Xcom 2

Thank god the lasers don't look like ass, unlike their SMG pack. I rarely see people talking about the mods they use, so here's an info dump of the ones I find manage to keep this game still sort of fresh:


A from-launch mod that originally removed a ton of long animation delays that were associated with most abilities and actions. I'm not sure how much it still does after the patch that added Zip Mode (which, by the way, you SHOULD be using), but I still use it.

Self explanatory. A nice convenience for when you are camping on the maps without timers, or if you use a mod that extends or removes timers.

A serious MVP QOL mod. Removes all those slow camera panning effects and delays when moving between base menus and rooms. Also has the effect of making the geoscape feel like it is performing a lot better.

This one is fantastic. Once you've played with it for a while it feels like it was always intended to be part of the UI. Knowing exactly how much time there is left until a scan site will disappear forever is a game-changing feature, but in a good way.

This one is even more optional than Overwatch. I wouldn't say its crucial, but if you like moving all your soldiers into the evac zone before giving the order to evac you might like the convenience.

In vanilla XCOM 2, the reload animation for every particular soldier has to finish playing before the next queued ability will run. This fixes that oversight. Absolute 100% required mod for multiple playthroughs unless you love having your time wasted.

A purely cosmetic mod that lets you equip your soldiers with the looks of any armor in the game, regardless of what they are actually wearing. This allows you to use NPC-only outfits, too, like the high heels some NPCs are wearing or the suit & tie outfit seen on VIPs or the newscasters during cutscenes. There are alternatives to this one, but I like it best.

Other urls found in this thread:

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=644076161&searchtext=
xcom2.smods.ru/
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Do you hate timers? Well, this is the mod for you. While you can configure it in the inis, the default behavior is to increase mission timers by 4 turns. So if you just want missions to be a little less "rush rush rush" (or simply hate the occasional RNG with map generation where a VIP mission is literally impossible to do in the timer), there's no need to configure, just plug and play.

There's a ton of different map mods on the Workshop. If you want more maps, you should install them all. The way maps are structured in the game all map mods are inherently compatible.

This little mod offers a bunch of minor features like more fine-grained customization of the camera rotation, but the real reason you probably want to install it is that it allows real-time adjustment of the base squad size during the geoscape, accessed through the gameplay options menu. It also changes the UI for squad deployment to support larger squad sizes.

In XCOM 2, hit and crit chance are a unified roll. That is to say, if an alien has a 10% chance to hit you, and a 10% chance to crit you, every hit they get will be a crit, rather than an additional roll to see if they crit or not. This mod reduces crit chance by a scaling amount based on how low your aim is. At 85% aim, there is no penalty. Below that number, it slowly starts to degrade crit chance. I find this more impactful than the EU aim rolls mod, but it's up to you which you prefer.

An edit of the "It's Just A Scratch" mod to be compatible with Shen's Gift DLC. It's Just a Scratch (and this) restores the Long War wound-related feature where your soldiers are only wounded if the damage taken during a mission starts to harm their base health. In other words, in base XCOM 2 any damage at all is a wound. With this mod, a character with 5 base HP and 5 from armor will not be wounded if they only take 5 damage.

A minor mod, but a nice one if you actually wanted Rulers to be a respectable threat. Repeaters can no longer insta-kill Rulers. That's it.

This is a big mod. Does more for your gameplay experience than all the other mods listed so far put together. A Better Advent essentially redesigns almost every Advent enemy in the game, offering multiple variations on every enemy, and plumping out the Advent roster in particular. You'll find advent soldiers with shotguns, early armor pips, or sniper rifles. Sectoids who do not use PSI but prefer to fire their plasma pistols (and do not have melee weakness) will spawn from the first mission. Etc. HUGE difficulty spike for the beginning of the game, and moderate overall, so it's a great mod to both make things fresh again and to counteract all the mods that hand XCOM more power.

Increases the size of enemy squads with A Better Advent. That's it. A good addition if you change XCOM's default squad size, or get bored in the base game.

Here's the other major, HUGE mod you definitely want to at least be aware of. Loot Mod adds a fuckton of mods (i.e, slottable upgrades) for every item type in the game. These are defined by rarity in terms of power and drop chance. It adds lootboxes as a core mechanic to the game, which require research time to open, which does a long way to fix the vanilla game's notorious problem of eventually having nothing to use your research department for. It was inspired by Diablo. Normally I'd consider that a black mark of shame, but this mod is actually really good for making the game feel fresh and fun again. It gives XCOM a lot of increased power, but A Better Advent can offset that. There's a definite joy to slotting upgrades into your gremlins or grenade launchers. More customization is never bad, right? Well, I recommend this mod without reservation. Just make sure you use something like A Better Advent to counterbalance it. Also, pay attention to the next mod. It's important.

