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[Jopax]

Get Shrekt

[Cptn Kaladin Anrizlokum]

I have a rather game-breaking bug going on, but a rather, unusual one.

The aliens don't move anymore. At all. Under any circumstance. Not on their turn, not when their pod is revealed, not even when I break concealment for the first time. I tried an overwatch ambush, only for it to be useless because "standing perfectly still, minding their own business" isn't enough to set it off. It started on the previous mission (a downed UFO), but I hoped that it would only last for a single mission. Nope. I feel like I'm beating up children now. Even attacking the Sectopod feels like a violation. (Although I did skulljack a codex, and the thing that popped out had so much dodge it managed to survive for a while despite me apparently turning off the aliens.

It started when I ran a Heavy MEC full force at the enemy and micro-missiled itself. I think that's it. I get VERY weird bugs whenever I do that. Once all the animations stopped and the game wouldn't continue, and this time, well, this happened.

Fortunately it wasn't Ironman, so I can still deal with this in any case.

I had the same problem, but it started when I gas-grenaded a pack of mutons led by a berserker. The only person who could see them was in concealment, so everything just froze... I had to reboot XCom 2 in order to fix it.
The aliens would just stand around until their turn timed out. I got a flawless 13/13 civilians rescued terror mission out of it though, so that was nice?

[Toaster]

Does anyone else feel that the game has a pacing problem?

It starts fine and you feel like you are progresssing, encountering new cool enemies and so forth. Then you suddenly get plasma weapons and power armor, there are suddenly gatekeepers on every mission and nothing left to research. Instead of a steady progress and development, you just suddenly jump to the maximum level. After that I just sort of grinded the game to an end, I didn't really feel it had anything interesting to give me anymore.

I concur.  The eventual obvious Long War mod will work really well, I feel.  But yeah, I was progressing kind of slowly on the missions until I realized I was picking up the scraps at the end of the tech tree, then powered through the second half of the story until the end.

It's nice to see SATELLITE ALL THE COUNTRIES gone (I never had more than half coverage; granted I was always supply starved) but the pacing is indeed off a little.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly, I was saying it from near the start, what nuCOM 2 needs boils down to this: A much longer effective Doom timer, either by modding alien progress and objectives to move more slowly/toward a much more difficult goal, or else by brute-forcing it with a very large countdown bar; and a much larger, deeper, more slowly acquired tech tree (with more random + customization options, natch) paired with a similarly larger, slower-moving progression of difficulty.

[Toaster]

A randomized tech tree... mmm, I believe this game could pull it off.  Expand the weapon tree to five tiers, not entirely unlike Long War in that they have advantages and disadvantages per tier.  Each tier is missing a weapon selected at random.  Rework the autopsies so you can't get every upgrade from them.  Yes, yes, it's totally doable.


I think the tech tree feels shorter because all the air game researches are gone and not replaced.  The Avenger needs more tech-gated options; the quick building unlocks at the beginning (proving grounds, AWC, resistance coms) don't count.  Right now it's what, just that, psi lab, shadow chamber, and defense matrix?  Upgrade for power from elerium?  It's skinny.


Also, the Doom Counter looks shorter than it really is.  Facilities are easy to hit, and there's quite a few story points that lower it.

Spoiler: By my count, a bit spoily (click to show/hide)

9.

1:  Blacksite, first Codex
2:  Forge, Gate
3:  first Avatar

That's 3/4 of a bar right there.

As a side note...

Spoiler: Late/end game question (click to show/hide)

Once I hit the Forge I powered through the rest of the story, so I'm not sure.  Do you ever fight an Avatar outside of scripted content?

[Flying Dice]

That's the point, though. The "short length, easy reduction" Doom counter encourages a style of play where you rush through the campaign to avoid the loss-condition, to the point that the dominant meta is to slow down as much as possible by milking the timer before resetting it. If you make it longer and tick slower, you can slow down the progression of tech and difficulty alongside it, opening up space for new content and more mission overall + options at any given time.

[EnigmaticHat]

I'm pretty ok with the short doom timer.

I think Dark Events should be cumulative rather than timing out.  Obviously this would require a very different deck (and some should probably still be monthly) but I don't think it would exactly ruin the difficulty if advent got a few extra permanent armor plates.

[misko27]

Honestly, I was saying it from near the start, what nuCOM 2 needs boils down to this: A much longer effective Doom timer, either by modding alien progress and objectives to move more slowly/toward a much more difficult goal, or else by brute-forcing it with a very large countdown bar; and a much larger, deeper, more slowly acquired tech tree (with more random + customization options, natch) paired with a similarly larger, slower-moving progression of difficulty.

I agree, and I was just thinking about this earlier today. I think it would be really nice to have a longer doom counter, because it could allow a campaign to have more ups and downs then it does currently; simultaneously the pacing could be worked out so as to be a lot neater, so even if the early game is still a little disproportionately punishing, it would be ok because it's not the end of the world (I hear that in general, XCOM 2 is better at this then XCOM EU). The tech-tree needs to be worked out further. Fortunately this is something Firaxis can and does fix in expansions, but until then we at least have modding.

