@jimbo: I still don't know what you meant by luck in the first few missions dictating the difficulty of the rest of the game. How?

Quick question, how many of you started out with the tutorial? If you don't you end up missing the entire premise of the game, and honestly a really dope little scripted sequence that sets stuff up. I just restarted without it and the way the game starts out is confusing without it, kinda silly to leave out a pretty crucial story thing like that.

i restarted on rookie and am enjoying it A LOT more

i don't need the stress of even veteran in my life right now

@jimbo: I think he means that by virtue of them dying as rookies or squaddies in the first few missions it is difficult to think of them as your best soldiers because all your other soldiers are at most a mission away (or 5 days for the training building) from matching their level. New recruits are cheap and come instantaneously you would have to have seriously fucked up to be in a position where losing 2 squaddies destroys your campaign.

Ok, I can't think of a simpler way to explain it than how I did first time.

I don't think it's that difficult: if they're better than your other soldiers then they're your best soldiers. Losing one or more of them to dice rolls going against you will necessarily make the next mission/s more difficult than if you hadn't.

None of this is even disputable; this initial race against the difficulty curve is a basic design concept of the game. If you get ahead of it it becomes progessively easier to stay there, and if you slip behind it becomes progressively harder to catch it again. Each mission without losses makes the next one easier to surive without losses, and vice versa. Given the lack of complexity, lack of abilities and lack of bad luck survivability in the early game, which side of that curve you fall on is largely going to be determined by how the shots land or miss.

The game is harder when you lose a couple of your veterans late game, more so then losing shite rookies/squaddies early game.

@jimbo: Yeah, I have been thinking about this and having finished the game twice now I still can't see how your point makes any sense. Losing a few soldiers in the beginning of the game that happen to have a few more points of aim or a few more points of Will compared to other rookies isn't going to matter in the slightest later on when that constitutes a 2% overall difference, if any difference at all.

Honestly I can't say that I think anyone who is familiar with XCOM will agree with you on this. Early mission losses aren't a big deal because the rookies are just cannon fodder at that point. Injuries and deaths matter far more later in the game once you have soldiers developed, but at that point you should have two or three full squads to rotate in and out anyway. Even then, in the late game, Majors and Colonels are routinely given out as mission rewards and it isn't uncommon to see those guys trump the stats of even soldiers who have been around since the beginning. Or you can buy high ranking soldiers with Intel from the Black Market for cheap during a month when you are getting a fat discount.

I literally save scum on every death. I basically have the same crew for every mission. And this game still stresses me out. And I love it.

So, I went back to my Legend campaign and decided to scour the entirety of the final level in order to try and find the Avatar that teleported away, after getting a hot tip that sometimes they just bug the fuck out and launch themselves a mile away. Turns out, it was the right thing to do; somehow it decided that the start of the map was a valid location for it to pick. Moral of the story? Avatars have no set teleport distance. They can just go wherever the fuck they want, including so far away that your camera won't even bother to indicate that they've moved anywhere valid at all.

So, my No Deaths Legend run is complete. I will now try a No Upgrades Commander one, which I assume will rely mostly on Psi Operatives...again!

Man, I have really enjoyed playing this week but I think I need to give it a rest and come back to it after a patch. Finally after a few restarts I felt like I had some tempo going with the metagame and the combat. Then I went on a rescue mission to secure a captured soldier. The first encounter just took me way too many turns to deal with even with experienced troops and mag weapons (a Muton that comes back to life when it dies? Fuck you, XCOM!) and making my way to the evac zone it was clear I was not going to make it in time. I figured I would just evac early to save what I had left of my squad but turns out that was not allowed and of course my best team was now captured. I resigned to another restart at that point but I figured I'd let the next mission play it out with rookies just to see what happens. Headed out to save some civilians and immediately encountered EIGHT CHRYSSALIDS. I mean come on! I don't even know how to deal with that. I managed to take out 4 or 5 using a mimic beacon and plasma nades but still, those melee attacks...

Fuck this game (for now).

I'm on my third restart and I'm taking the view that I need to bring along at least one , maybe two rookie/squaddie soldiers every mission to level them up, even when I have a full strength 6-person squad available at HQ. In my previous two games, I've been unable to keep pace once serious injuries, and their corresponding long recovery times, have kicked in for my 'A-Squad' later on in the game. I need to make the bench a little bit deeper... basically

Kitted out Colonels in late game (excluding final mission) are vastly more resilient to bad luck than a Squaddie/Corporal/Sergeant during the first few missions. They're also trivial to replace later in the game assuming you luck out during the opening missions and got far enough ahead of the difficulty curve early on. I would certainly value my best soldier/s a lot more highly in gameplay terms going into mission 5 than going into mission 35.

