I propose that this thread is deleted on grounds of excessive militarisation, speciesism and for promoting speciecide.
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They drew first blood
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Don’t worry
(spoiler alert)
We wont be killing ALL the aliens.
I, am The Commander.
Captured by the Elders at the end of the first alien wars, I have been in stasis for the past twenty years, unable to do anything but wait. Alone with my thoughts, thinking nothing but of plans for what I will do to these bastards once I get out of here, I bode my time.
A small group of my squad was able to escape when I was captured, led by central command Bradford.
Right, thats what I said, Central. Bradford is a chatty dude who will never ever ever shut up while trying to defeat the aliens, so I have enlisted a special mod to get him to quite the hell down while I’m thinking.
After twenty years, Xcom isn’t the only group who has banded together to take back our planet. Three other factions have emerged, including the Reapers, who Bradford is in touch with. Along with Xcom, this agent is on the case, to recover The Commander and get him back in the fight.
Advent, the aliens forces on the ground, are at heightened alert tonight.
But that wont stop Bradford and Outrider from breaking me out by any means necessary
.
Reapers exist in the shadows, specially designed for maximum stealth.
Outrider proceeds to the interior of the building.
There, Advent holds two scientists hostage, asking them to do… something.
The captain takes one of the scientists and leaves the room, leaving one advent soldier.
A noise is heard behind him.
Outrider has seen this kind of thing before, and it sickens her. Bradford interrupts before she can make a mistake.
Instead of a swift death for the “I was just doing my job” guy, a sharp blow to the side of his head knocks him out.
Outrider approaches the tube the scientists were working on. The stories were true.
The time has come.
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Rusian, ahem!, ALIEN propaganda plays nationwide on the eve of Unification day. The day the aliens claimed victory over the planet and the elders took what they claim to be their rightful place. They denounce our attempts as acts of terror.
“The Speaker” approaches the podium.
Perfect, now is the time to strike.
Damn it, Bradford, I just said that.
Advent scans the streets, looking for anything suspicious or our of the ordinary. Somehow, they miss the most wanted criminal out there, who is freely roaming around the crowd.
Its a good thing they stopped that lady. She seemed super dangerous. I’m sure the woman in the ballcap holding her hand up to her ear and whispering to herself poses no threat.
Operation Gatecrasher is a go.
I sincerely doubt you have to actually put your hand to your ear to make that work, guys. You’re just gonna call attention to yourselves.
See, now you’ve done it.
Ahhh, I see now. A distraction.
That’s why you’re my guy, Bradford.
So, what happens now?
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
With that, its time to send in the UP squad. Gatecrasher is a go.
Lets see who we got.
Smrk, Beetlejuice Wick, Skydiver, and a mystery man in a hood.
Everyone, on the ground. Lets kick some alien ass.
We start each conflict concealed from the aliens unless notified otherwise. This allows us a bit of stealth room to obtain our objectives. In this case, plant the X4 explosives at the base of the statue and blow it to hell.
We pick up with that, next time.
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Some cleanup here. The majority of the cinematics happen early game, so the posts shouldn’t be quite as long or as photo heavy going forward. That said, I have reduced the size by 50% of each photo. You can expand each to their larger size by clicking on them. Most containe some kind of subtitles, so you may want to to read what is going on.
What kind of health insurance do we have?
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I guess thats going to depend on which country we start with. Everyone keep fingers crossed for No USA!
Nevermind
Whos died
The entire run actually. Some of the mods I added have induced game breaking bugs, so I’m restarting three missions in.
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So, I’ve had this game on ps4 for a while but never played it. I’m starting up a campaign and god damn is this game buggy. Feels like in addition to weirdly long load times and frame rate drops I also lose things like the cover indicators and whatnot randomly.
Nonetheless I’m enjoying it
It is a slightly buggy game
@CanadaMatt3004 is it too late to get a Jiggy character? I’m like a pretty typical Jewish looking guy with black hair, blue eyes, and glasses.
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Its not! I am actually restarting this weekend after doing some testing and removing some gamebreaking mods.
