X-COM 2: War of the Chosen

The Chosen,whose new album is out this week.

War of the Chosen is a massive DLC pack for X-COM 2 which, like Enemy Unknown's expansion, Enemy Within, transforms the standard campaign with new content, adding additional enemies, units and features of the strategy layer.

First and foremost are the titular Chosen, a trio of badass enforcers for the alien Elders. In a cutscene completely outside of X-COM's possible view or knowledge - a first for the series - the Assassin, the Hunter and the Warlock are tasked with returning the Commander to ADVENT custody. In order to ensure best results from their infighting underlings and promote cooperation, the Elders promise control of Earth to the one who captures the Commander (and later have the gall to get pissed at the Chosen for being competitive.) What this means in-game is that each Chosen controls an area of the world, and has the potential to show up during missions in this area and get all up in your face.

Strike a pose.

The Assassin is a bit like your Rangers, combining tremendous speed with a concealment power, a devastating melee attack which leaves all nearby X-COM operatives effectively puking their guts up in shock, a shotgun for back-up, and the ability to move after attacking. Oh, and she doesn't trigger overwatch fire, because fuck you, that's why. The Hunter is all about precision range work, bouncing all over the shop with her grapple and deploying a targeting lock which forces the engaged target to reposition or face a lethal attack in the following turn. Finally, the Warlock has some nasty psionic abilities, and they are all built like bastards, overflowing with hit points, armour and reinforcements. Oh, and you can't permanently kill them at first. And they can sometimes capture your soldiers.

Thoughout the game, the Chosen learn more and more about your operation, with an ultimate eye to attacking the Avenger and recapturing the Commander. This growing knowledge provides an additional countdown which, unlike the Avatar Project, can never be reset. In addition, they have the option to capture your soldiers for questioning, which is just... rude.

Sneaky!

But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the ruthless alien enforcer, and that additional strategy layer element comes into play with the covert action screen. Managed via the new Resistance Ring facility, Covert Actions allow you to seek out rare resources, but also to find information on your enemies just as they seek information on you. The primary missions of this type relate to locating the stronghold of each Chosen and unlocking a mission to infiltrate it and destroy the stasis coffin which keeps them alive, but you can also send troops to find out where they are holding your captured soldiers, and completing such a covert action similarly activates a one-off rescue mission. Completing a covert action requires you to assign one or more soldiers, scientists and engineers, and possible intel or supply resources, with most actions having a required baseline and additional assets which can be assigned to buy off some of the risks. Each action has a risk of injury, ambush or capture, which makes covert action a bad choice for getting some quick experience on the rookies.

These two are introduced as barely able not to kill each other. I think most
players probably set them up as a max-bonded kill team.

Covert action opportunities are provided by the three Resistance Factions, another addition to the game. The Reapers are facemasked, Russianish scout-snipers who look like refugees from Gone with the Blastwave and eat ADVENT troopers for breakfast; literally. Naturally, this makes working with the Skirmishers, ex-ADVENT defectors, iffy at best, and the goal of the Covert game is to get each of the factions sufficiently onside to create a united resistance. The third faction, the Templars, are psi-cultists, but lack the specific beef with the other factions which makes the Reapers and Skirmishers engaging. At the start of each month, any faction that likes you (including X-COM) can be assigned Resistance Orders, which act as powerful modifiers for the coming month, boosting income, reducing the risk of Covert actions, or making certain Proving Ground projects complete instantly, to name but a few. Each of the factions also provides a 'hero' soldier for your forces (and the Reapers at least may very rarely assign a Covert action allowing you to recruit another,) with powerful abilities.

The templar's focus is, essentially, cutting a fool.

The Reaper uses stealth, sharpshooting and explosives. Their enhanced Concealment mode, Shadow, makes them incredible point-runners for ambushes, and they can remain in cover for entire missions if correctly specced and used for picking off the injured. The Skirmisher focuses on mid-range firepower and mobility, with a grappling hook that can be used for traversal, to drag in enemies for a melee attack, or to take the Skirmisher across the map to the enemy. While the Skirmisher does have a limited melee capacity, the real close-range specialist is the Templar, who has only a machine pistol to back up a brutal hand-to-hand attack and a battery of psi-abilities which are powered by successful melee kills.

