@gaspower: Can do, just wasn't in a situation where that would have worked out. I find making full topics/blog posts on my phone to be too much of a hassle; once I get back I can do a full write up on how (un)fair XCOM really is, but not towards the player as you would expect.

I think you got your title right there. :P

The avatar project is 2 ticks from being completed. I don't even have the shadow chamber yet. Even my best soldiers are dying.

I'm playing on normal. I feel like I'm going to lose.

I love it.

The difficulty curve in this game is a horrendous mess. How you get on first time around will largely come down to a) pure luck during the first handful of missions, and b) whether you happen to guess a good or bad order to do the meta game stuff in. Once you get ahead of the difficulty curve it's a doddle to stay there (short of a mission completely breaking on you, which isn't out of the question).

There's actually no real reason to even see a Codex at all before you have a full squad of Colonels if you don't want to, by which point you are wrecking everything easily. The game is pretty much over once you realise the engagement phase is largely irrelevent and all that matters is that you aggro the enemy at the start of your turn and not the end. Once you're past the early mission bullshit, as long as you pull the enemy mob/s at the start of your turn they are going to be dead before they ever get to retaliate.

@mirado: We already know from Enemy Unknown that the game is coded to cheat for the player. And we know from Long War, that it is necessary to prevent critical game failure due to randomness. Without those cheats, the game can be literally impossible to win. I don't mind losing, I don't mind setbacks, but losing because the seed that was generated was never going to let you win, is not actually fun. Long War removed all the cheats, and it wasn't until my third try into Long War, that I moved through the game with tremendous ease, where my two others were catastrophic failures, because RNG never worked in my favor (unable to shoot down any UFO ever, rarely hitting shots, never ever ever ever getting psionic soldier etc).

You keep saying this about "pure luck" over and over and it simply isn't true. If you know what you're doing you absolutely can get through the majority of this game, even on the highest difficulty, and rarely ever lose a soldier. If you don't believe me, just go watch some Legend Ironman videos on YouTube. What are these guys, the luckiest people in the world? Even though they can successfully do it over and over?

I've been through the first dozen missions or so on Legend twice already, didn't lose anyone, and I could do it again. This game is about mitigating the effects of RNG, not being beholden to it.

@zevvion said:

I don't think this holds as true for XCOM 2 as it did for EU/EW. It's missing a lot of the critical failure points that the older game (especially with Long War) had; in fact, I'd say there's exactly one (not including bugs), and that's Skulljacking. Everything else in the game (outside of miss streaks, but frankly that's just how XCOM works. It IS possible to plan around your misses after the first month, and even the best guys like Beaglerush are often forced to restart a Impossible/Legend campaign due to an early failure, but that tapers off as your troops get better) is more or less in your hands, as long as you don't royally fuck up the strategic side of things.

You can pull out of most missions without taking any run-ending losses, if necessary. The missions that you can't do that on (VIP extractions, etc) can fuck you, but I consider most of those to be bugs (evac point moving to the other side of the map, remaining on inaccessible buildings, etc). Once you see all of the game's tricks and know what to prioritize building, you can bring the game to it's knees fairly easily. The amount of streamers pulling out Legend wins reinforces this; they aren't all unnaturally lucky, but outside of an early reset or two, they seem to be plowing through the game just fine.

Hell, I got jammed in the arctic and was still able to string enough connections together to pull out a win. The key is to ride that timer for every bit of time that you can, and save any Avatar reduction for when that countdown timer is getting low. Shame that the final mission bugged out on me (the last Avatar teleported off the map, rendering it unwinnable), but that's how it goes when you play Ironman this early, I guess.

@mike: Unless you are able to mitigate them 100% (which you literally cannot do with the skills available at the start of the game) then it is absolutely a question of luck. Most actions in the game being determined by a dice roll should be a dead giveaway that luck is involved.

It's nice for you that you got through a whole twice without losing someone, but with hundreds of thousands of people playing the game plenty are going to hit the not-exactly-remote odds of missing 2-3 70% shots in a row or being hit by a couple of 30% shots in a row. Even using the concealment ambush tactic the game straight up advises you to use, it's still possible your whole squad can miss their overwatch shots and then lose someone through full cover. There is nothing you can do about that except be luckier.