You are going to be significantly more likely to get through mission 5, 6 etc. without losses if you're able to go into them with a mix of Corporals and Sergeants than if you have to go into them with a squad of Rookies because your best soldiers just wiped to unlucky dice rolls / map generation / mob placement etc. I suspect that, proportionally, vastly more campaigns are terminated due to bad luck during the first ~5 missions than are terminated during the ~5 missions immediately preceding the end game for any reason.

Having now completed my campaign, I can say that during the whole thing the 'hardest' mission I encountered (excluding one VIP extract one which was completely broken) was the reactor mission during the tutorial. Like the rest of the game it demands very little skill, it's just the point at which I had least control over the outcome of the mission. I still can't think of a single way of approaching that mission which won't leave you relying on luck. Also it's just plain weird to me that they made that mission significantly tougher than the first mission you get if you don't take the tutorial.

And how often you place your troops behind cover. And how you utilise explosives. And whether you move for flanking shots or not. All of which are things not governed by chance. Whether you do well or not in the early game is determined by how well you understand the rules of the game and how good your tactics are. A skilled player will consistently do better than a poor player.

If you mean over enough attempts, and if by 'consistently' you mean 'usually' rather than 'always' then sure. Over any single attempt it's absolutely possible for a poor player to come out of an early mission with a better outcome than a skilled player. That is inevitable when the central -and at that point unavoidable- mechanic is RNG. Like I said, two players can make the exact same moves and see completely different results. Then of course there's the random nature of the mission generated to take into account as well (see Zevvion's post in one of the other threads here about how he has been handed a string of much easier missions in his Legend campaign than in his lower difficulty campaign - a perfect example of what I've been saying about this game).

I get that some people 'got through without losing anyone, so it must be like that for everyone', but that simply isn't the case. I really don't think many people are so dense that they can't figure out not to randomly stand around in the open or throw their grenades at their own team or whatever it is you guys think people are doing in these missions. I simply don't believe there are enough 'certain' moves you can make at this stage for the outcome not to be governed by chance.

If they didn't want their game to be described as luck-dependent then they shouldn't have put a RNG at the heart of it, it's as simple as that. Of course, the developers themselves know that and are absolutely fine with it, which is fair enough.

The guys who are beating Ironman Legend over and over without losing any soldiers must be the luckiest dudes on earth. They should play the lottery.

@extintor said:

I know I should do this too, but is it even a viable option? When the missions start getting Difficult or Very Difficult, I don't think you'll see another Easy or Moderate mission again (I don't think I have). Giving Rookies or Squaddies the best gear in the game doesn't do much good if they've got 65 Aim and can't hit anything. I guess if you can get a deeper bench before those mission pop up you'd be okay, but then it might take longer to get the squad size increases than it would taking the A-Squad all the time.

It's very viable. And advisable. Just bring in 1 or 2 rookies/lower ranked soldiers on runs so that the veterans will balance them out, even if you could just field the whole A-team. A full two squads worth of dudes is a good enough minimum start for a healthy rotation, and will safeguard well against injuries or potential deaths. More is better ofc.

Well, I assume you guys are talking about Squaddies, since there is absolutely no reason to ever bring a Rookie on a mission unless if is the first month of the game. But as for Squaddies, yeah you can totally bring them. Just bring a max of 2 to a mission and you should be fine? Just make sure they have explosives or Mimic Beacons/Flashbangs or some such so they will be useful. It doesn't matter how high rank your soldier is to use those things (Grenadiers not withstanding) and they remain incredibly useful. So you can set up 4 people on overwatch, have one person take a shot out of concealment, and keep your Squaddie's turn to check if it should throw a Mimic Beacon afterwards.

Then just try to have them kill something off when it's low on HP. By flanking shots or explosives. Even if they won't get any kills, they should level up on mission completion alone in a couple of missions. If you're playing on Ironman, you should always keep a diverse barracks. If you're not playing Ironman, you could potentially reload and try to do missions without getting hurt, but I personally find that incredibly tedious.

One thing that I am genuinely appreciating about XCOM 2 is the work that they did to psi abilities - it's a lot more nuanced and balanced compared to previous games.

