TC McQueen
Member
Don't play Long War 2 until you've got a few complete campaigns on Veteran done.
Get the mod that causes the timers to not start until you lose concealment (True Concealment, IIRC), and the Shadow Ops Gear mod.
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XCOM 2 |OT| Be Aggressive! Be Be Aggressive!
- Thread starter Sober
- Start date
Get the mod that causes the timers to not start until you lose concealment (True Concealment, IIRC), and the Shadow Ops Gear mod.
CrocMother
Banned
Best way to learn is to watch some let's plays. I'd recommend marbozir or ChristopherOdd
I'm generally not going to go watch an external video to learn basic mechanics of a game. That's not an acceptable way to do business IMO.
That said, my issues with mission 2 were related to not even trying to infiltrate. There are explanations for the new Long War 2 stuff in the in-game encyclopedia which can be accessed in your commander's room. That's still a bit more buried than I like.
Here's the gist of it:
The only thing that truly matters is current activity. Current Activity(CA from now on) is dictated by Baseline Activit(BA) and Infiltration(IN). CA affects how many and how large the pods will be, as well as reinforcements, and extraction time.
At 100% IN, your CA will be equal to the BA. Anything below 100%, and your CA will be more severe. Anything over 100% reduces it, to a maximum of 200%.
Your IN progress is affected by the troops you are using to infiltrate. Their skills, equipment, and numbers can all affect this. Some classes get skills that will make them better at infiltrating. Some equipment also modifies this, i.e. SMGs are better than heavy weapons, etc. The most drastic change is troop number though. 5 troops suffer no penalty, but going over that starts to increase your infiltration time. In general, you're aiming to have your total infiltration time be less than the time before the mission expires. You can spend 25 intel to give yourself a retroactive 75% bonus though.
I haven't started making a specific infiltration team, but I probably will eventually.
That said, my issues with mission 2 were related to not even trying to infiltrate. There are explanations for the new Long War 2 stuff in the in-game encyclopedia which can be accessed in your commander's room. That's still a bit more buried than I like.
Here's the gist of it:
The only thing that truly matters is current activity. Current Activity(CA from now on) is dictated by Baseline Activit(BA) and Infiltration(IN). CA affects how many and how large the pods will be, as well as reinforcements, and extraction time.
At 100% IN, your CA will be equal to the BA. Anything below 100%, and your CA will be more severe. Anything over 100% reduces it, to a maximum of 200%.
Your IN progress is affected by the troops you are using to infiltrate. Their skills, equipment, and numbers can all affect this. Some classes get skills that will make them better at infiltrating. Some equipment also modifies this, i.e. SMGs are better than heavy weapons, etc. The most drastic change is troop number though. 5 troops suffer no penalty, but going over that starts to increase your infiltration time. In general, you're aiming to have your total infiltration time be less than the time before the mission expires. You can spend 25 intel to give yourself a retroactive 75% bonus though.
I haven't started making a specific infiltration team, but I probably will eventually.
Every rookie having flashbangs and grenades is pretty nice at the start.
Dick Justice
Banned
Have they still not fixed the bug with rebinding with the mouse scroll? Rebound zooming in and out to my mouse wheel, and it never saves after exiting the game.
Unless I'm crazy zoom is the default setting for the mouse wheel. Why would you need to rebind it?
If You want to reverse the directions. Scrolling down to zoom out and scrolling up to zoom in feels much more natural to me.
RandomSeed
Member
Rebinding keys has been screwed forever (previous game), and it drives me nuts. I have to swap the Q and E keys and mouse wheel every time i load the game.
Dick Justice
Banned
Poodlestrike
Banned
Okay, so, first trial run with The Long War (and that TLW Silencers mod) straight up broke me. I could probably recover, but frankly, after the last 2 missions I feel like I've learned enough to earn a restart.
Mission 1 went swimmingly, aside from a couple of wounds. I did let my squad get overly distributed, but frankly, the enemy was pretty tightly packed in, and I didn't actually get hit until well towards the end of the fight (fuckin' Pectoids got smarter when I wasn't paying attention).