If the game isn't supposed to be luck-dependent then it shouldn't have dice rolls as a fundamental part of the design.

The majority of the game this stops being an issue, I agree. Not because the luck element disappears, but because you rapidly become massively OP once ahead of the difficulty curve.

You said "pure luck", insinuating that the entire game is all dice rolls and skill has nothing to do with it. Aren't you the one who previously said that the game is 90% luck which was roundly rejected by essentially everyone else?

That "whole squad missing overwatch" is possible, but it isn't the norm. In fact it's more unlikely than likely, and the game adjusts for those strings of misses by giving the player additional hit chance on subsequent shots, unless you're playing on Legend. Furthermore, in my opinion if a player is relying on a string on 70% shots to hit or they could possibly lose a soldier, I think they are doing something wrong.

Its not pure luck, but luck is definitely at the forefront. I feel this game is like a game of poker. In poker you play the odds its strategy envolved but it mostly lies in playing or not playing a hand. Luck is definitely there ive missed multiple 70 80% times in a row, missed 99% shots etc. Ive missed shots with a sniper only to get killed through cover from a rifle at the same distance lol. Even with the numbers apparently skewed towards the player, its still a game of chance.

@oursin_360: You may have missed a few 70-80% shots in a row, but how many times did you hit multiple 70-80% shots in a row?

People love to complain about those 95% shots five feet away that missed, but no one ever talks about the other 19 times out of 20 that those 95% shots connected. Or the time you really needed that 25% gamble shot to hit, and it did and saved the day. Just plan ahead for the possibility of your 1 in 20 chance of a 95% to hit being a miss and you'll come out on top.

@mike: honestly not as many as I've missed lol. Like people complained about rng last game but it didn't effect mw that badly, this game i miss way more. I have had about 2 missions i remember i connected about 80% post match but mostly its about 40-55% but it could be my perception. If there is a way to check the total record ill check later.

@oursin_360: That post-game shot percentage does not take everything into account, don't even pay attention to it. I've missed numerous shots and it still says 100% sometimes.

Beyond all that, unless you are playing on Legend, the game will give you behind the scenes aim bonuses every time you miss, until you hit, then it gets reset to the shot percentage that you see. Aliens get a penalty to hit in subsequent rounds after they hit you. On Legend, what you see is what you get.

It really just may be a case of remembering the stand-out bad moments.

I have liked what I played so far. I am getting weird bugs that break the game though. There was one where the icons disappeared from the geoscape and would not let me get back to the ship causing me to control/alt/delete out. It would even appear after loading a previous save. I had to delete all save games and start again. Very frustrating because I had to start over before due to some really poor early game decisions.

so you'll see me being pretty positive on the game in various threads throughout this "website"- one big disappointment for me, however, is the music. i think michael mccann's work from enemy unknown (much more synth, heavy drums) beats the pants off of the new stuff.

the adrenaline rush when this would pop off hasn't been matched, sadly.

I was exactly there and recovered. For a minute I thought I was going to have to restart but I managed to finally get things rolling.

Ask and ye shall receive. I did a fair amount of deep diving with the SDK, with the caveat that there's a lot of shit in there so I may have missed something. Still, I think people might be surprised at the amount of assistance the game is trying to give you, especially if they weren't aware of the fact that EU/EW did something similar.

@mirado: Just honestly not true. You cannot plan around 100% chance to hit, because the only soldiers capable of doing so are Gunslingers and Rangers. I see where the difference comes from, you think missing twenty 90% shots in a row is unlikely, therefor impossible. It is unlikely, however, it will statistically happen to someone at some point if the game won't cheat for the player. It did to me in Long War several times. That's not actually fun. Especially if the seed that was being rolled ended up in favor of the aliens. My rolls were apparently all 96-100, then the ones on the aliens turn ended up around 10-20, since they kept hitting me through full cover and even hunkered down soldiers. If I weren't playing on Ironman, I could reload the previous save since I'd know what the seed would look like and make it work. That is bad, in my opinion. The game doesn't have to be statistically accurate to be tactical, in fact like I said, it makes more sense for it to not be. Because rolling a 'you're going to lose' seed does not make a good game. Not for me anyway. I like RNG, but I don't like an unwinnable situation.

