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So uh, how's Long War 2? I did some searching and it seems like the general opinion here was that it's not very good I don't hate the idea of more classes (even though there looks to be a lot of overlap between the classes' roles, and they're apparently also poorly balanced) but the whole infiltration mechanic sounds like extraneous tedium for one.
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Aug 16, 2020 02:54
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i dislike LW2 because of that extra cruft but the easiest answer to your question is that you either love it or you hate it, there's not a lot of in between. if you've played XCOM 2 once to completion and are looking for something else, you owe it to yourself to at least install LW2, even if there's at least half a chance you will uninstall it in a few hours.
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Aug 16, 2020 03:14
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I guess that's fair enough. e: Nvm I got Chimera Squad instead 
blizzardvizard fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Aug 16, 2020 |
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Aug 16, 2020 08:11
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I remember really liking the stealth mechanics, IIRC if you catch an advent alone and kill them without anyone seeing, you keep concealment. I dont remember a ton since I only played it a bit when it was brand new, but I definitely remember having a specific ranger who went solo on all prison break missions and managed to get a few prisoners extracted without ever being seen
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Aug 16, 2020 10:51
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Infiltration in LW2 is definitely a bad mechanic, but it's got noble ideas - give more variety in the game by giving you reasons to use a bigger variety of squads and roles. There are some big problems though: - Looking at a mission description, planning out what you think your squad is going to need, picking your squad and gear, and then going and doing a bunch of other stuff (including other missions that you planned literally hours ago) really sucks. This one's up front just to emphasize how bad it is. It might seem like a minor niggle when you read about it, but when you actually try and play a game like that you pretty quickly realise just how rough it is on the gameplay flow. - The balance on it is subpar. Doing one or two in-and-out stealth missions with a tiny squad is good fun, having that be 90% of your game time (because that's the optimal way to play, since you have a limited number of soldiers and tiny squads get you the same resources for winning with fewer troops used. Except for the missions that you just can't do that with. Hope you looked up which those are on the wiki before doing your squad setup!) is pretty unfun. Especially when the stealth gameplay is barely passable to begin with, since the underlying game is still a squad tactics deal. - Can I mention the whole flow-breaking thing again? It really plays into how the whole geoscape is unintuitive and makes it hard to tell (unless you're already intimately familiar with the systems in play) whether something is hard because you hosed up (and how you hosed up), hard because the game randomly decided to gently caress you this one time, or hard because that's just the intended level of difficulty if you're playing correctly. Overall it feels like the mod developers only listened to feedback from a tiny number of die-hard fans that were just shouting "git gud noob" at anyone who pointed out ways that things could be made less player-hostile. (A message to people making difficulty mods: If you're thinking about making a player-hostile mechanic, have you considered not doing that, and instead getting a similar level of difficulty by increasing the health or damage numbers on enemies by just a little bit more? "Hard" doesn't need to mean "obtuse"!)
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Aug 16, 2020 11:27
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Jabor posted:(A message to people making difficulty mods: If you're thinking about making a player-hostile mechanic, have you considered not doing that, and instead getting a similar level of difficulty by increasing the health or damage numbers on enemies by just a little bit more? "Hard" doesn't need to mean "obtuse"!) I disagree; difficutly settings just changing the damage input/output of the player is quite literally the lowest effort thing possible, and it usually ruins a lot of the intended gameflow. E.G. you're effectively playing instagib since medkits can never keep up, certain tools don't work if the enemy hp is too high (one-shots, DoTs, etc). Making the game harder doesn't need to be fancy; just chucking 50% more enemies is sometimes a great thing, as it gives better incentive for AoE, or upgrading enemies to harder variants, or so forth. It takes more dev time, and sometimes it's great, other times less so, but almost guaranteed that if the primary thing your difficulty slider does is affect damage, it's not very good. I realize that all the vague examples I listed work for XCOM, but for the counterexamples I was thinking of: Instagib in Prey, (but conversely, in DX, lowest difficulty is 'who cares that I'm being shot?'); sniper rifles, pipe bombs, and being on fire are from various FPS's; 50% more enemies being great is from Doom and DN: Manhattan project. For Long War, it's something that looks like on paper that would appeal to me, bringing back some less forgiving OG mechanics, but I've heard too many horror stories to try and think that it'll be fun. I only needed a small taste of Xenonauts to find out how a teensy tiny bit of unexplained, new, 'git gud' mechanics can totally ruin your playthrough; namely the air game and how alien sightings cost comical monthly income.