The hero units are not distinctly more powerful than regular soldiers, but they are versatile, especially with the new ability point system, which allows you to choose abilities from multiple branches of their advance tree at each level. In addition, each has the potential to inflict horrific damage, with a high level Templar carving a swathe through the enemy, and the upgraded Banish ability and a souped-up rifle allowing the Reaper to take out half a dozen large enemies in a turn on a good day. The Skirmisher lacks any such extreme manouevres, but has a number of traits granting additional actions, including the hit-or-miss potential of Battle Lord, which for one turn each combat grants the ability to act like one of Vahlen's rulers and act each time an enemy takes an action in the character's line of sight.

By this point, their guns had been named... after
each other.

Another new addition to the mix is soldier bonding. Operatives sent on missions together, especially those who spend time in proximity on the field and shoot at the same enemies (or at enemies shooting at each other,) develop cohesion, and have the potential to form bonds, which grant extra abilities relating to their partner. Such pairings can then be made the subject of an inspirational poster, as can victorious group shots and other photos taken with the new photo booth feature. Stored in our game files, these can be found as propaganda posters around the battlefields, which now include underground levels and abandoned city blocks. The last of these are home to the Lost, zombie-like rejects from the Elders' experiments that attack in hordes. Killing one grants an extra action, so it is possible to take down a lot of Lost in a single turn, especially with a good sniper.

War of the Chosen overhauls X-COM 2  with a new feeling and a host of new gameplay elements, although one of my favourite things doesn't come up until the very end, when we see the Skirmishers welcoming waves of ADVENT troopers now free of conditioning. It's rather sweet. It also expands the original game without the crippling difficulty hike that makes it hard for me to get on with the excellent Long War 2 mod. I won't say 'otherwise excellent', because it's a feature rather than a bug, but does unfortunately mean that the mod is not really for me (at least until someone with better technical skills than I creates a better aim mod that works with LW2.)

Further Thoughts on Long War 2

Regions have different ADVENT strengths; currently I'm dealing with low
strengths, but I suspect it's going to get nasty once I manage to scrape together
the resources to build a radio room and reach out to somewhere I've not been
yet.

My second attempt at Long War 2 is going better; partly because I've better distributed my veterans and made serious use of the 'train rookie' function of my Guerrilla Warfare Facility, partly because I'm not attempting short-time missions(1), but also because I'm playing on easy, because I don't find getting repeatedly slaughtered fun(2). Even on easy it's pretty damned tough.

Once you get into it, two things strike you about Long War. One is the increased depth of the overworld strategic game; the other is how the way you play changes. Stealth becomes important for more than just setting up your first ambush. Whereas in the standard game it's a point of pride to get all of the aliens even if your mission is to evac a VIP; in Long War, you've never done better than if you never have to fire a shot. The first time I stealthed all the way to the cells and nipped out the back door with the prisoners without a single exchange of fire, I felt like a god; probably Loki. There's still a satisfaction - a huge satisfaction, even on easy - in a two-strong Ranger team taking on five-to-one odds to put down the guard on a prisoner transport, but it's no less a victory when you then book for evac without even stopping to see what reinforcements are coming.

Infiltration fundamentally changes human resource management.

The changes in the strategic game are simple, yet profound. Firstly, there is an overarching goal to the missions in each area. Many missions involve intel gathering, which may turn up a lead. Once you have a lead, you have a shot at Liberation missions, which reveal the location of Regional ADVENT HQ, unlocking a straight assault mission to remove the region from ADVENT control entirely (although I suspect not irrevocably.)

Secondly, infiltration completely alters your troop management. In the basic game, you get one or maybe two squads-worth and train them hard, while the bottom of the order sort of languishes. In Long War, teams spend days at a time infiltrating mission sites. Between that and healing times, you'e going to use much, much more of your roster and it really is worth cycling through to keep everyone trained up. Weapon and armour management is also once more a thing, as Long War removes the squad upgrade option; new weapons have to be built individually and supplies are at a premium. Something is nicking most of my drops and I still don't know what. Maybe if I can get the Officer corpse I need to make a skulljack(3) I can finally find out!

Finally, there's the whole question of managing the resistance. I've barely got into that, and although it mostly seems simple - each resistance member at a haven can scavenge for supplies, snoop for intel, recruit new resistance members or hide - I suspect it may become important later and I may regret not paying more attention now. Given that the havens are now persistent entities with characters who do things for me, I anticipate retaliation missions feeling a lot more personal.

(1) Attempting anything with less than 200% infiltration is a doomed venture, at least with basic gear. Once I can send a couple of heavily armoured ninjas into the field, I may spec a squad for short infiltrations.
(2) I'm basically not committed enough to break the cycle, so I never get the catharsis of victory to counter the constant frustration.
(3) Proving Ground projects don't need huge amounts of supplies, but tend to require 'parts', and since most of your missions end in evac, you don't have as many stiffs lying around. You can't pick up dead or incapacitated enemies and carry them to evac; I've tried.

