-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
XCOM 2 |OT| Be Aggressive! Be Be Aggressive!
- Thread starter Sober
- Start date
ISee
Member
Mission starts, I click on my ranger and give him a very simple and short move order...
There were 19 enemies on this extremely small map (maybe 2.5 full moves to cross it). No matter what I did a new group added every round, while the clock kept on running. Mimic beacons saved me, but I had to make a suicidal move for the mission objects at the end. Nearly cost me my squad and I had two soldiers bleeding out at the end. This game is crazy and I can't stop playing it.
There were 19 enemies on this extremely small map (maybe 2.5 full moves to cross it). No matter what I did a new group added every round, while the clock kept on running. Mimic beacons saved me, but I had to make a suicidal move for the mission objects at the end. Nearly cost me my squad and I had two soldiers bleeding out at the end. This game is crazy and I can't stop playing it.
Wraith+Untouchable gives you the potential to kill several enemies in a turn.
In the late game, the grenades hardly do any damage. They shred armor, great. But they don't do enough damage by themselves to warrant them. Plus your own soldiers can carry the same grenades
Salvo is great, and was a good strategy, but my heavy definitely did not pull the same weight as my sniper, ranger, and specialist.
Plasma grenade is excellent game changing damage midgame and still good damage by the end.
Grenades (from Demos) and Psi-Op are, imo, the most currently overtuned parts of the game and they eventually break the game with how good they are completely trivializing firefights. The former is incredibly good damage and armor breaking while also destroying all cover. The latter is an over-capable jack-of-all-trades and the point where you realize you can Dominate a Gatekeeper with >65% probability (and pretty much everything else 100%) is the point where you realize how broken it is. Or just wipe out/panic all organics with a Rift.
Acid is even better except it doesn't destroy buildings/cover. It deals a good chunk of upfront damage, removes 3-5 layers of armor, and Acid Burns for 3 damage a turn. Their damage output is incredible on AoE hits (which are easy to align with larger radii), and the ability to remove cover makes them even better for the rest of the team.
Shredder alone is great
Never mind far-ranging cover destruction they can put out, and increased explosive radius meaning you can hit more enemies and blow up more cover
Ranger is so Op. My killing machine (Jane ' lights out' Kelly, 51 kills on 20 missions') killed 7 aliens in 2 turns. I started the round by having her squadmates each hit one of the 6 targets. I then activated ' reaper mode' on Jelly, what followed was a bloodbath. She tore through the aliens one by one, on the approach to the sixth alien a
awoke. The turn ended, but not before her 'untouchable' perk kicked in. The next round started with the
swinging at her dead to rights, of course it missed, because of Kellys perk. I could only laugh as the cpu round ended with the
being 100% exposed to the rest of my squad.. Needless to say, it didn't end well for him. I hope they don't nerf this class, such a joy to play.
faceless
faceless
faceless
Glitchesarecool
Member
One of my psi ops (GodVegeta) learned Rift out of the gate and just got the chance to learn Void Lance.
Shake Appeal
Member
Yeah, and the effect is even more pronounced in the early game, where losing your newly-minted corporal/sergeant for several weeks isn't much better than just having them die. Cool, I refilled my soldier's five-pip health bar, but I still won't get to use them again for a month. And if it's your Concealment Ranger just before the first Retaliation mission? >_<
Sustaining any injury means falling back on squaddies/rookies at a key developmental phase where individual perks really matter, you don't have a deep bench, you don't have an AWC to mitigate injury times, and the chances of not being 'Gravely' wounded are slim to none. I'd rather kill or be killed than injury-spiral to death.
By the end game though, it wasn't even about cover most of the time. Sectopods, gatekeepers, and archons don't even use cover. It's really just andromedons at that point. Even without mimic beacons, I could 1 round most pods without needing grenades, and if something somehow survived, stasis or MC or hacking was always a last ditch save.
Shake Appeal
Member
Heavies chucking plasma grenades with the right upgrades can do north of 10 damage while destroying cover and shredding armor on multiple targets over a huge area at mid-long range. And they can carry multiple grenades. And some of the special grenades are even crazier. And they can fire a grenade and then take another action.
And they have Rupture.
It's all fun and games until you activate Reaper and miss your first attack.
End game grenadier becomes a swiss army knife with great range if used well.
