1862

Gunslingers are very often completely ineffective without ap ammo in my experience.

1863

Indeed. And are incredible (situationally) with it, or, as KiloOhm pointed out, with bluescreen rounds on certain missions. Gunslinger feels very balanced and cool to me.

1864

A few things:

  1. I finished my first game last night. I admit, I had to savescum. But I was on the final mission, literally down to the last guy, and (I hope this is not too spoilery) the final guy I need to kill was literally in the range where the random damage roll would kill him or leave him with 1 or 2 HP, and if I did not kill him on that turn, my squad would wipe. I wanted to see the end of the game, and I was not going to play another 50 hours under that circumstance just to do it. I do plan on Ironmanning my next game.

  2. I constantly see little green arrows or red arrows around my guys, but I can’t tell what the hell they mean most of the time. Is there an area you can hover over to do this?

  3. Likewise, I sometimes forget, in the mission (particularly if I’ve saved in mission and it has been a while) who has what ammo types, who has the mindshield, etc. Is there something you can hover over that tells you that? Hovering over the gun tells you what upgrades the gun has, but it does not seem to tell you ammo type, for example.

1865

I would also like to know about 2 and 3 in SlyFrog’s post. The last couple of missions my guys have all had two red down carets next to them and I can’t figure out why.

1866

They are buffs and debuffs. I read that you can use F1 on a unit to get more info, but I’ve never done it. I’ll give it a try next time I play.

Edit: Hover the mouse pointer over the name of the soldier in the lower left corner and press F1. It gives a bunch of stats.

1867

Thanks for the info, Rich.

1868

On further testing it seems that F1 isn’t necessary.

BTW the plasma lance sniper rifle is awesomesauce. It even takes special ammo and applies their debuffs.

1869

LOL, I spoke too soon, even Commander Ironman is too hard. I’ve stepped right back to Veteran Bronzeman (there’s a mod for it). I’ve decided to go Bronzeman because of general bugginess, just for safety’s sake. Having to re-start the entire mission is enough fuss and pother while you’re immersed that you only really do it if either the game does something irretrievably buggy or something silly like a mis-click is what results in the disaster. You still get the tremendous psychological benefit of the ongoing momentum of an Ironman game (i.e. not even thinking about saves - it’s surprising how much the mental chatter of that interferes with the flow of a game).

So even Veteran is pretty hard without the safety net of saves and re-doing, I’m into April and lost 3 troops. But it’s kind of doable while learning the game. I kind of misunderestimated just how subtly different everything is from the previous game, or from LW. It’s definitely got its own organic vibe to it.

Interestingly, while it still retains the binary board-game element, I think the RNG element is better integrated into the boardgame this time somehow. I’m thinking of Troopers - mere cannon fodder you say, but actually I’m finding that if I’ve got 2 Troopers and a Sectoid, it’s the Troopers I need to kill first, because they can really get some sneakily devastating shots in if you’re not careful about cover and positioning, whereas the Sectoid usually only does one stupid thing that’s usually get-overable with a Flashbang and doesn’t do much damage to you.

Maybe something to do with the difference in how hits are calculated? I noticed my Do Not Want reaction when I saw a mod to revert hit calculation back to XCOM style. There’s something really enjoyable and “bigger” about the way it’s done now, but I can’t put my finger on it, it just feels better, more alive, more dangerous, yet still copeable-with.

1870

You know what I really hate? Aliens that throw plasma grenades. I have got to remember which ones they are.

1871

Ah, just had a light-bulb moment!

It’s the Plan A/Plan B thing. With XCOM, it always helped if you had a Plan B, of course, and to some extent there was always contingency at the back of your mind. But generally with XCOM, the pattern was you’d work out a “neat trick” for a round, and most of the time it would work, there was seldom much need to have a really solid Plan B.

With XCOM 2, YOU REALLY NEED A PLAN B ALL THE TIME. That’s the effect of the changes, it makes the gameplay more intricate, because your “neat trick” is less guaranteed to work, and you’re as often scrambling to retrieve a sorry situation with your Plan B, as you are exulting that Plan A worked.

With XCOM 2 I’m much more thinking, “ah yeah, but what if that doesn’t work?” than I ever was with XCOM or its follow-ups.

1872

And psionics bring you back to predictability because they pretty much always hit – with the exception of mind control and insanity – and the damaging effects tend to have narrow range so you can tell what’s going to happen better than with most other attacks. But you can realistically have advanced psionics for only a few missions before you have to end the game somehow, so it’s kind of a reward for getting through the rest of the game with 96% attacks that miss or are dodged…

1873

I played some this afternoon again, and while hovering the mouse pointer over the soldier’s name brings up some stats, I still can’t figure out why all my guys start out with the debuff marker and never get rid of it (the pop-up doesn’t give any clues). Is it because I haven’t done anything with psionics?

