1582

It’s great to hear, but I’m honestly surprised he’s saying they have the issues “in sight” rather than “several of these issues have been addressed in internal builds” or something. It sounds kind of like it may be another few weeks (or more) before anything official happens.

1583

I experienced my first death last night in my current campaign due to mind control. I’m near the end of the game, and I was doing some BS red mission that it would have “terrible” ramifications for the resistance if I skipped it. So, ok. I brought along my shiny new PSI guys, each with plenty of PSI skills including Domination. I was anxious to try it.

We snuck up close to a pod, I put everyone on Overwatch to ambush, and then used my PSI to Dominate a dude. Then the shit hit the fan. The Domination was successful, but, I didn’t get an ambush. In addition, the dominated guy aggro’d two more pods, for a total of 9-ish enemies. The nine enemies then got a) a reaction turn where they scatter to cover and b) and full turn. 60 hours into this stupid game and I’m still not sure when the enemy gets a full turn after they’re aggro’d and when they only get a reaction turn. The nine guys then mostly ignored the dominated guy and focused fire on one of my guys (a colonel) and killed her.

Lesson - don’t dominate from an “ambush.”

1584

I have the same complaint on what pods will get aggro’d. I haven’t been able to figure it out and after 15 hours of play, I’m no closer to understanding it.

I think most of it has to do with perceived sight distance (hey they must have thermals because they can see through roofs!). I had experimented on one level, save scumming about 8 times to try different things, and had come to the conclusion that if one of my squad could see a pod, then even if I shot one from another pod, they would aggro. Experiments where I remained out of visibility of 2nd pod, the 2nd pod wasn’t aggrod when I shot one out of the first pod.

The chain reaction you described is kind of worst case scenario.

Thanks for adding one more to the list!

1585

Did this on Commander and could barely manage to take down #2 only with a full retreat to the entrance (starting the intro video again). Lying in ambush the implicit timer kicks in as #3 still wasn’t engaged and collecting a steady stream of … . Scouting revealed the mess, brought my PC to 5 fps, the mentioned gfx bugs kicked in and I won by pure luck after recovering from two game crashes, though the only ones in the game.

1586

It’s simple. Enemies get a reaction turn once they come into sight of a non-concealed XCOM operative. Enemies get a full turn once none of your XCOM operatives have actions left. I never played much with the psi, but I guess dominated enemies count as honorary XCOM operatives.

You should definitely have got shots off from your soldiers on overwatch once the first pod started scattering. I don’t know why that wouldn’t trigger unless the soldiers on overwatch didn’t actually have LOS on the enemy. Edit: I think I’ve been cheated of the occasional overwatch shot sometimes because the first step or two the enemies took brought them out of my LOS or firing range…

After the first couple of fights, I rarely put everyone on overwatch because I didn’t like the enemy getting a full follow-up turn right after the ambush. Leaving two or three soldiers out of overwatch meant I could do a little triage and move to flank and eliminate enemies that had made it to cover before they could shoot at my guys. Also, you can’t fire grenades from overwatch and I love grenades.

1587

This is what I think happens:

When you get a pod into regular line of sight of your squad (if you are out of stealth), the pod gets aggro-ed no matter what. If you use scanners or other stuff then you don’t trigger aggro with that.

If this happens in your turn, the enemy gets a full turn after yours, if it happens on the enemy turn (because they move, or some building gets broken) they use their turn scrambling to cover and don’t get to shoot.

The ambush thing does look like a bug.

Edit: ninja’d

1588

Has anyone noticed a performance improvement with the latest Nvidia drivers (361.91, released 2/15)?

1589

Seriously. The last mission was a giant pain in my ass – I only manage to win because I smote the last objective with my rapid-fire sniper about a turn before I would have been completely overwhelmed. I lost my psyker with Solace to a mind-controlled ranger who got too close, knocked her to 2 HP, and THEN lost his mind-control (and then she was plinked by one of the many enemies on that last stage that do their bullshit teleporting). Then I wasted a mind-control on a half-dead sectoid instead of an Andromedon due to a UI skipping bug. I was not real happy at the prospect of possibly playing that mission over again, especially because the first part is a tedious cakewalk, and then the difficulty just jumps up to insane. nd this is with a mod that bumped my squad cap up to 8.

1590

I want to see games change the whole “you aim as well and deal the same damage at full health as you do with next to no health”. Tired of 1 hp dudes that are completely unaffected by being near death.

Takes me back to Raven Shield when you were limping around, even if your damage was the same.

1591

Yes, I preferred this option in the previous game. I also liked the option to increase hit chance as you get closer to flanking something. Nothing I hate more than shooting someone in the back, with my gun touching them, and missing.

1592

In any event, the problem I have with Xcom2 is the same problem I had with the previous game that kept it from being “near perfect.” The RNG is too close to the surface. It is too obviously a board game and not a strategy game.