You want flashbangs over there? Acid? EMP? Fire? You want to crit with your grenades? How about do all of that and then get to shred the armor of that annoying MEC over there? And still have 3 more grenades?
Grenadier got you
You want flashbangs over there? Acid? EMP? Fire? You want to crit with your grenades? How about do all of that and then get to shred the armor of that annoying MEC over there? And still have 3 more grenades?
Grenadier got you
Unfortunately never got Acid grenades so can't comment.
At the end my specialists both had rocket launchers and because I had Africa, everyone carried grenades. It just seems that most of the heavy's abilities have been repurposed elsewhere. I agree destroying cover is mostly essential, but I never worried too much. Both snipers had superior scopes, tracer rounds, and aim stims.
Some of heavy's abilities would be better but the ammo penalty is very harsh, rupture drains 3 ammo, which is all of it without the extended clip
I don't know if this a bug or what, but I'm pretty far into the game, I have the final armor, but It won't let me use all three slots to carry items. It shows me the third slot but it's locked and says I need Advanced Armor or something. I don't know what that could mean, I've literally run out of things to research. Am I missing something or is this just a bug?
Glitchesarecool
Member
The range that heavies can toss grenades is crazy for fights. Using them to hit something down at the other end of the street and then let my sniper pick off the survivors (now exposed from cover) is something tough to replicate safely with regular mooks. Plus as others have mentioned, upgraded they're running around with a bigger blast radius and up to four grenades.
Hmm tried to load a save this morning and game crashed. Previous two saves from the same mission also all crashed... I'm not really interested in marching through in search of a stable save. What gives? I'm reinstalling the game now. Anyone got any maintenance tips? The crash happens right after the loading propaganda image. I get a couple UI elements (like health bars) on a mostly-black screen before the crash.
vpance
Member
Succinct Verbosity
Member
So getting really annoying performance issues in the late game. Turns are taking ages and entire animations are being skipped. I know this isn''t the performance thread, but hot damn I shouldn't be getting these issues on my rig.
I don't actually get hurt too much, but I'm extremely OCD about having health topped up
I do miss the old system. Healing alone is a bit lower in the tree of useful options when it does no alleviation of wounds after.
Standard armor has two utility item slots. The two experimental suit types sacrifice one of them for their special abilities. Only grenadiers get an extra slot for their second grenade.
ISee
Member
I have her with me because of Inspire. It opens up another layer of possibilities and it even allows to soften the rng character a bit. Also soulfire is a huge help to kill of certain targets which tend to doge and soak up too many shoots.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
This happens with my sniper in Serial mode as well, like 4/5 times I swear. I can't even remotely trust the damage indicator telling me that my 100% to hit will "definitely kill them" since now every unit has high dodge and/or armor.
vpance
Member
That's true. AWC pretty much solves the problem by mid game though especially once you have a deeper amount of skilled units.
Now Stabilize, that is super useless!
I haven't had a soldier bleed out or go into that state yet
Kaffeemann
Banned
Nvidia users should do this to get nice looking HBAO with better performance that the vanilla SSAO:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/46333l/hbao_works_in_xcom_2_and_gives_a_good_performance/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/46333l/hbao_works_in_xcom_2_and_gives_a_good_performance/
Whom_Gods_Annoy
Banned
But you are guaranteed to hit that first attack.
I use serial only if I have Deadeye or the enemies are already whittled down by a grenadier/stocks. Same goes for Reaper.
I'll agree though that nothing makes me more salty than an enemy grazing my 100% chance shot.
Okay, then until you miss the second attack.
UpDownLeftRight
Banned
Just curious what order is everyone else building facilities in generally? I was looking back at my saves and noticed I spent a lot of time ignoring the rest of the world and built up stuff like the AWC and psilab over comms and it seems like it paid off pretty well, but just wondering if people focused on expansion first and reaped much benefit? It kinda felt like I'd have had plenty of resources with little to spend it on that way.
Also is it just me or are the three options to counter the aliens always moot? The option to prevent avatar progress and buy more time to build gear is always a huge advantage compared to stuff like prevent venom rounds or prevent random faceless spawns.
Also is it just me or are the three options to counter the aliens always moot? The option to prevent avatar progress and buy more time to build gear is always a huge advantage compared to stuff like prevent venom rounds or prevent random faceless spawns.