Overall, it does need to be smoothed out, and I'm confident it will be.

I have a rather game-breaking bug going on, but a rather, unusual one.

The aliens don't move anymore. At all. Under any circumstance. Not on their turn, not when their pod is revealed, not even when I break concealment for the first time. I tried an overwatch ambush, only for it to be useless because "standing perfectly still, minding their own business" isn't enough to set it off. It started on the previous mission (a downed UFO), but I hoped that it would only last for a single mission. Nope. I feel like I'm beating up children now. Even attacking the Sectopod feels like a violation. (Although I did skulljack a codex, and the thing that popped out had so much dodge it managed to survive for a while despite me apparently turning off the aliens.

It started when I ran a Heavy MEC full force at the enemy and micro-missiled itself. I think that's it. I get VERY weird bugs whenever I do that. Once all the animations stopped and the game wouldn't continue, and this time, well, this happened.

Fortunately it wasn't Ironman, so I can still deal with this in any case.

I had the same problem, but it started when I gas-grenaded a pack of mutons led by a berserker. The only person who could see them was in concealment, so everything just froze... I had to reboot XCom 2 in order to fix it.
The aliens would just stand around until their turn timed out. I got a flawless 13/13 civilians rescued terror mission out of it though, so that was nice?

Ha. I got to smack around the spoiler that popped out the codex a bit, and then play a game of "taunt the sectopod". I kept expecting them to like, do something though, so that threw me off my taunting game. I kept thinking "it would really suck for the Sectopod to stop its inner meditation right when I'm being an idiot".

 Even the little "ALIEN RELAY YOU NEED TO DESTROY" wouldn't explode after killing it, and just continued to spin around minding its own business.

[Chiefwaffles]

Having the dark events reworked into a system of gradual alien progression would be pretty cool, yeah. Kind of like Long War. Where over time the aliens gradually get stronger, and it's up to you to keep that progression as slow as possible.
But I think some way to handle multiple cards at once would help with the feature. It'd reward players that're doing really well by having temporary little to none progression for the month. But still be hard enough that alien progression is inevitable.

[EnigmaticHat]

I shot an out of sight pod with a rocket once (used support scan to spot).  Nothing happened.  They took damage, but they didn't trigger, so when I encountered them later they got a run forward move.

[Egan_BW]

Having the dark events reworked into a system of gradual alien progression would be pretty cool, yeah. Kind of like Long War. Where over time the aliens gradually get stronger, and it's up to you to keep that progression as slow as possible.
But I think some way to handle multiple cards at once would help with the feature. It'd reward players that're doing really well by having temporary little to none progression for the month. But still be hard enough that alien progression is inevitable.

Dark Event: New alien unit.

[Toaster]

Well, the advent troops already progress in level; that could easily be tied to an event.

[TherosPherae]

Get Shrekt

beautiful

[Cthulhu]

Depending on how moddable the game is getting rid of the doom counter completely and reorganizing the way the aliens progress would be interesting for a long war mod, make it more akin to what the player does.

The whole "alien player" thing they hyped up really fell flat.  It just feels like you get random events and a timer ticks upward.  There's no sense of alien agency.  But having an alien player research and deploy new assets, give them an actual research tree to win the game akin to yours, and you could have something interesting.

Like the AI notices you're bringing two sharpshooters every game and researches the invisible tentacle fuckers to hunt them down.  Diversify facilities into different functions, maybe tying them to dark events in addition to research.  So each "forge" facility gives the aliens an increase to avatar project research speed and they can also use them to activate advent dark events like armor and viper rounds.  The player can destroy them to disable the bonuses.

And so on.

[xub313]

I just played the final mission.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The first bit, moving throught the underwater base, was a piece of cake. But I got my butt kicked in that last room with the avatars. Mostly due to having my snipers in horrible positions when started. Even when I got them positioned, an archon set up his missle attack righ on top of them. I was trying to focus my squad on one side of the map, but the avatars could just teleport to the other side where I couldn't reach them before they healed up.

Still, I think I could have suceeded if it weren't for the mind control. My grenadier got controlled on the first turn, she then shredded + holo targeted my medic, turning him into archon fodder. Later my combat specialist got controlled, and he executed my mind controlled codex, the ONE time I've ever had a repeater go off this campaign.

This was ironman veteran btw. Thankfully It lets you restart the final mission, so I'll give it another go tomorrow. Despite my loss, I really liked the mission and the game in general. A big improvement on EU imo.

Also, during a UFO mission, I realized that shadowstrike works when your soldier is ouside an enemy's line of sight, and not just from concealment. I've had a couple situations now where the sword was actually preferable to the shotgun, since you can dash from outside their LOS and slash them with good accuracy and crit chance.