"How you get on first time around will largely come down to a) pure luck during the first handful of missions..."

That (part) sentence insinuates to you that the entire game is 'pure luck' even though I specifically limited that statement to the first handful of missions? Ok.

I don't think the entire game is pure luck; I accepted right in my first post that overall there is a minimal level of skill involved. Given that the difficulty of the remainder of the game is largely derived from how lucky you are during the first few missions however, and many further elements of luck along the way (the continuing RNG-based gameplay, random bonus skill unlocks, random loot drops, random map generation etc. etc.) I stand by my original assessment of the game.

Your entire second paragraph here tacitly accepts that it's a question of luck. You're having to talk about what is likely and unlikely to happen, not what will or won't happen. The game making x more or less likely on different difficulty levels only further supports my position. If two players can play the exact same mission making the exact same moves and one can wipe while the other gets through without a scratch then blatantly luck is a big factor. Over enough independent missions this luck would balance out ofc, but the missions aren't independent and so it won't necessarily balance out.

To quote from that other XCOM 2 thread: "That's XCOM, baby! That's XCOM. Sometimes the rolls are with you, sometimes they're not." -Jake Solomon, Lead Designer of XCOM and XCOM 2. There's nothing wrong with that necessarily, but it is what it is.

I think of it as being a bit like poker, except if poker required you to stake half your buy-in every hand and if losing a hand meant that you had to go into the next hand with one less card.

It's only the individual hands remaining independent from each other in a game of poker which (usually) allows skill to eventually dominate over luck over the course of any given game. If poker used the above 'xcom-style' rules you could not reliably predict who would win any given game; it would largely be determined by whoever has the luckiest opening hand.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? My campaign was like 45 missions long, how is luck on the first few missions affecting the difficulty of the rest of the game? If you lose soldiers you can just build some extra development time into the strategic layer or skip certain missions and then reacquire regions with Intel, if needed. If that's what you are talking about.

And would you say having to take those additional steps is an advantage or a disadvantage overall? You just answered your own question.

If Player A loses his best soldier/s early due to unlucky rolls and Player B doesn't, Player B is necessarily going to have an easier task in the next mission than Player A. Player A also then becomes more likely than Player B to lose further soldiers in the next mission, as his remaining soldiers will be less able to survive any bad luck. And so on and so on.

The missions would need to be independent for bad luck in one not to have a ripple effect on those that follow, which is not the case.

@mike: I wanted to ask you do you have any good Legendary Ironman runs/streams you could recommend, i wanna put on something in the background.

It's a game of mitigation. You have tools at your disposal to reduce or eliminate your reliance on RNG. I never said it is impossible to miss twenty 90% shots in a row, but rather that the likelihood of that happening is so low that it doesn't match up with the number of people who seem to blame it for their failure. XCOM isn't a game where you are supposed to come out with perfect battles each time. The goal has always been to engage as few enemies as possible, with as many people as possible, in such a way that your chances of killing the enemy are as good as you can possibly make them, so that the enemy has less shots on you.

Sometimes that doesn't work out, and you get slaughtered.

There will be missions in which you roll an abnormal amount of misses, and the aliens land an abnormal amount of hits. Missions that, despite your best planning, things get ugly and you lose some troops or even the whole mission itself. That's just how it works; a small chance is still a chance. But your other goal is to make sure that such a mission doesn't cripple your entire campaign, that you can absorb X amount of deaths or Y amount of mission failures. You run a B team and a C team. You prioritize your supply and intel spending. That's the point of contention; some people think that you live and die by the rolls, where I say that you are given enough tools to make that an infrequent enough occurrence that you can still move forward when it happens.

How could I go for months in my latest campaign without taking a wound? I was playing on Legend Ironman, so it's not savescumming or letting the game fudge with the RNG. I could see a battle or two, but you can't possibly tell me I had 20 or 30 missions with good seeds? No, I abused the hell out of Mimic Beacons, slapping one on each trooper. That's six turns where I'm not going to get shot, and the AI will often flank themselves in order to try and slaughter the light show. I abused the hell out of mind control; the AI LOVES to shoot dominated aliens instead of your own troops, and a tanky unit can absorb a half-dozen or more shots. I loaded up on guaranteed damage like you wouldn't believe. I ran stocks to make sure I was never in a situation that required a hit to kill someone with low HP. I had a Specialist with Combat Protocol, or I had Grenadiers with Heavy Ordinance and Blaster Bombs, or I had Psi Troopers with Null Lance. I could drop 10 enemies without ever needing to land a shot.

