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[XCOM]: Tactical Breach Wizards: Defenestration
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I don't regard overwatch much in this game anyway. When a Justicar can just barrier up and walk through overwatch fire it takes the sting out. Similarly, Interceptors can just teleport past it.
I also rarely use overwatch myself for two reasons: first, the base overwatch cone is shorter than most enemy weapon ranges, and they're usually smart enough to not walk into a wall of bolter fire. Second, if you're in full cover when you enter overwatch, you step to the side and likely are an easy target...you don't even duck back into cover after shooting.
Overwatch is for melee enemies...even then, a lot of them will just stand there and mutate for self-buffs rather than charge you.
Maybe later ill stop using grenades but early game they're super effective.
I haven't tested it extensively but it sure seems like, while my boys leaning out from cover to fire will set off overwatch fire, I haven't seen enemies trigger that way. Might have just not had quite the correct overwatch cone, though, and stopped doing it prematurely.
EDIT: I just tested a new grenade I got, the Empyrian Brain Mine, Tier 3. It applies +5 stun in a .5 blast range (which my Purgator increases to 1.5). I used it to execute four demons in one round. Officially hilarious and not balanced at all. Glory to the Emperor!
The AI is a bit clumsy at times. Like, those spoodge-thrower plague marines, they just keep running away and gooping up the floor around them, not once has one ran at my squad and hosed them down in what I can only assume to be eldar feces.
Complex Games previously only made F2P mobile games, apparently, and pay2win is essentially how those so business. I think they're still adapting to single player balancing.
Anyway, Garran's really good, but he's not really as broken as you'd expect for a level 20 character. The inability to gear him makes him less attractive for specialized missions.
Deathguard are some loopy fuckers, that's for sure. My headcanon is that Nurgle basically hollowed them out mentally and they mostly live only to spew goo. Plus they're paranoid, so they overwatch the flanks instead of facing the enemy.
The only other baddie with AI that bad are the melee daemons that mutate instead of attack.
How do you feel about Jane Kelly in XCOM 2?
I don't think this is how it works—like, it's not a hit percentage in cover.
Cover in Chaos Gate reduces damage, so light cover and full cover can lead to a zero damage shot (from you or from the enemy). You will just not take that shot, most of the time, but the enemy often will, because the AI is very tentative, sandbagging a bit for the sake of immersion and ease of play, and tbh a little bad. Part of the reason your marines feel so tough is that enemies are more likely to overwatch than shoot you even when you're in the open, and their overwatch never gets more than one shot, unlike yours. They waste tons and tons of AP.
But zero damage shots in cover do damage destructible cover, so sometimes they'll shoot you out of cover with a zero damage shot.
I recently did the mission that unlocks other seed types and while that one was challenging, the game is becoming trivially easy even on Ruthless. The AI is just really absurdly generous to the player and I'm kinda disappointed.
tbf, every game kinda hits a point like that where you just zip past the difficulty threshold.
Although I will admit Xcom2 ran a way tighter ship and that point came a lot later in the game.
In my game I told the chapter master that I would perform every glorious deed for 2 months, resulting in me doing ridiculous things like doing missions without spending willpower or leaving all my fancy tier 3 weapons and armor on the ship. It's made some missions significantly harder and made me think more on team composition.
While that has been fun, mofo promised to send a fully-outfitted strike fleet and where is my strike fleet, man?
If you were truly devout you would know that the emperor is all the protection you need.
Actually the other reason is that my two best guys were out on a 60 day mission when I triggered the endgame, and over half my team was already banged up (some from random events). There's one point in the endgame where (minor, non-specific spoilers)
Switch: SW-1493-0062-4053
Who?
Enemy variety is pretty limited as well, or at least it's growing too slowly for my taste
Still a great game that I'm going to finish, but I wonder if I'll replay it in the future on the hardest difficulty (no resurrection for your knights does seem like a nice challenge early on)
Jane Kelly is a named character in XCOM 2. She's the ranger that triggers the bomb in the truck in the opening. Almost everyone uses her their first run. She's kinda a memetic badass.
In Xcom 1 you leave yourself open, a thinman crits you to death from on top of a building. Xcom 2 you get stunlancered and one shot with bad positioning
In this, the goopthrowers are like, hey man don't walk on this floor for a couple of turns. No damage though, even though I could totally spray 3 of you
They deliberately and obviously don't play anywhere near as rough as they could or should. And it's not a variable on difficulty levels.
I think it would be better if those enemies were just weird daemons that were compelled to spread infection. Making them plague marines, who should be a rough equal to regular Loyalist marines (not Grey Knights of course), makes their ineffectiveness grating.
I hope Complex Games is listening to complaints and trying to figure out how to do difficulty correctly. They have a fantastic platform tor XCOMing in the 40k universe; just gotta make the enemies not have to be total morons in order to manage difficulty.
Example endgame mission (no story):
I could buy it based on Grandpa Nurgle's strategy of letting the infected live to spread disease... but Astartes of any variety don't work like that, really.
That kinda leads into my main complaint, I'm not a fan of how the strategic layer is balanced. You get front loaded all your resources but most of the tech and upgrades are (randomly?) back loaded so I just couldn't purchase anything by the time I unlocked it. If I'd gotten food production earlier I might have been about to trade for enough tech to keep up but I'm pretty sure I'd already lost by the time it unlocked.
I found food production not worth the base slot because the amount of food provided is trivial compared to defending a town from a raid, completing a mission, getting a faction drop, or even many site investigations.
I feel like I didn't get that many base attacks; are you knocking over dens and lairs after your radar reveals them?
Yeah, as soon as I have a healed crew I take them out. I do currently have a citadel up but it's on the wrong part of the globe to the source of my base attacks. Been hesitant to take it on because my first Scylla was in a haven defense and it killed two troops and then promptly fell over dead of it's own accord. I think my actual issue is not activating enough Phoenix bases, don't have enough radar coverage to catch all the lairs.
Okay, yeah. Getting a base or two on every continent is really handy, not only to detect pandoran structures but to reveal investigation sites and havens, which are all potentially lucrative. You eventually also need refueling points so you can get to Antarctica.
I always rename a random character Jane Kelly in every XCOM 2 run. If she dies, a new Jane Kelly takes over.
She's like the Dread Pirate Roberts.
I don't think it actually does any psychological warfare damage in-game when Advent realise that they just can't kill this one human, but I'm happy with the thought of it.
iirc she's also the Director of Chimera Squad
Yes, I was getting there eventually. 😁
(Chimera Squad is great)
I also would not be put out if XCOM 3 used breach mechanics for some missions. Way to get right to the action.
We Are All Jane Kelly.
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
Actually now that I recall, I did save Jane Kelly in the soldier creator roster so sometimes she just shows up in recruitment. I imagine her first day mostly consists of signing autographs.
Same reason I still play Into the Breach occasionally. I know that each skirmish is only going to be 3-4 turns.
EDIT:
Looks like a good update patch for Daemonhunters just dropped.
Well it's a good thing they fixed all that Purgation Ritual stuff after I had a hell of a time with the endgame. Now that I'm Ironmanning it I'll be happier when I drag my sorry carcasses past the finish line.
You could even stick to the Inquisition theme and add in Sisters and Deathwatch
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
In addition to a Gaunt's Ghosts XCOM, I could handle a full Sororitas game. Still power armored badasses, but maybe not as meaty (currently playing on Ruthless Grandmaster in Daemonhunters, and I don't actually fear for my troops' lives even when I gravely miscalculate, which drains some tension). Would still want to knock over pillars onto heretics, though.
Maybe fight Slaanesh for added purity vs depravity points.
100% same!