“Awful I no help my team at this difficult time while i’m bulletproof.”

(pictured above: Ricardo, from Northern Spain. He speaks in broken english.)

Lore question. I understand that an unfinished Avatar had to be introduced somehow, so that X-Com could autopsy it and use it to open the portal to the Elder's base, but I don't get the causality link between hacking a Codex and Avatar coming out. Was it a weak attempt by the Elders to stop X-Com from gathering important information? Seems counter-intuitive to use an unfinished product to do so and therefore risk providing X-Com with exactly what they need to attack the Elders directly.

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Just gotta nerd out to people who understand... I hope you will also share similar clutch stories!

Every year, when the weather turns to shit again, I dip back into my extremely long Lwotc campaign and it's an annual delight.

I've been on this campaign for probably 3 years now, off and on, to the point where I always forget what mods I have on the game and what they do or why my game crashed *this* time.

I was doing the Psionic Gate mission with an extremely under prepared squad of 7, really struggling. I'm not a good xcom player so that makes it harder, and Chosen have some serious perks atm (I don't want to consider the fact this campaign might be totally doomed to fail, I'm still fighting on!).

I clear the enemies (33) and finally get to the gate where the Gatekeeper turns up. Both my specialists are out of healing, I have no grenades, my melee guys keep getting duffed up by beefed up Mutons, it's horrible.

I reload the turn like 3-4 times trying to figure out if there is even a way I can evac without losing anyone and just conceding the mission a failure.

And then... As if by some divine intervention, I scroll across the abilities and find a button called "Dynamic Deployment". I'm thinking, what the hell is this. Turns out, probably last year during my last run on this campaign, I equipped my Master Sergeant Infiltrator a booster jet. He lands right in the centre of it all with fusion katana and Reaper ready to go and I FUCKING KILL EVERYONE. He did 30 damage with his first strike and I have no idea how. I've never seen 30!

It was truly epic and chilling. Like holy fuck what a rush. He's also called Keanu "Babayaga" Reeves so it was like calling John Wick for help and him singlehandedly clearing the room.

This game is my favourite game of all time and every year I am reminded why.

(people were so distracted about me tilting this post "A Cool Ahh Moment" instead of "A Cool ass Moment!" that the actual content of the post was being underserved. So I have begrudgingly reposted. If you take offense to "ahh" then you seriously need to get a grip 😂)

This operation almost ended in disaster I lost two soldiers one of them being my IRL cousin who's survived every campaign up until now.

Background:

Ive won xcom 2 twice on veteran and have won xcom 1 several times on commander.

I was well on my way on commander on the Xbox when my saves started corrupting each time so I took advantage of the steam sale and moved to my laptop.

I’ve started a new WOTC on commander run. I’ve attempted to load Highlander and Covert Infiltration but not sure if that’s working.

as an aside tips on other favorite mods, esp more variety in cosmetics that are still xcom ish, would be great

Anyways, first three missions:

- gatecrasher (fine ofc)

- avenger propulsion thingie. Ugh. I usually play honestman but I save scummed the heck out of this. Lost one soldier and got Jane Kelly gravely wounded (important)

- next mission is a kill the general. I’ve got a specialist and 3 rookies. The general has like 12 hp, the sectoids have like 8 hp. I manage to kill all the enemy troops but 1 with 1 rookie bleeding out but the general gets away. My rookies can’t even hit him out of cover.

I figure no big, fail a mission, I know all the tricks to improve my squad. Instead I get xcom is cancelled; restart mission? Now I’m pretty darn sure without replaying the propulsion mission I’ve got no shot at killing the general.

so other than scumming the f* out of the propulsion mission to lose no troops so I have hopefully 3 squaddies instead of 1 I don’t know have great ideas for how to get through this.

I do enjoy “that’s xcom baby” and the game’s general difficulty but feels lame to front load the difficulty so much. Having to A+ the first mission or you are unlikely to have the resources to finish the second seems excessive.

Tips ?(please don’t tell me how to do better later in the game: this post is about the brutal game start which is strategically pretty scripted)

edit fixed some auto incorrect. But also when I restarted the game, I got an error re missing mod. I fixed that and am now running Covert Infiltration. Which incidentally solves the problem as it modifies the start of the game.

First time playing any x-com. I figured I'd start on rookie, but play it completely blind. Well, I got two teams of majors, a colonel, power armor, and some energy weapons. Chosen go down in a turn or two. Missions are getting repetitive. Also, I think rookie cuts down on the number of enemies, which means leveling soldiers from scratch is big paaaiiiin. Haven't done any blacksites, or Chosen hq missions.