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Aug 16, 2020 12:40
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A notable point is that Pavonis were busy when WOTC came out and had no inclination to rerelease their mod, so LW2 has basiclly been somewhat defunct for a significant amount of time. It wasn't until around this year that a dedicated mod team finally go it off the ground, so Long War of the Chosen only entered beta like this year. However, the assets and gameplay expansions were generally well received, and the end result is that a lot of parts of LW got piecemeal ported over to WOTC. Off the top of my head, SMGs, the Perk Pack, the Classes, maybe the grenades, the coilguns/lasers, the yellow alert system and the Plating have been ported over and, in some cases, built into subsystems of their own to help you tailor a lot of it. I think there's someone working on a Covert infiltration system of some sort, although I'm unsure of its relation to actual LW2. And obviously if you're willing to put up with a little beta, LWOTC is actually working so you can happily try that.
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Aug 16, 2020 13:19
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Serephina posted:I disagree; difficutly settings just changing the damage input/output of the player is quite literally the lowest effort thing possible, and it usually ruins a lot of the intended gameflow. E.G. you're effectively playing instagib since medkits can never keep up, certain tools don't work if the enemy hp is too high (one-shots, DoTs, etc). Making the game harder doesn't need to be fancy; just chucking 50% more enemies is sometimes a great thing, as it gives better incentive for AoE, or upgrading enemies to harder variants, or so forth. It takes more dev time, and sometimes it's great, other times less so, but almost guaranteed that if the primary thing your difficulty slider does is affect damage, it's not very good. The issue is that most difficulty-mod developers defend obtuse and tedious gameplay mechanics by suggesting that anyone complaining about them is just bad at the game, even when removing or adjusting those mechanics and instead adding difficulty in other ways would be more fun with the same amount of overall abstract "difficulty". Yes, buffing enemies needs to be done with some thought rather than just blindly changing numbers - as with all balancing. (This is another issue with difficulty mods - often the "balancing" is "I'll just make this as hard as I think is possible, and if someone can win with enough savescumming then I guess it's fine").
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Aug 16, 2020 17:00
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It's worth noting that the folks working on LWOTC (the expansion LW2 port) have gone beyond porting over the base LW2 mechanics and adjusting the Chosen and hero units to fit them; they've decided to "rebalance" (read: mostly nerf) almost every LW2 skill tree and equipment item, add some new skills of their own design, and in the most recent version are even completely revamping the psi tree with new skills and tree structure. I liked my beta 3 playthrough but it seems pretty clear that the project is getting bloated and might not release anytime soon.
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Aug 16, 2020 17:55
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From what I saw they apparently disabled the Chosen as well at the moment since they haven't figured how they want to balance them yet, and it'd feel weird playing War of the Chosen without the actual Chosens. I think they disabled the headshot mechanic for the Lost as well, which if they didn't balance them to be easier to kill, sounds like more of the typical "hard for the sake of hard" design decisions. Anyway, Chimera Squad looks like bite-sized XCOM but each encounter feels super dense. I don't know if it's my starting picks (Claymore/Blueblood/Shelter/Patchwork vs Sacred Coil) but Impossible feels more challenging than even some Legend WOTC maps at times, though granted they're different beasts. Patchwork mind controlling an Android or Turret nearly every map feels like a huge advantage and yet there still had been close shaves. I'm loving it though.
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Aug 17, 2020 06:21
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blizzardvizard posted:So uh, how's Long War 2? I did some searching and it seems like the general opinion here was that it's not very good XCOM2+WOTC is so good, you really don't need a mod like LW2 unless you just really, really wanna change it up. A few QoL mods or stuff like skill tree randomization or whatever are all you really need.
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Aug 17, 2020 14:20
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Instant Avenger Menus, Stop Wasting My Time (removes various pauses around the game), Evac All (1-button evac for everyone in the evac zone), and I'm the Commander Here (respec soldier skill trees, for a small cost of AP; you still buy the skills themselves at normal cost) are all godsends. Smart Overwatch All (1 click to put all or all other soldiers on overwatch) is also a nice touch.