Or it could just be a bug, I suppose.

1874

Those are elevation indicators. I think green means you have elevation advantage against an enemy, and red means an enemy has it against you.

EDIT: (Or so I have interpreted them, might be they’re general aim advantage/disadvantage)

1875

It’s probably the monthly bad guys special feature. Like increased enemy spotting range or something like that.

1876

An in depth explanation of what the Shadow Chamber can tell you.

via Reddit

Dude has a lot of spare time.

1877

Now that you mention it, that has to be it. Once I was in a situation where I was forced to ignore picking a guerrilla mission because my Avatar bar was full and counting down, and the only way to counter it was to establish contact with a region that had a blacksite facility. Then later most of my veterans were wounded and I had to ignore a council mission (ugh). As a result the bad guys got extra armor and vigilance, respectively. I’m over the extra armor part, now working through the vigilance.

1878

Ok, I must be going a bit mental, I tried to bring up inventory/stats/what not by hovering over the units name but didn’t get anything. Must still not be getting this. Anyone care to enlighten me once again on how in a mission you can look at the stats and inventory of your units.

1879

I’m a bit disappointed to hear that the Avatar project isn’t permadeath for your game - with my first, half-finished “getting to know the game” run, I was terrified of the counter, I thought it meant game over when you reach the final, so you had to gradually beat it back. Now Beaglerush tells me that you get a chance to salvage the situation and can “ride” the timer.

Meh, I suppose it’s better that way all round, and makes for a longer game, but still with some risk; but it would have been cool to have it be a hard counter. No doubt there’ll be a mod for that.

Btw, I had some problems with Avast causing crashes. If you’re having puzzling crashes you might have to make exceptions in the File System Shield for all the Steam folders and the separate XCOM2 folder in My Documents My Games.

I’ve also had to dial back my overclock from the spiffy 3.8GHz I’ve had it for years, to the boring 2.53Ghz stock of my ancient Core2Duo. The game seems very tetchy about overclocking, more than any other game I’ve played (in fact I’ve never had problems with overclocking in games ever before). Means I’ve also had to dial back the eye candy a teensy bit, but what the hey, still looks great.

I’m so lucky at the moment in that I’ve been having an unexpected week off, so I’ve been really hammering it. The more you get into it, the more you realize the game is tremendous, an absolute classic, even more so than XCOM. Everything’s just more refined and smoother-flowing all round, and the classes are just awesomesauce in action. I’m loving perma suppression on my Grenadier, it really does a lot to counter the “unfair”-seeming hardness of the game. The builds are fairly linear down the trees mostly, but there are some cross-overs here and there.

Also pleased with my facility build path, I’m fairly level with the aliens at the moment, if not a whisker ahead, which is as it should be. Mag/Gauss weapons and Predator/EXO/Spider, vs. up to Berserkers and those Centurion Mutons. Nearly ready to start taking a pip down on Avatar (which is about 3/4 way) on a new continent. Psionics up next.

But the cost in lives! 8 good soldiers dead and one captured. (Recapturing a Sharpshooter who was left behind as a VIP was a cool and unexpected touch - looking forward to getting that Ranger back at some point.) I’m starting to get less injured though, and those are mostly due to forgetting not to clump and getting grenaded.

I also spend much more time than is healthy in the Character Customization screen, sculpting these unique characters and loving them, and I’m usually so upset that I actually write special epitaphs for soldiers I lose. Only a few words, but sometimes the feels are quite feely.

The only mods I’m using are cosmetic/voicepack mods (but tons of them) and a few QOL (e.g. overwatch other/all), no gameplay affecting mods at all (e.g. Gotcha and other more game-changing stuff). Not going to touch any of those mods until I’ve played through as Solomon intended.

It really is a new form of art to have these characters who you live through emergent adventures with and have war stories to tell about. Nothing like it in the world. You can love characters in books and movies, but you don’t live and breath with them as you forge ahead into the unknown, like you do with these guys and gals.

1880

@easytarget

You don’t get a pop-up at all when hovering over the name (on the lower left of the screen btw, near where the rank indicator is)? It doesn’t have inventory, but does show health, aim, hack, will, armor, dodge and psi strength. I wish there were a way of bringing up the inventory as far as loadout–I often have trouble remembering who has dragon rounds vs. bluescreen vs. tracer etc.

1881

Rounds should show on the weapon, Papageno. Buffs and debuffs show right by the character name. You should be able to hover over those. The rest is covered by the ability bar. I know there’s a mod to show all of this in one place, but I can’t remember which it is. If I’m on later, I’ll look it up and post.