Even if I take the time to setup the perfect ambush, it is a crap shoot whether it will do anything because of RNG. I can and do miss all of my opening shots from minimum safe range and good angles. The kicker for me was when I missed a backstab with a sword.

1593

I thought the last mission was more interesting than the last one, which was really just a parade of everything you’d encountered in the game followed by an anticlimactic final engagement that was ridiculously easy. This one on the other hand starts out relatively easy but you just know in your gut it’s not going to stay that way and it certainly doesn’t.

I will concede that my decision to stall at the end to train up a couple PSI troops proved fortuitous, not only were they fun to use on some missions at the end, they proved quite useful at the final stage of the final mission.

Also, the strategic layer on this one is so much better in my opinion than the last one (which in my opinion was not a strategic layer at all, as in there was only one choice what to do, launch sats). Way more engaged in making decisions about what I want to focus on or react to in this one on the strategic layer. And I’ve liked the tactical better too because it started out tense from the first mission and just stayed that way with no milk runs.

On the one major downside for me, I find it hard to believe, no, I’d go further than that, impossible to believe, Jake didn’t know his game was a complete mess performance wise, it comes up in so many places throughout the game it’s impossible for me not to conclude that’s a flat out lie. The alternative is a Triple A game was released w/o anyone testing it or in fact even playing it, because you need only turn it on and run through the first mission to see what everyone is complaining about. Hopefully that’ll get fixed sooner than later.

1594

I thought rescuing the Commander (you) in the tutorial was dumb. But the final cutscene was really cool and they bring it full circle.

1595

I’ve heard this kind of comment before and not trying to troll you but I don’t get it. To me if you take away the RNG it’s a puzzle game - since when do strategy games not have any RNG? I mean there are certainly some, but even the old grognard boardgames have dice rolls.

Maybe I’m not getting what you mean.

A little bug I ran into today - My grenade cursor was completely covering some baddies but for some reason they weren’t glowing red, I thought it might just be a graphical bug but after I launched it nothing happend. I heard the explosion but neither their cover nor they took any damage and graphically I saw no explosion. I guess the building was glitchy or something.

1596

The funny thing is that people who complain about the RNG are usually those who don’t use any strategy and instead have a rather simple (and risky) play style.

1597

I’ve had games where I had to run every turn to even get to the evac zone. Those games are not about choosing a strategy, the game forces you to make extremely risky plays to get everyone out.
A lot of those missions don’t work for me thematically. You are a guerrilla unit with single objective, why do you have to mop up random enemies to get a successful mission? It makes little sense other than yeah you need the kill XP. The game should let you evac whenever the hell you wanted to when your primary objective had been completed. It doesn’t. It gives you a “poor” rating if you evac out.

And why the hell is the evac zone all the way over there to begin with? You have a giant helicopter like flying object and you make people risk everything to run to where you happened to park that thing? It’s contrived and lazy.

1598

I’ve never had to run across a map to get to an evac zone due to the timer, ever.

1599

You do know that strategy is all about adapting to the situation? Those missions usually tend to force you to bring your A-game to the table and thus I’d argue they achieve their purpose. Squad selection in particular is made even more important with these missions as well as what gear you bring with you.
Btw the game forces you to make risky plays because else a good player would pretty much never lose a soldier but that’s totally different from people using a rather limited play style and thus creating themselves risky situations.

A lot of those missions don’t work for me thematically. You are a guerrilla unit with single objective, why do you have to mop up random enemies to get a successful mission? It makes little sense other than yeah you need the kill XP. The game should let you evac whenever the hell you wanted to when your primary objective had been completed. It doesn’t. It gives you a “poor” rating if you evac out.

And why the hell is the evac zone all the way over there to begin with? You have a giant helicopter like flying object and you make people risk everything to run to where you happened to park that thing? It’s contrived and lazy.

That’s kinda a contrived and lazy complaint. It’s like asking why the aliens let your ships fly around at all or why better units like Sectopods don’t show up from the beginning. The reason is obviously for gameplay reasons. If you wouldn’t have to kill the remaining enemies on the map you could cheese a lot of missions and avoid combat which isn’t really part of the game design (X-Com isn’t a stealth game where you are supposed to sneak your way out of situations). Besides that you can still abord missions early, it’s not like the repercussions are that big for a failed or poorly rated mission.

1600

Maybe you’re playing on “piss easy” but I’ve had at least 5 of those missions.

1601

What difficulty are you playing on?

I just finished the game on Veteran – which, to be fair, isn’t anywhere near the hardest – and only encountered one mission where I was running at least half the time to make the evac. I think some of it has to do with the random nature of the maps, and some may be that you have fewer turns on higher levels of difficulty.