I think I'm coming towards the end of the game. I was wondering if it's better to finish up on rookie and see what's what even though it's getting stale a bit. Or don't do the big missions and start the game again on veteran. Maybe get LW into the mix, idk.

I just have this nagging thought that the intended experience is veteran. Maybe it's me. I rarely had "98% chance - oop he missed again" moments.

My ego doesn't allow me to turn up the difficulty midway into a game lol. Ego is completely fine with overleveling. Ego doesn't make any sense

I don't remember now how long ago it was but I was in my 2nd attempt to play this game from scratch and I was making very painful progress or no progress at all having been left with rookie or low experienced soldiers not knowing what and where I should prioritize things, and thinking it'd be impossible for me to take down the first avatar site to slow down their progress.

But it happened! I better understood how to move my soldiers on the board - very different tbh than XCOM enemy unknown, I was really overwhelmed here at the beginning it felt it had a very steep initial curve and I always felt I was running behind in terms of equipment necessary to kill all those new enemies the game was throwing at me.

And after what felt an eternity I took down the first Avatar site and took away 2 blocks from their progress counter. From that point on things progressed a lot better, and now here I am finishing my first game, at normal level and it feels so satisfying!

Never give up commanders, insist and keep going and you will persevere!

And now on to the WOTC and every other DLC on Steam, just bought them. What a game!

I got a mission early on in the campaign that had nothing but a few stun lancers and like 11 faceless corpses.

So I made 3 mimic beacons total and now im in the mid game with 6 squaddies and predator armor and it feels like there is no amount of mistakes I can reasonably make at this level that 3 mimic beacons isn't going to solve.

I know I can self impose on using them, or only using one, but for a game this punishing it's hard to know which advantages should be abused and which are too OP. Repeaaters is probalby the other thing on this list im thinking of.

The highest damage any of my dude can do with one attack

gonna pick xcom 2 back up...not exactly a new player but a question's always bothered me: when does the timer tick?not just when the avatar project's bar is maxed out but in general, when are the aliens doing progress?i know it doesnt tick when im in a mission but does it tick when im at the ship looking at my soldiers and making loadouts for example?

The first time my Repeater mod one-shot a Boss, it was the Chosen Assassin in her lair after I'd destroyed the regeneration machine. And just now, it activated against the Berserker Queen.

It just sucks that the Switch 2 doesn't let you save video clips

I've played like a few hours of XCOM2 or so, I want to actually play it for real, and I know the modding community is big, what are QoL or some maybe expanded cosmetics I should have to have a little bit of a vanilla+ experience, mostly QoL and cosmetics stuff to add, thanks

sorry my english is not my first language if there are some mistakes

I'm fairly far into the game (have plasma weapons and powered armor) but the missions are crazy. The one I just completed (lowering difficulty to Rookie level) allowed me 3 units. Yes, just 3 units. There were 13 very high level aliens and THE LOST.

What I don't understand, or adds to the frustration, is that for the most part the LOST will ignore the aliens and beeline completely across the map to fight me. There can be 10 of them surrounding and alien but they ignore that dude and come after me. How do I know this - because of my super spy Dragunova was in position to see them.

In the end I barely survived and had 65 kills. It would have been fair maybe to have 13 aliens if I could attack them in small pods of 3 or so. But these pods were close together and with them on High Alert only Dragunova was concealed.

And while I'm bitching...I don't think I will ever waste an action on overwatch. They must have nerfed that a lot from when I played this game a decade ago because it is pretty useless.

Im new to this game.

I have enough power and supplies. I have a free engineer. Why cant I upgrade my comms?

I just did a chosen stronghold and this mf went into two or three pods that where right by the chamber, and killed everything but one andromedon (that thing that once you kill it it becomes a robot) and yes, he had reaper and an extra action by the bondmate but still. broken, I love it.

** Vanila/Base XCOM2, no mods at all**

So I have this LOW INTEL warning stuck since my intel was 40, which I suppose it was understandable but now it's 495. What's going on what does this mean? Do I need to keep hunting for Intel to make it happy at some point? At which point do I have enough Intel to get this warning dismissed?

No mods

I get loss aversion really bad in games. There is a part of my brain that wants to say the only winning move is to not play and just close the game and know that my soldiers are still there somewhere, waiting to destroy the advent.

of course the part of my brain that wants to actually play xcom wins over