Dump the Reaper and add another Sniper.
Geez and here I hate the timers - I get pressured, make mistakes in a rush and then end up replaying the mission. If/when I go back, I’ll add whatever mod gives me more time.
Sorry, I was thinking of the ability that lets the Reaper fire and and remain in cover. Sting.
I can’t load up a game to look atm because my last game was Ironman.
Hey, no problem. :)
Better yet, keep the reaper and add another sniper. Dump something else.
Why? Turn 1 advance your reaper as far forward as you can (1 action point move at a time to maximize). This is a long way and will typically reveal several pods. Once seen by a reaper they are marked for good and can always be seen by you, even if they move into cover later. Then move your two snipers to high ground if you can. With squadsight they will see the revealed pods. The next turn one of them can activate ‘serial’ (if they aren’t on high ground or they don’t have ‘death from above’) and kill the enemy until they run out of ammo. If they have a reloader installed, they can take a free reload and keep right on killing until all the pods are dead, they miss, or fail to kill with a shot, whichever comes first.
Meantime, move the reaper ahead again as far as you can. With their huge movement range, most of the map will be revealed by now along with more pods. Use your other sniper to kill those using ‘serial’ or ‘death from above’ in the same manner. Congratulations, your mission is about over in 2 turns. That’s just how powerful the reaper/sniper combo is.
This obviously works best in more open maps (city or outside). Underground maps can take a bit longer. I finished over 90% of my missions in 5 turns or less because of snipers and reapers. Some took more than 5 turns. Those were usually the Avatar, main story and Chosen missions. Some of those can be a bit more lengthy. Timers are a complete non issue with this strategy.
You’re also talking about pretty late game. I don’t think Reapers come into their own until they have a few levels in them.
Well, true, but more like mid-game I think. Reapers can scout like champs right from the beginning but Snipers need to get serial and death from above which takes some time. Snipers level fast though because of the huge number of kills they get.
I think that you all have very good views on how to run your squads as efficient murder machines.
However you are missing the fact that charging in rangers to heroically stab aliens in high risk scenarios is a real adrenaline rush.
X-Com 2 is all about creating a glorious mess of things with ill thought out haste and then trying to bail yourself out.
That’s how heroes are made.
And a few corpses along the way…
You sound like someone who understands the wonderful pinball of death known as the Vanguard in Mass Effect 2
Man, I totally should have gotten this in the sale. At least there’s another one coming up soon!
The Reaper hate in this thread is coming straight out of bizarro world. Easily my favorite class in the game. I sometimes even ran two of them in the same squad!
Scouting and tagging enemies, silently dispatching targets…making it easier to set up optimal positioning for a maximum killzone firing solution before blowing stealth…one of my favorite things. Also they were incredible hard to kill because they could re-stealth. If the mission turned into a total debauchery bloodbath of dead X-commers, Reapers were always safe to slip away unscathed.
On Snipers. They can be great or nearly useless. They are really situational. Mostly I found them to be sub-par as compared to the other classes I chose, even though, on occasion they outshone just about everyone. It is just that there are to many situations where they can’t use their advantages, such as any kind of map where your maximum range isn’t very far due to many factors such as a lot of buildings, interior spaces etc… The other 3 classes I listed were always useful 100% of the time.
Reapers I played with for a while, but mostly it ended up being a 5 man squad with 1 stealth person I didn’t use much for combat, just scouting. While I like the scouting bit, I didn’t like the fact that once they lost their stealth, they were kind of wimpy.
On the other hand the grenadiers can shoot at a fairly long range, shred armor, and can do a full auto blast, and then launch plasma grenades fairly far as well, blowing up structures as well as aliens. One of my favorite tactics was having a bunch of aliens taking cover near a vehicle, and then attacking the vehicles instead of them, causing it to detonate, taking out all the aliens hiding around it.
With 3 of these guys in your squad, you do not need to worry about scouting so much.
The 2 psi-ops are great crowd control, and with insanity-mind control or regular mind-control, you can have your “scouts” too.
The specialist can heal and is the psi-op equivalent for machines.
I have tried many combos of soldiers, but I keep coming back to this mix.
Thumbs up!!
Reapers are incredibly useful for tagging VIPs or chosen that need to be neutralized or captured.
Anyone who has used them in a high explosive setting and then say they are no fun is not doing it right :)
Snipers are god tier in the previous XCOM but I found them kinda lackluster in XCOM 2. The problem is mobility. If you move them, they can’t use their rifle. You want a sniper in a static elevated position with clear line of sight of the battlefield and this isn’t always viable given the map. You really need that OP “sky god” armor they didn’t bother to bring back for XCOM2.
With Reapers you can scout the entire map, tag all the pods, and choose a perch for them easily, and set up all your other dudes perfectly.
It almost feels like cheating. Almost.
The thing is, if they are built correctly, they are useful anywhere once you get them built up. They can clear a room for you even in a tight map with Serial. Lightning Hands means a free pistol shot before they use their rifle and Faceoff means a pistol shot at everything they can see. The only time I was in a situation where the sniper wasn’t useful was when they were still squaddies and sergeants.
Yeah, this is why you want to take out the Chosen Assassin first and ASAP. The sniper rifle you get from him can be used even after moving on the same turn. It comes with free reloads. It is godly. His pistol that you get is darn near as good a plasma weapon since it ignores armor. Those two weapons combined with the right skills and Bluescreen rounds ammo turns your snipers into gods.
On mobility, I found the wraith armor great for snipers since it has a built in grapple. Use the grapple to zip up to a high spot and then use the Chosen Assassin rifle to rain death on the same turn.
What I really want is XCom 3. Phoenix Point has left me hungry for an XCom game and isn’t really satisfying me. Maybe if there was another mod like Long War to make the game fresh again.
The team that did Long War is currently working on Long War for Xcom 2 WOTC. Not sure when it will be released though. I think it’s currently in beta.
Since when? They were working on their own game and I thought another unrelated group was just allowed to use their forum to organize.
Hmm, looks like it’s actually a port to wotc by somebody else with the original team’s blessing. Here’s the reddit thread I saw:
And the github page:
I bounced off this game three years ago, but with all the talk of Phoenix Point, I figured I’d try it again. I had the exact same experience.
I love the opening tutorial mission. Then I get a mission to disable a converter, and I lose almost my whole team. I’ve tried it three times, and it never goes right. The advisers tell me to stay in concealment and use overwatch, but that never seems to work. I get off one shot with overwatch, the aliens alert, and we trade losses. Yes, I hack the thing, but usually with at least two dead by then, and the hacker herself exposed, about ready to die as well.
Am I doing something horribly newbishly wrong? I feel like I shouldn’t be losing 2-3 members of my squad on what is billed as an “easy” mission. Ready to quit as I did three years ago, sadly.