Fucken’ aliens got it comin’ to them! fuck 'em up Guap!
Guap for President! Guap’s gonna fuck up some of them illegal space aliens!
Some of them?! All of them!!!
I started a game late last night but only had the chance to get through the first Lost mission and the first counterattack with the Chosen showing up. Turns out this game I met the Hunter first and he already bagged and tagged one of my boys. Damn, I’m gonna have to kill him first, and listen to Preachy McZealot or the hissing Assassin later in the game.
Haven’t seen the Spark mission or Alien leaders yet. Probably they appear a bit later.
I’ve just started another playthrough of this game and man, does it have a way of making me feel like an incompetent butcher! I was inspired by seeing Christoper Odd start another “Season” of Xcom 2. He plays on legendary and I don’t think he had one injury on his first four or five missions (though to be honest, he did get some good RNG rolls when baddies should have hit him). He’s executing flanking, destroying guys, it all seems to work for him.
My playthroughs, on the other hand, are littered with bodies - my guys get one-shotted (now and then) by the green beam the aliens shoot, the bad guys will shoot from way across the map and hit my guys behind half or full cover, and of course then a couple of guys will panic.
I realize Xcom 2 can be brutal but I swear I’m trying to take it slow and approach slowly and set up kill zones. I guess I’m not very good at it. :(
Also, I realize it’s late to have this objection but I really do hate that most of the missions have timers.
This may not seem intuitive, but it’s better to break stealth sooner rather than later. I mean, get set up so that you can take advantage of that opening volley, but generally you’re just delaying the inevitable. Also, if you wait too long, the enemies will tend to clump up and cause problems with multiple pods activating simultaneously.
That is the one thing I absolutely hate about the new XCOM.
The pod encourage gamey tactics and totally destroy immersion. They need to rethink this in the next XCOM. Or Phoenix Point.
Maybe make all the AI patrol like a normal unit and then cautiously move to sounds where there are gun battles etc until they are shot at or reach a minimum range, where they then use full movement points and react as they would combat. The pod activating thing sticks out very much like a sore thumb.
Yeah, the mission timer thing is a terrible mechanic. There are some mods that can greatly extend the time. I think now there is even a setting somewhere that relaxes the timers a lot.
One of the best guerilla tactical cards in WotC is the one that delays starting the timer until you are discovered. A second one adds 2 turns to every timer.
Yeah, I think you can double them in the advanced settings (thought that’s kind of the same as deactivated them in most cases). I’ve gone back and forth about the timers over the years. Currently, I’m pro-timer if only because the gameplay is so based around them. Without them, missions get monotonous and rote. I actually think it would have worked better if the timers counted down not to mission failure but to increasingly difficult reinforcement waves (eg. one on the tenth turn; a tougher one on the twelfth, etc.) So you could choose to overstay – but at your own risk. (Sort of like in Invisible Inc. or FTL).
I thought they were on to a better idea in the last one with a reward available that was on a timer that gave you the option to push and be rewarded for it.
Timers feel like a bolt on to me in xcom2 compared to say how they were implemented in Invisible,Inc where they feel integrated from the ground up in the game design.
Here here! Though I kinda miss the Sniper, he is a fun shittalker and I can avoid him mostly.
Edit:. Did your Assassin assault your ship?
That’s such a sweet feeling. Finally burying those alien leader assholes is almost as good.
Sniper assaulted the ship, I killed the assassin just before she could launch an attack.
What I like most about killing the chosen and the rulers was the weapon and armor I got from them.
On fully ranked up squad they become god like.
By late campaign I can send a reaper to spot enemies and then have the sniper using Icarus armor jump to the highest point on the map with good visibility and proceed to kill/clear the map solo using the hunter’s rifle.
The payback for the early couple of months in the campaign that are ironically the hardest in the game is some good fun.
I still don’t understand why squad level tactical games don’t simply copy JA2’s mechanics. It’s been 20 years and there hasn’t been a single game since then that could match the tactical options offered by the vanilla version of JA2, nevermind the 1.13 mod that expands on them.
I still remember grinning like an idiot the first time I put my guys into an ambush position (rooftop sniping from prone position is still unique to this game for some reason) and baited the enemies into a kill zone by firing my weapons, thinking how even more mind blowing the future games would be. Or the first time I played 1.13 and got my shit pushed in by enemies who learned how to climb on rooftops and by the new sector reinforcement feature that ended up in my squad getting surrounded and absolutely decimated.
More to that, even playing night missions and feeling like they were a true night mission surrounded by darkness, having rifle fire light up the soldiers giving away their position, Blood and Dmitri throwing knives for insta-kills in a high risk, high reward situation. Getting overrun? Bring on Grizzly with a light machine gun to lay true suppressive fire. Not that weird suppression crap that XCom has.
Thanks Bateau, I’m pissed off now that JA2 was the highpoint and nothing has quite come close since. I did hold high hopes for XCom, and while I’m not overly annoyed by the game, it did have its share of missing pieces that detract from the experience.
When it releases in Dec check out Phoenix Point, I loved playing the beta put about 30 hours in before I decided Id wait till the release, It feels like the original Xcom but also feels like Jagged Alliance 2 in the modeling of weapons, and how tactics play out. No teleporting enemies, you can get swarmed if you dont play smart, and they use height, and my rockets love taking out a snipers nest. The destructible environment isnt as eleqaunt as Silent Storm, but its there and works.
Gooooood, Silent Storm. What a fantastic opening and premise that fell apart later. Still, I’ll always remember battling out Germans in destructible houses with things falling down from the second floor.