dipmonk Posted December 12, 2025 Posted December 12, 2025 (edited) Just played X2 for the first time (bought the Kickstarter way back when). In general, I loved it, which is no surprise since X1 is one of my all time favs. I like the new mission types, graphics, music, QOL fixes, being able to redo air combat manually, and the main menu screen looks great on my ultrawide. Fingers crossed for mods adding map packs & custom portraits. BALANCE I played an honestman Veteran run since I hadn't touched X1/Xcom since 2019. I lost ~1 soldier/mission in the first month, felt a little easy... and then for the next 7 months the game was exceedingly easy, ground & air, and I regretted not choosing the top difficulty. Then about day 240, there was a massive difficulty spike. The aliens were one-shotting my guys w/ their new weapons (and perhaps better aim cuz they were elites?). Then I got Vanguard armor and the game became stupid easy again. So I'd say X2 would benefit from beefing up the aliens in the early & mid-game. Make the aliens tougher so there's a real jump after fighting cleaners. And maybe smooth out the armor curve, and differentiate Xenonaut weapon tiers more (e.g. so accelerated becomes borderline useless and you NEED lasers). I'd also love if the orbital & endgame missions could be ramped up; in the orbital data raid I finished the objective with 3 turns to spare and camped my soldiers around the teleporter pads and farmed reflexes/kills until I ran out of ammo. I understand some players might rush into these missions to prevent Buenos Aires from being flattened by space bugs... can there be a balancing mechanic where the longer you delay those missions, the harder they become? Or the better your gear (e.g. running mostly guardian & stalker vs. a full squad of vanguard) the harder it is? At the very least, the amount of aliens that teleport in should grow ever greater & faster to ratchet up the tension and make it feel like a desperate underdog bid. ENEMIES The AI's real dumb. Storming UFOs was dicey in X1/X-Division cuz aliens would be behind cover or hiding in corners on overwatch. And sometimes as I was getting my team in position an alien would charge out and lob a grenade. In X2 they seem to position haphazardly in the open. I only experienced two alien grenades the whole campaign. There's visual enemy variety... but in combat they mostly feel like different flavor sprites of the same thing cuz they're so easy to kill. In X-Division and/or X1:CE (it's been 6+ years so it blurs together), when armored Sebillians or Androns were introduced, they represented big difficulty spikes cuz the Xenonauts' current guns were borderline useless against them. Also they were a lot tougher so the Sebillian regeneration was actually meaningful, and the Androns felt like terminators cuz they were near-impervious to one weapon type. Also maybe they had more TU so their ability to walk through walls and disrupt your cover/overwatch plans happened more? Mantid symbiote gun is cool - but they don't shoot nearly enough of them. Give us a zerg rush! Mentarch floating ability has no effect on gameplay because maps aren't vertical enough and very rarely have non-traversable surfaces (water, flames). And they're generally in UFOs anyway so they can't fly over things. Sectons don't seem to stick together enough/come in big enough packs to make use of their triangulation. I don't think that ability is strong enough/observable enough anyway. Wraith cloaking is... okay, but too easy to overwhelm with bullets. Maybe better if it lasted for the entire rest of the turn so you gotta do whatever it takes to one-shot them, and if that fails, use grenades or overwatch. Servitor could be great... but aliens are usually so spread out that it doesn't do its job as a support healer or suppressor Cyberdrone is very cool except it's front armor isn't strong enough, it's too easy to kill with bullets to the face. Psyon mind control ability is way too nerfed. It means they're already close by and usu in weapon sights. Everytime they mind controlled a soldier (happened maybe 4x the whole campaign), I could one-shot them in the same turn. Also means mind shield module is pointless. Reapers are not scary. Maybe it was a fluke, but I didn't see reapers until like month 8, when I saw both reapers & reaper alphas for the first time on a terror mission. By then my soldiers & their guns could handle them with ease. MAPS Not enough verticality in the maps. Why no multi-story buildings? Also, I miss vents. They added some additional tactical options in X1's alien bases. Alien base design was interesting the first time - a potential nightmare with its 1000 doors. But there weren't enough aliens, and they were too dumb, to realize the nightmare. The second base assault, I found it annoying because it took foreeeever to clear, hunting down aliens that were aimlessly wandering through dozens of little rooms. Btw it would be cool if on both base & UFO assaults, once you breach the UFO/base HQ, all the remaining aliens beeline to help defend. UFO interior layout is okay... but I missed the layouts in X1, which felt less like random assortments of rooms. The Corvette you'd enter this little central square room with 3 doors and it was 3 Card Monte from Hell figuring out which ones had an overwatched alien waiting on the other side and how to position for that. The Carrier