XCOM 2 Tips and Tricks!

I'd like this to be a thread where you can share your tactics, tips, and tricks for busting the alien menace down to size. If you are going to mention any enemy or ability that isn't in the tutorial of the game (as you literally can't do anything but what they tell you, so you should check that out before coming here), I'd ask you to spoiler it for those who want to go in blind.

Here's a few to get you started:

• Left Ctrl will allow you to move your units to waypoints, which means you can plot out exactly how they'd make a move (so they don't run into fire or bust through a window)
• The game isn't specific, but Overwatch while Concealed doesn't have the aim penalty that it normally confers.
• Certain abilities grant damaging moves that cannot miss or fail. They are great for taking out enemies in high cover, especially if you are out of grenades.

Feel free to add anything you learn or discover as you go!

It seems like building the Advanced Warfare Center early could be a big one. Not only can it reduce healing times of wounded troops or retrain skills, but it also grants a chance to give a soldier a random skill from another skill tree every time they get promoted. So, the earlier the better on this one.

edit...and I just got my first random ability, a Specialist with Chain Shot. That is normally a Grenadier skill. Pretty cool!

I've now knocked over the first major objective, the Advent Blacksite, and I've come away with some more tips!

1. Even a 100% shot can still "graze" an enemy, doing reduced damage. Don't assume you'll get the damage listed, even on flanks!
2. Medkits protect the holder from poison. I totally forgot how useful that can be.
3. You get diminishing returns on scientists. I'm down to something like a 13% reasearch speed boost for picking one up.
4. You get a big power boost if you wait to put a generator on one of the power coils, which are buried deeper in your ship. Or, you can use those rooms for any other building, with no power cost.
5. Grenadiers can launch any grenade type, even if it isn't in the grenade slot. This includes flashbangs or smoke, which is handy as you can only take one damaging grenade type per solider.
6. The Sharpshooter's pistol also uses whatever ammo type you have equipped, not just his sniper rifle.

I would like to emphasize this point. Especially since the new types of grenades and ammo are almost free (requiring only a single item) and are quite useful. Finally getting these new toys really helped.

@mike Still haven't gotten a single extra skill from AWC and I built it first and already have several captains :/

Best tip ever: Flashbangs counter Sectoids. Breaks mind control, kills zombies and prevents Sectoid ability use on the next turn.

You are welcome

You know what else counters Sectoids? - A long sharp piece of metal! Seriously tho that is a good tip, especially when you don't want to move too much forward with your sword ninjas.

By the way if anyone wants to see some ridiculous shit, put a sword build ranger with Blade Storm in the middle of an enemy reinforcement drop, add sharpshooter with Kill Zone for even more hilarity.

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One thing that confuses me is how to make more of the specialty grenades you first get through Proving Grounds (acid, napalm, etc)? There doesn't seem to be a way to build them directly afterward. Do you just have to roll the dice again?

@tennmuerti: It's all dice rolls. Everything is good, but some are better than others. If you want multiple copies of the same grenade, you just have to get lucky. I guess it's a balance thing, but one of the mods I'd like to see would revolve around paying supplies/core to build those specialty grenades once you rolled them.

• Early game frag grenades are a godsend. I usually use one as my first move in an encounter because I can get at least one (usually 2) guaranteed hit(s) (kills if it's the weak troopers) and reduce the inevitable volley that I know is coming my way as soon as I initiate contact.
• I don't know this for sure but high ground seems to have a bigger effect on aim % than in EU. It's really easy to get snipers situated in this when you are concealed so get them in position on some high ground before you attack

Question: Is there an assault class analog in this? I feel totally naked without my big boys up front.

@nevergameover: Ranger is the new Assault analog, at least that's how I have been using them. I play Rangers in the front, Specialists/Gunners/Grenadiers in the middle, and Snipers in the rear.

Try out Flashbangs. As soon as normal grenades stop giving you easy kills, Flashbangs are the thing that takes over as being super useful.

Speaking of rangers, don't try to swing your sword at a Muton. It doesn't go all that well.

Here's a tip. If you have spent a lot of time outfitting or customizing your troops before a mission, back out and save before deploying. I've had a couple of crashes while loading missions and all of that setup work was lost. It's like the XCOM RNG is so deep it leaked over to the code and is screwing me even before the fighting starts.

Always shoot the stun stick guy first, seriously, they will always find a way to dodge half your shots at pointblank range and then stick you with their sticks. Also those sticks sometimes cause an unconcious effect which is a nightmare because as far as i can tell you can't revive your dudes without a drone.

@mikemcn: Correct, you have to drag their ass to an evac point if you don't have a way to wake them up.