Lets you put upgrades into any item type. Required for Grimy's Loot Mod, and really I wouldn't use this mod without Grimy's Loot Mod, since that's the only mod that actually adds the items you'd need to slot into anything but weapons.

Adds Alien Rulers loot (and mods) to the loot table of the Loot Mod. If you think mods for the Rulers weapons is too OP (which is a totally understandable opinion), you may want to skip this mod.

A matter of taste. Do you hate how shitty hacking felt for most of the vanilla game? Well, this removes the burdensome penalties of failing hacks. Instead of making the enemy tougher for rolling the dice wrong, you'll just waste an action and get the smaller penalties (being revealed, attracting enemies, etc). This definitely makes the game easier, but considering how the default playstyle with hacking in Iron-Man was just to never go for risky hacks, this may be a good thing.

What about overhauls? Well, we just recently got our first mostly-complete one of any worth: Spectrum. There's way too much shit to say about that one to fit in one post, though, so I'll let it go for now. Plus, it's still in a pretty fucking alpha stage despite being nominally released.

Still nowhere near enough
Where's a reputation system? Why are alien rulers still in the game? Why does the new Mecs have to be so disappointing?
This game needs a major overhaul mod to make it worth it.

Why do Advent Soliders look like soldiers from Alien Soldiers from season 2 Young Justice?

Is laser a side-grade for magnetic?

What do you think of the DLC? Alien Hunters sounds like shit, but Shen's Last Gift sounds interesting

Between Magnetic and Beam (new 3rd tier, beam now 4th)

Is this game worth a buy or a "buy"?

Okay, I remember seeing a mod that made lasers a side grade before the LWS version and I was wondering.

The unit Shen's Last Gift adds is a bit too strong.

Yeah, I liked the laser sidegrade mod. The advent weapon models looked cool. Always nice to see more weapon models for people to use, though, and the laser pack ones are very high quality ('cuz capnbubs did them, heh).

Is there a mod that removes RNG altogether? I just want a fucking TACTICS game, not roulette piece of shit.
Let me hit enemies 100% of the time, and let enemies hit me 100% the time, with cover function as damage reduction. For christ's sake!


Of course this piece of shit is not worth spending money on it.

THIS
It's a joke to call this game "tactical strategy" when your perfectly planned ambush with a 95% chance of success fails because le dice rolls said so
They are just too lazy to do all the work it requires to have a properly designed combat system because it would mean you have to balance all the numbers instead of just let dice rolls do it all, I have no idea why we still except this obsolete format of decision making in games, degenerate gambling addicts would be my guess.

You both really, really don't understand strategy games (or board games, or any tabletop game for that matter). I would suggest steering far, far away from them.

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There isn't hit chance in no RTS
There wasn't any hit chances in old Syndicate, Commandos or Mechcommander games.
As far as turn based games go - bam, they're all riddled with RNG bullshit.
I wonder fucking why.

Oh right tabletop.
The point of tabletop games is the social interaction with other dudes, joking around and fucking each other over.

When AI is fucking you over it's not fun.

That's a key factor in why people are more okay with dice and RNG in tabletop games, but the fundamental reason for having RNG (unpredictability and variety of outcomes) doesn't change.

If you don't like RNG that's fine, but it's not bad or novice design to include it.


Actually, there are. Starcraft had misses. You sound like you have no fucking clue what you're talking about, but prefer action games. That's fine. Stick to them, but there's no point complaining a type of gameplay you don't like is objectively bad just because you don't like it.

Fucking RNG apologists.

i hope someone is archiving or screensaving all that shit.
Any mods were you play as the ayyliens and invade earth? total conversion mod?
any mods were you marry the qts snakes can recruit snakes?

are you retarded?

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I disagree.
I'd say that RNG kills PvP, in PvE it's a non-issue.

Whats your steam id kiddo, I'll destroy your anus in rome: total war and you can cry to me about how there are no dice to roll so you can win, that's the real reason you shitters love dice rolls so much, so you can always have a chancee to win cause you're awful at chess and got your shit pushed in.