Mission 2, though, was a disaster; Rescue mission, sent along 3 rookies because I didn't realize that failing the door hack would set off alarms. Ran RIGHT into 2 pods trying to reach extraction. Shoulda repositioned the point. Lost all 3 squaddies and one of the VIPs.
Next mission is a VIP extraction. "Ah," says I, "won't get fooled again!" Much narrower timer on this one, so I pared down my squad to one Specialist for hacking, but was still forced to infiltrate at 38%.
Those of you who actually know what the mission entails are probably cackling a little right now.
So, that went as well as could be expected, which is not very. Gonna restart the playthrough and try to make not-awful choices this time.
Mission 1 went swimmingly, aside from a couple of wounds. I did let my squad get overly distributed, but frankly, the enemy was pretty tightly packed in, and I didn't actually get hit until well towards the end of the fight (fuckin' Pectoids got smarter when I wasn't paying attention).
Mission 2, though, was a disaster; Rescue mission, sent along 3 rookies because I didn't realize that failing the door hack would set off alarms. Ran RIGHT into 2 pods trying to reach extraction. Shoulda repositioned the point. Lost all 3 squaddies and one of the VIPs.
Next mission is a VIP extraction. "Ah," says I, "won't get fooled again!" Much narrower timer on this one, so I pared down my squad to one Specialist for hacking, but was still forced to infiltrate at 38%.
Those of you who actually know what the mission entails are probably cackling a little right now.
So, that went as well as could be expected, which is not very. Gonna restart the playthrough and try to make not-awful choices this time.
Over 100 hours and I never considered changing floor levels to not be zoom. The brain is funny sometimes.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Holy shit, SO MANY FACELESS. At first I thought those civilians without detection radius were just glitches... nooooope! 3 of them, right near where I went in.
Good god.
So glad I went for the full squad on this one, and I don't even want to think would've happened if I hadn't boosted infiltration.
Update: 6 of the bastards. At least. Was forced to leave without the Advent VIP, killed 18 dudes and there were still more on the map. Still, leveled up 8 rookies, which is really what I went there to do. Log says failure, but I'll call a 9-1 casualty ratio a success.
Update 2: Okay, so, a Thing I Have Learned is that there is no such thing as an actual stealth mission; it may be tempting to try and pare down the squad for a super high infiltration and then just sneak through, but there will always always ALWAYS be something that goes wrong. Come prepared for a fight, every time.
Good god.
So glad I went for the full squad on this one, and I don't even want to think would've happened if I hadn't boosted infiltration.
Update: 6 of the bastards. At least. Was forced to leave without the Advent VIP, killed 18 dudes and there were still more on the map. Still, leveled up 8 rookies, which is really what I went there to do. Log says failure, but I'll call a 9-1 casualty ratio a success.
Update 2: Okay, so, a Thing I Have Learned is that there is no such thing as an actual stealth mission; it may be tempting to try and pare down the squad for a super high infiltration and then just sneak through, but there will always always ALWAYS be something that goes wrong. Come prepared for a fight, every time.
Has anyone ever encountered this? I started up the game and I got an error, I don't remember the exact words but ti was something to do with not knowing which mods I had installed. Sure enough, that launch screen shows no mods installed. So I went back into steam and it still says that all my mods are subscribed. I tried unsubscribing and then resubbing but still nothing is showing up on the launch screen.
Is there a fix to this? Thanks
Is there a fix to this? Thanks
Shake Appeal
Member
My LW2 game just bugged out. None of the Havens are showing up on the geoscape, so I can't scan anywhere or advance time.
Eventually a mission popped up because the time continues to tick along, but when I hit confirm, there's no UI to interact with.
I might wait until they've patched it up a few versions before restarting.
Eventually a mission popped up because the time continues to tick along, but when I hit confirm, there's no UI to interact with.
