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XCOM 2 |OT| Be Aggressive! Be Be Aggressive!

J

Jintor

Member
ugh it's probably irresponsible of me to preorder a pc game when i dont' know if 1070 card prices will drop before then (i had to slot in my backup vid card and now everything sucks balls)
 
T

TC McQueen

Member
Spacecowboy77 said:
So the official pricing for the expansion is 40$. Kinda expensive in my opinion, given that Enemy Within was 30$.
Click to expand...
Considering the amount of stuff they've done for this expansion, including obsoleting multiple mods by incorporating their features into the expansion, plus getting a bunch of Star Trek: The Next Generation actors to voice stuff, $40 seems like a reasonable price.
 
B

Baron_Calamity

Member
Spacecowboy77 said:
So the official pricing for the expansion is 40$. Kinda expensive in my opinion, given that Enemy Within was 30$.

If anybody wants to preorder, the best price I've seen so far is 29.51$ through Green Man Gaming with coupon code 2017E318OFF

https://www.greenmangaming.com/games/xcom-2-war-of-the-chosen
Click to expand...


Meh. its a little high but Xcom games have always given a lot more hours per $1 gameplay. I won't preorder but I'll probably get it at the launch price.
 
E

Erheller

Member
Jintor said:
ugh it's probably irresponsible of me to preorder a pc game when i dont' know if 1070 card prices will drop before then (i had to slot in my backup vid card and now everything sucks balls)
Click to expand...

Well, 580's are actually getting back in stock now so it's possible that the mining craze is dying down.
 
P

Poodlestrike

Banned
Doing a long war run and God dammit I'm gonna finally finish this thing. Early, but it's going well at month 3. Got 4 squads at mostly full strength,base is coming along nicely, have a Proving Ground and an AWC. Probably going to build a Resistance Radio or Guerilla Warfare center next. Found an extra resistance contact and I just need to finish my current mission to get enough Intel to use it, bringing total to 4. Pretty happy so far.
 
J

jtb

Banned
How long does a LW2 playthrough take? I feel like I'm ready to give it a shot, but not if it's going to consume every waking moment of my life
 
A

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
jtb said:
How long does a LW2 playthrough take? I feel like I'm ready to give it a shot, but not if it's going to consume every waking moment of my life
Click to expand...

100h or so.
But don't worry about that, it takes a few tries before you can even think of taking a campaign to completion.
 
L

LurkerPrime

Member
What are the chances Long War Studio will update their comissioned, pre-LW2 mods for compatibility with the War of the Chosen expansion? IIRC they're working on their own game now.

...I really like those mods.
 
P

Poodlestrike

Banned
LurkerPrime said:
What are the chances Long War Studio will update their comissioned, pre-LW2 mods for compatibility with the War of the Chosen expansion? IIRC they're working on their own game now.

...I really like those mods.
Click to expand...

They were working on their own game when they made LW2, too. Gotta imagine somebody over at Firaxis is working to make it happen.
 
Evolved1

Evolved1

make sure the pudding isn't too soggy but that just ruins everything
I love when you lose a soldier in full cover to some scrub AI standing in the open who hasn't flanked you or capitalized on a height advantage. I understand RNG... but this shit should be weighted somehow. Full cover should nerf incoming damage potential, not just be some all or nothing chance to hit. Especially since I honestly don't trust XCOM RNG lol... it's just too weird too often.

I don't know... just crazy how often I take hits in full cover. That shit feels like a betrayal.
 
C

CrocMother

Banned
Evolved1 said:
I love when you lose a soldier in full cover to some scrub AI standing in the open who hasn't flanked you or capitalized on a height advantage. I understand RNG... but this shit should be weighted somehow. Full cover should nerf incoming damage potential, not just be some all or nothing chance to hit. Especially since I honestly don't trust XCOM RNG lol... it's just too weird too often.

I don't know... just crazy how often I take hits in full cover. That shit feels like a betrayal.
Click to expand...

I'm not ashamed to say I'd save scum a well promoted soldier getting crit'd in full cover or something like that.
 
E

Erheller

Member
Evolved1 said:
I love when you lose a soldier in full cover to some scrub AI standing in the open who hasn't flanked you or capitalized on a height advantage. I understand RNG... but this shit should be weighted somehow. Full cover should nerf incoming damage potential, not just be some all or nothing chance to hit. Especially since I honestly don't trust XCOM RNG lol... it's just too weird too often.