had this massive ground floor bay/hanger that made a lot of sense for its ship design. The landing ship had this big open interior - you'd enter on the ground floor and aliens would rain down shots from behind railings on the second floor balcony/landing. Devious! MISC If I could have my druthers, I would stretch the new mission types and appearance of new aliens into the midgame. Currently after the first two months, there are no more new aliens until late game reapers & eternals, and only the classic mission types (UFO/terror/alien base) till the orbital. Could you let cleaner missions, or cleaner-style missions (sabotage/ambush/escort VIP/etc) continue? And delay the appearance of some aliens (e.g. Psyon/Wraith/Cyberdrone)? Maybe the aliens retaliate after the orbital missions by sending all their remaining Cleaners at you in a kamikaze base assault? Because another issue is that I experienced one base assault early-ish, and then never again, cuz it was too easy to shoot everything down. One CTD - randomly, when equipping a Warden armor on a female soldier on the intermediate dropship A visual glitch - when a mentarch died from bleeding on its turn, its body stayed levitating When the sloped walls in alien bases are destroyed, it looks like I should be able to stand in their spaces but I can't. I'd think either make them indestructible or let us stand in those spaces and use cover properly. Typo in the last sentence of UOO-1 Bridge Assault text - "that WE have no choice" Maybe add info to the air combat tool tip for weapons - about needing to have a UFO selected by a plane for its missiles to fire. Took me months in-game to figure that one out (didn't matter though cuz missiles are too weak to be a factor, at least on Veteran). Lol at one of the soldier names being Putt Anna, I guess that must be a personalized one. Okay, that's kind of a lot! But don't get me wrong - I had a BLAST playing the game, it's really well done, I will recommend it to others and I will definitely be playing a Commander Ironman campaign next year. Edited December 12, 2025 by dipmonk 1 1 Quote
Chris Posted December 15, 2025 Posted December 15, 2025 On 12/12/2025 at 1:16 AM, dipmonk said: Just played X2 for the first time (bought the Kickstarter way back when). In general, I loved it, which is no surprise since X1 is one of my all time favs. I like the new mission types, graphics, music, QOL fixes, being able to redo air combat manually, and the main menu screen looks great on my ultrawide. Fingers crossed for mods adding map packs & custom portraits. BALANCE I played an honestman Veteran run since I hadn't touched X1/Xcom since 2019. I lost ~1 soldier/mission in the first month, felt a little easy... and then for the next 7 months the game was exceedingly easy, ground & air, and I regretted not choosing the top difficulty. Then about day 240, there was a massive difficulty spike. The aliens were one-shotting my guys w/ their new weapons (and perhaps better aim cuz they were elites?). Then I got Vanguard armor and the game became stupid easy again. So I'd say X2 would benefit from beefing up the aliens in the early & mid-game. Make the aliens tougher so there's a real jump after fighting cleaners. And maybe smooth out the armor curve, and differentiate Xenonaut weapon tiers more (e.g. so accelerated becomes borderline useless and you NEED lasers). I'd also love if the orbital & endgame missions could be ramped up; in the orbital data raid I finished the objective with 3 turns to spare and camped my soldiers around the teleporter pads and farmed reflexes/kills until I ran out of ammo. I understand some players might rush into these missions to prevent Buenos Aires from being flattened by space bugs... can there be a balancing mechanic where the longer you delay those missions, the harder they become? Or the better your gear (e.g. running mostly guardian & stalker vs. a full squad of vanguard) the harder it is? At the very least, the amount of aliens that teleport in should grow ever greater & faster to ratchet up the tension and make it feel like a desperate underdog bid. ENEMIES The AI's real dumb. Storming UFOs was dicey in X1/X-Division cuz aliens would be behind cover or hiding in corners on overwatch. And sometimes as I was getting my team in position an alien would charge out and lob a grenade. In X2 they seem to position haphazardly in the open. I only experienced two alien grenades the whole campaign. There's visual enemy variety... but in combat they mostly feel like different flavor sprites of the same thing cuz they're so easy to kill. In X-Division and/or X1:CE (it's been 6+ years so it blurs together), when armored Sebillians or Androns were introduced, they represented big difficulty spikes cuz the Xenonauts' current guns were borderline useless against them. Also they were a lot tougher so the Sebillian regeneration was actually meaningful, and the Androns felt like terminators cuz they were near-impervious to one weapon type. Also maybe they had more TU so their ability to walk through walls and disrupt your cover/overwatch plans happened more? Mantid symbiote gun is cool - but they don't shoot nearly enough of them. Give us a zerg rush! Mentarch floating ability has no effect on gameplay because maps aren't vertical enough and very rarely have non-traversable surfaces (water, flames). And they're generally in UFOs anyway so