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XCOM 2 >  Workshop > DerBK's Workshop > A Better ADVENT: War of the Chosen > Discussions
A Better ADVENT: War of the Chosen
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 This topic has been pinned, so it's probably important
Dabor 23 Sep, 2017 @ 5:30am
Legend + Beta Strike + ABA : What it's like
Two things to get right off the bat. First off, there is another post from Olin011 commenting on ABA in general, and I agree with pretty much everything there, at least in broad strokes. Second off, I'm mainly writing this because DerBK himself said that he thought the Primes would make late-game Beta Strike too difficult and that it wasn't to be taken as a challenge - but I took it as one anyway.

I should also say that I don't play on Ironman. The vast majority of my reloads are either because I totally forgot something (SITREP, dark event, etc) due to talking to a friend or watching a video on the side as I play - or because I'm intentionally testing out interactions in a way that wouldn't be safe to do otherwise. The only "actual" reloads I make have to do with things I would mod out otherwise and just haven't found a WotC mod for yet (like a panicked soldier running forwards and hunkering - in a position where EVERY SINGLE enemy can flank them).

And with that established, let's begin. I haven't quite finished my campaign yet, but I'm far enough along that I can comfortably judge every phase of the game. This is mostly meant to explain the appeal of playing under those conditions to people who might question it - a friend of mine said it didn't sound interesting to him, and after watching me do a mission or two, loved the idea and immediately rushed to download the game himself. The combination of all of those conditions pretty radically changes the game - some OP things become cute gimmicks, and some cute gimmicks become OP. If you enjoy often having missions where enemies barely get a shot off at you, then Legend + BS + ABA definitely isn't for you - but having extended firefights with multiple pods at a time where I can have soldiers lose large chunks of HP and yet not have much risk of surprise deaths is pretty great.

What gets buffed
  • Crowd control in general becomes great. Stasis, the Skirmisher Tier 2 Ripjack, Frost Bombs, etc. When you can't reliably kill all enemies, being able to reliably put a 50 HP guy to sleep for a turn is a big deal. This also applies to your enemies. Stasis on one of your soldiers can markedly slow down your ability to stop enemies from constantly raining attacks on you, and an enemy using Holy Warrior, Mind Control or Shadowbound is terrifying when they're at full HP - grinding through a 30+ HP Spectre on your first meeting requires good conditions and some good focus fire, and early game 20 HP sectoids have to get quickly exposed via grenades and weakened lest they get mind control off at full life.
  • Damage Mitigation and healing abilities. A Templar having a 50% chance to reflect attacks doesn't sound too great if he's got 16 HP and enemies deal 6-11 damage or such. An unlucky crit or two and he's dead? Nah. On average the reflection can do well, but it's not going to take too many missions until he gets an unlucky streak. When your Templar has 30+ HP though? Even if you have to let multiple scary enemies take shots at him, he's pretty much never going to go down that turn, and you're very likely to see deflection pay dividends in the long run. On the same note, your guys take damage much more often, while taking lethal damage a lot less often - so medkits can and will be used very well. On the same note, enemy armour is a big deal and you want to have plentiful and reusable armour bypassing methods. When even the basic MEC is 24hp 2armour, you can't hope to blindside it with enough raw damage to make the armour irrelevant early on. You really need to shred it.
  • Cooldowns in general. Your average mission will take more turns, so cooldown-based abilities have more chances to shine, while charge-based abilities have a proportionately smaller impact. This doesn't make the game better or worse - just different, but if you've already played the usual for a long time, you find the change of priorities interesting.
  • REPEATERS! These things are broken as hell and make the game a lot easier if you keep them. I really recommend https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1130014360 to put them in a more reasonable price.

What gets nerfed
  • Obviously, the counterparts to the above buffs. Glass cannons have a harder time avoiding retribution, charge-based abilities can't make as big of a difference, and mods that aren't the vanilla repeater feel inferior and decide to go get drunk instead of working through their issues and have their relationships fall apart... or something like that.
  • Kill-dependent abilities. There are no less kills to go around on a per-mission basis, but there are definitely less kills per turn. Abilities that depend on getting kills (Implacable/Untouchable, Death from Above, Rend, Reaper, Silent Killer) become much more specialized and require more setup - nothing but the biggest crit on the squishiest enemy will let you kill with a single normal attack. These abilities are still powerful and useful, just not quite as consistently accessible as normally.
  • One-hit blocking abilities. Untouchable and Parry are still very useful, but there's usually going to be more than one enemy left alive able to attack, so they just help mitigate damage, and are much less often capable of entirely nullifying retaliation.