I don't know... just crazy how often I take hits in full cover. That shit feels like a betrayal.
Click to expand...

Are you playing on a difficulty below legendary? If so, the game's RNG is actually cheating in your favor :p

Standing in cover, even in full cover, doesn't make a soldier magically invincible. Full cover only gives your soldiers 40% evasion, and aliens have 60+ aim if I remember correctly. So even in a best-case scenario, the aliens probably have a 20% chance of hitting your soldier. Add in more advanced aliens, aiming angles, and marks, and that hit rate can approach 50%.

The easiest way to mitigate that is to kill or disable (flash bang, mimic beacon, status effects, etc) every alien you see every turn so that they either don't get a chance to shoot at you, or if they live and take a shot, they have bad aim.

Also, Long War had damage reduction for standing in cover. Enemies also got damage reduction. Mechanical enemies got lots of damage reduction. Damage reduction made the game harder for the most part, not easier.
 
S

SRG01

Member
Erheller said:
Are you playing on a difficulty below legendary? If so, the game's RNG is actually cheating in your favor :p

Standing in cover, even in full cover, doesn't make a soldier magically invincible. Full cover only gives your soldiers 40% evasion, and aliens have 60+ aim if I remember correctly. So even in a best-case scenario, the aliens probably have a 20% chance of hitting your soldier. Add in more advanced aliens, aiming angles, and marks, and that hit rate can approach 50%.

The easiest way to mitigate that is to kill or disable (flash bang, mimic beacon, status effects, etc) every alien you see every turn so that they either don't get a chance to shoot at you, or if they live and take a shot, they have bad aim.

Also, Long War had damage reduction for standing in cover. Enemies also got damage reduction. Mechanical enemies got lots of damage reduction. Damage reduction made the game harder for the most part, not easier.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the thing about XCOM 2 is that turtling in cover is the wrong strategy. Cover is important, of course, but it has to be mixed with an aggressive play style.

Knock out as many aliens as you can, then disable the rest.
 
J

jtb

Banned
I don't like how the game so heavily incentivises breaking the game's encoutners into such bite-sized chunks; 2 or 3 units at a time. (I know there's a name for this, but I can't remember it off the top of my head)

Sure, you're being "aggressive" but only because the game's processing engine is too shitty to ever want to calculate more than 3 AI units at any given point in time. If you're not longer in stealth, why would enemies not all rush you - regardless of whether you "activate" them or not?

At that point, it's faux-aggresion because the game is actively encouraging you to game its systems.
 
G

Grimsen

Member
jtb said:
I don't like how the game so heavily incentivises breaking the game's encoutners into such bite-sized chunks; 2 or 3 units at a time. (I know there's a name for this, but I can't remember it off the top of my head)

Sure, you're being "aggressive" but only because the game's processing engine is too shitty to ever want to calculate more than 3 AI units at any given point in time. If you're not longer in stealth, why would enemies not all rush you - regardless of whether you "activate" them or not?

At that point, it's faux-aggresion because the game is actively encouraging you to game its systems.
Click to expand...

You can face way more enemies than 3 at any given time in xcom 2, not sure why you'd make stuff up like a shitty processing engine?

Edit: there are mods if you want all pods to rush you, and in LW2, pods react to noise if they're within a certain distance.
 
J

jtb

Banned
Grimsen said:
You can face way more enemies than 3 at any given time in xcom 2, not sure why you'd make stuff up like a shitty processing engine?

Edit: there are mods if you want all pods to rush you, and in LW2, pods react to noise if they're within a certain distance.
Click to expand...

No, the game incentivizes you to only activate one pod at a time, and wipe them out in one turn. Rinse, repeat. Which doesn't feel very agressive to me. If you're good (at the base game anyways), you'll divide and conquer each pod as efficiently and quickly as possible, and if you get drawn out in a long encounter with multiple pods, you're fucked.

The game has well-documented horrible performance issues (particularly for a turn based game), how is that something I'm making up?

What I am doing is connecting those two dots. But the first game was the same with its pod centric design, but it didn't have stealth/detection mechanics built in iirc
 
T

TC McQueen

Member
Grimsen said:
It'd make sense if the performance tanked specifically when facing multiple pods. It doesn't.
Click to expand...
If anything, it's all the damn shaders that tank performance. When I got my Ryzen 5 1600X, XCOM 2 was configured to use 2 cores for shaders, because that's all my i5-3570K could do. I hit 30FPS on tactical before blowing things up/lighting them on fire. I set XCOM 2 to use 4 cores and my tactical layer FPS jumped to 60FPS before stuff blew up/lit on fire.