I might wait until they've patched it up a few versions before restarting.
so i just did a vip extraction which doubled as a soldier rescue, wouldn't let me rescue the soldier.
upon hacking, he wasn't active, and when i evac'd the vip, the soldier disappeared, saying i rescued the optional second person as well, but i didn't and the end of misison briefing said VIP lost for the soldier
Using LW2 if that makes any difference
upon hacking, he wasn't active, and when i evac'd the vip, the soldier disappeared, saying i rescued the optional second person as well, but i didn't and the end of misison briefing said VIP lost for the soldier
Using LW2 if that makes any difference
Spacecowboy77
Member
My LW2 game just bugged out. None of the Havens are showing up on the geoscape, so I can't scan anywhere or advance time.
Eventually a mission popped up because the time continues to tick along, but when I hit confirm, there's no UI to interact with.
I might wait until they've patched it up a few versions before restarting.
I had the same problem and resolved it by deleting the files in Documents\My Games\XCOM2\XComGame\Config
Some of these LW2 maps + time limits are absurd and just not even remotely balanced. I just had an 8-turner that had me and the objectives on opposite ends of a huge map. I did a test and the only way to make it all the way to the objective required moving every turn, and the map was littered with pods.
TC McQueen
Member
The timers are definitely not based on the size of the map. I had a ton of problems with them in vanilla XCOM 2, because the procedural generation would often put objectives on the other side of a big map or require scaling a big building to get close. Timer Tweaks and True Concealment solved those problems for me though.
CrocMother
Banned
Sadly I don't think my computer can handle this. It was really chugging near the end of my ABA2 campaign.
Also, there is no harm waiting for 2..or 15 updates to this.
Also, there is no harm waiting for 2..or 15 updates to this.
Poodlestrike
Banned
I really hope True COncealment ends up LW2 compatible.
CrocMother
Banned
I thought that was essentially integrated into LW2?
Kaffeemann
Banned
I never thought that the timers are unfair in XCOM 2. At least not most of the time. No idea how the situation is in LW2 because I barely played it yet.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=847481752
Poodlestrike
Banned
Royal_Phalanx
Member
I suggest setting the timers to a low value so when you are detected by the aliens there is still some real pressure to get out in time. I think True Concealment should be integrated into Long War 2 itself.
CrocMother
Banned
according to this mod compatibility list, true concealment is both compatible in LW2 and elements of it are by default integrated into the mod.
Poodlestrike
Banned
The True Concealment Steam community page said in plain English it wasn't compatible.
shrug.emoji
Ive noticed no elements of TC in LW2. The timers are super brutal on some maps and the clocks tick down regardless.
Poodlestrike
Banned
See, this feels like an issue with enemy patrol patterns to me. Done two LW2 missions with True Concealment, and the first one was straight stealthy. Made it all the way to the hostages before getting detected (goddamn door hacks). The second, I didn't make it more than 4 turns before getting stuck behind cover with a patrol drone starting to flank and was forced to go loud. Neither took more than 25 turns.
Idk, maybe I'm just playing suboptimally, but both were great fun.
Royal_Phalanx
Member
I got spotted 2 turns in by a drone hovering past and I couldn't make it in time. I just popped the evac and held them off until the skyranger arrived.
Played almost the entire weekend. I don't want to install LW2 yet until I finish a first run.
I just had my first encounter with a Sectopod, with 2 Andromedon, a shield bearer and a couple of snakes. All while still having 2 turns to disconnect the alien transmission and 4 out of 6 soldiers with some damage.
That was one hell of a fight
I just had my first encounter with a Sectopod, with 2 Andromedon, a shield bearer and a couple of snakes. All while still having 2 turns to disconnect the alien transmission and 4 out of 6 soldiers with some damage.
That was one hell of a fight
So apparently I skipped a mission that affected what my haven could do, cause suddenly I wasn't gaining intel, which meant I stopped getting mission notifications. Basically took a month to go away, and who knows how far that set me back.