@beachthunder: I love the PsiOps guys to death, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them balanced. They are by far the most powerful class in the game, nothing else even comes close to how good they are.

@jimbo: When you say that the game is luck dependent, are you saying that that is the deciding factor in the game overall, not player skill?

The ending of this game is way too anime for me.

@mike: Fair enough, but it's now only viable to have a maximum of two PsiOp characters, and mind control takes a while to unlock.

@mike: I don't know about that. They are very strong, but they take such a long time to acquire though, not to mention they are very costly considering you need to build a psi labs and spend time on research and excavation. Having one killed would be heartbreaking. Quite literally 40-50 days of training down the drain.

@zevvion: None of that has anything to do with how powerful they are compared to other classes, though. I'm talking about their relative power and utility, not the resources needed to get them there. What you're talking about is really an entirely different conversation, and while I see what you mean it isn't what I was getting at.

@mike: I just mentioned that is somewhat mitigated by how hard they are to obtain. Especially on Legend I just can't put the time and resources into acquiring them until the game has progressed such that it honestly barely even matters anymore.

So I have seen some bugs. Just thought I'd say I wasn't immune!

Had one time I had to restart the game to prevent enemies continually just not acting at all in their action phase. I could never trigger them in or out of concealment. I also have had some animation states kind of getting stuck for characters. Like a Ranger got stuck in the "Bound" position but a Viper after I killed the viper and was moving around like that which was pretty funny.

I'm close to done I believe? I accidentally missed building a couple things and got into the Psi game a little later than I should have I guess. But I am enjoying a couple soldiers I have in that category. They are powerful but in my opinion virtually all the classes are really powerful in this game in a way I only felt the Sniper (in only one of its trees) was in the last game really. I think they did a great job with all the classes and in general just having lots of awesome abilities in the game that are fun to use.

A minimal level of skill is required, as I said in my first post. I don't believe you can guarantee a lossless victory in those early missions however, even with perfect skill (happy to be shown a strategy which reliably avoids any RNG rolls for or against you). And it's largely the outcome of those missions -in conjunction with some of the many other random aspects of the game- which will determine exactly how difficult the missions that follow are.

I'm not saying it's impossible to turn it around if you take early losses due to shitty luck, but to do so you will inevitably again be relying on luck going your way- and at worse odds than if you hadn't taken the initial losses. There is simply no luck-free strategy that I know of until you are sufficiently far ahead of the difficulty curve and with sufficient upgrades/equipment to reliably detect and kill everything before it can get a shot in.

There are at least three AAR posts in the final mission thread which make it sound like luck played a big part in determining the outcome there too. It would be hard for it not to when the USP of the final bosses is that they randomly teleport all over the place. Luck was certainly the deciding factor in my last mission, because the last 2 avatars all but suicided themselves. Granted, once you have prior knowledge I'd imagine there are several 100% reliable strategies for the final mission, as you have access to a lot of cheesable tactics by that point and the new unit you get given has some very powerful and unlimited skills.

@jimbo: For the final mission, I just mind controlled everything. Brought 2 Psi Operatives that were fully leveled, plus the Avatar. Because of the Alien Psi Amp, my own Psi Operatives had like 70% chance to Dominate a Gatekeeper. Which takes a lot of enemy fire. So in one turn I captured a Gatekeeper and two Andromedons. It changes things up drastically.

I havent been able to play lately but i realizs now is that the difficulty lies in the way the enemy levels. Before at least it appeared that tge enemy leveled the same as you, in this one i feel you are constantly needing to keep up with them as they get stronger. Where i messed up initially was in waiting too long to level armor and weapons (also not knowing that i didn't have to buy regular armor for all my soldiers). Rng def plays a part but i think rookies and sqaddies need better gear much sooner than in EU. You lose some higher level dudes early enough the impact is lessened by gear quality. I think early choices in the meta game have way more impact than before. I just restarted and only lost one soldier so far.

@zevvion: Yeah I imagine that would help. I never got around to trying out Psi Ops. Psi Lab was one of the last things I built and by that point I just wanted to get the campaign over with.

I did Mind Control one Andromedon with the Avatar in the final room, but for some reason it immediately made the graphics spaz out so badly that I had to restart the game.

Apparently there is an update out.

So ehm.. has anyone else run into a bug where you can't contact certain regions ? Decided I'd finally try out Ironman with the new patch out, but then I ended up getting fucked because it wouldn't allow me to go from south Asia down towards Australia. So instead of contacting one region which would allow me to take 2-3 pips off the meter I had to go four regions over westwards, which I didn't have enough Intel to do in time.