I'm sure a lot of this isn't a surprise, but it helps illustrate the finer points that work together. Before getting into the specifics of how this hits into ABA, you need to know what the normal flow is like. There's a lot of multi-turn fights with multiple pods, picking off high priority targets while minimizing the risk from the other enemies. Sometimes you can't stop a Heavy Lancer from getting a hit in on you - but it's not often going to kill someone and you get to focus him down next turn. The fact that sometimes you have to let an enemy rush you and get an easy attack in is a lot of what changes about the challenge, and a lot of where ABA really starts making a difference. Many enemies in ABA are markedly more threatening if allowed to attack, and thus deciding when you have to let them get an attack off becomes more complicated and interesting.

A lot of the AI improvements in ABA fit surprisingly well and go both ways. Just as much as certain enemies will shamelessly rush forward to taking flanking shots, so will the player - if you know your ranger can take a crit or two, you'll often rush them into a vulnerable position. The fact that it feels like the enemy know it's beta strike, and are taking full advantage of that fact, is one of the things that makes it fun.

The Primes are interesting. To some degree, it almost feels like they're not as bad on beta strike. When you usually don't expect to get shot at, but the primes get to shoot you in the middle of your turn, it's a big deal. But when you're already expecting to get shot and have armour and medkits aplenty, the primes getting more shots off on you doesn't feel too radical. Some of the primes can be stunned by Ripjack, others just get worn down by 15-20 damage Ranger crits pretty quick. Or you can just ignore them and try to ensure their normal action gets wasted on a Parry/Untouchable. And of course, you'll be picking up Rupture as a bonus ability on anyone who can get it.

The Chosen aren't too different. You can probably already imagine what changes about them (no easy insta-kills just by exploiting their weakness unless you've got multiple guys ready to exploit them with multiple actions via bonds), and the main impact ABA has is that Chosen that summon reinforcements can be markedly more threatening - a Chosen who makes an anti-riot mech with double HP has a really sturdy defensive tool all of a sudden. Overall though, dragged out Chosen fights are part of what I find fun - the Chosen would take a couple of turns to focus down just a single one of your soldiers (if you make it that easy for them) but you take a while to wear them down, so there's a lot more back-and-forth and risk management. Just having everyone dogpile the chosen isn't an option unless you've got multiple high quality rangers in on it. Since Alien Rulers wait at facilities rather than surprising you, you can be way more ready for them, so I think their difficulty ends up decent either way.

All in all, it adds up to a lot more of a feeling of messy tactical combat - a lot of back-and-forth skirmishing, retreating wounded soldiers as others rush in the open to draw enemy attention, trying to close down a flank with debuffs while pushing up the other... the feeling of having an actual fight with aliens, rather than just looking to slaughter them the first turn you meet them 9 times out of 10. You get to see abilities like Bladestorm, Return Fire, or Deflect in action as shots are constantly exchanged, and a new enemy pod stumbling in to an existing firefight is a moment of "well, things just got interesting" rather than "welp, guess there's a risk of my guys randomly dying to a stray crit now." I don't think I've ever been too close to "suddenly" losing a soldier. If I do, it's because my team got worn down in an extended series of firefights, not killed out of nowhere. It gets rid of one of the more frustrating aspects of the game - the massive volatility of individual rolls - and replaces it with a lot of multi-turn planning that's satisfying and rewarding.

That's everything I've immediately got in mind. I would say the early mid-game is the hardest part of the game - when you've got ONE of mag weapons/predator armour but not the other and have glaring weaknesses for enemies to go after. Once you start getting enough ability points going around to tailor soldiers around fighting superheavy enemies (chosen, primes, sectopods/gatekeepers, rulers) with rangers getting massive crits and heavies causing massive shredding, the game definitely gets a lot smoother. ABA keeps the late game interesting rather than making it get too easy, but it's the mid-game where the new enemies are at the most interesting and brutal, where you just can't really plan for all of them (especially if you don't have a Shadow Chamber going to plan out your ammo and vest types).

I'd be happy to answer any questions about what the experience is like on specific mission types or against specific enemies, but I was just hoping to give a comprehensive overview on how it plays, since thus far DerBK's answer to the beta strike question has just been "it's not balanced around that and will probably be too hard." At least in my opinion, the difficulty is a great and challenging place, and while it's not as silky-smooth polished as the base game, it's a pleasantly different experience that lets you view most of the abilities and classes in a new light.

