XCom 2 anyone?

Peregrino

Fair warning, when I wasn't playing an IRE MUD and in my post WoW period, I was playing XCom: Enemy Unknown.  I got to where I could beat the game easily on classic ironman and I made many attempts at impossible ironman, but as a friend once said, it's called impossible difficulty, not reasonably difficult difficulty.  So I never did beat I/I although I passed the 100 day mark at one point before some lucky (for them) chrysalids turned the game into CCom.

I've been playing XCom 2 and while I think it's a good game, the performance issues are the stuff of legends and I just haven't been able to get into it.  My pet peeve is the stun lancers and their suicidal AI.  In the first game if you killed all of an alien's friends it would be like "wow, I'm getting out of here" and in XCom 2 they charge you and kill somebody before dying.  When you combine that with a turn limit in most missions it gets pretty annoying.  I used a mod to nerf them a bit so that they actually stun like their name implies instead of killing you which helped a bit but it still hasn't been as fun as the first game for me.

So, anyone else play it?

Aepas

One that note, Stun lancers are going to be difficult early game until you get magnetic weapons. By the time you find Elite stun lancers I hope you got plasma. 

Stun lancers have a pretty painful start, and really they should be focused above all else save for a bound ally. I typically focus Lancers/vipers(bound)/commanders/sectoid

The performance issues are not that bad to me, it only happened during a few cutscenes but the gameplay was mostly flawless. 

Learn when to retreat, Panic is no longer an issue so there is no problem with pulling out, except for the fact you don't counter a dark event which all suck, so you just have to deal with it. I lost my first 3 retaliation missions in a row because I just gave up, and still ended up beating the game. I pulled out of a few escort missions as well. Keeping soldiers alive and well is the best you can do. Overall, I find Xcom 2 to be much more rewarding than the first one, much more difficult, and glorious.

Get the warfare lab ASAP so you can unlock your extra potential on your soldiers. Everyone gets 1 bonus perk, only unlocked with the warfare center so if they get it at lvl 2 and you don't have it built yet, they'll never get it. 
Armor shred is your friend, I'd take that over anything anyday. Acid grenades are great. 
Psi-lab rush rush rush, the base skill STASIS saved my team more times than I can imagine.

I assume if you're having trouble with stun lancers you have not met crysalids yet... 

Enjoy!

Peregrino

Aepas said:

One that note, Stun lancers are going to be difficult early game until you get magnetic weapons. By the time you find Elite stun lancers I hope you got plasma. 

Stun lancers have a pretty painful start, and really they should be focused above all else save for a bound ally. I typically focus Lancers/vipers(bound)/commanders/sectoid

The performance issues are not that bad to me, it only happened during a few cutscenes but the gameplay was mostly flawless. 

Learn when to retreat, Panic is no longer an issue so there is no problem with pulling out, except for the fact you don't counter a dark event which all suck, so you just have to deal with it. I lost my first 3 retaliation missions in a row because I just gave up, and still ended up beating the game. I pulled out of a few escort missions as well. Keeping soldiers alive and well is the best you can do. Overall, I find Xcom 2 to be much more rewarding than the first one, much more difficult, and glorious.

Get the warfare lab ASAP so you can unlock your extra potential on your soldiers. Everyone gets 1 bonus perk, only unlocked with the warfare center so if they get it at lvl 2 and you don't have it built yet, they'll never get it. 
Armor shred is your friend, I'd take that over anything anyday. Acid grenades are great. 
Psi-lab rush rush rush, the base skill STASIS saved my team more times than I can imagine.

I assume if you're having trouble with stun lancers you have not met crysalids yet... 

Enjoy!

Thanks for the advice I did figure out that I had to attack stun lancers first with high priority.  I eventually beat the game on veteran on my first playthrough.  My computer is getting old (nvidia 640 GT, dual core CPU) so my performance has been particularly bad.  Otherwise I might have played through it again.  I started a second playthrough on commander ironman but got wiped and thought to myself, it's too jumpy for me to try and come back from this.

I think my standards might be too high, I never quit a mission and quit after my first fail in ironman :P But not because the game was horrible or anything.

I also sold all of my advent troopers in my first playthrough and had to save scum my way straight to warden armor which was pretty meh and probably part of why I hate lancers so much.  Having a level 2 or 3 stun lancer hit someone with no armor is brutal.

