Ahead of the release I'm trying to decide if I want to play this with the "simplified form" of the old DLCs or if I want to keep them in the original form.
I know the expansion offers the option, but I'm not sure what sort of difference it makes.
Also, this is a feature in this expansion that curiously enough no youtuber or preview/review seems to address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YxIFTbKB3c
Essentially there will be a series of fixed "scenarios" to solve as individual puzzles.
Not sure why it's getting ignored, because I think I will have a lot of fun with it.
I saw so many people doing the lost intro mission that I think I will turn it off. Read somewhere that doing so give you a random faction soldier at gatecrasher!
I'd say that you should at least stick to vanilla for few more hours just to familiarize better with it and not be too overwhelmed with the amount of new stuff this expansion introduces.
I mean, I finished the vanilla game 5 or 6 times at this point, at every difficulty level from Veteran going up, and I still was almost overwhelmed watching a couple of youtubers playing this.
I saw so many people doing the lost intro mission that I think I will turn it off. Read somewhere that doing so give you a random faction soldier at gatecrasher!
Yeah, it's a second wave option to choose a specific faction to start with, but you can also select none of those and leave to chance.
By selecting the story mission, your first two heroes will always be the same and your third will always be a random templar. Also your first chosen will always be the assassin.
I tried Xcom 2 during Steam's free weekend a couple of days ago. I found it to be incredibly difficult. Are these games supposed to be that punishing? Should I drop down to the lowest difficulty, or do I just suck?
To expand on this, my issues were two-fold:
1) I felt like every first attempt at a mission was essentially a throwaway, as I needed to use it to discover enemy placement (didn't appear that this was random?)
2) Every shot missed. Every. Single. One.
ok it wasn't that bad but it was certainly high enough to feel like I had no real control over the outcome of any combat encounter.
I want to like the game, but perhaps Mario + Rabbids would be more up my alley
My Amazon order said it will be arriving tomorrow at 8pm.
Also, I'm one of those lucky ones who were able to snag this at $10. Still hoping they would honor that price since they also honored the Hitman price error some time ago.
I tried Xcom 2 during Steam's free weekend a couple of days ago. I found it to be incredibly difficult. Are these games supposed to be that punishing? Should I drop down to the lowest difficulty, or do I just suck?
To expand on this, my issues were two-fold:
1) I felt like every first attempt at a mission was essentially a throwaway, as I needed to use it to discover enemy placement (didn't appear that this was random?)
2) Every shot missed. Every. Single. One.
ok it wasn't that bad but it was certainly high enough to feel like I had no real control over the outcome of any combat encounter.
I want to like the game, but perhaps Mario + Rabbids would be more up my alley
The game has what's usually called an "inverted difficulty curve".
It tends to start harder and get (comparatively) easier as you progress, because despise the enemies getting stronger, you'll snowball even more.
That said, the game also relies far less on random chances that a lot of people realize.
There are plenty of ways to minimize risks and to play it safe, not rely on "dice rolls" that much, if at all, especially as soon as your soldiers start to level up and acquire better equipment and abilities.
Some suggestions:
- especially at the beginning of the game never leave your soldiers exposed, always move from cover to cover unless you are securing a last kill without exposing new ground.
- move in unexplored areas of the map only at the beginning of a new turn, when all your soldiers will be available to react to enemies that will activate in the process.
- never take low chances shots unless it's your last desperate option or you can afford to miss them and try something else with other soldiers.
- in the beginning rely on explosives a lot, not just to damage enemies, but to blow their cover and expose them to better shots.
- secure abilities with guarantee hit/damage for finishing wounded enemies.
- crowd control items/abilities like frost grenades, Stasis and mimic beacons are incredibly powerful tools when you learn to use them.
- losing some men here and there is a hard blow to take, but not the end of the world if you can't avoid it.
By the end of the game I was hardly ever taking any shot with less than a 85-90% chance and regularly being able to wipe even additional pods of enemies activated by mistake.
Essentially I wasn't really playing chances anymore, but moving only to get assured kills most of the time. An occasional miss every 10-20 shots was something I could deal with pretty reliably.
I tried Xcom 2 during Steam's free weekend a couple of days ago. I found it to be incredibly difficult. Are these games supposed to be that punishing? Should I drop down to the lowest difficulty, or do I just suck?
To expand on this, my issues were two-fold:
1) I felt like every first attempt at a mission was essentially a throwaway, as I needed to use it to discover enemy placement (didn't appear that this was random?)
2) Every shot missed. Every. Single. One.
ok it wasn't that bad but it was certainly high enough to feel like I had no real control over the outcome of any combat encounter.