So, I’m glad you bumped this. I was probably going to bump it tomorrow, and Ill get a jiggy character.
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After a few days of waiting, the squad finally touches down for Gatecrasher.
Recently acquired Jiggy joins Trolly and two mystery men in hoods for some alien slaying.
As we touch down, we realize we are starting with some great position in high ground, and discover the identity of our two mystery squaddies, LouisCypher and RiskyFlush.
Our objective is ahead. Destroy the alien monument and send a message to the aliens, but more importantly, to the people, that revolution is afoot.
Ill go over some quick basics for those who have never played. This is a turn-based strategy game, meaning two teams (us and the aliens) each take their turn in their own time, and then freeze while the other team takes their turn. Each of your players gets two action points per turn to do as they wish. Each action takes up an action point. Things like moving, shooting, throwing a grenade, using an item, etc. all take one action point. Moving into a blue square takes one action point. Moving into a yellow square (dashing) takes two action points. Using our weapon on the first turn generally takes two action points. Our goal in most missions is simple, kill the aliens on the map and complete some kind of objective. In Xcom 2, things are changed slightly from the original in that there is normally a turn limit that the object must be completed in, which encourages you to move towards the objective quickly. Gatecrashed has no such time limit, so we will take our time a bit in the opening fight.
There are two types of cover in Xcom 2; half cover, and full cover. Represented below by the half shield and full shield icon. Full cover grants much better protection against alien attacks, provided you don’t get flanked.
Offensive and defense bonuses are granted for things such as high ground, flanking, shooting from cover, etc. Flanking is the name of the game. If you are able to maneuver your squad in such a way that you can move around an alien’s cover and still have action points left over to shoot, you will flank them and be able to ignore a majority of their cover.
With that said, we move LouisCypher to the edge of the building for a better look, and discover our first alien pod.
This is Advent, the Stormtroopers, puddies, footclan, etc. of the Xcom universe. We don’t know entirely what they are, only that they have generally human movement and characteristics, and follow the aliens orders. This pod has two troopers and an officer, a much more advanced advent troop that can provide bonuses to his compadres and has better offensive and defensive stats. In Xcom 2, we almost always start in concealment, meaning the aliens do not know we are here until we reveal ourselves, either by moving into their field of vision or initiating an opening salvo. That being said, we can comfortably move everyone else to the edge of the building for a better look.
As always, we can count on Bradford in the upper right to summarize what I just said in two sentences.
Comfortably hidden behind the walls, we move into Overwatch, a single action point action that ends a turn and allows us to fire on the enemies turn if they move into our field of vision and discover us.
The aliens move closer, and we can see a few more details about the battlefield. The red marks on the ground signify that if we move into them, we will be spotted by advent and they will break for cover. I have a mod installed that introduces the Yellow triangle as well which indicates whether we will be seen or break concealment, even if an enemy pod is not on screen.
The target preview icons show which aliens can be seen when our cursor is in any position and what type of shot we would have. Red represents a shot at an alien behind cover, and yellow represents a flank shot.
With the aliens nearby, and wanting to do the most damage possible, we send Trolly off the roof to ambush Advent with a Frag grenade, which has the possibility to roll a 3 or 4 damage on each enemy in range of the grenade.
The grenade hits all three enemies, but alas, not a 4 to be seen, and all three enemies book it for cover.
Risky surveys the situation to figure out his best option. The officer broke towards Trolly and is super dangerous, so its important to kill him this round at all costs. The grunts are less dangerous and take a backseat in our decision making here.
Neither shot is particularly great, but we have a secret weapon up our sleeve. We start each game with one member of one of the other three factions who are working with us. In this case, Louiscypher is a Skirmisher. Former Advent who have broken away from the aliens mindcontrol and are fighting back. He has a special grappling hook on his arm that has a chance to pull an enemy to him and deliver a 4 hp shot with his hook. Conveniently, just the amount of HP the officer has left.
And wouldn’t you know, he was carrying around some sweet loot too.
