Finished a campaign

[Solver]

Took me some three weeks but I just finished, for the first time, a full campaign in the game. Milestone 7 is stable enough that I only had minor issues with the latest builds, great progress compared to earlier milestones where I'd run into some blockers before getting to the endgame. Here's some unorganized thoughts from the playthrough.

Overall, I'm very happy with the game. It's fun, it's satisfying, the pieces fit well together, it's a cohesive great experience.

I had a long campaign, kept the UOO missions until the end. So I did UOO Sabotage when I already had Fusion weapons, from there it was a straight sequence of UOO Bridge Assault -> capturing an Eternal -> Endgame. Probably not quite the intended sequence but I was managing panic well enough to let me delay the UOO that much.

During this run I had some real setbacks and I love that I could push through and win. I had set up a secondary base with some nice manufacturing and radars, but I lost it. Retaliation UFO coming in, damaged, so it landed not too big of an assault force but I only had a few sentry guns and rookie soldiers guarding the base. Cyberdrones were too much for privates to handle, so I lost the base. Then later, I had a terror mission go sideways. Lots of aliens (I think it might have been the bug that got fixed later), lost two soldiers, saw that ammo might be an issue, had to abort. Still got it in the end.

Love the writing and can't get enough of the Chief Scientist. I'm sure some people will find him annoying but he works so well for me.

It's as always super satisfying to watch some rookies get lucky and become indispensable. One of my rookies who was pretty bad and was just guarding the dropship area on a cleaner extraction mission got a couple good shots there, luckily survived a few more missions and became one of my best soldiers for the final assault. This is one of the most satisfying things in the game.

The early missions with varied objectives are fun, unfortunately they're one-off and later don't happen. One thing I'd love in a DLC would be to randomize this some, even on existing maps. 

I really like the stage where you have various armors with different tradeoffs. Almost a shame that they all converge into the Vanguard which is just the best in every way. A Stalker-wearing jetpack sniper is a totally different soldier from a Colossus-wearing tank, but by the end it's less varied.

I couldn't find a real use for breaching charges in the mid or late game. Early game they're very useful to destroy cover and expose enemies, but once you get Alenium explosives then regular grenades are enough to destroy cover, and lasers also work for that. Even moreso with later tech.

Operation Endgame was a massive jump in difficulty even compared to Battleships and UOO Bridge Assault. Lots of aliens, and you have to push forward to destroy the gateways on time, all while trying not to get caught in a crossfire between the heaviest alien units. And that's just the first part, though actually it's harder than the second - part two, there's no time pressure and more cover, you can advance methodically as in an alien base. I appreciated the difficulty, it's worthy of the final mission, but it's probably too much of a jump.

Mantids with bio-launchers were surprisingly hard to deal with. Bleeding wounds and then up to three of those bug critters. Ouch.

In one of the earlier builds, maybe 7.2, my sodiers were still blowing themselves up with grenades indoors (UFOs, bases). By the current build that finally seems to be fixed, mercifully enough.

Of all the psionic units I fought, I had a soldier get mesmerized exactly once. Eternals with their mind control are a threat (and take forever to go down to batons) but mesmerize appeared to be a non-factor.

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All in all, congratulations on being almost at the 1.0 release and I very much expect the game to do well. It's a very fun and satisfying take on the X-Com formula and remains different even now that squad based tactical games are more popular.

[Gijs-Jan]

Thank you for the write up, and excellent to hear you enjoyed it! 

[fusion-waffle]

4 hours ago, Solver said:

During this run I had some real setbacks and I love that I could push through and win. I had set up a secondary base with some nice manufacturing and radars, but I lost it. Retaliation UFO coming in, damaged, so it landed not too big of an assault force but I only had a few sentry guns and rookie soldiers guarding the base. Cyberdrones were too much for privates to handle, so I lost the base. Then later, I had a terror mission go sideways. Lots of aliens (I think it might have been the bug that got fixed later), lost two soldiers, saw that ammo might be an issue, had to abort. Still got it in the end.

Well done for turning it around & overcoming these setbacks!

 

4 hours ago, Solver said:

I couldn't find a real use for breaching charges in the mid or late game. Early game they're very useful to destroy cover and expose enemies, but once you get Alenium explosives then regular grenades are enough to destroy cover, and lasers also work for that. Even moreso with later tech.

Interesting -- I've been favouring demo packs over grenades.

One thing I've noticed playing 7.x is that it is much easier to destroy the roofs of alien bunkers during Endgame Stage 1 -- if there is an alien on a bunker roof, 1 fusion demo pack thrown at the alien wont kill the alien but it will create a huge hole in the roof (and then the alien will fall down into the hole. Hilarious). When you start throwing fusion demo packs around, it feels like these alien bunkers are made of tissue paper. It was much harder in v6 stable to destroy roofs. I guess this is a consequence of the v7.0.0 balance change reworking damage types vs terrain? This has also created a couple of fun gameplay situations:

• Vertical firefights, with aliens inside bunkers trading fire with xenonauts on the rooftops
• After being knocked off a roof by a fusion demo pack, i had a Cyberdrone jump back out of the crater up onto the roof!  Yeah, Cyberdrones hover & their Xenopedia entry claims they are Hovering & that it works like a jetpack. But I've never actually seen a Cyberdrone do a jetpack move before, across 5+ prior campaigns.

Edited March 14 by fusion-waffle

[Solver]

50 minutes ago, fusion-waffle said:

Well done for turning it around & overcoming these setbacks!