Peregrino

Also I agree with the psi lab rush.  That was basically when the game switched from hard to easy for me, the aliens dropped like flies against the psi stuff.  Except for those gatekeepers, wow.

Aepas

Yeah, Commander is a good bit more difficult. I think the main changes are that
AI (unshackled)
movement (unshackled)
LOS (unshackled)

Then everything pretty much gets +1 health and +1 armor if it has armor.
and of course your soldiers get -1 health, and I think miss one health upgrade when leveling, so your colonels have -2 health at the end. 

In xcom 1 I would restart the game after a wipe, but that's the beauty of Xcom 2. You can actually salvage your game even if you see that your team is going to die. A lot of times you can sense the impending doom before the next turn, so you can evac most of your guys. Also remember to evac anyone that might die from crysalid poison or something similar, the get healed in the skyranger. 

Darktalon

Oddly I haven't had much issue with the lancers. Archons appearing out of the shadows and hitting for a kill in 1 shot has happened several times. Gatekeepers are beyond crazy as well, either drop them as soon as you see them or be ready for a lot of problems.

Citrus

I recommend some mods to fix some of the issues you have with 2.

Some I use:
Stop Wasting My Time: speeds up/gets rid of a lot of the pauses in between actions/turns.
True Concealment: the mission timer doesn't tick down until you are revealed, allowing you to play more tactically at the start.
Accurate Swords:  never miss with swords, cause I mean come on.

There's also some AI mods that improve the enemy AI in the game, as well as a mod that makes the roll system the same as Enemy Within, which rolls miss/hit/crit/dodge separately unlike XCom 2 which rolls all of them together.

Aepas

Citrus said:

I recommend some mods to fix some of the issues you have with 2.

Some I use:
Stop Wasting My Time: speeds up/gets rid of a lot of the pauses in between actions/turns.
True Concealment: the mission timer doesn't tick down until you are revealed, allowing you to play more tactically at the start.
Accurate Swords:  never miss with swords, cause I mean come on.

There's also some AI mods that improve the enemy AI in the game, as well as a mod that makes the roll system the same as Enemy Within, which rolls miss/hit/crit/dodge separately unlike XCom 2 which rolls all of them together.

Stop wasting my time is a good mod, but True concealment and accurate swords are kind of lame. They take away from the urgency of missions for starters, and the strength of the sword is in it's movement and to hit, not one or the other. It's fairly balanced as it is, plus you can get it up to 100% if you really want with a PCS. 

I can't see a reason the AI mods would be needed since on Commander mode they were pretty solid in most respects, and as for seed generation instead of rolls, I prefer that because it makes save scumming quite a bit more difficult to do. If you plan on doing the quick-load quick-save I could see a reason to change how rolls work. I've never really understood the idea behind mods that  just make things easier. 

Peregrino

I once had a mission where the extraction zone was 3-4 dashes away from the VIP target.  It was horribad.  I had to save scum it real hard.  If I got that in ironman I would just consider at least most of the squad DOA.  So I like true concealment.  I take my time setting up my ambushes and stuff.

I'm considering making my own mod, where the aliens have one giant group in each level (more realistic) but fewer aliens total, but there's more dropships that come in.  The dropships would contain more aliens too, not just 3.  I haven't gotten around to it though cause my poor system performance makes it unmotivating.

Aepas

I guess, but it seems like it takes away from the hit and run tactics. The whole game is made to play out as risk and reward, from how the loot drops to hacking systems. It makes sense that you only get a few turns to Evac someone when you're in on a stealthy operation before they notice a whole dropship waiting on you. The game is perfectly playable even on those missions because you have the tools needed to get through that kind of situation as long as you read the description first and actually build your items. 

Missions where escorting is primary and you have to run quickly. 
2x flashbangs 2x mimic beacons. 2x specialist and 1 psi operative, then mix it up. 

As much fun as the modding community can be I'll never really agree with making a part of that game easier on people. It's not meant to be easy.

Peregrino

The psi troopers actually really disappointed me.  I loved how in the first game you check your existing troops and see which one has the "gift" of psi powers and then you make one of them the "volunteer".  Making psi soldiers a mostly normal class takes away that special feeling.

Peregrino

This is how I usually play XCom:

Jukilian

85%?

Pfft, man. You're not playing it right.

 http://plays.tv/s/KieNQWrZLFVv

Here's a shot I did the other day.