Here's a tip: Don't trust the "there's going to be damage here" indicators. Some enemies mark a spot on the ground where they plan on doing damage, but the damage is NOT contained to that one tile. Clear the fuck outta there.

If one of your soldiers gets incapacitated by one of those annoying enemies (Vipers) you can use a combat drone attack to free them. You can also send a drone to heal them if need be, the enemy will not be healed.

Make sure to have extra recruits on hand, even if soldiers aren't KIA, they can get injured and be out for weeks, so you need a deep bench. Get them by going to the armoury (25 supplies each) and as missions rewards.

More than that, build the guerilla training school. It lets you stick a rookie in there for 5 days to get their first promotion which helps. It also lets you buy some pretty useful upgrades, including increasing your squad size which is key.

Grenades are useful for guaranteed damage, and are also good for blowing up vehicles for bonus damage (3 I think) and for taking out an enemies cover, letting other soldiers get open shots on them.

Overwatch.

Personally I highly recommend researching hybrid materials then developing predator armour, which for my money is immensely helpful as it immediately gets equipped to all your troops making them way sturdier and opening up an extra utility item slot.

Better armour helps here and it is obvious anyway but try to keep some key players alive and prioritise getting them promoted. It's good to spread promotions around for a balanced roster, but squad number upgrades have a rank prerequisite (upgrading to a six man squad requires you to have a captain).

A specialist who can use Gremlin heal equipped with a medkit is a good safety net, especially as they can heal from really far away.

Avoid selling corpses. Even if you've already done an autopsy and it seems like you have way more than you need, they will likely be needed for development of items that you will want.

I need help, it may just be me being stupid though. I have built 4 nanovest but once I go to the soldier loadout to switch out my kevlar they aren't there.

Nevermind figured it out, it's a utility item.

You can use your sniper's Killzone ability from concealment to take shots on every enemy in a group during an ambush, just trigger it with a shot from someone else.

1. Do not underestimate Gunslingers. When you stack their skills, they can fire like 3-10 times in one turn and they are highly accurate.
2. Customize every character you can and check in when you reach higher ranks since it unlocks new customization options. Once satisfied with one, edit their bio, name, appearance etc and save them to the character pool from there. No need to go into the special character creator. They'll show up on your next playthrough. You essentially only have to create a specific character once this way.
3. Reaper is properly contesting Rapid Fire, which I thought impossible. Especially with Shadowstep and Untouchable, you can basically just go to town. Use your Gunslingers to make enemies with too high health for a kill, a bit weaker to set them up.
4. Complete story missions to reduce the Avatar Project. Each successful part of story reduces it by 1 or 2 so far it seems.
5. Be careful of Sectopods. They have ridiculous amounts of health and they can basically take 3 actions each turn. Fire twice and then another special ability which I thought was either area overwatch like Kill Zone, or preparation for launching missiles the next turn.
6. Save your Elerium Cores! I got plenty of them early, like 5, so I randomly experimented, but I haven't seen one in over 8 hours now and I can't make some of the stuff that's actually great like Alien Grenades. You should spend them on random stuff if you have like 3. If you only have 2, probably hold on to them for something you know is amazing.

Doing an evac doesn't cost a movement point, so you can dash to the evac zone without worrying that you'll just stand there like an idiot for one turn.

Can anyone tell me what it means when an Advent Officer marks one of your soldiers? Not sure if it draws aggro from other aliens or if it affects your cover bonus.

@dgtlty: they get a bonus % to hit you

The enemy has a bad habit of upgrading their units as the campaign goes on, especially robotic ones. The best way to counter this? (item spoiler) Research Bluescreen rounds, and you'll find yourself doing a whopping 5 extra damage per shot on any soldier that has them equipped. It turns all robotic enemies, even the late game ones, into tissue paper.

My secret recipe is to equip them on sharpshooters, since it applies to their pistol, and they usually can get more than one shot off per round. It's how I'm able to kill even incredibly tough robots like the Sectopod on the first turn I encounter them.

Am I missing something or can you only have 1 Labratory built? After building one I no longer see the option to build any more Labs. Not greyed out or anything, just gone. Which is weird considering there is a region bonus for +20% research for each lab you have.

I think this is a really good tip: Using Aid Protocol on the first action does not end your turn. This is useful in many, many cases but especially if you're in concealment and setting up an ambush. Place all your troops and set them on Overwatch except one with which you are going to take a shot. Use your Specialist to apply Aid Protocol on this person, then set your Specialist to Overwatch. Take a shot with the one who has Aid Protocol buff, and he will take the shot and still get a reaction shot when they disperse.

@zevvion: That is a very good tip, but you need to mention you have to spec into Threat Assessment for it to work, otherwise they just get the defensive bonus.

