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Any advice for having XCOM 2 timed missions not feel like completely frustrating bullshit? XCOM has always been a set of games that punish sloppy, hasty play really hard and the timed missions force me into sloppy, hasty play that leads to squad wipes and it's very "GAME WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME!?" feeling. I have no idea how I'm supposed to move fast enough to not get screwed by mission timers without randomly walking unprepared into groups of enemies that kick my rear end. I just ragequit a fresh campaign because my first mission after Operation Gatecrasher was a timed mission to hack a console on a train. I start sneaking out, see a patrol, set up to ambush it, it patrols away and hops over the train (so I can't even follow it to blap them) so I move forward, it comes back, I break concealment to kill it, then when I move into the train to hack it with two turns left, there's two Sectoid squads and reinforcements immediately pop. Lost my whole loving squad because none of them could get better than 50% shots on anything the entire fight and I missed almost every damned shot. I blew through XCOM: EW on Normal Ironman with almost no trouble (I lost 3 soldiers the entire campaign and had the game easily in hand the entire time, to the point that it got a little boring) and I can't get anywhere in XCOM 2 without just constantly feeling like the game is wholly stacked to be completely unfair bullshit. Magres fucked around with this message at 09:23 on May 24, 2016 |
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May 24, 2016 09:20
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Literal Nazi Furry posted:have you tried the true concealment mod I have not. That makes the timer not start until you break concealment, right? I probably should, I hate not being able to actually lurk around and scout things in concealment and I feel like that's a big part of the point of concealment. Honestly part of my frustration is that I've watched a little of other people play it and they just tend to regularly stop 5-10 squares short of enemy patrols to set up overwatch traps despite not using scanners and playing on Ironman mode and I have no idea how they seem to preemptively know where the damned patrols are. I'm stupidly competitive and hate being bad at things, particularly when there's clearly some way to play better than I am and I just can't figure out how to make it work. Magres fucked around with this message at 09:31 on May 24, 2016 |
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May 24, 2016 09:28
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Thanks for the advice guys! And for not just mocking me when I was being a little whiny  I'm gonna try to play a little faster in the first few rounds (I've gotten burned by being revealed in round 1 by a random civilian hidden in a tiny, 3 tile pocket of fog of war so I'm really anal retentive about never walking near any fog if I can help it and it slows me down a lot sometimes) and see how it goes. Jabor posted:I dunno, I never had trouble with the time limits or bad activations on my first playthrough, and I had no idea what the underlying mechanics were. Yeah, I adore Phantom, it makes everything in life a thousand times easier. Same with stupid line of sight tricks with Grenadier, hucking grenades over obstacles at targets your Phantom Ranger can see is great
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May 24, 2016 16:29
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I wish I could have been there when the devs came up with the idea for Fuse I imagine the office was filled with a bunch of evil cackling
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May 27, 2016 18:18
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Backhand posted:Shred is one of the better things to have in the whole game, sure, but that's why I always run two minigun specced grenadiers per squad. Yeah I love having a couple grenadiers around and shredding everything. Though recently (I don't have any good Psi Operatives ready yet) I've been running two Grenadiers and two Sharpshooters and I'm having a really hard time deciding whether I want to have two Grenadiers or two Sharpshooters in general in my final squad - I'm planning one of every class and one extra, and giving up having two Kill Zones for ambushing pods is hard because double Kill Zone makes for some real nasty ambushes.
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May 27, 2016 20:01
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Flashbangs really help make Codexes reasonable before you have the guns to blast them apart in a hit or two. Units that are disoriented cannot use Psionic powers, which includes Teleport, Clone(!!!) and the Psionic Rift Codexes use. This also means that if a Sectoid manages to mind control someone and hide behind high cover you can't get flank shots on, you can just flash bang the damned thing. Fair warning though, a flash banged Codex/Sectoid will instead just shoot at you so if you can leave a corpse out for a Sectoid to waste its turn turning into a zombie, don't flashbang the Sectoid. Battle Scanners will force Faceless to reveal themselves. Also, I'm not positive but in my experience if you rescue a civilian it will never turn into a Faceless right up on top of you, it's the civs you leave 5-8 squares away from you that you have to worry about.
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May 31, 2016 06:41
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Digirat posted:Oh it sure will Seriously? Good lord that is just such an rear end in a top hat design decision. I really hate stuff like that where the game just goes HAHA GOTCHA YOUR FAVORITE SOLDIER IS DEAD
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May 31, 2016 06:50
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I love the mission names this game comes up with sometimes 
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Jun 3, 2016 21:08
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Thyrork posted:
"OH MY GOD HITLER WHY!?" That was beautiful and made my lovely morning a lot better
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Jun 14, 2016 18:05
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Kwyndig posted:Haha, no. Why ever use move+sword when I can run and gun into a rapid fire with a shotgun point blank for better accuracy and 3x as much damage? Particularly with the GTS Ranger flanking damage bonus. Even with a 100% sword accuracy mod I basically never used swords. If there were some scout ability where killing something with a sword put you into concealment or something, I'd be interested in swords.