As I rolled into the late game, I very rarely took an action which required any sort of hit chance.

Yeah, you can savescum and play with the numbers to make the seed work for you. You can change the order of shots or moves so that you land just about everything. If that bugs you that sometimes the game is just going to say "Today, you are missing 80% of your shots, best of luck," that's fine. It might not be the game for you. I'm not saying that isn't true, I'm saying that you can run into a few of those and still have a successful campaign. I'm saying that the only dice rolls that can sink your game this time around is Skulljacking; you fail that enough, the game doesn't move forward, and you eventually lose. It's unlikely you'll whiff more than two or three times, but it is possible.

Every other bad break is survivable. Something's wrong if you keep running missions in which you miss more than you hit. Something's wrong if you pile up body after body. These people that are cruising through Legend aren't doing it on good rolls alone. At the very least, they aren't relying on them, because, as you said, you can't. So what are they doing differently?

@mirado: None of those reliable tactics apply to the early game though, which is a bone of contention for many I think. It does sound like once you're ahead of the difficulty curve relatively unharmed you will rapidly accelerate away from it though, which matches my experience.

I think it's an unfortunate structure which sees you crossing your fingers and hoping for the best at the start, then -assuming that goes well- effortlessly steamrolling everything in sight for ~3/4 of the campaign. The sweet spot (for me at least) where it's both a good challenge but one in which the outcome is firmly in your hands seems very small if it's even there at all.

@jimbo: The early game is just not as hard as you are making it out to me. The basic enemy types of advent trooper, advent officer, and sectoid are simple to deal with. The trooper (on normal and below) can always be killed with a grenade, the officer will often mark targets instead of shooting himself, and the sectoid would rather raise a zombie than try to attack your soldiers. Yes later on you get a lot of different tools to help but you also deal with enemies who cannot be allowed to live a single turn. If you are relying on 4 60-80% shots to kill 2-3 dudes a turn you are just asking for RNG to fuck you.

I had one game in Long War where I didn't shoot down a single UFO. Ever. The chance to hit on aggressive was 55%, and I missed nearly every shot. One in 4 fighters got a single shot in, and then the UFO escaped. This happened every single time which resulted in not getting any materials to purchase upgrades for my fighters, let alone my soldiers. The entire game was lost 100% at fault because of RNG and nothing else. In another game, I never got a psionic soldier so I could finish the game. Apparently they had removed the piece of code that dictated psionics to be found if it took to long. Precisely because the chance at discovering it is reasonably high, so surely it will happen relatively soon? Nope. 30+ tests yielded nothing. And because it takes time, I had to keep doing missions. I can't just reroll until I get it, it just stretches out the game to the point of fatigue. Again 100% RNG at fault.

These are some examples why the game should cheat for the player. This is not a showcase for how statistics work. This is a videogame. It should be finish-able. It should not be relentlessly punishing because of RNG one time, and ridiculously easy the other. Which, by the way, happened to me in XCOM 2. My first two Commander runs failed, mostly because 'protect the device' RNG can stack against you heavily, resulting in the device being destroyed in as little as 3 turns (while, by the way, it takes a solid 4 turns to even dash to the thing). I lost regions every time because while no one took damage and I killed every alien, the damn device kept getting destroyed in 3-4 turns which was just ridiculous considering how far away it was.

On my third run, I discovered how unlucky I was, since every 'protect the device' mission this time around, has the thing spawn literally one dash away from my drop of point as opposed to 4 dashes. And better yet, most of the time it's not even under attack for the first two turns. It is hilarious to experience, as if I was playing on Impossible before and Child's Play now. Even though it is the same exact difficulty. And that is the point I'm trying to make. The game should offer a certain challenge on a certain difficulty. The challenge should not largely be dependent on RNG.