TL;DR Beta Strike with ABA is fun and interesting, play it if you wanna.
Last edited by Dabor; 23 Sep, 2017 @ 5:44am
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Showing 1-15 of 17 comments
Dabor 23 Sep, 2017 @ 12:00pm 
Also, psy soldiers are obviously gods late-game, being cooldown-focused. A lot of what they do (especially mind control) doesn't care about HP, so they're just better. Using Domination on a 62 HP 2 Armour Archon Prime that can use Blazing Pinions every turn, and it's got a 100% chance with the Alien Amp since he only has 50 Will?
#1
DerBK  [developer] 24 Sep, 2017 @ 3:31am 
This is really interesting. I can't really comment much further on it, because i didn't try it myself. But when asked about it, i'll be happy to point people towards this thread from now on.

Good writeup, thanks.
#2
Dabor 24 Sep, 2017 @ 3:00pm 
Just met my first Sectopod prime (at the forge) and killed it in two moves. I shot it with a Rupture from a Grenadier with AP ammo - it did a 17 damage crit, shredded 3 armour, (bringing it to 77 HP and 2 armour) and then got shot back from the sectopod for 2 shredding and 8 damage (bringing her from 30 to 22).

Then I had my Reaper do a Bluescreen Rounds Banish for 6x15 damage and it died.

The Shadow Chamber letting you prepare for primes (you'll also see the gatekeeper and such coming on story missions) is actually an important element in their difficulty, I think. Being able to bring a frost grenade or stun ripjack that'll disable them (for sectoid/berserker/muton primes), Psy troopers to control or easily debuff them (archon prime with his low will), kill-based soldier that can easily clean up summons (death from above + darklance sniper for chryssalid queen, or death from above of any other class) or, for a super mech enemy like sectopod/gatekeeper, simply bring a Bluescreen Banish/Chainshot/Fanfire to follow up your rupture.

And I think that's another positive thing about the Primes. They make you want to use the Shadow Chamber later on to plan out your loadouts. In vanilla, other than bringing bluescreens for gatekeepers/sectopods, it was never that big of a deal. But when the right crowd control ability can nullify a 60+ HP super-enemy, it gives you a reason to build varied and tailored squads depending on the enemy you'll see.

On that note though, I'm doing ABC+ right now with the base 6-man squad, because you get so powerful late-game in beta strike that I need the extra enemies just to feel even a bit challenged. But the super-late game has always had that issue, once you're able to always have colonels with maxed weapons and near-maxed psy troopers. Loads of new features mean you're even more absurdly strong in the very end-game (ability points, stats from covert ops, chosen weapons, breakthroughs, faction orders, some of the new continent bonuses...) mean that without the non-beta strike risk of losing soldiers to freak critting accidents, it's pretty damn hard to get blindsided by the enemy.
#3
DerBK  [developer] 24 Sep, 2017 @ 9:12pm 
Godamnit, now i want to play with Beta Strike, too -.-
#4
Dabor 25 Sep, 2017 @ 2:36pm 
That's the idea!

One thing I'll mention as a mod I enjoy a lot on beta strike is bringing up cover bonuses to 30/45. I think it helps smooth out the earlier difficulty a bit, at the point where most enemies (and most of your guys) can't meaningfully bypass cover or its defensive bonuses, and gives you much simpler positioning-based methods to mitigate retribution. At a point where even a firefight against a single enemy pod can last a couple of turns.

The fact that this makes anti-cover tools more important on both sides is compensated for by the fact that the vast majority of these are charge-based, and thus naturally less powerful on beta strike. Earlier on, being able to strike multiple enemies out of cover at the same time isn't likely to mean you can actually kill them all.
#5
Dabor 25 Sep, 2017 @ 9:14pm 
Doing the final mission, just had the buggiest interactions on earth with an Archon Prime.

First try: I set up everyone in overwatch and use Insanity on it that'll rupture it. The idea is that if it gets mind controlled or panicked, yay, and if it doesn't, then everyone overwatching it while it's ruptured will kill it. Insanity attacks it and mind controls it, inhuman reflexes activate... and it flies over my team and uses blazing minions, and yet none of them shoot it because it's technically under my control while doing so. ♥♥♥♥ that, quickload.

Second try: I provoke it normally to fly into my overwatch. It flies in, getting hit by a load of shooting and a blade storm. It's dead before it can get into the position it was going to pinions in. "Inhuman reflexes" appears over its dead body. Then a bunch of blazing pinion rockets instantly hit my squad... and then it moves to the enemy turn.

I have no idea what happened there.
#6
DerBK  [developer] 25 Sep, 2017 @ 9:20pm 
The first one makes some sort of twisted sense, how the different mechanics stack up to create something... uuuh... "unique".

