Be Excellent To Each Other

Long War's a bit hardcore for someone that's never played the main game before!

The timers soon become less of a hassle once you’ve got good gear. Plus a beautiful touch was that a bastard King Alien knocked Grim... out and I didn’t have time to extract him, so he got captured.

About ten missions later the goal of my mission was to rescue him! Which I did!

Vanilla Xcom 2 is 13.99 on PSN at the moment.

That's a steal, though the DLC packs are good.

Long War main problem is that's just too long (well, duh!). But seriously, the main game is long enough, here it's a grind. I wouldn't recommend it.

I feel like XCOM2 made the first obsolete. Both games have the problem that feel too scripted (with its stupid pod activation system), but xcom2 kind of disguises that problem.

But yes,enemy within is much better. The Meld system brought a risk/reward mechanic into the game that the vanilla lacked.

I did find XCOM 2 too short. There was loads more stuff I wanted to do (I didn't even start looking at Psi, for example) but the game forced me into the endgame when I didn't really want to.

This is one of the good things about the WotC add-on. The addition of the Chosen, along with the covert ops angle, means that you can "game" the game to a degree and put off the endgame for basically as long as you want.

It has its own problems as a result, but I found it made it possible to go through the game at more or less my own pace (with the odd bit of urgency as the Avatar project creeps up and you have no means of getting it down)

Even in the vanilla XCOM2, the Avatar thing is a huge improvement over the terrible "panic" system in the original. I get what they were going for, and it really isn't XCOM if it's not horrifically easy to lose the entire game if you drop the ball a bit, but it still felt a bit too aggressive.

I found with Xcom 2 it was hard at first in terms of the pacing, but once you’re kitted out you can blast a couple of enemy bases and get the avatar project down to a low level, and then you can just do your monthly missions at leisure.

That said, early on it was tough, and I did get on the ‘you lose’ timer. Easy enough to whack it right down though after a while.

Even with that, I had comfortably researched everything in the game, and then some, but my Psi folks were still fairly basic (in fact I only had one).

Various steam sales on this at the moment

£7.99 on CDKeys too.

If you do get it for PC myp, you might like to consider the following mods for some small but useful UX fixes:

Gotcha Again - gives you a preview of which potential moves will flank an enemy; this isn't obvious without it
Stop Wasting My Time - removes some weird pauses the game does after various events like getting a kill or throwing a grenade
Instant Avenger Menus - removes some tedious animations shown in the strategic layer, in particular the very slow geoscope hologram zoom thing
Evac All - gives you a single click button to evac all your soldiers in an evac zone, as opposed to you having to do them one at a time
Show Health Values - gives you a numerical value for enemy health so you don't need to count up the health bar pips on beefier opponents with 10+ health

None of these affect game balance at all.

Yeah I won't be buying any games in the foreseeable future it seems. Just checked my bank balance and it's not pretty.

Time to turn pro on iracing?

Funnily enough NASCAR has just announced a money-spinning Pro series with iRacing but sadly my iRating is nowhere near good enough currently, if it ever will be.

This has potential, though also sounds a touch XCOM Apocalypsey, which I never got on with.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-06-29-what-happens-when-superhot-meets-xcom

War of the Chosen is a precise £14.87 at GreenManGaming at the moment.

It's bloody brilliant, too

I have purchased this and am just three missions in, and it is.

I didn't get to know vanilla XCOM 2 terribly well, so am struggling to identify everything that's different about it, but whatever, I'm enjoying it (in a stressy fun kind of way).

I'm also sad I can't play it on my commute, but finding a laptop with a sub-14" form factor, that doesn't cost the earth, and is capable of handling XCOM 2, seems impossible.

Just did the mission where you meet the factions and fight the lost. Epic.

Boom, headshot!
Boom, headshot!
Boom, headshot!

Exactly!
It took me a couple of turns to truly understand that, yes, you keep shooting till your ammo runs dry. Then reload and start again.

Great fun.

I may be wrong but the experience so far feels more focussed than vanilla XCOM 2. I'm being given less opportunity to go off in random directions and build unnecessary facilities (either that or it's more heavily sign-posting the things it thinks I should be doing). Which I prefer, as I feel like I'm not making catastrophic decisions that will fuck me up later on, while I'm learning the game.)

Pacing is something I found tricky in both versions of XCOM 2. The first time I played, I was scared of the Avatar Project timer and charged through the plot, which made it pretty tough. The second time I deliberately did it much more slowly, which meant I could batter the chosen and steal their lovely shit as well as beat all the Kings, and basically had two full squads of colonels and majors by the end. What it also meant however was that even tiny side missions would throw sectopods and gatekeepers at me every time.

And then three more if you have the perk which gives you a free reload.

Jazzy got six sniper kills in one turn for me once.

The Darklance has three free reloads, which makes for fun shootings.

Stupid addictive XCOM2.

I did the advent black site mission tonight. I've not been cheesing save-reloads till now, but fuck me, I'm on save 87 now.

I lost Mox and Jayne Middlemiss (who were bonded, so felt fitting), with a heavily injured Templar dude carrying reaper lady, who was carrying the vial, to the evacuation point.

I hope I don't live to rue the loss of Mox too greatly. I'm reading a Reddit post that suggests my squad should have had at least two snipers in it for that mission. I had no snipers.

That's a bit of a shit of a mission that, especially if the RNG decides to give you a chosen too, which it did for me

Yep, I got chosened too on it. I ended up taking everyone down the far side of the map untik we were near the evac point, without conflict, and then sent reaper to get the vial. Unfortunately it meant I was facing all patrols at once, plus the chosen, before I could get everyone out of there.

Tempted to do it again with snipers and try and save Mox, but also glad to be out of there.

Thoughts on Predator Armour - worth getting or should I hang on until I can afford an EXO suit? I'm resource poor at the moment so don't want to be spunking my alien alloys needlessly (rules to live by).

Always upgrade your armour as soon as you can.

Definitely upgrade to Predator. Squad wide upgrades are always a bargain compared to individual items like the exo suits, because you don't have a limited number that you can lose when you die

Nice, will be slipping into my Predator suit tonight then.

May also play some Xcom.

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Findus, later

Gizza kiss