Hold it you inbred millennial fuck, don't insult Chess by bundling this piece of firaxtrash with it.

There are absolutely dicerolls in Total War. And I don't just mean assasinations and spying. Combat between units has a diceroll component to it. Why do you think that even units with only 1 hit point sometimes absorb arrows and other times die right away?

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Thanks for the list of good mods OP. I'm gonna try them when I'm off work tomorrow.

It's a tactics game, just like Jagged Alliance, Hard West, Syndicate, XCOM, and X-COM.

Too bad XCOM2 remains a spiteful wannabe "Dark Souls of TBS" game.

Shit, even EU is better. 2 lacks a stupidly large amount of shit the prior game had, for absolutely no reason that I have been able to discern as of yet.
Where's my fucking SHIVs? MECs? Biologically modified supersoldiers? Where's my standard classes? Why has it been shortened to a handful of useful classes and a larger group of completely rubbish classes?

At least the sneks are hot.

Actually did a reinstall since last I played (back in March when it released), lot of good mods have come out.

Dunno though, I feel like the LWS perk pack has made swords/shotguns waaaaaaay too good in the early game.

That sword buff is big, and getting shit like slug shot for assaults is also big. They've scored probably 80% of my kills in the first 2 months of missions.

Been playing with most of the mods OP used, and better advent + larger enemy pods, and larger starting squad.

I found this.

steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=644076161&searchtext=

But im not sure about compatibility with other mods or if it is even good.

Have they finished releasing all the DLC yet? I want to wait until the full game was finished before pirating and i'm glad I did since it sounds like the game was pretty dissapointing.

I think Shen's Last Gift should be the last one unless they gonna pull double season passes since that is the last one the Season Pass says is included.

I've heard people say they'll do another actual expansion, but that might just be wishful thinking

They better do it, the current DLCs and the game itself are a disappointment.

Where is snek porn at?

The game was so shit that noone wants to post about it.

It's called probability, the game's RNG is dogshit and it lies to you on what it is but if you can't handle RNG that tells me you can't into probability. Besides how exactly would you make the game beatable if every hit is guaranteed? Suddenly you're overhauling the whole engine as you realize that the game wasn't designed for that.

In MC2, pilot skill determines whether or not a shot will hit. Elite AI is a good shot. If you play wolfman's mod, the mercenary level pilots and ai shots will track because the gunnery skill is so high.

Confirmed for playing on Green difficulty.

It's the usual necessity of balancing, though. Swords were so bad before no one would build for them–maybe they swung it too far in the opposite direction, but sometimes that's what you need to do to alter people's thinking.


There is going to be an expansion pack. It was 99.9% confirmed by stuff they accidentally put into the modding SDK.

What do you mean? By bad, you mean too RNG-based?

My badass ranger would rape with his upgraded sword, but my other rangers would miss at the worst time. I've generally enjoyed using swords; maybe, I'm lucky.

Their damage is incredibly low compared to shotguns in all but the first month or two. And then there is the pod activation system which makes melee not very good. That is still a problem when people overbuff swords, and really WHY they overbuff swords–if you are going to risk everything by possibly activating too many pods, the payoff has to be BIG.

Shotguns at least have the option of firing at range. Swords will inevitably create problem situations.

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Hunter Axe was really cool for letting you do that. Too bad it's a (1) use. Still my favorite weapon in the game, and the only thing really worthwhile out of the Alien Hunter DLC.

Fuck off casuals, there's no 100% guaranteed success in real warfare, everything can and does go wrong. Tactics is as much about improvisation, plan Bs and unaccounted scenarios as it is about pre-planned actions. If you can't handle a miss because you were stupid enough to leave your soldiers too exposed to survive, that's your tactical shortcoming, not the game's design flaw.


Warcraft 3 had damage distribution and passive abilities that granted a critical chance or dodge, and it was all part of tactics.

Many games like Company of Heroes have chances, and Company of Heroes takes it so far that artillery has a pretty notable deviation. Unless you are hitting superior from behind it's most likely going to bounce off.


Chess is trash, even crappy downgraded in content and complexity games like this offer more options and strategic planning and tactical thinking than chess.

That's what I was trying to get across, but it's pointless to even explain that to someone who thinks RNG is inherently bad or wrong, it's like the people who think real-time or turn-based is what makes a game good or bad.

