Be Excellent To Each Other

Not X-Com, but this sounds like it's right up my shitter.

https://www.pcgamesn.com//phantom-doctrine/phantom-doctrine-release-date-gameplay-trailer

That does sound pretty good.

Finally started playing XCOM 2 on the peecee.

It's bloody wonderful (as everyone knows).

Love the little touches in it, the Living Quarters, the Bar, the holographic wanted posters in the cities of your (I presume) most lauded trooper.

It looks so, so much better than Enemy Within, too.

I appear to have a barracks of nearly exclusively women, which is fine (obviously), but I did like having a troop of comic celebrities, with the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Gazz Topp in previous games. The only bloke I have is Pat Sharpe (because he has long blonde hair), and he has a crack troop of Nigella Lawson, Louise Wener, Annika Rice and Annie Lennox bringing up the rear. Basically I ran out of inspiration with those. I think there aren't many women I find basically ridiculous, which is why I'm struggling to name my troops.

Aside from that, I'm enjoying it enormously, even though I'm all too conscious of the fact I'm making some likely piss-poor base planning decisions in the early stages.

I never rename my troops, it is time for engage and I like to see how the dice fall. My star trooper right now is 'Wildchild', and she's a hard-as-nails assault class from Norn Ireland. I have made all my snipers Australian this game though. I don't really know why.

Vanilla XCOM2, or War of the Chosen?

I wasn't sure I'd be keen on WotC, but it makes a massive difference and really completes the game.

Vanilla XCOM 2. If I stick with it this time, I'll get WotC later.

Vanilla. I've just established comms with my first group of the resistance, so I'm early on in the game. Worth restarting?

I like the idea of exclusively aussie snipers.

Oh it's £35 quids? Sticking with vanilla!

My snipers were all Korean, solely because the game decided that Koreans become snipers, it seems.

That's one of the reasons I wasn't sure about it, but IMO it's totally worth the extra outlay.

I'll wait till it comes down, plenty of fun to be had in vanilla as it stands.

I made all my troops people from Beex.

Gaywood was the #1 hacking Specialist
Grim... was the heavy weapons Demolitionist
Jazzy was an insanely good sniper (she ended with most kills, including six individual kills in one turn once).

Christ, I'm a nerd, Grim...'s devoid of subtlety, and Jazzy's an accomplished murderess. Talk about typecasting.

On that topic, I was looking for a way of sniffing HTTP traffic on iOS earlier and came across a post you made on Engadget talking about Burp Suite.

So, thanks!

Jesus wept, that’s a long time ago.

Mario + Rabbids has whetted my appetite for something like this. Am I best off playing the first new XCOM considering I have that on Steam?

The first (new) XCOM has some foibles that you may not get on with, that are not quite completely fixed in XCOM 2 but are made better.

XCOM 2 has its own problems though (mission timers in particular weren't very well received)

I've not played M+R (its on the purchase list though) but if you've already got XCOM, may as well give it a whirl. I may have a Steam code for XCOM 2 kicking around somewhere.

I hate mission timers and think they serve to just make you rush for stupid reasons. In XCom2 they are at least well judged and stop short of frustrating, thankfully.

WotC is on a one-day Steam sale for 25% off, BTW. I might pull the trigger.

I don't mind the timers. It mixes things up nicely and, as you say, although they prey on your mind they're not often all that tight. I had an 'extract a target' one the other night that had an eight turn limit; I finished with three turns to spare despite pausing to scrape up loot and spending two turns positioning my guys before luring some reinforcements to overextend into a fire corridor rather than press forward and engage them where they stood.

If you can, play enemy within rather than enemy unknown. Same game but much better. I was also recommended the long war mod though I never had the stones to try it.

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).