First Thoughts on Long War 2

Moar choices!

Back in the days of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a group of enthusiastic fans produced 'Long War', a massive full mod which extended and expanded the gameplay with more soldier classes, tech tiers and missions. When it came to making XCOM 2, instead of slapping these upstarts with a cease and desist order, Firaxis Games gave Long War Studios (now Pavonis Interactive) early access to the project so that they could begin work on 'Long War 2', a similarly epic reworking of the sequel. The mod was released yesterday via Steam Workshop, and it resoundingly kicked my arse.

Make no mistake, Long War 2 is not just about making XCOM 2 last longer, it makes it tough. Entry level missions have Sectoids and armoured drones with stun guns, and new ADVENT troops like the Engineer with her grenade launcher and the Sentry with her mad Overwatch skillz, and they all dodge like absolute bastards. Your hit rates are for shit and there's every chance that even a successful shot will be dodged for a minor graze. Oh, and there are a lot of them on each level, with a tendency to converge on you as soon as you go loud.

Now, it's not all doom and gloom. First, you begin the game with a few extra bits and bobs, in particular three grenade/utility slots, nanoweave vests - which provide 'protection' instead of extra health, which means that the first few damage levels don't count as wounds - and sweet, sweet flashbang grenades. Within the first mission I had come to love these little beauties, so much so that I felt betrayed the first time an ADVENT Engineer lobbed one back at me. On the other hand, regular frag grenades are much less reliable.

In addition, you begin with the ability to ship eight soldiers on the Skyranger, so you can send a hell of a lot of hurt out in a single package; the flipside is that you no longer land in the combat zone. The Skyranger drops off your squad and they infiltrate the AO, a process which takes several days, and longer the more people you send and the more heavily tooled up they are. Missions are time limited, and if you don't have time to fully infiltrate the already bastard hard opposition is increased. At low infiltration levels, the mission launch screen advises that the opposition is 'impregnable.' So, while you can send eight heavily armed bastards, unless you have plenty of time available, it may be better to send a leaner squad to face a reduced defence. As an additional factor, emergency extraction is not instant; it takes time for the Skyranger to fly in. Best not to hold out to the bitter end.

All in all, Long War 2 is a tougher, grittier version of XCOM 2, with more choices to make and much more of a feeling that you are scrabbling against the real power in the world. There's a whole extra level to the Strategic game as well, with Resistance Havens to manage and a sector control game I haven't even touched on yet on account of getting my arse kicked in the missions the whole time. Now, partly this is because I screwed up. The game assigns all of your squaddies from the first mission to a single squad - a pre-assigned group of soldiers that can be quickly selected in the load-out screen - and I didn't mix them up, so I have one unwieldy group of shitkickers and a bunch of frail and unsupported rookies instead of salting the veterans across the squads to support the newbies in leveling up. And partly it's because the game is brutal.

X-COM 2 - Thoughts on completion

This is the Avatar, the pinnacle of the Alien masterplan. It has silly hair.

So, I have now finished my first play-through of X-COM 2.

The pacing of the game is interesting. Unlike its predecessor, nothing comes for nothing. whereas in the glory days of X-COM there were new scientists and engineers shipping in every month, here they have to be hired. Individually. And they cost, so there's a trade off between investing for the future and buying in enhancements for the field troops. This means that in the early part of the game, your progress is slow. Your engineers are individually assigned to clear rooms and create or - once you have enough of them to spare one or two from clearance and construction duty - enhance the rooms in your ant farm. Scientists are less exciting, and although individually named they basically just reduce your research times.

In addition, your monthly income is in the form of a supply drop, which has to be collected by the Avenger, and while you're doing that, you can't do anything else. The singularity of the Avenger quickly becomes a source of tension, if not frustration, as scan events crop up and you have to choose between resource seeking, expanding your network of resistance contacts and just staying at home to lick your wounds (until you get the Advanced Warfare Centre, which accelerates healing, built, expect to spend a fair amount of time at Resistance HQ with the 'quicker healing times' bonus activated.)

As you go through the game, Advent works on a series of black projects designed to make your life more difficult. Some of these just advance the Avatar project which serves as the endgame clock, but others give the enemy bonuses for a month, or send a flying saucer to come and shoot you down. In the latter case, this can result in the game's version of Enemy Within's base defence map, in which you have to defend the Avenger from an infinite supply of bads while also making an end run to take out an EMP spike. You can - indeed, you must - return the favour by attacking Avatar blacksites to reduce the Avatar counter, usually by planting a bomb, although a few special mission have you retrieving information.

