the middle of a city, or a overhead bridge, a train, or whatever, that if a soldier can move 12 tiles in his turn, he will move 12 tiles, unimpeded by almost all geographic features, excepting walls. They will jump from improbable heights, climb 3 meters as if was nothing, jump up and down from cover sometimes in a hilarious way, until their destination point.
Gameplay wise, I consider it a waste. What path you take, your movement, doesn’t matter a lot, you more or less always move the same quantity, and what it matters in this game is what are the properties of the destination tile (what enemies you can flank there & distance to them, does it have good cover?, etc). Hell, all that elevation changes that the scenarios have and using a higher point barely gives you a small aim bonus, a waste as I said.
Not only the landscape doesn’t affect movement enough, I think it also doesn’t affect reaction shots, and the LoS/LoF are as wonky as ever so it also doesn’t affect properly LoS (for example, sometimes you make a reaction shot and the shot who goes in a straight line makes a hole in a wall in the path to the enemy, showing you truly didn’t have a proper LoS on him).
I feel as there were rich tactical possibilities that are not being used here, as the game main gameplay focus is on a)where is the cover and b)your abilities.
The game is too long.
They took Xcom2 and they added the the three Chosen. Each one supposes an extra goal to defeat apart from the main one, and searching first how to infiltrate their base, the chosen also can appear on normal missions causing complications (result: more wounded/dead soldiers than normal), add finally add things like new things to research, the new tiredness system, the bonds that need training, etc. And while all that happens extending the length of the game by extra weeks of ingame time, the game will also spawn more normal missions (as they appear every X days) in these extra weeks. All together increases the length of the game, too much imo, you need ~55 battles to complete the game fully when it’s all said and done.
And then we have the difficulty. Xcom2 was a hard game, but with the new additions I think they went a bit too far. Once the tutorial phase is over things really get complicated. I don’t know how a new player in the genre could play it, even in the easiest difficulty. 25 years gaming, lots of tactical games on my back, and I had big problems (only solved through savescumming) in some parts, playing in ‘regular’ difficulty! Another problem is the unevenesss of that difficulty, as once you unlock the extra slots, get your group of Majors with a decent armors and weapons, the difficulty lowers even when new tougher enemies apepar.
The Chosen are Annoying.
OMG shut up already. They talk in the tactical battles (and you can’t skip the dialogue), they spout their repetitive drivel in the strategic map, the game really makes you focus on them (avatar project what?), despite being so uninteresting.
Let’s talk about luck.
RNG has been a part of the series since the first game, the ‘failing 90% to hit chance in a enemy in front of you, making you lose your soldier’ thing has turned into a meme. People even defend it, as it wouldn’t be Xcom without that! ;)
But really, maybe it’st time to rein in it. Maybe it bothered more than before with the extra difficulty, but I had times where a pair of ‘bad rolls’ cause a cascading effect (enemy stuns me, chosen mind controls another soldier) making lose the battle utterly. Then I reload, and without making any important change to my tactics, I pass the mission without problems. Luck can cause too much variance in the player’s performance, in other words.
And unlike the original game which also was RNG-happy, here it’s more bothersome losing two soldiers in a battle, because the lower soldier amount, the higher importance of abilities (and therefore the rank soldier), and the armor/weapons they carry and you can lose that needed special build time and materials to be built.
I’m having a really difficult time figuring out the right difficulty for this.
Playing Commander mode, I’ve been stomping each fight, with no casualties really. Nothing really even that close, except for one fluke alien crit shot.
But then I did the Chosen HQ mission, and had a full squad wipe, without even getting close to completing the objective.
This makes things very difficult, because if I take a step down all of the basic meat and potato missions are going to be even easier. But I’m not sure how I can win Commander if I get utterly mauled on the special missions.
Why don’t you just put the difficulty down for these missions only?
Honestly, I think it, like a lot of things in this game, it just depends on you self-adjusting the difficulty by deciding when to do them. I was able to do my first Chosen mission before I had armor or even decent weapons. If I had done it at that time I’m sure it would have been basically impossible. I waited until I had reasonable gear for the first and it was tough but ok. I did the second with nice gear and a leveled up squad and it was easy.
