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.

\
Findus, later

Gizza kiss

After a hefty hiatus I returned to the War of the Chosen last night. I'm still only a few hours in, but I must say I find the Covert Ops and the Geoscape phenomenally stressful. I have no idea what I'm doing or what direction I'm best pushing towards, or what to prioritise. Everything feels like a decision in the dark. Perhaps that's intentional for newbies, but I don't feel like a strategic mastermind at this point, I must say.

Covert ops is pretty much just some free extra bonuses

With the occasional chance to get to leg it through a swarm of NotZombies.

That makes me feel better. My life is already a patchwork of decisions I may live to rue, I don't need too many more.

Having an absolute whale of a time with this now. The systems are slotting into place and I feel like I'm finally acting with purpose.

Unfortunately screwed up my workshop placement by putting a couple of non essential adjacent rooms next to it, which are constantly powered by gremlins, even though I'd prefer to have them in some thing like the infirmary.

If they made this for the Switch I'd be picking up a Switch at lunchtime. At the moment am playing on my laptop on the train and at home (Steam Cloud syncing is too unpredictable) and I could boil a pan of pasta from the heat it chucks out.

In War of the Chosen, who is your preferred faction?

My Templar is a galloping death machine, who has been a cert in every available mission.

However, my Skirmisher recruit is now vying with him for relentless destructive capabilities since she got the Retribution perk, equivalent to Templar's BladeStorm.

Meanwhile, I find my Reaper fairly underwhelming. Unable to deal much in the way of damage. Perhaps I got used to playing without a Reaper after my original Reaper was captured early on. But I find I don't get much from the one I recruited.

So, in answer to my own question: The Saint, Simon Templar.

Who is yours?

Concur. Templars are awesome. I never really got on with the Skirmisher. The other ones are fine but I never found the C4 that useful and stealth is for losers.

I need to get me some more Templars.

The Reapers are awesome, because you can get significantly closer to enemies without them noticing. So if you use them up front you generally see enemies before they see you. Since I’m an impatient SOB and like running people around corners with no actions left, having a Reaper out front is super duper useful.

A lot of their skills are rubbish, and their gun is never quite as good as the regular sniper rifles, but I seem to remember some of them being good, such as shooting without being revealed, and extra damage shots.

The Templars are sometimes annoying with their low ash damage compared to a rocket, but charging them into something and using the Parry ability to negate damage from the first enemy attack each turn has saved my life dozens of times.

The best thing about Templars is their ability to move again after they kill someone.

This sounded positive enough to up my squad size so I could fit in a reaper - and my first chance to try my new fangled outfit is on a chosen invasion of the avenger, which seems utterly terrifying and now I'm sad because I think everyone is going to die.

Well folks, we survived. Grenadier Les Ferdinand was the only fatality (it was his first mission, too). Poor Les. He dealt out some serious damage before getting splattered.

His fellow grenadier, Zlatan Ibrahimovich, made it by the skin of his teeth, with one block of health remaining.

Reaper Christopher Biggins was indispensable, pushing up the canyon to get to the big fuck-off Anker power block for the big fuck-off Megatron gun without being disturbed.

Focussed on dismissing the Chosen Assassin early in the mission. Really need to pop over to her base and mess with her stuff (I'd been planning a raid on the Hunter until this happened), but I suspect most of my soldiers are, frankly, knackered, and need a nice lie down.

Chryssalids can fuck off. Jerry Seinfeld nearly became a big blob because of one, but was saved by the bell.

Sniper Sporty Spice was MVP.

Played a hyper annoying mission yesterday that required me to take a squad of sergeants or lower. Fuck me do those chumps miss every other shot. Charlie Brooker and Sporty Spice bought it, the former deservedly after missing every single shot he was given. TBF he was a squaddie, but still.