If they can optimize shader loading/handling, that would do a hell of a lot to boost performance.
 
A

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
jtb said:
No, the game incentivizes you to only activate one pod at a time, and wipe them out in one turn. Rinse, repeat. Which doesn't feel very agressive to me. If you're good (at the base game anyways), you'll divide and conquer each pod as efficiently and quickly as possible, and if you get drawn out in a long encounter with multiple pods, you're fucked.

The game has well-documented horrible performance issues (particularly for a turn based game), how is that something I'm making up?

What I am doing is connecting those two dots. But the first game was the same with its pod centric design, but it didn't have stealth/detection mechanics built in iirc
Click to expand...

The reality is that the most interesting decisions of the game are "Can i do this without triggering a pod" - balancing pod fightning vs new pod activation.

10+ firefights are fun because they're novel - but they devolve in slugfests very far.
"It doesn't have to be so?" Maybe. But nobody in the genre has done 10+ vs 10+ tactical engaments that don't feel like slugfests and where individual skills and varieties don't matter, so i'd say there's wisdom in how XCOM approaches tactical combat.
 
S

Sblargh

Banned
Finished my first ever legendary ironman run without losing a single soldier and doesn't have the screenshot to prove it because the game crashed after I killed the last boss and now the save file is just corrupted.

So yay, one of the toughest things I ever done in gaming and can't properly brag about it due to lack of evidence.

Oh. Watching the Firaxis own playthrough and they talked about alien rulers.

They don't react anymore to every single action you spend (reload for example don't trigger a reaction) and they only appear on specific missions like defending a facility, so you kind of know when to find them. I can get behind those. I love the rulers, I think they are an excellent twist on the normal rules. That said, since they can't be disabled like a normal unit, and since they are very efficient at disabling your soldiers, they can be unfair under certain conditions.

Anyway, it is a nerf, but it seems to make sense.
 
S

Sblargh

Banned
Covert actions seem to be a soldier dump. This plus fatigue I guess they set out on a mentality to not have soldiers doing nothing.
 
L

LurkerPrime

Member
Sblargh said:
Covert actions seem to be a soldier dump. This plus fatigue I guess they set out on a mentality to not have soldiers doing nothing.
Click to expand...

Plus the soldier intelligence, soldier compatibility, and quirks(?). There's a whole lot more stats flying around that need to be considered when optimising a squad.

I really like the sound of all these changes and additions. More RPG in my strategy is always welcome.
 
S

Sblargh

Banned
Man, I am so hyped for this expansion.

I was trying Long War 2 again and there's two things I love about Long War 2:
The infiltration mechanic and squad management.

I really like this notion of having different teams doing their own thing around the world, I like not having on super-team because it makes XCOM less of about a war and more about these 5 people who are eventually replaced.

Otoh, I just can't play the tactical layer of Long War 2. I really enjoy vanilla's focus on killing the pod the turn it appears. I know it is something that turn people off, specially because trading shots back and forth looking for a flank was how EU/EW worked and in that regard, LW2 captures it perfectly.

Otoh, I prefer Vanilla "this is a puzzle: how many can you kill/disable before the turn is over" approach so much more. So War of the Chosen, I hope, will scratch the itches LW2 scratch, i.e., the squad management, the feeling that I am coordinating a larger team composed of smaller units doing their own things instead of this linear supersquad while keeping the tactical layer mostly intact, because imo it doesn't need work.

I would still prefer something like the infiltration mechanic over fatigue because I really like the feeling on LW2 that there is a lot going on and you have to pick and choose which of these opportunities you will take and it always annoyed me how Vanilla forces you to take every mission.

And there's a combination of mods that resolve that up to a point:

- Mission Penalty Rebalance: It makes so you can ignore missions and no big deal (you just don't get the reward); just retaliation have a more mandatory feeling to it.

- Scanning Sites Plus: It gives you more scanning sites after you complete missions, but instead of just giving you the reward, it gives sends you into another mission.

- Fatigue updated or something: It's a fatigue mechanic.

And well, it works, but the infiltration system overall is more interesting.

So with the expansion, we will get fatigue, which is not optimal imo, but you also have bonding and its own infiltration missions. Anyway, as I said, it looks like they are giving your soldiers things to do and that's great. I do feel that's what the game is mostly missing.