I want to like the game, but perhaps Mario + Rabbids would be more up my alley
I tried Xcom 2 during Steam's free weekend a couple of days ago. I found it to be incredibly difficult. Are these games supposed to be that punishing? Should I drop down to the lowest difficulty, or do I just suck?
To expand on this, my issues were two-fold:
1) I felt like every first attempt at a mission was essentially a throwaway, as I needed to use it to discover enemy placement (didn't appear that this was random?)
2) Every shot missed. Every. Single. One.
ok it wasn't that bad but it was certainly high enough to feel like I had no real control over the outcome of any combat encounter.
I want to like the game, but perhaps Mario + Rabbids would be more up my alley
I tried Xcom 2 during Steam's free weekend a couple of days ago. I found it to be incredibly difficult. Are these games supposed to be that punishing? Should I drop down to the lowest difficulty, or do I just suck?
To expand on this, my issues were two-fold:
1) I felt like every first attempt at a mission was essentially a throwaway, as I needed to use it to discover enemy placement (didn't appear that this was random?)
2) Every shot missed. Every. Single. One.
ok it wasn't that bad but it was certainly high enough to feel like I had no real control over the outcome of any combat encounter.
I want to like the game, but perhaps Mario + Rabbids would be more up my alley
The maps are semi-random (it remixes a premade pool of parcels randomly) and so enemy placement is always different.
A big (big!!!) part of the game is precisely how to deal with advancing through the map while not knowing where the enemy is because fighting them on your own terms makes all the difference, your goal is to trigger them either by them walking into your overwatch trap or by your very first move of the turn, both cases allowing you to make full use of your squad before the enemy has a chance to fire; and then you also have to worry about fighting them in a way that does not reveal any other enemies.
Learning a good set of practices that allow you to control the battlefield like this is what makes the game less RNG-based.
And then there's stuff like high grounds, exploding covers, skills with guaranteed damage (grenades, for example, do both guaranteed damage and destroy covers), free actions, knowing enemy priority (the basic example is that, early on, you should focus on the generic soldiers who can straight-up shoot shoot murder your rookies and leave the sectoid, who instead of shooting will try fancy stuff like ressurecting a zombie or mind control for last)
So do play at a lower difficulty, because you do need a good understanding of the basics in order to develop your own methods or "best practices". The game is balanced around the notion that if you are playing at a higher difficulty, then you already know what to expect and so no hand holding. The consensus is that if this is your first XCOM game, you really should be playing at the lowest difficulty; if you played thed previous one (Enemy Unknown), then the one above the lowest is the recommended.
Cannot wait to get stuck back into some XCom2, found the vanilla version much harder to ironman than the first reboot, but thinking I'll take another bite of that cherry.
Thank you everyone for your replies. Definitely some good strategies to try. Granted, I didn't put much time into the game over the weekend (only a couple hours) so simply playing the game more would help quiet a bit with the difficulty I imagine.
Yeah keep in mind that Jake Solomon wished he had an even easier easy setting in XCOM 2 for new players. The game has a ferocious intensity, especially early game, and it isn't all clear to new players that the core gameplay loop in the game is sequencing moves in a turn as a risk mitigation exercise.
Is there any way to make the Propaganda Center put out Communist propaganda style posters? I like that art design a lot better than photobooth posters everyone has been putting out.
Is there any way to make the Propaganda Center put out Communist propaganda style posters? I like that art design a lot better than photobooth posters everyone has been putting out.
The game has what's usually called an "inverted difficulty curve".
It tends to start harder and get (comparatively) easier as you progress, because despise the enemies getting stronger, you'll snowball even more.
I basically agree with everything... except that last mission. I don't know if it was just my squad or what I had equipped or what but goddamn that last mission in XCOM2 was just insanely difficult for me.
In any event, I'm thinking of picking this up after reading up on it a bit more. I really enjoyed XCOM2 and by most accounts this is basically XCOM 2.5, which sounds like fun to me.
On one hand I want to play immediately on the other I want to wait for the mods that make the game run faster/smoother (similar to the ones removing hunker down and overwatch delays in EW). It's been so long since I played XCom 2 I'll probably say fuck it and jump right in.
It will be overwhelming, but I'm pretty sure that's the point of the expansion honestly. There are so many systems tugging you in different directions that it can seem hard to manage. This game will give anyone who wants to clear every event off the map some serious anxiety...
There are some good toggle options for the different settings though, so you can tailor the experience to your desired difficulty level in different ways.
Hmm, kind of worried it might be overload for me then. I beat the first game but between the second one apparently being harder by default plus the overwhelming nature of this expansion..
