Another L/I Campaign Debrief

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stefan3iii
Posts: 319
Joined: Wed Feb 01, 2017 3:49 am

Another L/I Campaign Debrief

Post by stefan3iii »

I posted this on reddit, but someone suggested I post it here as well:

http://imgur.com/a/72BCG

First of all, thanks to Pavonis for making such an awesome XCOM 2 mod, it's not easy living up to the legacy of LW1, and I feel they've really made an amazing game. Below, I'll give a summary of my strategy, tactics, and things that I'd love to see improved.

I played with all default settings, all DLC enabled, though I never had the alien ruler mission appear.

Tech Path

I had previously made a post on doing a shredder rush https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/ ... ip_report/ , it was super powerful but I lost that campaign on Advent HQ, I had no idea there'd be so many enemies and came unprepared :)

For this campaign I wanted to compare it directly to a standard laser game, so my research path was:

* Resistance Communication
* Modular Weapons
* Alien Biotech
* Render Trooper for 2 Alloys
* Hybrid Materials
* Laser Weapons
* Advanced Laser Weapons
* Combat Armor
* Power Armor (ie Shredder Guns/EXO Suits)

From here I went for incendiary grenades then mag weapons. I did get warden armor before coil guns, but regretted that. Both standard laser and shredder rush seem very effective. Interestingly, in this game I would've had a nightmare trying to shredder rush, because the first two supply drops had no alloys to buy at the black market.


Buildings

* GTS day 1 - This is for training shinobis, specialists. Making shinobis into oscar mike officers. Later in April to get high aim gunners/sharpshooters.
* Once I've excavated the middle square on level 2, I built a workshop.
* Next priorities are Resistance Contacts, Proving Ground, AWC, Lab.

Proving ground is for Incendiary grenades. I build an AWC very late, because I don't take a lot of wounds, and there is just no time to be training AWC perks in the early game.


Strategy Layer

Day 1, all rebels on intel, set soldier adviser, scan at home. Once I've uncovered the two missions in the home region, I go unlock the Black Market. I avoid sending rookies on these early missions, just so I can train the exact classes I need. I think I only random promoted like 4 rookies in addition to the 8 I do from gatecrasher.

When Resistance Comms research completes, I unlock a new region, the one with the most Haven members. Set them all to intel as well. If I only have 4, recruit until I have 6. Why 6? I don't know, 6 seems to work well.

As soon as the GTS is complete, start training Shinobis and Specialists, until I have at least 4 of each. I also begin training Oscar Mike on each Shinobi. Specialists can solo most hack workstation and data recovery missions. Shinobis can solo extractions, and jailbreaks. If available, I bring a specialist to jailbreaks as well, as the hack rewards can be very impactfull so early in the game. If the mission looks especially easy to stealth, bring tag-alongs for some extra XP (ex 1 turn evac missions, or jailbreaks).

For missions that have a nice long infiltration time available, I send a real combat team with a sniper and gunner, as they're harder to do stealth missions with since they can't equip SMGs, and I think they're the most important troops to actually level up.

Once I have 4 Shinobis/Specialists, I switch over to training high aim gunners and sharpshooters. Generally low mobility troops become sharpshooters, while 15+ mobility become gunners. Later I'll return to training more shinobis and specialists, the mid game can get really crazy with 5-6 stealth missions infiltrating simultaneously. 4 sharpshooters and 4-6 gunners is good.

As I unlock the third region, regions are going to start hitting 4 advent strength. At this point, I'm saving my A teams for Ambush Troop column missions, if both teams are available and a guerilla op pops with a long infiltration, I'll send a combat team just to earn experience. When a region has 2 guerilla ops discovered in it, I switch the rebels over to recruit. I also switch a region to recruit if I just can't keep up with the missions in general.

As I enter the mid game, my A team becomes occupied by Ambush Troops. When Network Tower/Advent HQ unlocks, the A team is going to spend about 20 days infiltrating, so the B team will have to take over Ambushes. The flood of guerilla ops missions are all being done by stealth teams. It's not unusual to have 5+ missions infiltrating at the same time throughout the mid and late game. I stopped doing guerilla ops with combat teams at the end of April, for the rest of the campaign I stealthed every guerilla op. Here is my guide to stealth: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xcom/comments/ ... lth_guide/

Once I have 6+ regions unlocked, the A team is going to be fully occupied with Ambushes, and the B team will be very busy with retaliations. Occasionally, I squeeze in two Troop Ambushes simultaneously, knowing that if a retaliation comes I'll have to cancel.