The second one is just plain weird. Sounds to me like the visualisation was wrong here and showed you what happened in the wrong order (something that happens quite often in WotC). Presumably, you landed your Bladestorm in respnse to the Pinions and not the other way round.

You will be happy to hear that i planned on making Archon Prime unable to Pinions on reaction anyways, so that's just one more huge reason to do that.
#7
Dabor 25 Sep, 2017 @ 10:57pm 
Makes sense to do, since it makes it surprisingly more threatening than a lot of other primes due to that possibility. Pinions is radically scarier if it happens later into a turn, and isn't cancelled by enemy death. While especially on beta strike the damage from it isn't insane, it adds up easily and strips loads of useful cover (not to mention destroying most high ground the player might sit on.)

Generally though, Prime Reactions have a lot of quirky situations happen that are just kind of no-win. If you let them react a certain way, it leads to a bit of frustration for the player (for the same reason that, say, a panicked enemy or Lost triggering a codex to clone would be), but if you don't, it gives players a way to trivialize them to some degree. Rushing a Prime with Bladestorm Katana/Rend is really powerful on beta strike, so I can only imagine that it's even better without it... the fact that the Prime at least reacts to damage from such counter-attack moves keeps it from being an easy way to bypass them. They're already quite vulnerable to mass overwatch, but the fact that that usually requires isolating them as the last enemy means it's not trivially easy to set up (requiring stasis or a frost bomb in the team to do easily from a distance, and obviously delaying you by a turn or two if you're on a timed mission).

But then you get situations like "prime shoots your templar, he reflects it into the prime... so the prime shoots him again." Overall, though, I think they fill their purpose. If anything, I would probably ask if it's possible to give them some degree of resistance against the easy disables. The fact that you can stasis a Sectopod Prime frankly feels a bit cheap. Even isolated it can still definitely hurt your guys, but it's nevertheless pretty much always worth it to do, and has a 100% chance to work.

It's kind of like how it's easy to shut down reaction-teleports from a Planeswalker Chosen or (I think) Avatar by frost bombing them, to the degree that I always bring it along against such enemies so I can do the usual "dogpile them with crits" strategy. I'm not sure if it'd be possible to make Prime Reactions force freeze/stun timers to tick down, but I think it would make disabling them a more balanced option. It's still possible to freeze them and ignore them, but it wouldn't be as easy to disable them and then rush them down. Trying to hack-shutdown a Sectopod Prime comes with the possible downside of making its inevitable retribution even stronger, but freezing or stasising it is totally risk free.

And that said, I'm playing on Legend, where rushing psi soldiers isn't too practical - they'll be taking XP away from the other classes you need to level while usually providing pretty specific utility, just due to how long the training time per-ability is. I imagine on lower difficulties they could be used to make beta strike easier a lot earlier.

--------------------------------

You can probably ignore a lot of this rambling if you want to. Ultimately, the game feels absurdly easy now that I've finished my run - none of my guys got below half HP on the final mission, and half of them never even took a hit. I had a team of Templar, Psi and one of each base class, and ALL FOUR of my base class guys had rupture loaded, with Ruler armours and Chosen guns, so it'd be kind of expected, but even with ABC+ I was blown away by how easy things felt. I did have soldiers get to around 1/4th HP a few times in the end-game, but that's not saying much, and it usually involved me playing a bit aggressively because I just wanted to hurry missions up. At the same note, when I did the last Chosen Stronghold (Warlock) I killed him (130HP 5 Armour in 2 turns, then killing the 160 HP Sarcophagus in 1 turn with a Bluescreen Pistol Sniper and Bluescreen Skirmisher with gold bond partners on point, and then blitzed him again the following turn when he respawned with only 40ish HP.

But the end-game is really clouding my judgement here. The funnest parts of X-Com have always been BEFORE you have a team full of colonels with maxed out gear, and during those parts beta strike with ABA worked well, not to mention making the game take longer during those sections, with more chances to make interesting tactical decisions due to longer mission times.

I'm not sure what I plan to do for a follow-up run. I'd probably do larger squad + ABC from the start, just to enjoy some team interactions that I otherwise wouldn't have had a chance to see (and with ABA's AI, I'm assuming the larger scale on beta strike will generally make it harder. On average, more enemies will survive your ambushes, but your soldiers will have the same amount of HP and thus be somewhat more prone to getting focused.) But even then I fear that I would have a significantly easier time. I made many impractical decisions due to not understanding a lot of things, both about the new classes and how the old classes would interact with beta strike or some newer gear/possibilities, not to mention I had no idea what the new autopsies did, or which research I needed to do to get the weapon upgrades for the new classes. I would also probably drop the cover buff to 30/45. While I enjoy it, the more cutthroat nature of having cover on 20/30 means you need to hunker and limit line of sight more often, and it means enemies which follow a strategy of "run in the open and shoot your guys" aren't at a significant disadvantage compared to the intended difficulty if caught at long range.