That goes without saying I would think.

I'll repeat my previous tip since I haven't seen any Gunslinger hype still: Gunslingers are insane. Lightning Hands = free pistol shot. Quickdraw = pistol shot as first action only costs one action. Face Off = Fire pistol at all visible enemies. Fan Fire = fire 3 times at one enemy.

They are insaaaaaaane with the beam pistol. Lightning Hands > Quick Draw > Fan Fire on one target = 5 shots on one target without any penalty whatsoever. That's 4-6 damage * 5 = 20-30 damage. LH > QD > Face Off = 3 shots at one enemy and one more shot against all other visible enemies. It's just nuts. The inherent high aim of Sharpshooters makes it really crazy. Especially because you can more or less choose which target will take a hit each round fired, as opposed to all other abilities like Rapid Fire and Chain Shot that must be fired on one target.

Hooooly shit, I just discovered the religion that is mines. Sweet mother of god these things are OP as fuck.

There I was in a middle of setting up the usual ambush scenario on a pair of mutons and one of those flying dinguses. Decided to finally give mines a try. They don't trigger detection, so i shot one right in the middle of the enemy pod. Took a shot (which missed, of course). And the mine triggered right as they start to move. It blew straight through the armor of the mutons, killed one the other was at 1 hp, and killed the flying dude too. That was almost a triple singlehandedly. The damage is nuts! The rest of the squad was like "er what are we here for?".

One thing I think that should be pointed out for people just getting started is that they changed the way weapons work. You no longer have to build a single weapon for each soldier you want to equip it. Now you essentially just build "access" to a weapon. It makes the high cost of building weapons make a lot more sense because now the cost is basically the cost for an unlimited number of weapons.

Just something that I thought people used to the first game should know since lack of this knowledge caused me to ignore Magnetic weapons for awhile.

Get a mimic beacon ASAP. It's effectively a grenade which creates a hologram of a squad member that will cause all enemies to waste shots on thin air. I can't even begin to describe how many times that thing as saved my ass. Can't recall for sure but I think it came from the faceless autopsies.

Research psionics asap! Instead of being an extra skill tree for existing soldiers like in EU, psi troopers this time around are a seperate class that needs to be trained from a rookie. You pop them in the psi training center and pick a skill, and they'll learn it and rank up once the requisite days have passed, but you can take them on missions without interrupting their training. Get mind control (dominate) first, it's even more OP than it was in EU. It can only be successfully used once per mission (you can wiff and try again once the cooldown is done) but the control lasts for the entire mission, and, like in EU, enemies seem to prefer to kill mind controlled units over your soldiers, so a particularly strong unit like the andromedon, my personal favorite, combined with a specialist healer, can be an incredibly effective tank.Some of their other skills have a chance to inflict temporary mind control on targets, so with a little luck you can amass a good little drone force. They can also inflict panic, and lock units down with stasis. I never go anywhere without one.

Try to get acid bombs for your grenadiers, they are amazing. Also, everyone is talking hot shit about gunslingers, but as far as I can tell there's no reason not to hybridize your sharpshooters.

Lot of great stuff in here. I've got a couple of tweaks that speeds the gameplay up a little bit.

If you want to speed up the running animation, navigate to ..XCOM 2\XComGame\Config\DefaultAnimation.ini and change MaxUnitRunRate to 2.0, and bUseRunRateOption to true (this gives you a slider in the options). You can also reduce the slow mo when firing at DefaultCamera.ini, change ReactionFireWorldSloMoRate to 1.0.

Use T and G for zooming in and out.

Here's something you might not have realized which is a bit of fun: if a panicking solider has Aid Protocol + Threat Assessment, they will fire at YOUR troops when they move or shoot.

It hasn't happened to me as I don't have Threat Assessment, but I've seen reports of people losing troops to friendly fire.

When the Avatar progress bar fills, it's not instantly game over. You get a countdown timer and a warning that they are about to finish it. From what it looked like, you still have like 14 days after the bar fills to decrease it (by destroying a facility for instance). Perhaps I didn't read the timer properly and it was less, but it felt like a lot of time.

This is on Commander. I'm sure it's less on Legend.

The Gremlin counts as your Specialist for the purposes of being spotted. This means, if you send it to zap someone, it's as if your unit is running over there itself, and that can trigger pods you weren't expecting.

Frankly, I regard that as a bug; you can't possible tell me that aliens ignore the sounds of gunfire, explosions, and the death cries of their comrades, but one little drone is enough to tip them off? That's a bit too much to swallow.

A fun trick I discovered by accident: If you have an enemy on top of a building, throwing a grenade to blow up the wall that supports their floor can cause them to fall and take damage or even kill them outright when the floor falls out from under them.