they can't fly over things. Sectons don't seem to stick together enough/come in big enough packs to make use of their triangulation. I don't think that ability is strong enough/observable enough anyway. Wraith cloaking is... okay, but too easy to overwhelm with bullets. Maybe better if it lasted for the entire rest of the turn so you gotta do whatever it takes to one-shot them, and if that fails, use grenades or overwatch. Servitor could be great... but aliens are usually so spread out that it doesn't do its job as a support healer or suppressor Cyberdrone is very cool except it's front armor isn't strong enough, it's too easy to kill with bullets to the face. Psyon mind control ability is way too nerfed. It means they're already close by and usu in weapon sights. Everytime they mind controlled a soldier (happened maybe 4x the whole campaign), I could one-shot them in the same turn. Also means mind shield module is pointless. Reapers are not scary. Maybe it was a fluke, but I didn't see reapers until like month 8, when I saw both reapers & reaper alphas for the first time on a terror mission. By then my soldiers & their guns could handle them with ease. MAPS Not enough verticality in the maps. Why no multi-story buildings? Also, I miss vents. They added some additional tactical options in X1's alien bases. Alien base design was interesting the first time - a potential nightmare with its 1000 doors. But there weren't enough aliens, and they were too dumb, to realize the nightmare. The second base assault, I found it annoying because it took foreeeever to clear, hunting down aliens that were aimlessly wandering through dozens of little rooms. Btw it would be cool if on both base & UFO assaults, once you breach the UFO/base HQ, all the remaining aliens beeline to help defend. UFO interior layout is okay... but I missed the layouts in X1, which felt less like random assortments of rooms. The Corvette you'd enter this little central square room with 3 doors and it was 3 Card Monte from Hell figuring out which ones had an overwatched alien waiting on the other side and how to position for that. The Carrier had this massive ground floor bay/hanger that made a lot of sense for its ship design. The landing ship had this big open interior - you'd enter on the ground floor and aliens would rain down shots from behind railings on the second floor balcony/landing. Devious! MISC If I could have my druthers, I would stretch the new mission types and appearance of new aliens into the midgame. Currently after the first two months, there are no more new aliens until late game reapers & eternals, and only the classic mission types (UFO/terror/alien base) till the orbital. Could you let cleaner missions, or cleaner-style missions (sabotage/ambush/escort VIP/etc) continue? And delay the appearance of some aliens (e.g. Psyon/Wraith/Cyberdrone)? Maybe the aliens retaliate after the orbital missions by sending all their remaining Cleaners at you in a kamikaze base assault? Because another issue is that I experienced one base assault early-ish, and then never again, cuz it was too easy to shoot everything down. One CTD - randomly, when equipping a Warden armor on a female soldier on the intermediate dropship A visual glitch - when a mentarch died from bleeding on its turn, its body stayed levitating When the sloped walls in alien bases are destroyed, it looks like I should be able to stand in their spaces but I can't. I'd think either make them indestructible or let us stand in those spaces and use cover properly. Typo in the last sentence of UOO-1 Bridge Assault text - "that WE have no choice" Maybe add info to the air combat tool tip for weapons - about needing to have a UFO selected by a plane for its missiles to fire. Took me months in-game to figure that one out (didn't matter though cuz missiles are too weak to be a factor, at least on Veteran). Lol at one of the soldier names being Putt Anna, I guess that must be a personalized one. Okay, that's kind of a lot! But don't get me wrong - I had a BLAST playing the game, it's really well done, I will recommend it to others and I will definitely be playing a Commander Ironman campaign next year. Thanks. It's always useful when players post up something this detailed, and I'm also glad to hear you enjoyed the campaign overall. I've read your feedback, and I've added a few notes below: Your difficulty curve feedback tracks with what I've heard from some other players too. The big spike in difficulty on day 240 comes because we're introducing alien Fusion weapons at the same time as a new rank of aliens that are tougher and more accurate than previous ranks (we'll be addressing this in Milestone 7). But it might also be that your natural level is Commander difficulty; I personally think the Cleaner missions in Phase 1 are about the right difficulty so if you're finding them too easy then it might be worth moving up. Can you explain further why you found the missions too easy in month 2 onwards? Was the problem that the aliens never had a chance to shoot at you at all because you could always kill them immediately? Or was it that you did take hits, but your upgraded armour was strong enough that it was easily mitigated? Could you describe your overall strategy in terms of what you prioritised on the strategic layer? Out of interest, did you run all the story missions as soon as they appeared (e.g. the orbital missions)? I think it's quite unusual to finish the UOO Sabotage mission that quickly. But I've not played it since the last balance pass. Thanks for the feedback on the alien abilities. Oh yeah, the alien base vents were cool. I'll create a note to see if we can add a few vents to the base maps if we have time. Depends how much time the level designer has free. You can still clear the command room in the alien base to get vision over the whole base. But yeah, having the AI make an effort to reclaim the command room would be interesting. I'll note that down as something to look into for Milestone 7. Yeah, the mission variety is a bit constrained by the structure of the game unfortunately - given that the aliens are massively outnumbered by the humans and fighting on hostile territory once the overt war starts in Phase 2, most of the mission types don't make logical sense any more. I do have some ideas for how to add more mission variety to the mid-game but that's probably DLC content at this point, because it's so time-consuming to add new missions. We've spent quite a lot of Early Access on that sort of thing already - the ATLAS Base, Cleaner Ambush, Extract VIP, Rescue Soldiers, UOO Sabotage, and UOO Bridge Assault missions were all new additions at various points during Early Access. 1 Quote
Skitso Posted January 2 Posted January 2 (edited) On 12/15/2025 at 7:06 PM, Chris said: Thanks. It's always useful when players post up something this detailed, and I'm also glad to hear you enjoyed the campaign overall. I've read your feedback, and I've added a few notes below: Your difficulty curve feedback tracks with what I've heard from some other players too. The big spike in difficulty on day 240 comes because we're introducing alien Fusion weapons at the same time as a new rank of aliens that are tougher and more accurate than previous ranks (we'll be addressing this in Milestone 7). But it might also be that your natural level is Commander difficulty; I personally think the Cleaner missions in Phase 1 are about the right difficulty so if you're finding them too easy then it might be worth moving up. Can you explain further why you found the missions too easy in month 2 onwards? Was the problem that the aliens never had a chance to shoot at you at all because you could always kill them immediately? Or was it that you did take hits, but your upgraded armour was strong enough that it was easily mitigated? Could you describe your overall strategy in terms of what you prioritised on the strategic layer? Out of interest, did you run all the story missions as soon as they appeared (e.g. the orbital missions)? I think it's quite unusual to finish the UOO Sabotage mission that quickly. But I've not played it since the last balance pass. Thanks for the feedback on the alien abilities. Oh yeah, the alien base vents were cool. I'll create a note to see if we can add a few vents to the base maps if we have time. Depends how much time the level designer has free. You can still clear the command room in the alien base to get vision over the whole base. But yeah, having the AI make an effort to reclaim the command room would be interesting. I'll note that down as something to look into for Milestone 7. Yeah, the mission variety is a bit constrained by the structure of the game unfortunately - given that the aliens are massively outnumbered by the humans and fighting on hostile territory once the overt war starts in Phase 2, most of the mission types don't make logical sense any more. I do have some ideas for how to add more mission variety to the mid-game but that's probably DLC content at this point, because it's so time-consuming to add new missions. We've spent quite a lot of Early Access on that sort of thing already - the ATLAS Base, Cleaner Ambush, Extract VIP, Rescue Soldiers, UOO Sabotage, and UOO Bridge Assault missions were all new additions at various points during Early Access. Dipmonk has a lot of good points there. I second the difficulty curve issue, where the cleaner missions/abductions at the beginning of the game feel more difficult than most of the UFO crash sites following them. All the missions with no time pressure are too easy as you can cheese the dumb, over aggressive, one note AI. AI needs a lot of love and yeah, the alien species do feel samey. Their abilities need to be stronger and AI more diverse. Regarding the difficulty levels, commander needs something more. Now that you nerfed the 120% alien aim bonus, the only thing it has going vs veteran is higher enemy count (which isn't enough). Alien bases and UFO's feel underwhelming as there are not enough aliens and the player has upper hand in unit numbers in most situations when it really should really be the other way around whrn fighting on enemy ground. Raiding larger UFO's feel boring as there's always way too few aliens defending them. Edited January 2 by Skitso 1 Quote