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Jun 19, 2016 03:21
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Alkydere posted:Personally I play with a mod that gives Ranger melee some slight tweaks (mainly +10/15 hit/crit per tier), and also Grimy's Loot Mod/Mod Everything. Swords become a lot more viable when they have even a bit more hit chance, and are modded to reduce enemy dodge by 20 (fuuuuck you Archons!). I play with the 100% sword accuracy mod and still barely ever use swords  Part of it is that I put Superior Scope + Superior Perception on my favorite Ranger so she could generally do Rapid Fire with 100% accuracy, or at the very least single fire people who are behind cover with accuracy in the 90s usually. Oh actually now that I think of it regarding Run and Gun, I don't even take Run and Gun anymore, just because she has high enough accuracy that I can usually blast people behind cover. I'd rather be able to pop from concealment and BOTH BARRELS a big target for 25 damage then re-conceal to resume scouting. For reference, my build on my favorite ranger - Phantom, Shadowstep, Conceal, Implacable, Untouchable, Rapid Fire. Shadowstep vs Shadowstrike is a tossup but usually my shots breaking concealment are nearly point blank and in flanking and she's got 110%+ accuracy (pre rapid fire) and like 80% or better crit chance. My Ranger absolutely demolishes things. Also all of this is on Veteran, so it could change drastically on Commander/Legend. Magres fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Jun 19, 2016 |
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Jun 19, 2016 05:05
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True Concealment is, imo, one of the best mods in existence and XCOM shouldn't be played without it. Mission timers starting while enemies have no idea you're even there is stupid, and so is having half the missions in the game ignore one of the biggest mechanics they introduced in XCOM 2. It makes timed missions easier if you play them well, and near impossible if you don't, cause you have fewer turns (after breaking concealment) to finish the objective, and if you're not milking your concealment to skip at least one pod you'll probably lose.
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Jun 23, 2016 04:23
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Yeah the only things I'm running are cosmetic slash user interface mods (stuff like on the post-mission screen it displays how many days people will be out when they get wounded), True Concealment, and 100% Sword Accuracy. Probably gonna turn off Sword Accuracy cause I don't care about it, but True Concealment is, as far as I am concerned, the true XCOM 2 experience. It doesn't make the game any easier (imo) it just makes it better.
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Jun 23, 2016 07:32
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Holy gently caress I had my Ranger kill eight enemies in one turn with Serial (she got it from the Advanced Warfare Center and it's godmode) during the final mission to save my butt. Just BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM over and over. Putting a Superior Scope and Superior Extended Magazine on her shotgun was a good investment. I'm gonna miss that Ranger so much, more than once when a fight was looking a little dicey and she'd just walk out and blast four or five enemies to rescue the mission, and she pulled out all the stops with this final mission.
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Jun 23, 2016 10:49
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SlyFrog posted:This is exactly what I thought as well. I don't think it is stupid. Concealment is on a tactical level (they do not know exactly where you are), not a strategic level (they do know that you are there, somewhere, as a giant ship flew in and dropped your dudes off somewhere). It makes sense to me that you would have limited time to get poo poo done after that, even if they don't know exactly where you are. Imo "they know you're around but not exactly where you are" is what non-Concealment is, because the pods are standing around (or patrolling) on high alert because they recognize you and move to engage you as soon as you're visible, and if they knew exactly where you are then you'd more or less have the All Pods Always Active mod as your situation. When you're in Concealment they're being lazy bastards and not really paying attention because they don't realize at all that you're there, which is also why the Vigilant dark event exists - everyone gets orders to sharpen the hell up and pay better attention, but they're still not on "there are enemies nearby" high alert, they're just actually doing their jobs and standing guard instead of slacking off. You're welcome to disagree with me though  That's just where my thinking for "True Concealment makes more sense than vanilla Concealment wrt timed missions" comes from.
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Jun 23, 2016 20:56
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Oh yeah timed missions own bones, I just think they're silly with Concealment sometimes. I'd enjoy having timed missions designed around not having concealment though. Make it a relatively easy mission, but you also have to make the entire thing a rolling firefight - timed missions with concealment (without True Concealment) generally just mean I sprint past as many pods as possible. Really, mission timers added a ton of room for interesting new missions.
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Jun 23, 2016 21:16
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RBA Starblade posted:My greatest(?) I absolutely hate seeing "Dodge: Grazed" on 100% shots. How does that mechanic even work, anyway?