Also ran into faceless for the first time. It's a rather annoying mission, cause I figured out what was happening when a bunch of civilians didn't have those red sight tiles, but you can't manually target them ahead of time, except by just lobbing explosives nearby. It was capture/kill VIP mission too, with normal sized enemy pods in addition to like a dozen faceless. I was forced to kill the VIP for lack of time. Also collapsed most of a very large structure to kill 2-3 pods that had converged onto it's roof and second story. Spent the last 3 turns doing nothing but running to extraction, with 4-5 faceless in pursuit. Managed to escape with everyone on the vesy last turn possible.
Also, Technicals with flamethrowers fuck up faceless.
Also ran into faceless for the first time. It's a rather annoying mission, cause I figured out what was happening when a bunch of civilians didn't have those red sight tiles, but you can't manually target them ahead of time, except by just lobbing explosives nearby. It was capture/kill VIP mission too, with normal sized enemy pods in addition to like a dozen faceless. I was forced to kill the VIP for lack of time. Also collapsed most of a very large structure to kill 2-3 pods that had converged onto it's roof and second story. Spent the last 3 turns doing nothing but running to extraction, with 4-5 faceless in pursuit. Managed to escape with everyone on the vesy last turn possible.
Also, Technicals with flamethrowers fuck up faceless.
So, from some early tweaking with LW2, I think there's definitely reason to update build order and planning from how one would generally approach XCOM2.
Should you Ironman:
- Fuck no. Too many glitches, wait a few months.
Right now I'd say it looks like:
- Ignore the Black Market, its too expensive at start and wastes 3 days.
- AWC (immediately, center tile)
- Excavate (down)
- Workshop
- GWC is too expensive early on, save it for when you have supply surpluses and pray you get good Rookie RNG.
- Haven: Put 4 on Intel/2 on Supply. Supply is going to get syphoned early on by invisible dark events, you're better off farming Intel for Infiltration Boosts and to spread your comm network.
- Geoscape: Focus on a region and liberate it as soon as possible, this helps lessen the burden of spread missions greatly and cuts out Supply losses.
The amount of units you're juggling, and the size of pods in general, makes it damn near impossible to have Flawless runs (without save scrubbing). AWC will allow you to keep ~three~ teams operational and allow you to juggle a large number of objectives.
Units:
- Every unit is great.
- Shinobi can/should be built to entirely counter: Sectoids (free, you get extra damage), Mutons (go for armor ignoring, melee evasion), Stun Troopers, and Berserkers. This is what this unit is best at doing, so make it good at doing this. A Shinobi can one shot a Muton and greatly hurt a Berserker with armor ignoring strikes.
- Flamethrowers are your friend. Burn everything. Be wary of missiles... you can blow yourself up if you are shooting down and the spread hits the floor. Yes, this is stupid.
- Flashbangs. Have your flashbangs ready.
- Blow up cars.
Team sizes:
- Create three cores of four right off the bat and send them on different missions, attach 1 to 2 rookies to each. These are your major cores from here on out.
- Select one of your "core teams" as a light group of ~4 units for short missions with short infiltration timers.
- Select one of your "core teams" as a big group of 6-10 for any mission that simply cannot be infiltrated at all or is hard on a glance. Some missions can pop up with <1 day infiltration and they are simply impossible to meaningfully do anything with. Throw your major team at this.
- (Unless you are changing timers) Avoid all missions that are about "getting a thing", these are 8-turn clusterfucks with you and the objective on opposite ends of the map with 3-5 Pods of 3-5+ aliens between you and the objective. These missions are fucking stupid.
Research:
- Modular Weapons as soon as possible.
- Comms
- Alien Bio Research (on the key from your skull)
- Start researching the aliens for tech. Armor Piercing Rounds from ADVENT are a must.
Should you Ironman:
- Fuck no. Too many glitches, wait a few months.
Right now I'd say it looks like:
- Ignore the Black Market, its too expensive at start and wastes 3 days.