It boggles my mind why so many people fail to understand that being good in a game like XCOM isn't about getting lucky, it's being able to OVERCOME bad luck. If your plan falls apart if one single thing goes wrong, it was a shit plan. There are exceptions to this where you become so ridiculously unlucky that you just automatically fail, yet those edge cases are so rare, while people act like they happen every time they play.

Exactly. Just like in this one mission I did where I skulljacked an ADVENT officer, triggered two pods right after, and had all my cover destroyed next turn as well as having my weapons cheesed by the codex.

Lost zero soldiers, only one gravely wounded.

You never played chess right?

Chess is so braindead simple that even a computer can easily pick it up.

Im officially triggered, congratulations

Or literally squad wiping and losing all your dudes, and coming back to win the game. A lot of people treat squad wipes as instant game-overs. It's true it sets you back a ton and XCOM could stand to be less snowball-y, but I find it sad so many people just give up on the spot well that happens as if the game can only be played that way. One of my most memorable moments with EU/EW was winning an Iron-Man game after I lost all my high-ranked soldiers.

Yeah but you gotta realize that losing can be fun. I remember how once in Enemy Within I lost almost all my elite well-trained dudes in that stupid Lovecraft-inspired fishing village mission. That was fun and appropriate. It was Iron Man mode and the last man standing wasn't capable of taking on the aliens and was on the less competent end of the team before the slaughter. Of course after that slaughter he became my best soldier and even got to avenge his teammates by being one of the soldiers sent to take on the mothership. That was fucking awesome.

Of course losing can be fun. If losing was never fun then Dwarf Fortress probably wouldn't have the fanbase that it does.

Go play some russian roulette with a shotgun.

Nobody ever said it was. Go play Jagged Alliance 2 or 7.62 if you want to see a battle system that isn't dogshit retarded like XCOMs. Or better yet, X-COM

What about Xenonauts or UFO: Alien Invasion?

So.. The same thing? If your strategy is so shit that a single failed shot causes it to fall apart then you shouldn't be playing these games at all. You're not the guy I was responding to anyway.

To be fair, X-COM (the original) was not a very tactical game. You could throw meat at the problem until it went away and it really wasn't hard at all, just confusing to new players.

All of its strengths lay in how awesomely simulationist it was (and yeah, all of EU/EW & XCOM 2's faults lie in how it is not simulationist at all).

I didn't like UFO much and Xenonauts just didn't have enough soul, but the battle system was fine. Mods have probably fixed everything that was lacking by now.


Considering one of those games is real-time, no it isn't the same thing you retard.

This has nothing to do with XCOM having a shit battle system. You have a whopping 3 states your soldiers can be in at any time, high cover, low cover or no cover. There are no stances, there are no movement options besides "go here" the abilities are all just shitty coverups for the non-existent inventory system. Remember gadgets like flares? There isn't even something as simple as snap shots and aimed shots. There is no strategic or tactical depth whatsoever. You are playing a shitty board game where all you can do is "I move guy here and shoot".

Cry more.

Can some nice person make an infographic out of this for future use? I´m always looking for good mods.

I think a great mod you have left out is True Concelement. With this mod the mission timer only starts, when your concelement is broken and i´t also quite good balanced.

Dwarf Fortress and other games where losing everything is common are way easier to restart however. The progress, especially on Legendary, is too long.

*too slow, and the initial "tutorial phase" too long.

You've never played strategy board games like Warhammer or the new kids in town like Warmachine not to mention the tried and true games like Go or Chess. Xcom Enemy Unknown and Xcom 2 have even less mechanics then Warhammer 40K.

:^)

So is this game worth pirating again?

user.

You also missed the operative word in that sentence, "shitty".

It still runs pretty bad even with the updates, if you are just curious it can be worth another download and playthough. God help the PS4 and Xbone when this comes to their systems.

as far as i understand the game still runs like shit.

I'll try to run it when i get a GTX 1080 on Monday. but it FPS goes all over the place with a 980 i can say that for sure.

It isn't GPU bound

haha

So have they finally fixed this PoS? I stopped playing right after one of the first big scripted missions because I was fed up with the bullshit bugs and shit.

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I was looking at this game on Steam, why is it Over $65?

In American dollars? It should be $60 without a sale it shouldn't be sold for 60 at all with the problems it still has

Are you Canadian? If not, then you're probably looking at the soundtrack+all DLCs, and that's not worth it at all. The new soundtrack is worse than EU/EW's, and pretty much all of the DLCs are shitty. A quick rundown:

Anarchy's Children
Overpriced and worthless/10.