I absolutely can’t stand how the second Chosen mission was basically an identical map, if not exactly identical to the first. For being the big new thing it just feels so lazy.
Eh, I hate doing that kind of thing. It feels like less of a game if I’m just adjusting each part to win.
I don’t mind losing a mission. The problem is just getting blown out so badly on a difficulty level where the rest of the game to this point has been a cake-walk. A close loss would have been fine. But I really had no chance.
I’m actually doing the Chosen mission fairly late. I have beam weapons (though I did not have enough to outfit them for each of the non-rifle classes) and had just gotten warden armor for everyone.
I learned the lesson about not doing things too early myself already as well. The game is actually a little frustrating that way, as it basically screams at you to do things before you’re really ready (in game terms). It’s constantly harping at you to do that first blacksite mission, for example. Also, the skulljacking thing, which unleashes something really nasty if you’re not ready for it. :)
What exactly is causing the issue for you? If you have beam weapons and a Reaper with Remote Start you should be able to get to the boss room of a Chosen stronghold nearly untouched. The Chosen fight itself could be a problem depending on its type, attributes and luck of reinforcements but once you know the flow of that portion you can also abuse certain things.
Slyfrog- what exactly was killing you on the Chosen mission? The Chosen fight itself, or the battles leading up to it, or both?
I lost my ranger to a lucky crit death before the final fight. Then, during the final fight, I could not destroy the sarcophagus while also holding off the four spawns plus the Chosen that kept regenerating.
I don’t know that this is necessarily a great strategy, but I never do black-sites or try and tackle Chosen until I have at least one of the following: plasma or power armor.
As a result I spend a large chunk of my campaign w/ Bradford telling me repeatedly all hell is going to break loose if I don’t go do something about {fill in the blank}.
I ignore him and let the pretty little red avatar counter get completely full and go into the counter mode for how many days you have left until you lose, at which point I do something about it.
P.S. This approach has been made easier in WOTC because there are covert missions that reduce the counter. One of which in fact takes it down one notch every month. ;)
Yeah, I let The Chosen missions set for a while before I worry about them. I didn’t touch them until they adequately annoyed me by invading my other missions enough, and they raise their knowledge fairly high.
I rather enjoyed the addition of the Chosen, put some spice into missions never knowing if things that were working pretty well might just go sideways at any moment if they showed up (or the Lost for that matter). I think in my current campaign I might just take one or two of them down earlier, I can’t recall if all three do this, but I know at least one or two of them have the ability to ding your troops morale (and I believe it’s permanent).
Once I discovered that was happening I went and killed them all off as I couldn’t routinely lose morale forever on my guys and not have that come back to bite me on later missions or the final one.
Besides, killing the Chosen and the Rulers gives your guys some really cool toys to play with, some of which can turn a battle from impossible to entirely doable (I mean seriously, some of those weapons and armor when coupled to a soldier you’ve maxed out on abilities make them pretty damn close to super human and capable of basically solo’ing a mission by themselves).
The problem I have seen with the Chosen, is how affect the progress and pace of the entire game. If you focus first on the Chosen (and the game really makes you focus on them with how much prominence are given), by the time you finish with all of them, you end up with all with a maxed out squad, all misc upgrades done and almost all weapon and armor research done, so when you resume the main missions, you are left to do them without any interesting progress.
The fortress missions end as soon as you kill the sarcophagus and the chosen. I brought a few mimic beacons so I could focus on the sarcophagus once I downed the chosen the first time.
I think that if they toned down or got rid of some of the new ways to reduce Avatar progress it would be fine. When I played through the second time I refused to use any of the covert ops or resistance orders that reduced the meter and I found the overall flow of the game to be much better.
IMO the limitless Avatar stalling is also what causes some players (especially newbies) frustration, because you can easily get behind tech-wise and end up in a near-endless loop of not really progressing but never losing.