Author Topic: XCOM 2  (Read 52059 times)

Offline TheVampire100

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #150 on: February 19, 2016, 06:05:51 pm »
I lost, Avatar got finished. Have to restart now, because it was Ironman. I had some nasty missions with Andromedons.

Offline Wingflier

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #151 on: February 19, 2016, 07:00:10 pm »
Glad I'm not the only ironman player in here. There's nothing quite like the feeling of that mission that goes to hell fast or 15 hours down the drain.
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Offline Misery

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #152 on: February 19, 2016, 08:34:43 pm »
Normally I'd do something like ironman in these sorts of games, but... not with the RNG having such a strong presence. 

Offline crazyroosterman

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #153 on: February 19, 2016, 08:55:00 pm »
Glad I'm not the only ironman player in here. There's nothing quite like the feeling of that mission that goes to hell fast or 15 hours down the drain.
speaking of which I don't think its in xenonauts? although its probably in the community version I imagine?.
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Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #154 on: February 19, 2016, 08:58:09 pm »
speaking of which I don't think its in xenonauts? although its probably in the community version I imagine?.

Ironman? Yeah, that's in both vanilla and community.
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Offline Aklyon

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #155 on: February 19, 2016, 09:13:31 pm »
I lost, Avatar got finished. Have to restart now, because it was Ironman. I had some nasty missions with Andromedons.
Andromedons are lovely MC targets. They can make holes in walls for you for free, tank damage (and do so for at least two turns instead of one, sectopods not counted), and shoot back! And also are hackable for even more damage-sponge, assuming you don't just kill it afterwards and that it attracts more attention than your team.

They're a pain to have to fight though, at least at first.

Offline crazyroosterman

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #156 on: February 19, 2016, 09:17:44 pm »
speaking of which I don't think its in xenonauts? although its probably in the community version I imagine?.

Ironman? Yeah, that's in both vanilla and community.
hu guess I must have missed it will have to remember to turn them on in my next run thanks.
c.r

Offline chemical_art

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #157 on: March 01, 2016, 03:00:15 pm »
Life is short. Have fun.

Offline keith.lamothe

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #158 on: March 01, 2016, 03:03:11 pm »
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Offline TheVampire100

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #159 on: September 24, 2017, 01:29:37 am »
Time to use my necromancer skills on this thread.

For thise who didn't notice, XCOM 2 got a nice new expansion called "War of the Chosen".
It's similiar to Enemy Within that it changes the entre game so much, that they have to keep it as seperate starting option for players.
This thing adds even more than Enemy Within and that expansion was already crazy.

I ry not to spil that much and just talk about the general gameplay features, that were added. Apart from new aliens, weapons, items and missions, the main focus are the three new bosses, the Chosen.
These aliens can appear on any mission and make your life miserable. You can kill them like any other enemy but they will then teleport out instead of actually dying. The key part of the game is to find the hideout of each of these bosses and finish it off there.

To do this you get support from three new NPC factions. You have to make contact to these factions, estabelish a good connection with them and they allow you to support on covert actions. Covert actions are non-playable missions (like in Enemy Within), whre you send out soldiers for a specific time and they will eventually return with a result. If they are successful, you get loot, progress, xp, you name it. Your soldiers can even get stats from doing these missions. However, they can get hurt, ambushed or even captured on these missions. the last one is really bad for you because captured soldiers get now tortured from the Chosen in order to learn the location of the Avenger (your base). You can rescue the soldiers in a special new mission type that involves stealth.

Additionaly to covert actions, each of the three factions give you access to new classes (or more specific, they give you one of their own soldiers). The special classes can choose from multiple skills.

While we're at skills, these are also new. The typical two branches are still there but with a new building, the training center, you can now branch out to a third path with randomized skills for each soldier. and you can even get skills from BOTH skill trees at once. Soldiers get now skill points for kills, these can be used to buy skills that you didn't choose by level ups or you can choose fromt he third branch that is randomly generated for each soldier. Additionally you also have "XCOM" skill points that are shared with each soldier.l These can be obtained from good strategic moments in battles like flanking an enemy or getting a good shot from an ambush. Defeating Chosen (even in the mission where you cannot kill them for good) also gives a good amount of these.

Now the features don't end here. A new enemy faction was added too. The Lost. These are your typical horror zombies that were exposed to alien radiation for 20 years. They are mindless, they are undead and they are very hostile towards anything. This includes the aliens as well, on missions were you fight both Lost and aliens, the Lost will alsso attack the aliens.
The Lost are drawn by loud noises (reminds of the L4D zombies a lot) and you can use grenades to lure them in specific regions, for an example in enemy clusters. keep in midn that the Lost will still attack you if they can.
The Lost don't have many HP, most of the time 2-4, in some stronger cases about 5-8. You can almost always one-shot them. But they come in big numbers, it's not rare to suddenly fave 20 of them at once. To counter this, each kill on a Lost will net you another free action to use. Cue for heroic zombie survival fights. In many missions with Lost it's impossible to beat them, they are too many, you have to evacuate after you finished the objective. The Lost add a nice variation to the mix bu can also annoy he hell out of you in missions where you really don't want them. *cough* Chosen shows up.

Except that, XCOM 2 is still XCOM 2, the main objective is still the same, the plot device is still the same with some variations here and there to fill in the Chosen.

A nice and welcome change are in the retaliation missions. There is now a variation to the standard version where the civilians are brought together at a safe spot and protected by resistance soldiers who ge their own turn an can attack and kill aliens for you. This makes these missions a lot easier and not so chaotic as they used to be. The aliens will in this variation however ignore your troops mostly and attack the civilians if they can to make up for that change. This includes aliens that you engaged already and are two steps away from one of your soldiers.