At some point in the campaign, I switch from focusing on intel/recruit exclusively, to finally generating some supplies. The early game economy is weird, in that you actually want to spend all your money each month, so you get your building maintenance for free. Generating a little bit of supplies doesn't make much sense, I'd only switch once I can take a big region with 10 rebels in it and set them all on supplies. Likely this is one of the early regions, probably with high advent strength so it's not generating good missions anymore anyway. Putting all the rebels on supplies is going to generate supply retaliations, which is great, because these missions are a joke and provide really easy XP for your B team.

In my game I decided to liberate a second region, but I think it was a mistake. The biggest benefit to liberation is the Advent HQ reward and the haven city defense mission you get when the aliens invade, which also provides great corpses. You really only need one to beat the game, and the 20% bonus to income is rather small for the amount of infiltration time and risk it takes to complete the network tower and advent HQ.

I was ready to do the final golden path missions around Sept, meaning I had coil weapons and enough high level soldiers. Instead I decided to faff around and unlock all the high level toys as well as experiment with some MSGT perks, and finished the campaign on Jan 17. Main bottleneck there was elerium, I had to melt a lot of elerium cores and power through a bunch more ambushes to get enough Elerium to research and build everything.

Throughout the campaign I never felt pressured by the doom clock, even extending the campaign to Jan 17, I was below half on doom. I did blow up 3 Alien Research Facilities.

I did 3 0% supply raids, starting in June. But stopped doing them when I heard they'd be fixed, as they are indeed super broken.

Tactical Layer

My tactical game is warped by two things:

* None of the missions my combat teams do have timers. This favors Sharpshooters and Gunners, which are very good at standing in a spot and killing many things.
* I use Shredder Guns and later Shredder Cannons. These are stupidly OP, as they're very good at destroying cover. They basically replace the Technical class, sapper grenadiers, and many AOE abilities.

My general tactics approach is to alpha strike the turn the aliens activate. My soldier builds favor outputting raw damage with Gunners, Sharpshooters, and Assaults while using a Sting/Incendiary grenadier as a fallback for CC when I can't quite kill everything in a turn. The general decision tree is something like:

* Activate a pod, usually by waiting for them to patrol into an overwatch.
* Can I kill them all this turn? If yes, proceed, often starting by firing a Shredder to soften up enemies and remove cover.
* If no, fire a sting/incendiary grenade. Can I kill everything that is not stunned?
* If no, fire another sting/incendiary grenade. How about now?
* No?? Really?? In the worst case I'm taking fire from disoriented enemies, not great. I favor having Ablative HP to avoid wounds as a last resort. Ideally my soldiers have enough HP to survive a couple of hits.

As the game is currently balanced this works all too well. I didn't bring a medkit on a mission until Water World, as getting wounded was rare, and even then it's easy to baby sit a wounded soldier to make sure they don't get shot at again. This also means that in my mind virtually all defensive perks are mostly useless: Low Profile, Tac Sense, Fortify, Formidable, etc .

I had two "Real Deaths (tm)" post lasers, which I define as soldiers I care about on my A/B teams. Ie, not suicide cheese missions, not stealth missions with low rank fodder, and not some low aim haven adviser or rookie. One was a good Grenadier on an Alien Research Facility, which for some reason I chose not to stealth with a Shinobi. Another was a MSGT Technical on literally the second last mission of the game when I was farming for Elerium, but that was more just me being lazy and making some really risky moves which were punished. I just wanted to finish the campaign at that point.

The alpha strike tactic is very effective in avoiding wounds, which saves you Soldier Time, one of the most important resources in the game.

Soldier Builds

Sharpshooter: DFA, Precision Shot, Dead Shot, Center Mass, Aggression, Hunter's Instincts, Serial

I think DFA is easily better than Rapid Targeting, and yes Precision Shot is actually an ok perk. The extra crit damage is significant, results in 1 shot kills more often proccing DFA, and the only competing perk DGG is weaker, I often find myself taking 100% shots anyway so it can be wasted.