And to be clear, I fucking love XCOM 2. I just think some aspects of its RNG need serious changing. While the turn timers can be dealt with, even though they are the same if the objective is 2 dashes away or 6 dashes away (and thus honestly needs to be changed based on distance to the objective), 'protect the device' is just poorly constructed for it. Additionally, I found the geoscape just flat out poor with regards to RNG. In one game, every single facility spawned at least 4 regions away and they made progress once a month leading to +4 Avatar progress in one month. In another, facilities show up right next to regions I already control, and seemingly never contribute to the Avatar project at all, even if I let them linger for months. It just doesn't feel balanced.

@zevvion: Long war was designed to be bullshit, I don't think it is fair to bring it into a conversation about balance and xcom2. I remember having to take very specific squads during my attempts to capture berserkers because you needed 2 arc carriers and an officer to even have a shot. We all knew going into Long War that the game was rigged against us, that was why we picked it up in the first place.

I agree with your point that distance from objective should be a bit more standardized if the turn timers are going to be fixed (ie almost 8 turns). That being said I like the fact that sometimes the game just fucks you and have to roll with it. I just finished a hacking mission (data will explode unless you get there in time) where all 4 pods were between me and the objective and 3 of the 4 were within line of sight of each other. I had to grind through 8 aliens in 3 turns using all the bullshit I could throw at the game and then fight a gatekeeper with only 2 turns left before mission failure. Pulling off that mission was one of the best moments of xcom2 for me and I don't think you get that kind of exhilaration unless you know that the game will try to fuck you from time to time and its on you to handle it.

You're missing context. We're talking about why the game cheats for the player in certain situations. Long War didn't do that, so it's fair to bring that up as an argument of why it should have.

There is a distinct difference in getting into a shitty situation that you describe, and one that is literally impossible though. I'm all for the former, but the latter should be removed from the game. I described one where the device was destroyed in 3 turns, while it took 4 dashes to even get there. That mission was unable to be completed successfully, no matter how you look at it. Statistically possible, yes. But definitely flawed design.

I don't know how you would remove one without the other and I'd rather both then neither, particularly because if your soldiers are fine failing a mission in xcom2 doesn't seem that bad. If they made it so that every situation is winnable (both on the tactical and strategic level) then I think xcom would lose a lot of its charm.

@twigger89: Every mission was winnable in Enemy Unknown and it was a fantastic game. The problem with losing Guerrilla Ops is that the region it takes place in loses contact immediately, and increases time and intel costs to contact again. Which happened to me 3 times in a row because of unwinnable missions, then I couldn't do anything to counter the Avatar project which was increasing by 4 each month. I realize I'm in the 1% this happened to, that doesn't mean it's okay to have design like that. Statistics are not an argument in this scenario.

@zevvion: Enemy Unknown was incredibly formulaic in hindsight. You would slowly over-watch creep across the map making sure every engagement was fought in the best way possible. Enemy Within a little better because meld forced you to be more aggressive but for as cool as the mecs and gene mods were they weren't really much better than the standard troops so slow and steady was still the best option.

xcom2 forces you to run and consistently move toward your objection regardless of the circumstance. That constant pressure adds real tension to the game and I think that is a fair trade off for the occasionally unwinnable situation. Battling the RNG is what makes xcom fun and I think the additional RNG in the sequel was a big net positive.

@twigger89: We think differently then. Being forced to lose is anything but fun for me. I like a challenge and I like tough situations that require careful tactical planning to complete. I think there is absolutely no reason to purposefully design missions to be unbeatable. Those missions are not fun and if someone is not playing on Ironman it would only enforce a reload of the last save and then just picking one of the two other missions to see if they can be beaten. You can totally remove unwinnable missions from the game by increasing the amount of turns available if the distance to the objective is too far, and/or making the device immune for a couple turns if it is too far.

On the other hand of the spectrum, having RNG going unchecked also results in incredibly easy missions sometimes, which is a subject we haven't talked about yet. My third Commander run is balls easy, because the objective keeps spawning in front of me, one dash away. If you truly like tough chance as you claim, you should by all means want this specific type of RNG to be addressed.

I didn't say it was hard or easy, just that the outcome in those missions depends on luck, which it does.

