The Firaxis XCOM Series

Turns ouf my recent playthrough also got corrupted. Even multiple save files didn't help. Oh XCOM you tease!

Now playing Normal Ironman.

Did Site Recon... Mission failed. 5 lieutenants died, including my favorite Support...

Before that, a squad of 5 got ambushed by 3 Chryssalid in a UFO landing mission. Lost 2 operatives. Zhang and Delta-2 barely made it out.

Does Site Recon usually happens before Gangplank? It wasn't the case in my last playthroughs.

North and South America + Africa are fully covered. I'm planning to cover Asia next.

edited 15th Mar '17 7:58:10 PM by RAlexa21th

Site Recon has a set appearance for its first occurrence, then it goes into the pool of random missions for subsequent campaigns.

I found Site Recon to be much easier if you have a MEC along, since you can use Collateral Damage to destroy fish before they burst, and it's not limited.

edited 15th Mar '17 11:34:09 PM by Medinoc

I was an atom away from screaming at the game yesterday.

With my previous playthrough done, I started a new one with the intention of getting that achievement of one soldier making it through every mission. I even lucked out and got a Sniper from my first mission's rookies, whom I started to gear towards Squadsight in order to keep him out of harm's way.

That is, until we assaulted a Small Scout where he got flanked by a Thin Man and hurt 1 HP. 1 HP. Which for some reason took him out of commission for 7 days, with an abduction popping up the very next day.

The game also seems to randomly switch between autosaving the last 3 turns or autosaving only the last one.

Also headdesked during Gangplank when the last remaining alien on the map was a Muton whom I hurt all the way down to 2 HP, then Suppressed with Zhang and flanked with an Assault with intent to capture. Except the fucker shrugged off the 80% stun repeatedly, regardless of how much I marched my other soldiers around to jiggle the RNG into a favorable roll.

edited 16th Mar '17 11:49:33 AM by amitakartok

How many times?

Is Save Scum on?

I don't know, somewhere around ten. Then I got sick of the game actively sabotaging my efforts and just shot the bastard in the face because Zhang didn't have enough ammo to Suppress it again.

No but the in-game hints say that RNG rolls only come up the same if they're preceded by the exact same sequence of events. Save Scum is only for resetting the RNG on demand.

edited 16th Mar '17 3:17:50 PM by amitakartok

I'm pretty sure you need to actually take an action that uses the RNG to save scum without Save Scum active. Moving differently doesn't cut it.

Which means you could try shooting at it first, there's a good chance it would miss.

Delta-2 stepped up to become a MEC trooper, but I kept forgetting to equip him with railgun. Circumstances forced me to assault the Alien Base early. Fortunately everyone got out alive.

The Aliens attacked HQ just a few days before I had Ammo Conservation and Tactical Rigging. The 2 gene mod were thankfully available just in time. Zhang still had his laser machine gun, but the Colonel Sniper only had ballistic weapon (ironically she's the MVP of the game thanks to Double Tap and Squadsight shooting down Sectoid Commanders and Floaters left and right. Disabling shot was super helpful agains Cyberdisk too).

Lost 4 blueshirts defending the HQ. One of them was zombified, dealt heavy damage to Delta-2, and then proceeded to fall off balconies and trip over ledges. Even in death she was a Butt-Monkey.

Poor blue shirts. Random brainstorm idea: one thing that could have improved the base defense and gave less incentive to turtle would be to make the forward areas more defensible. A good way to do this would be to make blue shirts more useful (even though watching the last HP of Mechtoids get plinked down by assault rifles is so satisfying) by adding secondary objectives. Maybe the highground in both of the forward areas has a fixed gun emplacement that takes several actions to set up, so the blue shirts could sacrifice their AP to that. Once it's set up, it'd could be manned to have something like fixed base Aim with MEC minigun-levels of damage output. This would significantly buff the blue shirts while still in that area, but still have it as outdated tech that the normal operatives wouldn't bother with. It would be imperative that the command center itself not have an emplacement, though (however, there could probably be some argument for having one at the rear balcony).

Ah....blue shirts. My favourite suicide grenadiers.

Encountered a Game-Breaking Bug again. Looks like XCOM is a game that only wants to be finished once.

Or else XCOM 2 is trying to shake you out of your endless combat simulations so you can lead the resistance.

On that note, I hope you kept a late-game save file of your first campaign, so you can take some screenshots that will help you recreate your favorite soldiers for the sequel.

That's kinda crazy. You're on console, right? What broke this time?

I mean, I guess the PC version earned a certain reputation for game-enders (like the teleporting pods that got to also immediately take their turn that murdered thousands of I/I runs), but I thought they largely patched it into being stable.

XB360

When the Skyranger reaches a destination, I get 2 options: assault and return to base. Assault freezes the game and Returning gets me stuck in an endless loop.

Training Roulette is fun. Zhang got Field Medic and Savior right off the bat. I'm glad that Squadsight and Snapshot are still there for Snipers. None if my troops have HEAT ammo yet, which concerns me.

Completed Site Recon. MEC Trooper and Rapid Fire Scatter Laser were handy for OHKO, and MEC can reach the transponder pretty quickly too.

Training Roulette is neat but you tend to end up with a squad full of Masters of None, which can make it difficult to handle certain situations.

I love Training Roulette. It's a lot of fun. I find most builds are still usable and sometimes you'll luck into some awesome perk combos, but you'll have a great deal of difficulty making a dedicated medic. Soldiers with crap perks get chopped up into ME Cs.

edited 19th Mar '17 8:16:56 AM by nightwyrm_zero

I have an Assault with Lightning Reflex, Heat Ammo, and Double Tap. Perfect for screwing up Sectopods.

Kinda disappointing. Where are the Aliens, Operatives, and personnels?

And everyone survived. Totally inexcusable.

A true XCOM coaster ride would have everyone sit down and then it would roll with a 95% chance to actually start. If it misses, then everyone has to get off and nobody gets a refund. An XCOM 2 one would be the same except when it starts there is a chance it will occasionally stop in the middle of a dive and reverse to the start.

Anyways, some of my thoughts on Long War 2:

The mod starts real well with brand new mechanics, classes and enemies that makes the game feel brand new (note I never played any of Pavonis' X2 mods prior to LW 2). I especially like that the new infiltration mechanic ensures you must have a large soldier roster that doesn't collect dust throughout the campaign.

However, the mod has some serious issues in the mid-campaign that makes playing it really frustrating for me. The sheer bulk of enemies makes playing aggressively very risky since a step in any direction can activate up to 10 enemies (frequently on your flank) when you're already knee deep in them. I also hate that on some missions (mainly the hacking ones) the enemy gets reinforcements every turn when you're already outnumbered. I get that in vanilla reinforcements were usually just free overwatch kills but this happens even on extremely light missions beyond 100% infiltration. LW 1 as well as vanilla EU/EW and X2 was disadvantageous to aggression as well, but it was still viable. But the more I play LW 2, the less viable it becomes and that's problematic when the vast majority of your missions are timed.

Vanilla X2 had some serious snowballing problems (in both directions, granted) but LW 2 strips out all the overpoweredness of your troops and does nothing to limit the enemies' bullshit and in some cases gets new ones. Enemies still get a free move into cover but now also get a free action when they activate on their turn (intentionally or not). Dodge is still in the game but now I'm finding it on ME Cs as well.

TLDR: I don't know if I'll continue to play LW 2 for long unless it get seriously patched. I'm finding myself save scumming more and more because I just find it plain unfair.