Whom_Gods_Annoy
Banned
Fair enough I guess. For me its all fun and games until me blowing up an enemies cover suddenly makes them untargetable by my other guys even though he could be shot at before when in cover.
Sure, but running into a bug is different from getting burned by RNG.
The entire point of tactics in XCOM2 is to mitigate RNG fucking you as much as possible. Reaper (and the sword in general) is just too unreliable.
Guerrilla school, AWC, power, workshop, comms, psi breeding, proving ground.
Also, I think the breakthrough events adds blocks to factories, so you can reverse it later by doing something you'd probably be doing anyway.
Yeah, same. I like using medics because they're a good fall back if you fuck things up and still do alright damage. They can also still hack lightposts for buffs(and extra exp on fails) pretty consistently with a skilljack equipped. Additionally the later overwatch abilities make them decent frontliners.
Almost exactly my build order, though I build proving grounds before comms or psi breeding. Need that special ammo for my Snipers. Dunno what I'd do without tracers or AP ammo on them.
Whom_Gods_Annoy
Banned
I agree with your first point, but I would say guaranteed damage and then 90% chance to hit after that is pretty reliable. I think it is in a really good place, some of the grenadier abilities are just stupid right now.
TemplaerDude
Member
Admittedly, I have a pretty high tolerance for bugs and glitches and the what not, and the most of the talk surrounding this games technical issues at first I found a little odd but now I'm starting to raise my eyebrow as my game gets a little deeper.
Technical issues that have been beaten to death like the performance of the game on higher AA settings (my PC should be able to crush this at max settings, but it's pretty choppy).
Clipping issues, everywhere, the annoying ones being when you're trying to hack and you can't see half the screen.
Some more aesthetic decisions like the action camera (which I like having on, I know it can be disabled) I'd say maybe 70% of my shots focus on the character shooting and misses the whole blowing-the-enemies-brains-out part (or missing).
The whole base building aspect is needlessly complex in some regards and not informative enough in others. I feel like sub-menus exist where there shouldn't be sub-menus and vice versa! Stuff like that makes me think I should be UI designer, I'd love to take a broom to the whole interface and clean it up.
With that said, this is still probably going to be one of favourite games of the year. Loving it so far and can't wait for the mod scene to pick up.
Technical issues that have been beaten to death like the performance of the game on higher AA settings (my PC should be able to crush this at max settings, but it's pretty choppy).
Clipping issues, everywhere, the annoying ones being when you're trying to hack and you can't see half the screen.
Some more aesthetic decisions like the action camera (which I like having on, I know it can be disabled) I'd say maybe 70% of my shots focus on the character shooting and misses the whole blowing-the-enemies-brains-out part (or missing).
The whole base building aspect is needlessly complex in some regards and not informative enough in others. I feel like sub-menus exist where there shouldn't be sub-menus and vice versa! Stuff like that makes me think I should be UI designer, I'd love to take a broom to the whole interface and clean it up.
With that said, this is still probably going to be one of favourite games of the year. Loving it so far and can't wait for the mod scene to pick up.
While I think combat hackers are more efficient in killing enemies and getting perfect missions, I still prefer having a medic with my squad. Combat hackers are a "win more" type of support that does really well while you're on top but does nothing if the situation goes bad.
Medics, on the other hand, help to reverse the tables if conflicts start going south. While it's preferable to play smart and safe, sometimes shit just happens. Especially in X-Com. I had one mission where a blue movement from deployment ended up activating 11 enemies on the map including double archons, andromedon and a gatekeeper. A mimic beacon can only do so much.
However, revitalization (or whatever the top level of healing does) not only heals every member but also revives anyone that's down as well. I went from a single bleeding-out member and a near hopeless situation to evacuating the VIP and all my troops without a single casualty.
Medics help to mitigate bad luck. If you don't have a lot of it, that's great. I have horrible luck though and the medic sees that my troops keep going. That said, I don't know what people think about the medic bay (or whatever it's actually called in the game) but I find that having that staffed with an engineer reduces most wound recovery times to a trivial five or six days. I also mix and match abilities from both trees, though. I really don't see any use in revitalize protocol or whatever it is that competes against hacking robots.
So, yeah, most missions the medic just runs around the back, throwing out aid protocols and doing remote hacking but on those handful of missions where I could wipe or lose one of my more valuable squaddies, I'm glad for the medic being there. And, really, grenadiers and psi-ops do so much work that it's not hard having a fail safe role that's little more than a glorified +30 defence and rifle shot kicking around.