As an added bonus, every turret I've done this to has died instantly. I don't think turrets can survive the fall. There's a steam achievement tied to making an enemy fall to their deaths that unlocks even on turret kills done this way...

Want to speed up post mission load times? Press Caps Lock.

I have no idea why this works, but people are reporting a dramatic drop in post mission load times. If your Skyranger is taking a long time to return to base, give it a shot.

Any ammo type is great for sharpshooters for the same reason, but great tip. Ill try it out in my next play through (just lost my ironman normal)

Here's a dumb bug that can really screw with you; if you are rescuing/kidnapping a VIP, when you knock them out, the game considers their position to remain the same when you pick them up, until you put them down again in a new spot.

This means that if they start next to a vehicle (or you place them down next to one) and it catches fire for whatever reason, they can be killed in your arms by the exploding car even though they are now miles away.

The only way around this is to make sure you drop them once you move away from the car, as that updates their position. You can then pick them back up and take them to the evac safely.

Do the Shieldbearer autopsy. It unlocks experimental armor. Which yields a better nano vest upon completion. Doesn't sound like much, but I really like them. They all give +2HP instead of +1, and they also have a special bonus ability. I have two, one grants immunity to poison, acid, burning and all other environmental hazards. The other grants the ability to regenerate 2HP per turn up to a max of 8HP per mission. So basically Adaptive Bone Marrow from EW, except it starts regenerating when any damage at all is taken, instead of only near death.

@neocalypso Good tip. I found that out for myself last night after finally splurging on some magnetic weapons. I thought it was a bug at first! This tip applies to armor as well.

My tip: when setting up concealed overwatch ambushes consider saving the actions of one or two of your soldiers for use after the ambush. This allows you to react to the outcome of the ambush before the aliens get their turn. You may be able to set up some flanking shots to finish them off, pop smoke to protect your squad, or simply run up and collect some loot.

@zevvion: Thanks to the wonders of AWC I got a sniper with Rapid Fire. It's on my Gunslinger to boot. It's like a scene out of an action movie. I can alternate between, Lightning Hands + Rapid Fire or first pistol shot + Fanfire when the situation calls for it. I can also just straight up just use Rapid Fire...with my sniper. Insane damage provided XCOM's RNG doesn't screw you over ofcourse.

By the way, this article on PC Gamer is really useful. Some of it is already mentioned here but in general has some really good tips, one in particular that is mentioned is the fact that not only do story missions or objectives sets back the Avatar project doom ticker but you can basically use that to your advantage. There are those Advent facilities for example that do set back the project when you destroy them but if you really want to min-max your playing time to buff up your troops and gear and contact more regions, don't destroy a facility or do a story mission the moment it's unlocked. Instead, try to ride out the doom ticker until you only have a few days left and then destroy a facility or do a story mission to set it back.

Also since no one mentioned this specific thing about the Flashbang yet, it DOES affect the Codex and Gatekeeper. It prevents the Codex from teleporting and cloning and the Gatekeeper from doing its AOE reanimation bomb. So what I'm saying is that the Flashbang, other than the EMP Grenade and Mimic Beacon, is an absolute life saver.

@gaspower: That's not a great tip on Commander difficulty and up. I just lost my second playthrough, and I'm doing the math now. I'm pretty sure I was unable to ever complete that game. ALL alien facilities spawned way far out on the map. I had to make contact with 4 regions before I could reach them. There is just not enough time and intel to do that. The only possible way I could've made it this game, is if I prioritized expansion and doing story missions ASAP and nothing else. The story missions only clear 1-2 blocks of progress. Meanwhile, you gain 3-4 blocks every month if you don't mop up facilities. By some miracle I managed to get on time to a blacksite by the hour and finish it. It knocked off 2 bars of progress, which immediately filled again in the couple days after. Not enough time to make contact with more zones.

I think I may have gotten unlucky. At least, I hope so. I'm going to give it another try, but this time I'll prioritize the story above all else.

@zevvion: What I did was I prioritize expanding and held off on doing the Skulljack optional objective until I was ready to deal with it. Just did a Blacksite facility mission instead and continued expanding. I think in your playthrough the facilities may have just been too far to reach unfortunately and maybe the Dark Event which added two blocks may have happened as well. AFAIK every Avatar project progress just gives one block every time other than the Dark Event that instantly adds two blocks of progress unless there is a something in your playthrough that I'm not aware of. I'm also playing on Commander, too for reference.

I attempted to do a skulljack during a "taking a landed UFO mission" and man, that was messed up. I lost 4 out of my 6 dudes, so I loaded my last s ave because I thought it was BS.

skull jacking can get very messed up