The Psi-Operative wields the power of purple.

One of my favourite things about the game's build system is Squad Upgrades. Once you finish researching a new class of weapons, you only need to build the squad upgrade and everyone gets the new hardware, which means no more juggling your one plasma sniper back and forth between injured snipers and accidentally sending your top soldier onto the deck of an alien battleship with a flak jacket and a 30.06 bolt-action. Basic weapons and standard armour is upgraded this way, although you can also build individual suits of heavy armour - the EXO and WAR suits - in the Proving Grounds. You can also make armour out of the three alien rulers, which is... a little bit serial killer, if I'm honest.

Once you've done the appropriate research and construction, you can start training an additional class of soldier, the Psi-Operative. Unlike in X-COM these are not regular soldiers with extra abilities. They train from Rookie in the psi lab and gain no XP or promotions in the field, and their suite of abilities can be customised as they train. Of course, you're going to want to get Mind Control, because it's awesome, not least because in this game it lasts all level.

The Andromedon; hard as nails and twice as useful.

There's a new alien called the Andromedon, which is basically a toxic beastie in an armoured battle suit. If one gets killed the shell cracks and it staggers about leaking toxic atmosphere for a bit. Mind Control one of those bad boys and you've got a friend of life, or at least for the level. Sadly you can't bring it home with you, however much I wanted to love him and hug him and call him George. In my head canon I was whammying the same Andromedon every mission; I called him Drommie and he was my bud. You know, in a creepy, mind controlling, Purple Man kind of way.

Eventually I got to the final mission and took my best dudes into the Advent core while whipping up worldwide rebellion by exposing Advent's programme of genetic harvesting and alteration. Tragically I lost two of my oldest and dearest shitkickers during the attack - and I think we must have left the damn Hunter's Axe behind as well, which is a bit of a wrench - but the Avatars were slain and thus the forces of goodness and niceness - or at least the closest approximation you can get while literally wearing the skull of the fallen as a hat - prevailed, after many hours of satisfying game play.

First Thoughts on X-COM 2

In the intervening twenty years, the Sectoids got ripped.

Somewhat behind the rest of the world, I'f started playing X-COM 2. Here are my early thoughts. As a note, I picked up a copy with plenty of DLC, including 'Shen's Final Gift', in which you discover a robot soldier left for you by Dr Shen, and 'Alien Hunters', in which you find some Van Helsing type weapons in a downed Skyranger and a major headache left for you by Dr Vahlen.

You open in a world governed by ADVENT, an alien backed government that decries X-COM as terrorists. Taking initial control of the traditional tutorial sacrifices, you bring your team along with Central Officer Bradford, to extract the Commander - who, in a metafictional headfuck, is of course you - from an ADVENT facility where - to continue the headfuckery - you have spent decades unwittingly aiding the aliens by playing through endless variations of the invasion in a simulation in your mind, which is implied to have been the original X-COM reboot.

Make no mistake; officer pullover will fuck you up.

This game is based around the Avenger, a captured alien transport fixed up by the now-vanished Dr Shen and his badass daughter Lily. It has its own engineering section and labs - run by former ADVENT collaborator Dr Tygan - a geoscape, and an 'ant farm' where you can build your facilities after clearing out the junk.

Much of the game is the same as it ever was, but with the addition of an overworld map which you need to navigate by contacting resistance cells, scanning locations and slowly expanding your influence. Some of your missions come from the resistance, others from scanning intel points, and some are linked to the central goal of preventing a project called Avatar reaching fruition by attacking alien facilities. The main things to get to grips with in the overworld are that funding is hella slow, scientists and engineers are rarer than hen's teeth, and you will miss out on things because there simply isn't time to do everything. Every time you set down to scan for supplies, there's a good chance one of your resistance bases will get raided, requiring you to mount a rescue mission (the game's equivalent of the old terror missions,) in which you have to tag out as many civilians as possible, at least one of whom is a shapeshifting ooze-ogre called a Faceless.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The mission control system is reassuringly familiar, as you order your troops across an isometric landscape, juggling unit cohesion with sightlines, cover and the need to shoot as many things as much as possible, because the aliens are much, much tougher this time out. Basic Sectoids are nails hard and chuck around mind control from mission 1. The Thin Men are replaced by the Viper, a vaguely feminine snake with arms, guns and an attitude problem. Even the grunts - adapted human troopers - have wicked pulse rifles and are led by tough officers with a fierce scarf game.  Later on you start running into armoured opponents and shit gets real.