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Jun 23, 2016 21:35
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Oh I'm dumb then, it was probably some like 90% shot that I mentally rounded to 100%
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Jun 23, 2016 21:45
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Doobie Keebler posted:That's funny. I usually round 90% shots down to zero. That's what happens when you need it to hit, anyway.  Yeah during final mission I had like 4-5 different 80-90% success chance actions (it was like a Mind Control, a Dominate, a Hack, and then a shot or two) all fail when I needed any given one of them to succeed for me to not be up a creek. I wound up having to burn through my Heavy Weapons on my Grenadiers to rescue things and was not happy about it.
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Jun 23, 2016 22:07
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Oooh yeah that sounds awesome! What's the name of it? I just finished a game of Veteran and I'm thinking Commander with more some more mods sounds fun
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Jun 23, 2016 22:22
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Game is good! If you're used to EU/EW or get frustrated if new mechanics surprise you (and screw you over in Ironman Mode) then I'd play on regular your first time, cause a fair few things changed up and the overall gameplay style has changed a fair bit.
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Jun 24, 2016 11:17
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NTT posted:Also, a lot of beagle's runs probably go late into the game, when his soldiers have high hit or weapon augments; overwatch becomes a much more reliable tool when your units have captain/major stats. Also, overwatch out of concealment has no penalties, which is why setting an overwatch trap to bust the first pod is good. Even with Superior Perception and a Superior Scope most of my overwatches miss. Even with soldiers with like 120 aim I don't bother to overwatch because I can just blow up cover and then 100% accuracy enemies instead (or just shooting people behind high cover at 100% half the time). I'm pretty sure the overwatch penalty is at least ~30%. Really, the only people I bother to overwatch with during fights are my Specialist and random people I Aid Protocol because I can Aid Protocol them for Covering Fire then overwatch with the Specialist (who has Guardian, or w/e the name of the ability that gives you a 50% chance to get another overwatch shot when you hit an overwatch) because sometimes the Specialist goes ham and overwatches like four or five times in a row and it's hilarious when she does, cause you can shoot the same enemy repeatedly. Aid Protocoling a Heavy as a Sectopod is coming in and having him hit then the Specialist just magdumping into the Sectopod and burning it down to like 3 HP is amazing. Basically I use overwatch if I have absolutely nothing better to do with people, but I'm generally looking for better things to do and I never set up overwatch traps unless I can get a patrolling pod to activate by walking into me instead of trying to set up a bunch of overwatches and then popping a pod. Even from Concealment I'd rather get good flanking positions then pop the pod and just shoot it to death normally. And during a firefight the only time I'm ever overwatching anymore is if I can't get shots better than like 70%. Magres fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 20:47
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I have a hard time not taking holo-targeting on one of my two Grenadiers. It's so nice for killing irritating high defense enemies, or just setting someone up for my Ranger to walk up and BLAM BLAM them with rapid fire
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Jun 27, 2016 21:27
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A trick for handling Rulers is having a Grenadier with Salvo and Heavy Ordinance with double Frost Grenades. I generally don't let Rulers do anything because as soon as I see one it's frozen, gets shot up, refrozen, and shot up some more, and by the time it's actually coming at me it's half dead. Also something to remember is that if you're out of good stuff to do with your soldiers against a Ruler, just pass the turn. It feels awful to let the enemy take a turn before you've taken all of your actions, but it's hugely important against rulers because every action you take that isn't hugely effective is a free turn for the Ruler. When I fought the Berserker Queen I froze her, shot her once or twice with my highest damage-per-action soldiers, froze her again, and passed the turn so I could get my high damage soldiers shooting at her again.
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Jun 28, 2016 22:18
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Alkydere posted:Yeah, it really does feel like the EU/EW "choice" of "Squadsight or not" or the Grenadier "choice" of "carry even more grenades or not" How is Squadsight vs Snapshot not a valid choice? I had a Snapshot Sniper who wound up with like 130 Aim at Colonel and regularly killed 3+ enemies with In The Zone.  Emo, you were the goddamned best and saved me so many times. Honestly I greatly prefer Snapshot to Squadsight because it's so much more flexible.
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Jun 30, 2016 22:19
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Malachite_Dragon posted:Because Squadsight + Double Tap + Archangel Armor sometimes felt just blatantly unfair So does Snapshot + In The Zone!  One time I had my favorite Sniper kill something like 7 enemies in one turn to instantly finish a Retaliation Mission gone sideways because she magdumped her Sniper Rifle on a huge swarm of Chrysalids that were about to start shredding civilians, then hucked at a Muton she didn't have the ammo to finish.
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Jun 30, 2016 22:26
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