So now I am on this situation where I want to play the game, I start it and it doesn't feel right. It feels like it is missing stuff that I never played it before.

I really hope the expansion comes with LW2 cool Squad Management screen where each squad has a different name and a different logo. If not, I hope a mod comes out soon. Because it is mostly cosmetic, maybe a little on the qol side, but it feels bettet to deploy "this squad here" instead of "these six people who are not fatigued right now".

And I bet it will be a great feeling to assemble combinations of bonded duos.

tl;dr: waah waah I want expansion NOW!
 
S

Sblargh

Banned
Oh man, futon objectives is cool.
I already use a mod that does it (as well as replacing timers by constant reinforcements) and all I can think is that it is cool that this is official because now the mod can get better. lol

Long War 2 had already introduced smash and grab missions. The notion of doing something while fighting endless waves and then having to make a choice to either leave with little or possibly overextending yourself is too good and makes too sense in the context of the game.

Playing the guerrilla war mods (it used to be one mod, now it is broken into 3 different ones: one that allows you to carry corpses out of the battlefield, another that replaces timers with reinforcements and another that delay evac and creates a zone where no enemy can be within otherwise it will be busted) is too good. Again, makes too much sense that the notion of eliminating all the enemies is ultimately impossible on a conquered world. It really feels like "oh, this is how the game should have been".

Anyway, it's very cool that this type of mission is official, I can dream that one of the second wave mods will be exactly that: replacing timers with reinforcements.
 
S

Sblargh

Banned
F4W8Kfg.jpg
Click to expand...

Mechanics spoiler, not story spoiler.

Man, some of these seem pretty powerful.
All of them combined and wow. But I guess a full screen like this is pretty late game.
 
S

Sblargh

Banned
I thought it was going to be a second wave option, with the timer rebalanced (like, less two turns to compensate). As it is, this is just a plain buff, lol. Not that I'm complaining, but you're basically adding free turns to your timer.

But the "collects instantly" duo is what seems really good to me. Shave enough days from scanning stuff on the map and I might actually use scanning time to accelerate construction or healing.
 
T

TC McQueen

Member
Here's a kick ass program that makes optimizing performance for XCOM 2 ultra easy:
https://github.com/HinoOokami/UE-Optimizer

Does everything in that UE3 optimization tutorial on Steam for you.

Instructions:
Select how much VRAM your video card has.

Select a folder \ users \ yournamehere \ documents \ my games \ (it will preselect Documents folder for you).

Then it will list all detected games and paths to their .ini files. Check what .ini files you want to modify and my program will do it for you (it will even make a backup of modified files).

Click Apply and it will try to make a backup copy in the same directory, remove ReadOnly from an .ini file if present, make changes and place ReadOnly flag so a game won't change anything back.

If you have a bunch of Access Errors try to launch in Admin mode.
Click to expand...
 
S

Sblargh

Banned
TC McQueen said:
Important info from Total Biscuit's stream - you can leave Target Preview on all the time.
Click to expand...

I don't know how I feel about it versus gotcha, in terms of UI.

UI to me is always about where are your eyes: at the interesting colorful stuff or at some stat and Gotcha makes you look at the map whaile the target preview thing on the bottom of the screen makes you look... well, at the bottom of the screen.

Otoh, there are plenty of situations where you have to do trickery with the map to get the information you are looking for and the target preview thingie at the bottom is always available.
 
G

Golden_Pigeon

Banned
Xcom 2 is heavily discounted on the US PSN right now:

29.99
23.99 (PSN +)

Annnnnnnnnnd bought !!! FINALLY

It's really nice of them to discount heavily the game with the new expansion coming along.
 
M

MrCompletely

Member
Sblargh said:
I don't know how I feel about it versus gotcha, in terms of UI.

UI to me is always about where are your eyes: at the interesting colorful stuff or at some stat and Gotcha makes you look at the map whaile the target preview thing on the bottom of the screen makes you look... well, at the bottom of the screen.

Otoh, there are plenty of situations where you have to do trickery with the map to get the information you are looking for and the target preview thingie at the bottom is always available.
Click to expand...

To your point about map trickery, I think the preview always on at the bottom is much smoother to deal with. The only thing I'm not sure of with this new official target preview is how to correlate the target icons in the preview with the actual targets on the map.
 
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