Alien Hunters
Further destruction of the art style and makes vanilla's kill-everything-in-your-path-ASAP-or-you'll-get-raped-to-death even worse with bullshit enemies/10

Shen's Last Gift
They took a single facet of a great DLC from the last game and fucked it up/10.

Considering that the DLC are sold as a pack and is only $5-6 cheaper than EW, I can't check, because the Resistance pack displays in USD but EW is in fucking Euros, I think that they were supposed to come together to form one EW-sized expansion. They objectively failed in scope, cohesiveness, balance, satisfaction, and fun. I wouldn't be surprised if they halfassed the DLC in this game because they wanted a Long War equivalent to do the work developing and expanding the game for them.

It is even more powerful than stasis since it lasts for more than one turn, it can effect a group of enemies, and you can kill them while they are frozen. Psi was already underpowered compared to MEC's in EW, I think its even worse in this one.

Why else would they make smaller DLC's that can be more readily integrated into the mods?

It's a solid plan to be honest, and I like the general idea, I just wish it didn't reflect as it does on the quality.

I disagree that Psykers are underpowered in XCOM2 just from the sheer utility they offer (guaranteed damage, buffing, debuffing, CC, status effects, Inspire, and Dominate), but it's retarded that they literally give you Stasic-but-better for free at the beginning.

Also, the idea that you only have one of each weapon was a terrible idea too, since it made the game's snowbally nature even worse. If you don't have all four still when you're fighting the Rulers, you're fucked.

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On top of the alien fursuits, the alien rulers are even more bullshit when you're on an escort mission, which they appeared on every time for me. They get a free move as I hunker down the escort so they don't get massacred by a fucking berserker queen with AoE attacks that knock half your units unconcious.
The Alien rulers would probably be better off as a seperate hunting mission where you enter their lair, kill all their escorts and then they appear next turn as a miniboss.

My opinion on XCOM 2's Psi is due to the fact I don't build the Psi lab until late game. So that means building a psi operative from scratch when I already have a full team.

Yeah, I usually build a psi lab in the midgame and have them train for two or three months until they have everything. When you're able to MC a Gatekeeper the first time you meet them, it sets the tone.

My usual endgame squad's

I haven't gotten to the lategame with SPARKS yet, so no opinion.
Also, does anyone know where the force level info is? I want to adjust Legendary's scaling so that research times are the same, since I fucking hate how repetitive it gets, but I instead want enemies to level up like 1.5 times faster to still encourage labs and choosing scientists.

In late game, Sparks become a joke
No PCS
No weapon mods
No items
Same aim as a grenadier
Less health than everyone
Armor that's largely ignored because everyone does 15 damage per hit now
And no good skills besides Strike, which looks like shit now thanks to the animation.
The only advantage to a Spark is that using one means you have some moving heavy cover and one extra heavy weapon slot. Funnily enough, thanks to Firaxis's brilliant programming, enemies can use your Spark as cover.

I forgot to mention
Sparks also don't get a Guerilla perk or get any effect from the AWC. One is merely the loss of a minor power boost, the other means that they have 30 day heal times, Which is worse since they only heal one at a time. You could end up with a literal queue three months long of Sparks waiting to be healed if you try to use a Spark army.

Well, good luck fixing FPS issues, Firaxis.

It would be nice if you could post a MEGA or some other direct download with all your mods since Steam Workshop is such a bitch to download from. Also CAPTCHA knows the secrets of Shen's DLC.

That's what normal, sane devs would have done but this is XCOM and the new meme is that XCOM IS SO HARD LOL DONT BE ANGRY AT THE RNG xD

DAT'S XGOM :D

They made the alien rulers the way they are because a significant section of their fanbase finds the current tactical combat way, way too easy.

xcom2.smods.ru/

Workshop mirror for pirate friends.

Are you fucking shitting me?
X-com was infinitely more tactical then Nu-com BECAUSE it properly simulated shit.
Bullets were actual projectiles which would actually be simulated not some cheap RNG bullshit base.

Building were fully destructible and could collapse, not RNG stat booster which occasionally blew up usually mixed with a few bugs.

Enemies actually wandered the map they didn't spawn in pods that didn't do anything until you discovered them.

Fuck off you nu-com apologist.