Gunner: Center Mass, Hail of Bullets, Demolition, Chain Shot, <anything works here>, Traverse, <anything works here>

Gunners are the meat of the bullet meal you're going to be serving the alien overlords. With Traverse + Chain Shot they can put out immense damage, on up to 2 different targets. Hail and Demolition give them the ability to fight from an entrenched position without risking fog reveal, taking out targets in cover. Saturation fire is like a bad Shredder Cannon, so I don't bother with that.

Grenadier: Doesn't matter a lot, except Heavy Ordinance, Rapid Deployment, Sting Grenades. This allows you to carry two incendiary grenades and 3 sting grenades, and fire up to two of them per turn when you're in trouble. Formidable is a terrible perk and you shouldn't take it, sorry JolNrbs, if you want more survivability equip a Vest or Ceramic Plate, you'll still have the same number of grenades since you took Heavy Ordinance instead. Dense Smoke is ok, but honestly a regular smoke grenade does the job pretty well anyway, and can be put on any soldier whose slots are less valuable than a grenadier's. I make Grenadiers my combat team officer.

Specialist: Nothing here matters, except Combat Protocol and Failsafe. The only time this class comes on combat missions is if you're trying to skull jack, or you're you've run out of things that actually do damage. Combat Protocol is great in the early game. Failsafe is great on stealth missions for extra tower hack opportunities for Alloys. as well as the occasional drone hack from stealth.

Assault: It's hard to build an assault wrong. They have so many good perks, just pick the stuff that kills things. Assaults would probably be the best class if I did combat missions with timers.

Shinobi: Early game I identify a couple of shinobis with high aim that become pistoliers in the late game once they retire from running stealth missions. Ghost Walker, Lone Wolf, Hunter's Instincts, Shadow Strike, Conceal, Tradecraft, Reaper . They can put out immense amounts of damage in a burst, by burning their Phantom/Conceal charges and using Fan Fire or Face Off. Reaper is just a god-like perk in general.


My final WW team was:
4 gunners
1 assault
2 grenadiers
2 sharpshooters
1 SPARK (really I brought him for fun, if I was trying harder I'd just bring another gunner/assault)
2 Pistol Shinobis

I would've brought more assaults, but didn't train any, wish I had. I flawlessed the tower, and took one wound on WW from an exploding sectopod, oops. I think the aliens shot once on a yellow alert. I had 9 shredder cannons equipped, but only used like 5 of them.

If Wishes Were Fishes

* I wish I didn't feel like doing so many stealth missions was the best strategy. I did a RIDICULOUS number of them, to the point where at the end of the game I switched to either skipping them even though it would've been strategically correct to do them, or just suicide cheesed them because that's faster. Having some stealth missions is good, but when 70% of them in the mid game are stealth it gets very old.
* I wish Liberating more regions was useful.
* I wish the end game tech mattered. I can't ever see it being an actual good idea to prolong the campaign, and risk some XCOM buggery from wiping your A-Team or save file. Most games would end on coil tech I think. I don't really want to extend the campaign length though, so compressing the tech tree, or reducing the number of missions done while putting in harder to unlock gates on the golden path might be a solution.
* I wish the proving grounds projects were more impactfull, there are so few important upgrades outside of Incendiary grenades.
chrisb
Pavonis Dev
Posts: 364
Joined: Mon Feb 27, 2017 8:43 pm

Re: Another L/I Campaign Debrief

Post by chrisb »

I think some people are really underestimating just how completely broken alpha strike squads are. I find yellow alert can actually work to your advantage if you play it right with them. It seems patrols pick up on the dead bodies after awhile, allowing you to often reload, get CDs back up and land a full overwatch. And with the ability to basically create a 'no mans land', the aliens sometimes will just end up exposed if they don't die from overwatch...

I'm not sure if yellow alert is really making the game harder or easier. It's sort of like Red Fog, most of the time it just makes the game easier, which is why I stopped playing with it. I think if pods are going to yellow alert, they need to not be so stupid as to run into no man's land and get completely wrecked when they do.

Although shred cannon is very broken, I find the alpha strike is still very capable even without it. There's enough cover destruction early game before exo available in rockets/demolition and even when exo's get nerfed you will still have sat fire/bunker buster. I think people underestimate technicals. Alone they are not spectacular beyond may, but played correct they can really turn a double pod pull into a wet puddle on the ground.
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