Ill explain that later. With the officer dead, we can breathe a bit easier, and we send Risky down to flank one of the troopers (note the yellow head in the target preview icon below)
He lines up and shoots.
Bullseye!
Since Louiscypher only used an item on his first turn, he has another turn and decides to take a shot against the remaining trooper.
Bam! A very impressive 46% hit. Pod 1 is down. We know there is at least one other pod guarding the objective though, so caution is still encouraged. We move everyone into position and overwatch, and here comes the cavalry.
They are positioned quite well, on the right side of the map, and towards the back with no clear option to flank any of them.
Well, no CLEAR option. Did I mention that Louiscypher can use his hook to grapple onto buildings in the distance? I didn’t?
Oh boy, you is soooooo flanked.
And a critical shot takes out the guy hiding next to the fountain.
Very nice, LC. Unfortunately, we still have two troopers to take care of and no clear path to do so.
Risky lives up to his name and takes a Risky shot that misses. Hopefully that doesn’t have dire consequences since he is closest to the action.
Trolly steps up to save the day.
A direct hit! But one short of the kill. Jiggy has a pretty terrible shot from this range, so he goes into overwatch to try to finish the guy off if he runs for it.
He does, but Jiggy’s reaction shot comes up short, and… hmmmm, thats a pretty good angle that guy has against Risky’s position.
Risky! Oh man, that one’s going to hurt. Losing 75% of your health isn’t a tickle.
The other trooper stays back behind the fountain in deep cover and takes a shot at Trolly who is in some deep cover of his own.
Luckily his aim is off, and he missed.
Risky, pissed about bleeding to death, decides to storm the gates and huck a grenade at the guy in his monument fortress.
Unfortunately, it’s just not Risky’s day, and he rolls a 3 to keep the scumbag in the back alive. With Trolly out of grenades and no other reasonable way to reach the guy in back, he goes after the guy to the right, pulling up right next to him with the super flank
And Cypher chucks one final grenade to finish off the pod.
Jiggy places the explosives, and Xcom heads to the Skyranger to get the hell out of there.
Before jumping into the Skyranger, the team takes a moment to reflect on a job well done and create some propaganda of their own.
Risky is super psyched about his near death experience. Each soldier is congratulated on a job well done and presented trophies and trading cards for their bravery.
MVP Trolly knows the best selfies are taken from the bottom up.
We head back to base, Risky collapses in a heap, and now we get the fun part, finding out what everyone’s special abilities are.
Jiggy is first, and will be our Ranger. Specialist in short range combat, his perk tree will include such cool skills as being able to avoid enemy overwatch, extra movement for turns, the ability to go into concealment even after the squad has been revealed, and oh yeah! A fucking shotgun and sword!
Next, We promote Risky, and not surprisingly he wants to stay as far away from the booming side of the alien’s guns and will be our Sniper. In addition to carrying a sniper rifle, he will also be well trained in the art of gunslinging with a pistol, and some cool perks to go along with that eventually, including the ability to fire a pistol at everyone on screen, no need to reload the pistol (this will be incredibly important later) and Kill Zone which is kind of like a super overwatch with the sniper rifle.
Luckily, I don’t tend to need Snipers super early in the game, so his injury isnt as big of a blow as it could be.
Not surprisingly, Trolly is our resident nerd, and will act as our Specialist. That means he gets a fun little robot to play with an is good at hacking. He will also most likely end up being our medic, which will come in handy down the line.
Oh did I tell you that Advent has robots too? Its true, and with Trolly on our side, we will probably be able to take control of some of them and have them shoot their masters in the face. Such fun!
Since LouisCypher already has cool powers, he doesn’t get assigned a class. He is a Skirmisher.
They Skirmish.
But we do get to choose from 3 new, pretty meh abilities.
I take the one which allows us to use an item without wasting a turn, so thats nice.
In our next post, I’ll show you around our new home, and we will get the answer to Trolly’s question about how good our health insurance is. I’m sure Risky is hoping for a Swedish home base. Fingers crossed!
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Hell yeah, I’m just tossing out grenades like it’s no one’s business and basically being a badass.