The problem is that the tactical gameplay is more punishing than difficult, which leaves people wanting difficulty beyond LOL DAS ESSCONBAUBEE super frustrated.

The removal of It's Just A Scratch while also adding in RNG for how long wound times are is proof that Firaxis wanted to make the game all about killing enemies before they can shoot, which is really not fun. Instead of planning around the aliens' unique abilities, they're just fucking health bars that you have to destroy in sequence that have a 65% chance to instantly knock out a soldier for a fucking month.

Like, the class abilities are usually pretty fun. The problem is that half of them are suboptimal because killing enemies or guaranteeing misses are the only useful skills with the wound timers the way they are. Why the fuck would you pick a healer when your soldiers aren't supposed to get hit?

Is there a mod that makes the mod more a guerilla warfare simulator instead of a trashy Enemy Unknown reskin?
Or at least a mod that makes the timers similar to Invisible Inc's timers?

One thing that need to rework that would increase tactical difficulty is getting rid of the pod system. Since the difficulty right now in these xcom games is from activating too many at once.

There is a guerilla warfare mod out there, pretty sure what it does is gets rid of mission timers, but instead replaces them with never ending reinforcements that get stronger and stronger, so you quickly get overwhelmed if you stick around. Basically gets rid of the "defeat all enemies" section of the mission and your objective is to just do whatever the point of the mission was and then evac. There is also an unrelated mod out there that gives you limited ammo reserves, could maybe combine the 2.


In what way? There is a mod that makes it so once you go loud the entire map is alerted to you. And there is another one that was an enemy type that is a "spotter", basically if he sees you he calls in reinforcements, but you can ambush him and skip all that.

Beaglerush's been streaming a mod just like that. No timers, non-stop reinforcements, and you only get the corpses and loot you carry out.

I'm not apologizing for new XCOM, it's a much worse game, but pretending X-COM was super difficult is just laughable.

Actually, I am 99.9% certain the reason they did wounds the way they did is to force people to field multiple teams. It's their version of Long War's (much hated) "Haha, you existed somewhere, so now you're fatigued! Sit in the barracks for weeks, nigga!". Something I think they are still grappling with is that most people who play their games don't ever want to feel as if they are "losing", even if it's an aspect of the game that doesn't matter. Even some "good" players will restart the game early on if they lose a soldier they consider essential, and a lot of people have trouble accepting even injuries. They want to run one A squad for the entire game. Ironically, some of the same people complained about how the design forced them to do this in EU/EW. Well in XCOM 2 the design is trying to make them NOT do this, but people still want to.

It works way way better in long war. The combo of the wound timer not being full pants on head retarded (seriously take 1 damage in XCOM 2 and you can be out for 20+ days if you get unlucky roll), and the fact that in LW you are suppose to have multiple squads, and there are enough missions to warrant and level up multiple guys easily makes it not such a big deal if someone is wounded for a bit.

Those are two different things.

Probably, but there's a billion better ways to do that. One mod I run adds in soldier notoriety that slowly decays, but every time you field them it multiplies. It punishes using the same dudes but makes it not RNG-reliant.

Just use the It's Just A Spark mod, man. It totally fixes this. I love running with medics now, it feels great.

That being said, I don't think this solves the underlying problem of the game being too much about offense. Someone really needs to address that with an overhaul. I want the game to get back to a point where you can have standoffs with the enemy, encounters that last a number of turns with smoke grenades and all that jazz. The big obstacle I see to that is timers–I really wouldn't mind seeing an overhaul mod that strips out timers for all but 1 or 2 missions. I really don't like them and feel like they are probably responsible for that "all-in, we kill them all or we're fucked" feeling. Some people suggest this would make the game easier, but I feel it's the opposite: a lot of the basic enemies in X2 are probably tuned to be easier than EU/EW because they assume you are often dealing with timers and have to do inoptimal shit.


Fair enough. Bad use of words. I'll take that back. I DO feel that what makes X-COM great is not its tactical combat, though–it's the overall feeling of simulationism that runs through the game. The tactical combat has that simulationist approach, and it is responsible for the things people generally love about (holy shit, there is a lighting model with gameplay ramifications! holy shit, bullets have trajectories! holy shit, there is an actual inventory system!) it. And the geoscape is famously much moreso that way, with all the micromanagement of multiple bases and base details.

I'm a huge fucking fan of games that take that approach, it's why I love X-COM, but it's not like there is literally nothing new XCOM does better.