The other big difference is that you start most missions Concealed, until you get spotted or take a shot, which means that you can sneak up and ambush the first set of aliens by setting up lots of Overwatch before you spook them, and there is little in gaming more satisfying than pulling off a perfect opening ambush. There are also plenty of minor changes to the system: In particular, reloading no longer ends your turn, so if you run dry in a protracted fight you can spend your next turn by reloading and then firing. You can also call in an evac if the mission goes south, and carry your fallen comrades home for life-saving treatment or to nick their stuff. Weapons are upgraded at a squad level (unlock the shard gun and all your shotguns become shard guns) but can individually be fitted with modular upgrades like stocks, sights and hair-triggers captured from dead enemies to give a nice, piecemeal feeling to the loadout.

"We'll include all the old alien types, but unrecognisable and really nasty."

There is a slight change to the class system: Rangers replace the old Assault class, largely by bringing a knife to the gunfight, although when I say knife I mean machete and when I say gunfight I mean it would have been a gunfight if the other guy had a face left. Heavies are now Grenadiers, swapping their rockets for a grenade launcher. Snipers are Sharpshooters, and Supports are replaced by the Specialist, who has a hovering drone.  Progression follows the same two-stream system, with mixing and matching perfectly possible, but the themes are much stronger. Grenadiers essentially get machine gun or grenade upgrades, Sharpshooters rifle or pistol, Rangers stealth or stabbing, and Specialists medical or 'combat hacker', which provides a suite of offensive and technical abilities. All troops are also super-customisable, although I'm not even touching that yet.

"You're very tall."

More variety is provided by the DLC. 'Shen's Final Gift' is a marathon slog through a robot factory filled with killer robots, controlled by an AI named Julian. Survive the bots and the turrets and the poison gas and you get to fight Julian on the roof, in control of a particularly vicious Sectopod, for control of Spark-001, a robot battle chassis. I called him 'Reus' for reasons which will likely elude those not au fait with the requirements of criminal culpability and/or Latin, and also HALO. It's a slog, and Sectopod Julian is a bugger, especially if you go at it in the early game (which I did.) On the plus side, your Specialist for the mission is Lily Shen, who is a tricked out Combat Hacker (and instant fail condition if she gets killed.) She is also, it turns out, Dr Shen's Final Gift, but in gameplay terms we get to keep the Spark.

VAHLEN!!!

And at least Shen left us something useful (as well as a crazy AI.) 'Alien Hunters' give you a set of special weapons - the Bolt Caster, a powerful but single shot rifle; the Shadowkeeper, a kick ass pistol which can drop you back into Concealment once per mission; and the Hunter's Axe, an awesome melee weapon with a second axe for throwing - and another new mission, this time to track down traces of Dr Vahlen, who turns out to have left you... a trio of giant 'ruler' monsters with dozens of hitpoints each, and armour, and they not only get a move during the alien turn, but after every one of your actions. And then if you ding them up a bit they run away, and randomly appear in another mission. If you're really lucky, you'll meet the Berserker Queen in a time-critical mission which then becomes impossible because you spent four turns trying not to get stepped on. On the plus side, in the initial mission you get to take Bradford along, although that does have the downside that, as a max-level Ranger with a custome assault rifle, he tends to hog between most of and all of the kills.

The Codex is basically Norton Antivirus with an actual gun.

X-COM 2  takes the excellence of X-COM: Enemy Unknown and runs with it, providing tougher challenges and an entirely new level of conflict to consider in the form of the overworld map, as well as sexier graphics and an almost entirely absent tendency for troops to appear to be shooting in entirely the wrong direction in the cut scenes. The limited resources enhance the resistance feel of the game, and it is very possible for an otherwise perfect mission - of which I have so far had one - to go aggressively south with the addition of a roving ruler or unexpected Codex (a flickering extra-dimensional projection of the ADVENT internet.) You are likely to spend a lot of time shuffling between troops with 60% of your force in the infirmary at any one time, especially while you're still using kevlar armour. Moreover, wounded soldiers can become Shaken, rendering them prone to panic and mind-control until they come through a mission effective and unscathed. Thus you have equal and opposite incentives to bench shaken troops or to bring them with.

There's only one real problem with the game, and that is that it kind of spoils its predecessor. I've played a lot of X-COM over the last couple of years, but I'm not sure I'll go back to it now that it's just a simulation I played in my head while I was in a tank, so that the aliens could learn to beat my peeps in battle. It's like being... the anti-Ender, which is depressing, if probably free of ultra-right bias at least.