gG-Unknown Posted January 2 Posted January 2 (edited) 2 hours ago, Skitso said: Regarding the difficulty levels, commander needs something more. Now that you nerfed the 120% alien aim bonus, the only thing it has going vs veteran is higher enemy count (which isn't enough). 1. Change was 130 >> 110 dont know where you fabricated 120. Anyway it was GREAT change and improvement towards fair play game. Difficulty based on linear rising numbers into insanity is example of lazy design. I have recommended this change and I am grateful it happened. 2. At the moments I would focus at Soldier AND Veteran difficulty as golden standard. Tuning Recruit and Commander can be done as very last think. AI could change, some game aliens features could change, some game mechanics could change all of this could potentialy change min or max difficulty when change is not always linear. Simply speaking, I would not bother tuning min/max difficulties now. Edited January 2 by gG-Unknown Quote
Skitso Posted January 2 Posted January 2 (edited) 2 hours ago, gG-Unknown said: 1. Change was 130 >> 110 dont know where you fabricated 120. Anyway it was GREAT change and improvement towards fair play game. Difficulty based on linear rising numbers into insanity is example of lazy design. I have recommended this change and I am grateful it happened. 2. At the moments I would focus at Soldier AND Veteran difficulty as golden standard. Tuning Recruit and Commander can be done as very last think. AI could change, some game aliens features could change, some game mechanics could change all of this could potentialy change min or max difficulty when change is not always linear. Simply speaking, I would not bother tuning min/max difficulties now. Just remembered it wrong apparently... And I agree 100% that the difficulty shouldn't be just higher numbers. My point was that now that the accuracy has been nerfed, there needs to be something else to increase the Commander challenge and differentiate it from Veteran. Commander should be the ultimate test for the most seasoned players like you and me where we need to use absolutely everything we got. Now it's just Veteran with few more aliens. Edited January 2 by Skitso Quote
dipmonk Posted February 25 Author Posted February 25 On 12/15/2025 at 9:06 AM, Chris said: Thanks. It's always useful when players post up something this detailed, and I'm also glad to hear you enjoyed the campaign overall. I've read your feedback, and I've added a few notes below: Your difficulty curve feedback tracks with what I've heard from some other players too. The big spike in difficulty on day 240 comes because we're introducing alien Fusion weapons at the same time as a new rank of aliens that are tougher and more accurate than previous ranks (we'll be addressing this in Milestone 7). But it might also be that your natural level is Commander difficulty; I personally think the Cleaner missions in Phase 1 are about the right difficulty so if you're finding them too easy then it might be worth moving up. Can you explain further why you found the missions too easy in month 2 onwards? Was the problem that the aliens never had a chance to shoot at you at all because you could always kill them immediately? Or was it that you did take hits, but your upgraded armour was strong enough that it was easily mitigated? Could you describe your overall strategy in terms of what you prioritised on the strategic layer? Out of interest, did you run all the story missions as soon as they appeared (e.g. the orbital missions)? I think it's quite unusual to finish the UOO Sabotage mission that quickly. But I've not played it since the last balance pass. Thanks for the feedback on the alien abilities. Oh yeah, the alien base vents were cool. I'll create a note to see if we can add a few vents to the base maps if we have time. Depends how much time the level designer has free. You can still clear the command room in the alien base to get vision over the whole base. But yeah, having the AI make an effort to reclaim the command room would be interesting. I'll note that down as something to look into for Milestone 7. Yeah, the mission variety is a bit constrained by the structure of the game unfortunately - given that the aliens are massively outnumbered by the humans and fighting on hostile territory once the overt war starts in Phase 2, most of the mission types don't make logical sense any more. I do have some ideas for how to add more mission variety to the mid-game but that's probably DLC content at this point, because it's so time-consuming to add new missions. We've spent quite a lot of Early Access on that sort of thing already - the ATLAS Base, Cleaner Ambush, Extract VIP, Rescue Soldiers, UOO Sabotage, and UOO Bridge Assault missions were all new additions at various points during Early Access. Sorry for not responding earlier, I checked for responses for a few days after but then got busy w/ life/work and stopped checking. You're most likely right that I should play Commander. Idk if still helpful but - - 2+ months it got too easy mostly cuz I could kill a good amount of aliens each round so they never got a shot off, yeah. That plus cover/distance meant they didn't hit me much and when they did it was mostly tolerable injuries - I think the upgraded armor certainly contributed to the easiness there, but it was the lesser factor. - I prioritized better weapons & armor & planes, then when that was taken care of did story missions. I faded optional autopsy or interrogation research since who cares about a species being 10% easier to kill when it's already so easy, and faded other things like the robot/gun platform things you can use instead of soldiers (forget what they're called). I think I played enough X1 that I had good instincts about what to prioritize. Quote
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.