I think it's a really good highlight too of what sets X2 apart from other current games in the genre. X2 maintains the original X-Com spirit where losses are expected and things can go bad quickly. A lucky alien shot, an unlucky miss from your sniper and suddenly you're this close to massive losses. But in this game, that's acceptable and recoverable. I know many players will restart a mission (or quit) if it goes really bad, but a failed mission or a lost base is totally recoverable in X2. Most other games have more guardrails against these situations. But X2 fixes the "totally bullshit" cases from the original X-Com (unavoidable blaster bomb straight into the dropship) while maintaining the spirit.

 

56 minutes ago, fusion-waffle said:

One thing I've noticed playing 7.x is that it is much easier to destroy the roofs of alien bunkers during Endgame Stage 1

For what it's worth I was blowing enough holes in roofs without demo charges anyway. I had regular fusion grenades blow holes in roofs, as well as rockets from the trusty ARES. And yes, it's fun to see aliens fall down into the building, even more fun to then shoot down at them from the roof. Demo charges would I assume blow bigger holes but normal fusion explosives do it anyway. At the same time by the endgame demo charges just take up too much space. With all the fancy modules and equipment available, backpack space is quite valuable.

[fusion-waffle]

15 minutes ago, Solver said:

I think it's a really good highlight too of what sets X2 apart from other current games in the genre. X2 maintains the original X-Com spirit where losses are expected and things can go bad quickly. A lucky alien shot, an unlucky miss from your sniper and suddenly you're this close to massive losses. But in this game, that's acceptable and recoverable. I know many players will restart a mission (or quit) if it goes really bad, but a failed mission or a lost base is totally recoverable in X2. Most other games have more guardrails against these situations. But X2 fixes the "totally bullshit" cases from the original X-Com (unavoidable blaster bomb straight into the dropship) while maintaining the spirit.

Yeah, well said. Once a player has achieved a reasonable level of skill at the tactical combat & has enough of a grasp of big picture strategy (prioritise air superiority - do not let those UFOs run amok across your funding regions) it is possible to have severe setbacks and still recover and win campaigns.

I'd played a couple of v6 ironman campaigns & understood that it is possible to come back and win campaigns after one or two disastrous missions where you lose your entire strike team. Training centres + NA & Europe funding region bonuses let you recover quickly after losing all your veteran soldiers, it's not campaign ending.

But I'd never seen a base defence mission until playing v7.0 - v7.2 with the accidental meta of "game crashes if you shoot down retaliation UFOs .. so enjoy those base defence fights". Also lost my second base early in phase 2, but turned it around. It's an interesting challenge. I lost it pretty early, the base only had 1 radar + 1 hangar + 1 angel, but it still puts you $3m or so & at least 30 days behind where you'd normally be.

 

I only played one base defence mission in v7.7 -- v7.8 and I was pleased to see that the aliens have figured out how to open xenonaut blast doors again, which is a big improvement upon v7.2.

Edited March 14 by fusion-waffle

[Solver]

Just got an idea. One minor thing that bothers me, there's little incentive to capture more aliens alive. Which is also a complaint I had about the original X-Com. Capturing one alien of each type is good for the observation bonus but there really isn't any reason to attempt more captures. The slight money increase doesn't warrant the extra risk.

Let additional live aliens provide some extra OPs. It's a versatile currency that's hard to generate on demand, so some OPs as a possible reward for live captures would be a situationally interesting incentive. 

[Skitso]

45 minutes ago, Solver said:

Just got an idea. One minor thing that bothers me, there's little incentive to capture more aliens alive. Which is also a complaint I had about the original X-Com. Capturing one alien of each type is good for the observation bonus but there really isn't any reason to attempt more captures. The slight money increase doesn't warrant the extra risk.

Let additional live aliens provide some extra OPs. It's a versatile currency that's hard to generate on demand, so some OPs as a possible reward for live captures would be a situationally interesting incentive. 

Excellent idea! I would love to have more means to earn OPs instead of the daily passive gain we currently have. It's something I hope Goldhawk will consider while planning the inevitable upcoming DLCs. Less daily passive gain and more active means like capturing aliens and additional misison types to boost the player agency. Additional mission types tied into supporter/infiltrator/OP system would be sweet and also keep the nice mission variety alive after the Cleaner arc is done.

[Rakiii]

1 hour ago, Solver said:

Just got an idea. One minor thing that bothers me, there's little incentive to capture more aliens alive. Which is also a complaint I had about the original X-Com. Capturing one alien of each type is good for the observation bonus but there really isn't any reason to attempt more captures. The slight money increase doesn't warrant the extra risk.

Let additional live aliens provide some extra OPs. It's a versatile currency that's hard to generate on demand, so some OPs as a possible reward for live captures would be a situationally interesting incentive. 

There are different alien specialists (engineer, leader, ... ) but there really isn't any reason to capture them. It would be cool to unlock more researches and things like that (been a thing in x1 modes) this way.

Edited March 17 by Rakiii

[Senteliks]

I like review with an exception Cleaners. I don't like phase 1, more specifically I don't like the intro Atlas mission. 

I been trying to mod it out, since now we have architecture for modding, it's just that decompiling and looking what i need to patch is going slow ( I found everything I wasn't looking for - AI, buildings, weapons, morale, attributes.... literally everything under the sky but things related to phase 1 with exception to Missions structure,).  

Something like Accelerated campaign for TErra Invicta. Thankfully unlike in TI, the focus of the game is not on Cleaners, so essentially I am just getting rid of very long tutorial. 

I just wish that this is an official option. Because once you play through game (no matter how far you progress), replaying over the same steps with the first Cleaner intro mission and then entire phase 1 is tedious, because you seen it and done it all.
 

Edited March 20 by Senteliks