- AWC (immediately, center tile)
- Excavate (down)
- Workshop
- GWC is too expensive early on, save it for when you have supply surpluses and pray you get good Rookie RNG.
- Haven: Put 4 on Intel/2 on Supply. Supply is going to get syphoned early on by invisible dark events, you're better off farming Intel for Infiltration Boosts and to spread your comm network.
- Geoscape: Focus on a region and liberate it as soon as possible, this helps lessen the burden of spread missions greatly and cuts out Supply losses.
The amount of units you're juggling, and the size of pods in general, makes it damn near impossible to have Flawless runs (without save scrubbing). AWC will allow you to keep ~three~ teams operational and allow you to juggle a large number of objectives.
Units:
- Every unit is great.
- Shinobi can/should be built to entirely counter: Sectoids (free, you get extra damage), Mutons (go for armor ignoring, melee evasion), Stun Troopers, and Berserkers. This is what this unit is best at doing, so make it good at doing this. A Shinobi can one shot a Muton and greatly hurt a Berserker with armor ignoring strikes.
- Flamethrowers are your friend. Burn everything. Be wary of missiles... you can blow yourself up if you are shooting down and the spread hits the floor. Yes, this is stupid.
- Flashbangs. Have your flashbangs ready.
- Blow up cars.
Team sizes:
- Create three cores of four right off the bat and send them on different missions, attach 1 to 2 rookies to each. These are your major cores from here on out.
- Select one of your "core teams" as a light group of ~4 units for short missions with short infiltration timers.
- Select one of your "core teams" as a big group of 6-10 for any mission that simply cannot be infiltrated at all or is hard on a glance. Some missions can pop up with <1 day infiltration and they are simply impossible to meaningfully do anything with. Throw your major team at this.
- (Unless you are changing timers) Avoid all missions that are about "getting a thing", these are 8-turn clusterfucks with you and the objective on opposite ends of the map with 3-5 Pods of 3-5+ aliens between you and the objective. These missions are fucking stupid.
Research:
- Modular Weapons as soon as possible.
- Comms
- Alien Bio Research (on the key from your skull)
- Start researching the aliens for tech. Armor Piercing Rounds from ADVENT are a must.
Disagree. The supply siphon is not %, it's fixed - Either go all in with one haven as Eng+6+ supply (and get 200 supplies) or nothing.
This is only for the first haven at the very start of the game. Intel is incredibly important early on to spread your web, and you won't get enough engineers in the first month to do that.
Royal_Phalanx
Member
I tried excluding missions from True Concealment where it would make sense in terms of immersion but doesn't seem to work that well. I might be getting the syntax wrong? Can someone else who has done this help me out?
http://www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=23646
1.1 is going to change things.
(pending changes, not released yet)
Any campaign I do now has all Avanger UI functions missing. Can't build items, research etc. (This one doesn't seem to be addressed in incoming patch 1.1 fixes)
I've restarted, cleaned up the config files, all to no avail.
I really don't want to have to reinstall 40gb of game.
Any ideas?
I've restarted, cleaned up the config files, all to no avail.
I really don't want to have to reinstall 40gb of game.
Any ideas?
Baron_Calamity
Member
How would I know if a mod disables steam achievements? Does the game alert you?
Baron_Calamity
Member
Next play through. They add so much, that you won't get anything from them that late in the game.
Awesome, ok, thank you
warning tho, dont do the viper nest mission the moment you get it (its possible to get it in month 1)unless you are ready. (or try it with a safety save right before)
its a doozy if you do it really early, before you have any real tech.
RandomSeed
Member
Was there ever a mod released that removed all of Bradford's voice acting? I use Quiet Bradford (of course), but I don't want to hear that idiot at all. "Advent came in hot, and so did.." SHUT THE FUCK UP, BRADFORD! GET IN THE CORNER! BAD BRADFORD, BAD! I've played this game a couple hundred damn hours, and I feel like he's going to be the death of me, rather than the aliens.