I just don't like arbitrary executions of that idea, like Long War's (EU/EW). At least with harsh wound timers you can say, "Well, I DID get hit. Once." Rather than it being just a fucking part of osmosis or something.

No what I meant like stuff like having civilian support, sleeper cells, propaganda, cutting off supply lines, that sort of stuff.

You know, I've been curious about this game for a while. Is it good to play the mercenary game with my ragtag of super rebels? It is worth a Steam Sale?

Is what? XCOM2? Like I said it's just Enemy Unknown with a halfassed reskin, bad performance and bugs

I see, so I guess the only thing new is the character customization? there are not even news for the rumored deep sea expansion?

None.

Now that's really disappointing.

It was so heavily teased in the ending cutscene, there's no way it's not gonna happen

I'm planning on getting It's Just A Spark when I'm next at my computer, but I'm still going to bitch at Firaxis for taking what worked, removing it, and seemingly not balancing around its exclusion.

Has anyone played around with the LW classes? How are they compared to LW/vanilla X2/other mod classes?

It's not going to happen, the director hates the idea too much.
What's probably going to happen instead is a ship rising from the ocean and the rest of the game is fought on land.

Why does the director hate the idea? Anyway, I guess they would do it in a sequel.

From interviews, he thinks the ocean is too alien and that fighting in a familiar environment like a shopping center is better for the Xcom atmosphere.

Probably doesn't want to deal with a fully 3 dimensional grid to work with, even though Terror from the Deep got around that issue by not giving a fuck.

...

… but preciselly the alien atmosphere makes it more interesting. Can't they make if hybrid and have encounters both in the deep of the sea and the surface?

I'm rather disappointed X Com didn't had a super brain from mars controlling the alien horde.

Nah fam, Xcom is secretly a horror game. Setting the actual game under the sea would take away from that.

But that makes even less sense! there is nothing more scary than the deep of the sea.

Just look up any interview by the game's director, he really hates the second X-com, probably because it kicked his ass.

Then why the hell they teased Terror from the Deep? What was he thinking about?

They weren't teasing a new threat, they were suggesting that the base wasn't fully destroyed.

Base DLC confirmed

DLC adds option to replace avenger with a base

I seriusly doubt it, although if that was the case, maybe they are foreshadowing the next enemies to be the other dimentional guys from x-com apocalypse.

You know what would work to revamp RNG?


Don't know if it has been made or talked about in the thread but that just came to mind.

...

For the most part RNG isn't needed while playing, maybe with things like dodging an overwatch and targets from long distence (say 20 to 30 blocks away), but other than that, I don't see much use in it, especially when you have fully upgraded troops that all miss a target just because of that one percentage.

I'm not sure I would take his criticisms of TFTD that seriously after all this time, I mean XCOM 2 is about as far as you can get from EU/EW & X-COM in terms of the flavor of the setting.

It is confirmed there will be an expansion, and both the ending cinematic of XCOM 2 (the glowing rift in the ocean) and the leaked content that was in the SDK (flooded coastal areas) suggests it will have something to do with the water. But I concur with the notion that it will be set on land. Probably just have some aquatic creatures coming from the sea.

For what it's worth, Jake Solomon's hate of TFTD really isn't that weird. A LOT of fans of X-COM share it. Some people like TFTD in spite of its flaws, but no one really denies it was a lazy (but occasionally fun for its challenge) clone of X-COM done in a year to make money.

And I guess I can't expect alien deserters nor horrible mutants to work for you, right?

Whelp first off the RNG is outright lieing to you, what the UI tells you is not the true percentage chance even if it says 100% or 0% the second thing is that the walls don't matter only what cover says so you'll have to rewrite the engine and how it handles terrain, and you'll have to completely change everything else like the AI and it's priorities and the actual stats of all your weapons would have to change to suit it. Plus the "chance to block" if shot at is still RNG to get hit you dumbass.

Don't forget how they massively jacked up the difficulty because of a bug that would set X-Com 1 on permanent easy mode.
I guess you could say that X-Com 2 is the Dark Souls of strategy games.

Yeah, it's a dumb idea I typically see proposed by people who just don't like this sort of game. They should play something they do like instead of trying to change something else.

I mean, the knock-on effects of getting rid of RNG are so many that you might as well just start over with a completely new type of game.