I've only seen it after I bought the guerilla school upgrade. Had it come up three times since then. Don't know what the percentages are though.
Medics, on the other hand, help to reverse the tables if conflicts start going south. While it's preferable to play smart and safe, sometimes shit just happens. Especially in X-Com. I had one mission where a blue movement from deployment ended up activating 11 enemies on the map including double archons, andromedon and a gatekeeper. A mimic beacon can only do so much.
However, revitalization (or whatever the top level of healing does) not only heals every member but also revives anyone that's down as well. I went from a single bleeding-out member and a near hopeless situation to evacuating the VIP and all my troops without a single casualty.
Medics help to mitigate bad luck. If you don't have a lot of it, that's great. I have horrible luck though and the medic sees that my troops keep going. That said, I don't know what people think about the medic bay (or whatever it's actually called in the game) but I find that having that staffed with an engineer reduces most wound recovery times to a trivial five or six days. I also mix and match abilities from both trees, though. I really don't see any use in revitalize protocol or whatever it is that competes against hacking robots.
So, yeah, most missions the medic just runs around the back, throwing out aid protocols and doing remote hacking but on those handful of missions where I could wipe or lose one of my more valuable squaddies, I'm glad for the medic being there. And, really, grenadiers and psi-ops do so much work that it's not hard having a fail safe role that's little more than a glorified +30 defence and rifle shot kicking around.
I've only seen it after I bought the guerilla school upgrade. Had it come up three times since then. Don't know what the percentages are though.
Dick Justice
Banned
Seems a bit too strong when using the inspector AO, but meh. Less GPU usage than SSAO, more than Tile AO.
No AO
Tile AO
SSAO
Inspector HQ HBAO
It's a percentage chance based on will above 50 afaik. Don't recall the specifics right now
Empty Space
Member
Just finished the campaign on veteran. There kind of reaches a point where your squad trivializes the game. I'm not exactly sure at what point that is but its something that I don't really think can be fixed at any difficulty. It got to the point where unless I was reckless I could generally wipe out an entire pod in a single turn before encountering a second one. Grenadiers are incredibly broken able to carry three grenades + a heavy weapon and using those things twice in a single turn is ridiculous. The only enemies that ever gave me any real pause were the Sectopods and even then it got to the point where if I needed to I could stun hack them.
Story spoilers below
Story spoilers below
I'm assuming the bit at the end was hinting at Terror from the Deep. Is there any indication that's going to be a season pass or expansion thing? Or should I just expect that to be XCOM 3?
Ah, thanks for the info. Guess that just confirms my rotten luck. I didn't see bleedout at all in my first run of the game. Either that or it's a really low percent.
(I mostly have bad luck)
Kaffeemann
Banned
Did you try setting it to High Quality instead of Very High.
Might help with it being too dark.
Dick Justice
Banned
There is no very high option. I chose high quality in the inspector.
vpance
Member
The argument against them is, why would you use medic protocol vs combat protocol, that has the ability to deal back guaranteed damage against the enemy, and maybe killing it outright so it wont have a chance to attack you again. Well, you do only get to do it twice per mission, but heal is up to 4x. But yeah, there's no way I'm taking a med only spec on a mission with MECs and pods, so I've been bringing both.
I dunno, I haven't found that separation in ability to be a huge difference maker yet (probably plays out more on C and L difficulties), and am comfortable with that extra bit of insurance in keeping someone alive. I've always been able to regroup next turn and solve the problem of killing the offending unit another way.
Come to think of it though, I can't remember a time where after healing someone has that unit been damaged again by more than what he had left over before healing... yet, lol. Maybe that will happen more later. Still, that psssh sound and the peace of mind
Glitchesarecool
Member
That makes no sense even in a game where you're fighting robots and aliens and whatever-the-hell else these things are. A grenade is a grenade no matter how far you fling it.
Poodlestrike
Banned
I think he means like distance from the center of the blast.
You're right that the other thing makes no sense
TemplaerDude
Member
I'm trying to imagine what faulty ass technology would even make sense in that context. Imagine flinging a grenade and praying too much gunpowder doesn't fall out. "GOD DAMMIT JOHNSON WHY CAN'T THEY JUST COVER THE HOLES UP?"