Don't expect I'm saying too much useful stuff here, just throwing out what comes to mind. If there's anything you're curious about before getting into Legend/BS/ABA combo yourself, I can probably answer it. That said, I'd be interested to hear recommendations on things to make my next run (whenever that'll be) harder (or at least different). I definitely enjoyed beta strike and would stick to it, having already played the alpha strike style for like 500 hours (not counting XCOM:EU, XCOM:EW and LW1). Ultimately, the "it gets easy in the super late game" is a problem not just with XCOM2, but almost every turn-based tactics game I've ever played. Unless somebody wanted to make an entire 4th tier of enemies with unique bonus abilities (which is possible, but also more work for less gain compared to adding interesting and varied mid-game enemies) I don't know if that'd ever change - and even then, the late-game challenge would come out feeling very different from the core challenge of XCOM, which is more about "work with what you've got" than pitting a super-optimized team against super-optimized enemies.

But as I said, this is just the issues of the late-game staining my memory of a lot of it. ABA definitely performed well, perhaps especially in beta strike, where the enemy's willingness to be ruthlessly aggressive is a must in an environment where poking from a distance has a hard time breaking through your soldier's beefy HP pools - and since they're going to end up flanked at point-blank anyway, they may as well get into that position on their own terms, getting the first shot on your guys. I don't feel the primes fail to perform their duty - they are significantly threatening enemies that I always make sure to account for - but the fact that most of the mooks supporting them are painfully underwhelming by the late game means it's painfully easy to gear up to focus on the primes (especially if it's a matter of disabling them to focus them down next turn), knowing that the rest of their allies will be dealt with easily off-hand. The only time I felt mooks truly worked to support a prime well is Sectoid Mindbenders + Archon Prime. He's easily dealt with by exploiting his low will, and their ability to cleanse him of will-related debuffs makes them scarily efficient partners.

I'll probably stop my rambling there for the moment. Thanks a lot for making my run a more enjoyable one - I really do appreciate it.
#8
hfok 9 Oct, 2017 @ 10:27pm 
Just want to chip in my 2cents here, if you're not too good at the game (ie. can't clear legend), but also would like to play with beta strike + ABA & ABB & ABC(not +), get robojumper's squad select and set your starting squad to 5 (or 6). This will give you a smoother start while having a really engaging campaing too.
#9
76561198156306918 4 Nov, 2017 @ 9:16am 
Originally posted by DerBK:
The first one makes some sort of twisted sense, how the different mechanics stack up to create something... uuuh... "unique".

The second one is just plain weird. Sounds to me like the visualisation was wrong here and showed you what happened in the wrong order (something that happens quite often in WotC). Presumably, you landed your Bladestorm in respnse to the Pinions and not the other way round.

You will be happy to hear that i planned on making Archon Prime unable to Pinions on reaction anyways, so that's just one more huge reason to do that.
Andromedon Prime - Bad name. Mechtoid maybe?
#10
JvJ 25 Nov, 2017 @ 7:25am 
So ive been playing legend + beta strike with ABA and oh boy Sectiods are vicious, ran into two will taking on a Advent General, the most intense battle ive ever had in Xom 2 two guys got mind controlled so the remaining 2 running through constant overwatch fire and lasted around 9 truns. All 4 guys Alive but heavily wounded for the 1st since playing this game i actually feel like xcom is the resistance.
#11
JvJ 25 Nov, 2017 @ 9:56am 
Retallion missions are a real kick in the balls as pods take 3-4 turns to deal with oh and stun lancers are super scary now combined with sectiod soldiers, this is going to take a lot of reevaluation on my side.
#12
.O. 3 Dec, 2017 @ 7:21pm 
I'm curious about the retaliation mission, do civies still die in one hit with beta strike on? Or can you count on them to take on average 2 hits to die?
#13
DerBK  [developer] 3 Dec, 2017 @ 10:10pm 
Civvies still die in one hit.
#14
.O. 4 Dec, 2017 @ 1:13am 
thx, i've just started a beta strike campaign now. I think I might hold off on including ABA to the mix until I know how things change with beta strike :P
#15
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