XCOM 2

Good chance I'm going to fail my first playthrough, spent so much time dicking around and looking at everything that I wasn't making contact so my income stayed pretty low, and now the Avatar project is damn near finished already so I have to absolutely scramble to start knocking bars off the progress meter. Still fun as hell, but in retrospect I don't think the warfare rush was worth it. The chance on a levelup is still really low, the chance that you'll get something good is pretty random (I just had a ranger get an overwatch perk), and the proving ground is one of the strongest facilities in the game so delaying that was a mistake too. Experimental ammo/grenades are a really big deal once you get predator armor and have that free gear slot.

What's really funny is that this is exactly how I had a Long War playthrough fail one time. I fell behind on satellites, the aliens got too big of a lead on me, and I just couldn't get back in control of the game.

*edit*

Concealment alone increases the replayability of the game tenfold, just from not having to deal with the tedium of slowly creeping your guys through a couple squares at a time to make sure you don't get butt fucked by your first pod activation every single mission.

Seananigans_sl said:

My game performs horribly :/ Well, during missions it's pretty much ok, but everything else is prone to bad stuttering and overall poor FPS, like cutscenes and transitions from one thing to another. Not sure wtf is going on, this machine should be able to run this np.

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Same, its just tearing my physical memory to pieces, CPU is fine but watching my physical memory its taking all available memory basically even after turning off all my other processes. I've never had issues with this before and i've played 10-15 games from steam on here in the last few months plus Smite.

That aside, so far pretty awesome but i don't like you have to pay to recruit your damn soliders you made!! Team Turbo fucking should be default!!

Seananigans_sl said:

My game performs horribly :/ Well, during missions it's pretty much ok, but everything else is prone to bad stuttering and overall poor FPS, like cutscenes and transitions from one thing to another. Not sure wtf is going on, this machine should be able to run this np.

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Same, I've got a beastly video card, but something must be bottlenecking - dropped it down to Medium and the stuttering went away. Looks a little less nice, but still gorgeous compared to the original.

Same issues, it gobbles up memory like mad (and I have plenty). Must be a mem-leak that I really hope they patch soon. At first I thought it was an SLI issue, but even then a single GTX 970 should be able to brute force something with this level of grafix, but then I noticed the memory use.....

Dandai_sl said:

Any opinions on difficulty?

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I started on veteran and made it to the first black site before having a complete squad wipe (with 3 vets already shaken/wounded) and going to have to restart tomorrow. AI is definitely smarter and mechanics are much more punishing (compared to EU/EW) if RNG isn't on your side. Going to stick with veteran and try and play smarter. Getting dicked over by command bugs though. Shooting without even selecting a target is lame.

I lost my first guy on the first mission. I was totally not expecting the Advent Officers to have fucking nades. I had two guys on different angles of the same high cover and he blew it and put them both in the open, one dude didn't make it home. They really did turn everything up to 11. I can't imagine what it would be like in EU to have Sectiods throwing nades or Mind Controlling shit right off the bat. Super fun so far, my load times are garbage as well.

I'm really not digging all these timed missions. I just squad wiped on a mission where i had to capture an enemy vip and then get all my guys to an evac point in 12 turns. Well I would have made it except the turn before I could get them all to the point the game dropped 3 guys right on it which made me fail.

Started the game on Commander difficulty. Got wiped on the first mission (where you retrieve the power source for your Avenger) and 2 KIA on the retry. I'm rusty, but loving it!

Utnayan_sl said:

So I guess they still sell box retail versions of PC games

Checked out Bestbuy and it's available for pick up, so I can add my gamer club discount to make it $47.99 and then use $15 in a cert, so I'll grab it for $32.99.

Can someone explain the major differences between this and EU? Never played Enemy Within. I know that Ambushes and Conceal are new, along with different skils. Is there a graphical upgrade? Also, I love story - and I have been hearing they really focused on story as well this time around?

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The game is much faster paced, most of the missions are timed. As far as the geoscape goes, it's basically what I imagine the alien geoscape looked like during EU/EW. Instead of starting with the whole world and trying to defend it, you start with a single region and have to spread out. There are 4(5) classes again, but talents are a bit more powerful and they basically encourage you to specialize your soldiers to 1 of 2 roles for each class. Instead of having to build weapons for every single person, you just build one and you have an unlimited supply. So building tech 2 rifles is outfitting the entire project with tech 2 rifles. Same with basic armor, basic tech 2 armor is predator which you get for everyone once you build it. Special tech 2 armor is the exo suit and the spider suit, which you have to build 1 at a time from the proving grounds. And I want to reiterate that the proving grounds should really be the very first facility you build, because you want those projects rolling out asap.

Most armor just gives health. Some armor gives 'armor', which is automatic X levels of damage reduction from all attacks where X is how many bars of armor you have. Armor can be shredded, it still reduces the damage from the attack that shreds it, but however many bars of armor were shredded by the attack are gone for the rest of the mission. And concealment is a really big deal, especially with rangers who can stay in concealment after it's broken and/or re-enter concealment. Having a concealed scout ranging ahead of your force looking for enemy pods makes a lot of difference on how well you can set up to engage.

Also there are TONS more alien types. I'd say I'm maybe halfway through a campaign (thats when they said Centurions should start showing up) and I'd say I've already seen as many different enemy types as there were in all of EW/EU.