He's a faceless, isn't he? Come on...has to be.
He's a faceless, isn't he? Come on...has to be.
So finally got this thanks to the humble bundle monthly and WTF!?!! The difficulty for this game makes no damn sense and I'm just on mission 2. I'm playing on the second option and for the life of me I can't make out what I'm doing wrong. The only conclusion I can come to is that the randomness of the attacks makes no sense or is completely in favor of the computer.
I have units in 100% cover from the direction I'm getting attacked from, two sides actually and still getting hit for max damage or crits. It's a common thing as well not once in a while. Yet I keep missing so many attacks where I have a 60% to 70% chance to hit and the enemy is in half cover or no cover. Then there is the round timer to get to an object where majority of that is simply getting to the area unseen (because screw you if you're spotted) and then suddenly meet with half a dozen to a little bit more enemies who never seem to miss. Then to top it off the damn game has the nerve to drop in enemy reinforcements when I do manage to make head way and allow them to move and attack as soon as they drop!? In a random location as well!? Then there is how far they can move and still attack.
I don't want to be forced to drop this down to the lowest difficulty but I might have to. I've played X-Com games before. I've played plenty of strategy games before. I don't think I've seen this before this early on a lower difficulty. I knew something was up when I played first real mission after the tutorial. There were a lot of things in that mission that bothered me but I figured it's X-Com and maybe I'm just rusty. Nope. I've never gone into "Fuck this game" mode this quickly. I don't know if I had massive bad luck with how the attacks come out or what. I wanted to picked this game up at launch because I enjoyed Enemy Unknown so much but wasn't able to. I'm now glad I only spent $12 on this. I'll considered it less if the batch of HBM games end up being decent. Ugh.
I have units in 100% cover from the direction I'm getting attacked from, two sides actually and still getting hit for max damage or crits. It's a common thing as well not once in a while. Yet I keep missing so many attacks where I have a 60% to 70% chance to hit and the enemy is in half cover or no cover. Then there is the round timer to get to an object where majority of that is simply getting to the area unseen (because screw you if you're spotted) and then suddenly meet with half a dozen to a little bit more enemies who never seem to miss. Then to top it off the damn game has the nerve to drop in enemy reinforcements when I do manage to make head way and allow them to move and attack as soon as they drop!? In a random location as well!? Then there is how far they can move and still attack.
I don't want to be forced to drop this down to the lowest difficulty but I might have to. I've played X-Com games before. I've played plenty of strategy games before. I don't think I've seen this before this early on a lower difficulty. I knew something was up when I played first real mission after the tutorial. There were a lot of things in that mission that bothered me but I figured it's X-Com and maybe I'm just rusty. Nope. I've never gone into "Fuck this game" mode this quickly. I don't know if I had massive bad luck with how the attacks come out or what. I wanted to picked this game up at launch because I enjoyed Enemy Unknown so much but wasn't able to. I'm now glad I only spent $12 on this. I'll considered it less if the batch of HBM games end up being decent. Ugh.
RandomSeed
Member
Watch someone do a couple of mission on youtube to get the idea what you're supposed to do. As a general rule, if enemies are taking shots at your squad, you did something wrong in the initiation or execution of your turn. Cover is not "100%", it adds 20 for half, and 40 defense for full cover. 60 and 70% shots are still going to miss often. You should not be setting off a half dozen enemies to fight at once. The average pod size is going to be like 3 aliens to take out. Use explosives extensively early to remove cover and give the rest of your squad higher percentage shots. If you don't think your shot will finish off the enemy, leaving you in a position to take return fire, then use another grenade for that guaranteed damage. High ground will give your squad a bonus to hit, and you should use flanking when you know you won't uncover new fog and possibly set off another pod.
Don't let your ego get in the way of dropping down the difficulty, either. I mean, that's what it's there for. I didn't know what the hell I was doing with Civ 5 when I got it, so I had to go to the easiest setting, and crank it up each playthrough until I found the one best for me.
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