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Aug 17, 2020 14:52
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Should I keep my first playthrough of the game on vanilla? I'm playing the ps4 free version I got on PS+ ages ago and debating buying WotC. I assume is have to restart but I'm only in April
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Aug 17, 2020 14:56
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Play through all the way on vanilla before going in on WoTC. There's enough random things that'll get thrown your way in vanilla, and adding in the Chosen beyond that could be a pretty far jump.
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Aug 17, 2020 15:00
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Not having evac all kills me on xbox and I wish it was just a standard QoL thing that would get added later on
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Aug 17, 2020 15:06
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Icon Of Sin posted:Instant Avenger Menus, Stop Wasting My Time (removes various pauses around the game), Evac All (1-button evac for everyone in the evac zone), and I'm the Commander Here (respec soldier skill trees, for a small cost of AP; you still buy the skills themselves at normal cost) are all godsends. Smart Overwatch All (1 click to put all or all other soldiers on overwatch) is also a nice touch. These are the exact mods I was thinking of, and I used all of those and then dumb cosmetic stuff, that's all for my runs.
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Aug 17, 2020 15:12
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Icon Of Sin posted:Instant Avenger Menus, Stop Wasting My Time (removes various pauses around the game), Evac All (1-button evac for everyone in the evac zone), and I'm the Commander Here (respec soldier skill trees, for a small cost of AP; you still buy the skills themselves at normal cost) are all godsends. Smart Overwatch All (1 click to put all or all other soldiers on overwatch) is also a nice touch. Lost Autofire is a nice QOL mod along those lines too, the AI is pretty smart about prioritizing its shots in order of the most likely to be killed to the least. EDIT: Another mod I've had a ton of fun with on my last playthrough is Iridar's SPARK Arsenal, which adds a rocket fist and a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher as an alternative to the Bit. The video on the workshop page sells it better than I ever could in text, all of the animations are so incredibly high-quality that you could have fooled me into thinking it's an official expansion. ninjahedgehog fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Aug 17, 2020 |
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Aug 17, 2020 15:13
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I picked this up again and my starting templar has bladestorm, reaper, and fortress at lieutenant and it is a real treat. please jake give me shadow step and sustain for cap. and maj. ty
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Aug 18, 2020 00:46
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After a lot of false starts I finally managed to beat XCOM  It was really close on the final boss and I lost my assault to friendly fire as I launched rockets at the boss, but I scraped though.
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Aug 18, 2020 04:38
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Sacred Coil's final mission holy poo poo  I don't know how I'd have done that without Patchwork.
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Aug 18, 2020 08:07
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blizzardvizard posted:Sacred Coil's final mission holy poo poo You want a scary thought? It got nerfed since release. It was originally even harder.
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Aug 18, 2020 11:48
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blizzardvizard posted:Sacred Coil's final mission holy poo poo I beat it first without Patchwork but it completely sucked. On the runs where Sacred Coil was second or third I made sure to include Patchwork on the Sacred Coil section.
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Aug 18, 2020 16:01
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  Blueblood and Shelter is a fun combo.
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Aug 19, 2020 14:21
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Beat CS. Shelter was a lot of fun if really weak to start with, Blueblood's just nuts all game, but I've gotta give the MVP award to Claymore and his double Motile Inducers. I didn't know you couldn't get all 11 agents and left the melee-focused ones "to last", who all also happened to be aliens and hybrids, so my "Chimera Squad" looked unfortunately tokenistic.
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Aug 20, 2020 12:33
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Finished my second playthrough, fun game. Definitely worth the value and makes me look forward to future titles in the series. It also made me grab WotC on sale a few weeks ago, so it'll soon be time to do an XCOM2 run with that content. I loved it, but haven't played since my second time through a couple months after release. Also, I just wanted to say that this run through ended with a Sorcerer using Tyranny on Shrike when they had one HP left. Absolutely hilarious way to finish it, guess that guy had some disputes brewing with management.
