XCOM 2 - Tips and Tricks

RPS is offering some help in playing XCOM 2.

I’ve played around 300 hours of XCOM 1, and 50 of XCOM 2 [official site], for my sins. I know full well that this does not make me any kind of expert but I’m experienced enough that XCOM 2 has not yet kicked my flabby little bottom. A lot of people are finding the game very punishing though, so I thought I’d try to help – both by sharing my own advice on how to keep your soldiers alive for longer and by inviting anyone else to share their own tips in comments.

This isn’t a definitive guide, but instead a grab-bag of assorted wisdom, both early and advanced, that I’m certain will help if you’re having a tough time with this wonderful (if sadly malfunctioning) strategy game.

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More information.

He forgot to mention new math for crits, they don't do separate rolls anymore, and counted as a part of hit roll added on top of the hit range in a weird way. So if your guy has 40% to crit and 40% to hit, he will either miss or crit, never score a regular hit. And that is exactly the reason why you can seen so much guys blown away with crit in full cover.

Did he mention hitting caps lock to fastforward endmission loadscreens?

joxer said:

Did he mention hitting caps lock to fastforward endmission loadscreens?

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From Firaxis:

"Hitting the key, through a rube-goldberg-esque series of events, forces all outstanding load requests to be filled immediately in a single frame. This causes a massive hitch, and potentially could crash the game. If you don't care about those adverse effects the synchronous load is faster."

So, if you don't mind taking the chance of the game scoring a critical hit on your CPU, by all means keep doing it.

You mean keep doing it - if you buy the game.
I didn't. Yet. As the current version is mutilated.

I played the entire game through and while there are some loading times involved, it didn't seem nearly as long as exchanging disks or floppies used to. I think maybe the longest pause I saw was perhaps 10-12 seconds, which is just long enough to have a blink and a nice stretch.

Main problem with XCom 2 for me, at this moment: Good game, but why didn't they start with the features and option from the last complete Xcom (EU), instead opting to start from scratch?

I find X-Com 2 to not be that difficult if we compare it with other X-Com/Ufo titles. I played it in the third difficulty setting out of four (Commander I think?).

Some missions near the beginning of the game feel really punishing, but once you level up your core team and identify their strengths and weaknesses and learn how to take advantage of them, most missions become rather trivial. It becomes common for your sniper to have 100% hit chance and wipe out entire enemy groups with a Serial Killer streak (previously softened by a grenadier as needed) and then you can send in your ranger to finish off any stragglers while the techs do their backup work to cover up for mistakes or that 93% chance that didn't go as you planned.

Psi Operatives are completely overpowered too, but I got mine so late that it didn't even matter.


The final mission is… peculiar. I see it causing a lot of pain to players, and I did suffer to get through it until I decided to do a kinda YOLO all-in and came up victorious, but at least that one mission does make things interesting.

I'd say what makes X-Com 2 overall less frustrating than the other X-Com/UFO games is the distinct lack of Ethereal foes, and somewhat softened morale mechanics. Except for the first few missions in which you really aren't ready to face Psionic Sectoids, you won't have soldiers going crazy and doing random stuff you don't want them to do, which honestly, it's what screwed up every lategame mission in the previous titles, at least for me.

Here's my tip: Wait until they finish the game, then play it.

I'll read it here in a second, but here are my tips:

1) Flashbangs
2) Flashbangs
3) Mimic beacons