Is it maybe random what the links are between regions? I've definitely had games where you could go from North America over to east Asia, but I can't do it the other way around in the game I'm in now. There also don't appear to be any links between the two northern African countries which seems pretty silly.

The region connections are randomised a bit I think, you just got unlucky when the world map was generated.

If you need a shortcut to reach an Alien Facility, apparently you can use Skullmining on an officer (not sure if it works on other advent troops as well) to gain access to it without needing to make contact with the region it's in. I read that it's just a flat 70% chance for Skulljacking to hit at all though, so cross your fingers and hope for the best I guess.

@jimbo: It is a flat 70%, and it's probably the one number in the game I would change. You are already running out of cover into melee range (with the possibility of triggering more pods), and you still have to deal with the hacking mini-game, so it seems unfair to put another dice roll on top of that, especially one that is completely unmodifiable. It's one of the main ways your game can fail if you had a less than perfect strategic game; take too long to establish your regional connections and the only way to really bail yourself out are those facility leads, as you mentioned.

At the very least, the two story-required Skulljacks should be guaranteed (the actual attack portion of it, the hack is a freebie as all objective hacks are).

The flat 70% does suck. At least you get a free action after a missed Skullmining attempt, though.

@mirado: To be fair, you can equip the Skulljack on anyone and a success will result in the Trooper dying regardless of how much health and armor it has. You can use Skullmining on an Elite Shieldbearer that is standing behind full cover for let's say 56% chance to hit with a regular shot; 70% and it's dead immediately.

Doesn't sound terrible in theory. However, while I haven't run into this issue myself, I have seen 87-95% blade strikes miss literally all the time. So someone out there is on his fourth game right now trying to just get that 70% to hit for story purposes. Sounds awful.

That said, perhaps there is a piece of code in the game that guarantees a hit on the Skulljack after a certain number of misses, similar to how the gift worked in EU.

Can you reattempt Skulljack if it misses?

@jimbo: You can but it's on a cooldown, I don't remember how long it is though. Definitely not right away, I'm thinking two turns but I'm not sure.

70% is just a carry over from the stun weapon in the first game, i'm sure there is an upgrade down the tech tree somewhere. I didn't look, but i had researched skullmining before i did my first skull jack and hit on the first try. (then a codex came out and, well you read what happened lol)

So far the update helped my performance a bit, didn't get so much in the single digits in the skyranger scenes and overall FPS seems higher. Also downloaded some voice packs as they fixed the issue where previewing voices crashed the game, i can say that so far it works. Also the Chrysallid crash is apparently fixed, i still haven't encountered one yet so i couldn't say for sure. I've only been able to play one mission so far since the update though.

@oursin_360: Nope. There is no upgrade for the Skulljack. It remains at 70% for the entirety of the game.

I finally typed up my thoughts into a review. I'm going to end up waiting for a couple of patches before starting another playthrough though.

You'll be fine. I got my Psi Ops character super late, and while he was good, I was doing just fine without him. The only unit I couldn't imagine not having in the late game was my hacker. She saved my bacon constantly between disabling Sectopods or finishing off a group with Capacitor Discharge or what not. Like you said, just about every soldier at level 6 in any class ends up a walking dealer of death.

FUCK YEA

I just killed 6 guys in one turn with my Colonel Sniper "Lockdown" (Serial for 3 sniper shots, followed by Faceoff killing 3 more). Then I gave him a full round of applause and blasted the song in celebration. This game is totally alllllright.

@nevergameover: Yep, Serial is awesome. I think I prefer season 1 more. Err...I mean, Serial is a fantastic skill, especially when you have the weapon upgrade that lets you hit even when you miss. It's incredibly useful when there's a whole bunch of weaker enemies around (psi zombies, cloned codices, etc...)

Serial + Autoloader + Ex mags is obscene, by the end of the game my sharpshooter had well over a quarter of the 520 total kills of the XCOM project. Nothing better than throwing in a tactical grapple mid killstreak to get an angle on more enemies.

One thing I think is a great mechanic is soldiers getting captured, then being able to be rescued later on. It was a great feeling going on a mission to rescue one of my created characters who I just assumed was gone forever.

@beachthunder: Agreed, it's pretty great. Though I felt those missions would have benefited from having to go break them out first, instead of starting the mission with them already there. Some type of nice set dressing. Like a jail cell, or perhaps even just a stand off where the captured soldier was about to break free on his or her own.