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Aug 28, 2020 00:55
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blizzardvizard posted:So uh, how's Long War 2? I did some searching and it seems like the general opinion here was that it's not very good it's very good. just obtuse and overwhelming in the mid-late game. definitely worth a go. there's a bunch of mods for it that can make it a lil more forgiving in the strategy layer. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1540258295 think thats most of the mods i use for my playthrus, if ur interested Dongicus fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Sep 3, 2020 |
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Sep 3, 2020 20:07
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blizzardvizard posted:Beat CS. Shelter was a lot of fun if really weak to start with, Blueblood's just nuts all game, but I've gotta give the MVP award to Claymore and his double Motile Inducers. Claymore is so awesome. His explosives allows you to get pretty creative with the way you beat missions.
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Sep 3, 2020 21:41
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Mesadoram posted:Claymore is so awesome. His explosives allows you to get pretty creative with the way you beat missions. And they regenerate.
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Sep 4, 2020 02:35
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e: I'm an idiot, wrong thread!
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Sep 6, 2020 08:09
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Not the common opinion but I didn't mind the infiltration technique. I kind of liked having to keep track of multiple teams. I set up a Predator team, with Dutch, Billy, Sexual Tyrannosaurus et al I set up an Aliens team with Ripley, Hudson, Hicks, Illegal Alien, and used the aliens assault rifle mod I set up a Star Trek TNG team with Picard, Riker, etc I set up a Star Trek DS9 team with The Sisko and pals Got voice packs for em all as well. What I'm saying is the mechanic played right into my nerdy tendencies. Eventually I just got bored though. Long War 2 is 2 Long.
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Sep 6, 2020 15:39
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Having an expanded CS type game where you manage multiple precincts/ bases with their own supply of units would be interesting.
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Sep 6, 2020 22:49
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:Not the common opinion but I didn't mind the infiltration technique. I kind of liked having to keep track of multiple teams. Also the Technical was a good class idea.
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Sep 7, 2020 15:21
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i legit never bothered with the squad mechanics. i just sent whoever i could spare and wanted xp on, the buffs you got werent that important for how much hassle it was.
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Sep 7, 2020 19:29
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Xelkelvos posted:Having an expanded CS type game where you manage multiple precincts/ bases with their own supply of units would be interesting. Adding investigative angle akin to Shadowrun would make this very interesting. ...And pretty much what they were sort of trying to do with XCOM: Apocalypse before they ran out of money and publisher patience.
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Sep 7, 2020 19:57
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I’m assuming it’s a no, but is there a way of opening the console on XCOM2 on the Switch? I’ve stuffed myself by selling all my Trooper corpses and now I can’t get armour.
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Sep 8, 2020 16:03
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So playing WOTC with a handful of cosmetic mods (hats, hair, tats only) plus evac all and stop wasting my time. Game crashes, then computer restarts. Suddenly, all of my saves say that no mods were active? Any idea what could have caused this? E: lol cool looks like this save / run is totally hosed ughhhh 
Hot Diggity! fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Sep 10, 2020 |
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Sep 10, 2020 03:37
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I saved some posters from a long-ago XCOM 2 campaign and felt like sharing. Some silly, some propagandy, all cheesy as hell. Hope you enjoy them!     
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Sep 11, 2020 02:20
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Anyone got any tips for beating Bellus Mar, I get to the last encounter just fine then Mar takes seventeen turns to clown my rear end and his eight million other units chip at my dudes before they can take any turns. If I even look at the generators I lose two units Also this is my first investigation so we have early game equipment it wasnt my choice. After doing some googling all the advice is "dont do sacred coil first" and "gently caress bellus mar" so I'm increasingly worried about my prospects
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Sep 13, 2020 05:21
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Danaru posted:Anyone got any tips for beating Bellus Mar, I get to the last encounter just fine then Mar takes seventeen turns to clown my rear end and his eight million other units chip at my dudes before they can take any turns. If I even look at the generators I lose two units Who do you have? Your team will wildly inform your strategy.
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Sep 13, 2020 05:26
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Cherub, Terminal, Verge, Godmother, Patchwork, and Axiom. Cherub's great for the first two encounters but his shields instantly melt at the start of the third 
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Sep 13, 2020 05:28
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