A last note, XCOM 2 has now daily challenges. These single player missions can be played for points in a daily leaderboard. It's a common thing in other types of games but I didn't expect in XCOM2.

And whiel we're at XCOM, he maker of XCOM has started a new game which will come out 2018. It's XCOM. With horror. It is, fromt he concept, XCOM Enemy Unknown but the twist is that enemies are procedurely generated on your behaviour and your playstyle. they adapt towards your stretegy, if you use a specific type of weapon often in missions, you will face enemies that are resistent towards it.
To make it even more crazy, the game will feature huge bosses with multiple attack patterns and you have to shoot of limbs in Dead Space Style to remove attacks from the boss and kill it off.
The premise of the game is that after a global virus broke out and infected wildlife and humans, the survivors settled in big megacities to be safe. The virus mutated its hosts and gave them properties of every specimen it had infected. The result are creatures with grotesque limbs made from different species. It looks very promising.
https://phoenixpoint.info/

Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #160 on: September 24, 2017, 07:11:17 am »
I actually backed Phoenix Point, outstepping my usual kickstarter-like hesitance. I'm hoping it'll be good. It looks creative and promising. Like what XCOM 3 should've been. If you've ever read the XCOM 3 (Apocalypse) design documents, that game sounds *AMAZING* But time and money constraints forced them to scrap most of the cool mechanics.
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Offline TheVampire100

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #161 on: September 24, 2017, 12:42:37 pm »
I'm quite excited for this game, not only because it's XCOM bu because it's a horror XCOM with grotesque monsters that could come from "The Thing".

Offline Misery

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #162 on: September 26, 2017, 04:37:56 am »
I'd forgotten this game existed.

After all the earlier conversation was over and done with and considered, I thought... okay, I'll pick it up, this might be pretty darned good.   Then I forgot about it.  I hate it when I do that.  Though, it's better than buying something and THEN forgetting about it.

Looking at this new expansion though, one thing stands out:  Holy freaking hell that is a PRICEY expansion.   Seriously, that's really expensive.  Not something that would stop me from getting it, but I'm usually suspicious of something where the price is somehow abnormally high.  Still I might go and pick the whole thing up.  As annoying as the first game could be, there was no denying the quality of it.  Aside from RNG overload at times the only true problem was that there was no way in hell my laptop could run it.


This new game you linked to also sounds very interesting.  I love the idea of these procedural monsters here, if they could pull that off well it could get very interesting.  I'm a bit suspicious of the bit where "OMG PRE-ORDER" seems to be 75% of that blasted site though.  Though I tend not to mind pre-order stuff when early access comes with it.  But that's generally the only exception.

Offline Mánagarmr

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #163 on: September 26, 2017, 08:03:51 am »
This new game you linked to also sounds very interesting.  I love the idea of these procedural monsters here, if they could pull that off well it could get very interesting.  I'm a bit suspicious of the bit where "OMG PRE-ORDER" seems to be 75% of that blasted site though.  Though I tend not to mind pre-order stuff when early access comes with it.  But that's generally the only exception.
Phoenix Point is *waaay* off though. They don't expect to be done even by 2018 if I remember correctly. So you might just wanna shove that into the "I'll check it when it's released" bucket.
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Offline TheVampire100

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Re: XCOM 2
« Reply #164 on: September 26, 2017, 01:25:27 pm »
It's funny that you mention the same complain that literally everyone mentioned during the pre-order phase: The price.
People told the developers that it would be unreasonable to charge this much fo an dlc/expansion.
Even for me it was really high, EW costed 30$ at release.
But after playing the expansion I think the price is fair. No cheap but fair. What you get is not simply additional content for the main game. Liek in EW you get an entire new side campaign on top of the main campaign of the game.
I just defeated the first Chosen and I put already many hours into the game. 2 more to go and while I don't expect the same amount of time for them anymore (my soldiers are all farmed up) I still expect some good amount of fun from this.

Especially the attack on the Chosen hideout is amazing. It's like a reversal base attack (people from the original X-COM will remember this). And don't get me started on the Chosen boss fight. Let me jsut say, this took me some time to win and I still lost a SPARK in the fight.

Of course I can udnerstand why people hestitate to buy it. it costs the same as the main game and with that much money you expect the same amount of gameplay. Do you get this? Hard to say, really, it's hard to meassure this because game time is tied to the main campaign as well, it just streteches it. In terms of enemies, there are many new, not as many as in the base game but still more than you typically would expect.
I think however the real kicker for this game are the factions and the new ability system, where soldiers can finally learn all the abilites from their class, not only what they've cosen during level up. This changes the entire way how you play XCOM. And the possibilities are amazing.
I may still have set teh price around 30$ (like EW) but this is just a personal choice and I think Firaxis nows better what expenses the had and how much money they have to expect to get back.

In terms of optimization: This is a problem I can udnerstand. Literally everyone complained that XCOM2 runs like a potato on a high end pc. It surprisingly runs on my old pc, not very fast but it runs good enough to enjoy this. That being said, War of the Chosen is way better optimized. The loading time between missions has been shorted dramatically (this was for many people one of the biggest issues, between each mission you had to wait 5 minutes until the screen loaded, not it's around 1 minute at best, probably fatser with better specs).
Does not mean that t will run now on your laptop. It probably won't because if you don't have the specs for it, you don't have them. But if it just run slow, it might run now faster.

Also, the specs are the main reason why I'm not pre-ordering Phoenix Point (as much as I wanted to). I have to wait until they tell what the specs for it ware. They mentioned they want it to run on lower end pcs but that being said, if it is as well optimized as XCOM2 it will cause only trouble. So I wait for early access at least and look what other people say about it.

 

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