Given the lack of complexity involved in the game at that point (use cover and hope you don't get hit, shoot and hope it hits) I strongly suspect that most people taking losses there are doing so because dice rolls and/or mob positions are going against them, not because they're too dense to figure out such complicated mechanics as 'don't stand in the open'.

I also blame the game for making a big fuss about using concealment ambushes at the start when in it isn't even a particularly good tactic.

Well im officially at the point of bo return, i literallt cant finish any mission at all now and the doomsday clock has started. I decided to ride this train all the way down and see how nice it burns!

My biggest problem that i come across every mission is pulling agro on multiple pods. For example last mission where i had more than all rookies, i got the drop on a pod and was easily on a good position. But i inched up a few tiles with one soldier to get a shot then agrod a whole new pod positioned outside the building that saw me o guess through a window. They get the flank which i could have survived, but they had a codex. In the end i got away with one soldier (drew scanlon) took out the codex and the mech, got the objective and made a dash towards extraction. Aggrod a pod of sectopods, while reinforcments came. Before i could make the last dash drew lost it and ran up a tower where he got flanked and gunned down. Now i only have rookies, no money, no time, and the counter ticking 21 days.

Honestly I cant wait to atart again lol

Despite Austin's heroism, I think I'm done as well. Supplies are super limited and my remaining squad of mostly squadies and rookies can't do shit.

So last night I tried hacking into one of those watch towers with my specialist who has 70 tech, and it showed that the tower has 80 tech. I saved right before sending the Gremlin to hack. It showed that I had a 74% of success. I failed and reloaded at least 10 times. I eventually said fuck it and ran in guns glazing. But what gives?

@mechakirby: the random number for the next action is already set so reloading doesn't change the number. You would have to make another random number check first (to use the previously assigned number) to then get a different chance for the hack. Basically it is to prevent people from save scumming every missed shot but I know there was an option in Enemy Within to change it, there is probably one in xcom2 that I just haven't seen.

@twigger89: Hmm... I don't understand. The game determined I was going to fail that hack before I even decided to hack it? Does the game re-roll every single possible action after every single action taken?

@mechakirby: Lets at the start of your turn the game gets a random number for 1-10. Lets say you rolled a 7. That number will stay at 7 until it is used by an action they requires a dice roll (like your hack attempt). So if you attempt the hack you use up that 7, but if you reload then the 7 is also reloaded, a fresh random number is not generated until that 7 is used up. Does that make more sense?

@twigger89: ah okay, got it. Except the game is probably doing 1-100. Let's say I roll a 70, if i attempt an action with a lower percentage than 70%, I'd miss, or higher than 70% I'd hit?

But you just said "Given that the difficulty of the remainder of the game is largely derived from how lucky you are during the first few missions." What does that have to do with losing one's "best soldiers?" They can't be the best soldiers if it's the first few missions of the game.

@twigger89: @mechakirby: It was a free update after EU (it was released before EW) called Second Wave and the option was aptly called "Save Scum".

@tennmuerti:I think Tornis on Twitch is doing an IM Legend run. He's from Russsia so his stream times would be in the day if you're in the US.

@tennmuerti Here's a good one, there are about 20 episodes already.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLj_Goi54wf0f2XYwenlNTbLJH7P3LiiDS

That is really good. Theres one good combat song in Xcom 2, and thats it (hint, it sounds the most like this). The rest is very middle of the road.

How's that?

@jimbo: Dude I'm not even sure what "How's that" is supposed to mean. Can you flesh that thought out a bit more? I mean I'm willing to have this discussion with you but that post doesn't leave me much to go on.

Okay, I kinda know what the answer is but two missions in (excluding Gatecrasher) on Legend-Ironman, I already have one failed mission with one guy evacuated who proceeded to get killed along with the entire squad in the next mission. I think I should restart but I feel like I should keep going. What say you, good duders?

You're 'willing to have this discussion' with me? You addressed me I believe? We could just roll a dice to see which of us is right and then pretend it was a matter of skill if you prefer?

'How's that?' is quite a common idiom. It meant 'I have absolutely no idea what 'They can't be the best soldiers if it's the first few missions of the game.' is supposed to mean. Your 'best soldiers', as in... the soldiers who are better than your other soldiers. I thought it was pretty self-explanatory.

Give it one more mission and see if you luck out with what you have left available?