The interesting thing to me is that TFTD is basically more beloved now than it was when people were playing it for the first time. The setting was always sort of cool and that was the one thing people really liked about it at the time, but people loving it for the crazy difficulty didn't happen until many years later.

For what it's worth, I think it's a cool little game, but you need to accept that it WAS a lazy and quick hack-job to raise money, kind of like Icewind Dale 2.

Never said get rid of it entirely, dumbass, just had an idea that may or may not work.

Well in EW there was gene mods that you can give your soldiers that were from the aliens but nothing of the sort has been hinted at for the new expansion. Maybe there's something in the SDK files mentioned. I don't know if they will have aliens or mutants work for you like you envision.There are mods that allow you to have EXALT and alien troops though

It may have been a lazy hack job back in the day, but amazingly it's a creatively genius masterpiece next to all the junk coming out these days.
They didn't take out vital features, they didn't just repaint creatures from the first game and call it a day, they didn't have the setting be literally the same as the last game.
In other words: at least it's not Bethesda.

There was two aspects to the SDK files: actual new areas with new textures and models, and references to data that wasn't in the SDK, all marked XPACK. The references only provide speculation, but the areas in the SDK were canal variants of current Advent areas and flooded coastal areas.

Some of the references included wording referring to "abandoned cities", hard to say if that was part and parcel of the abandoned area in Shen's Gift DLC or actually part of the XPACK.

I missed the ruined cityscape in X2, there's small towns with that ruined vibe, but nothing big. I wanted something like that map in EU/EW where a ufo has landed in a skyscraper and demolished it, and you're moving through destroyed city streets.

Yeah, it's kind of like the Infinity Engine games: the foundation is good enough that even when they're just creating really basic variants it still holds up.

Which is the exact same thing that the game has now, only "black" instead of "miss" which is fundamentally the same.

Then play on Classic or Impossible (EU/EW), play on Legendary (2) or change the configs in 2 to remove that shit. They only added it for the shitters that complain about RNG.

Bravo Firaxis

well it still runs like shit with a over clocked 6700K i don't know what to say about that. should i be using server processors or some shit ?

are they even going to patch it anymore or have that moved on to PS4 / XBONE

experiencing lag with 8 cores each at 4.2Ghz.

Scratch that. Games don't use that many cores.

I even forgot I had this game.

At least Long War gives you enough people to form A, B and C squads. XCOM2 doesn't, especially considering how worthless low-level soldiers are.

Oh yea, Firaxis' patch policy is a fucking disgrace.

In XCOM2, I can hire new recruits from the base that are fully maxed out every month. I have more elite snipers than I know what to do with.

Get good or get wrecked, the only possible way to beat the damn game

Are you really comparing the complexities of IRL firearms to the RNG of XCOM?

If I have a decently built and zeroed rifle, for practical purposes let's assume its an rack grade M16 with XM855. That'll give an average grouping of 4" at 100 yards. Now, rifles issued to grunts are beat to fucking shit so you can probably expect worse.

Point is, at muzzle touching distance, you shouldn't fucking miss.

Polite sage for autism

Bullets being actual physical objects that interact individually is infinitely superior to bullets just being a pretty FX with no actual impact.

Oh yea, everyone can cheese the game but having roughly 1.5 viable approaches to everything doesn't make for an interesting game.

Why it does it feel like this game has as much depth as a mobile title?

Answer because EU was released for iOS

just redownloaded the game and put up the mods you suggested, are there any mods the fucking shit where aliens have los and can shoot you in overwatch through goddamn walls

Accuracy is totally irrelevant in close combat, the only thing that matters is the shooter's ability to track the target. And even trained soldiers can sometimes panic in combat.

That was a holdover from before they decided against emulating the ballistics hit/miss of the original, where you could aim at the ground to destroy cover.

I'm going to assume you don't actually take XCOM literally. Because if you do, you are retarded. So assuming you aren't, I'll explain:

XCOM (and X-COM) is an abstraction of real combat. When you miss a sectoid with the barrel of your gun poking through his head, what would actually be happening is that the sectoid is MOVING, maybe reaching to gouge out your eyes, et cetera, so you miss. Or you panic slightly. It's not like in the alternate world of XCOM everyone is actually acting in sequence, just staring and waiting for the other guy to move before their magical invisible bubble lets them also act.

And yes, even in the original X-COM you can miss a point-blank shot. It's far rarer (because X-COM uses different dice), but it can happen.