Some tips assuming you aren't playing Long War 2 (tip 1 is most important) :

1. Use a reaper or similar consealed unit to rush next to the EMP spike to get visual, this will allow ALL your snipers to fire at it from across the map without needing to move closer.

2. Mimic Beacons are your friend and they help tons in this mision specifically.

3. Make sure you make good use of Grenadiers or soldiers with Shredder to take care of armor as most enemies at this point have some and it cuts down your damage significally.

4. Its almost imposible to win if you choose to fight straight on except if fully prepared so dont walk too far from the avenger platform except if there is some good high ground next to it. I would suggest you form a line of defence near the avenger and slowly creep forward of backoff when needed but try to not activate too many pods.

5. Bluescreen rounds and haywire protocol really helps in this mission.

1. Use a reaper or similar consealed unit to rush next to the EMP spike to get visual, this will allow ALL your snipers to fire at it from across the map without needing to move closer.

and here we start right with a deathtrap 100000% wrong answer, because hey, its NOT granted you have clear los to the spike from your ship (heck i coud call myself lucky if its 5% of all this missions i have seen)

4. Its almost imposible to win if you choose to fight straight on except if fully prepared so dont walk too far from the avenger platform except if there is some good high ground next to it. I would suggest you form a line of defence near the avenger and slowly creep forward of backoff when needed but try to not activate too many pods.

i get the feeling you adviced the crutch hero for a reason in answer 1. because this answer is so not true, this mission is one of the easer ones even in legendary, and its meaned to advance with some units.
another missconceptions of your is the pods, they are the last problem you get here. as long you dont sprint blindly into them you are fine, you will normaly only activate one, two when things dont go so smoothly. and the important point: they come to you, and in a way that makes them easy targets:
as long no enemy stands in your boarding area most of the enemys will ignore attacking you to get into sayed area.

5. Bluescreen rounds and haywire protocol really helps in this mission.

or not, because bluescreen dont does much vs viper, lancer, muton, advent units.....
it depends at what point he triggers the mission.

For the TS:
you blow up the problem way to much, what seems to be becasue you tryed to tackle the mission from a wrong angle.
1. you say you have mostly wounded soldiers. so thats no problem of the mission, thats a problem of what you have done so far before. sounds like you cash in to much hits in missions and have to less soldiers for rotation to mitigate that. if we talk WotC you shoud have 3-4 complete teams for rotation (because you must compensate for wounded/killed and exhausted soldiers at least every third mission because sayed exhaustion)

2. you dont "charge all in" , you send a few soldiers to the spike, preferable classes that operate best at mid to close combat range. sniper and heavy stay at your ships entrace to kill all that wants to enter your area and maybe support the frontteam.

3. if you have "dozens" of enemys at the field you seem to be highly undergeared for the state of the gametime. you see one reinforcement pad after a few turns, slowly growing in numbers over the battles turns passed. and even in legendary it stops at max 3 per turn (and that is only when you get the ufo darkevent in lategame and cant avoid contact) . so it is absolute manageable to kill the enemys before they mass to "dozens" if you equipment and soldier skills are not years behind the gametime passed.

like i already mentationed above, one key is to exploit the fact the enemy will definatly move to your ship, and will even sacrifce attacks for more movement into that direction as long no enemy is in that square. so as long you eleminate every enemy moveing in you have a much easyer time. worst enemy in that scenario are lancers, for obvious reasons.

I had this mission trigger on my ironman run right around the time I got to magnetic weapons and predator armour. It went smoothly and we had no casualties. Here's what I found:

This mission is a test of two things, your target priority and area control. You're going to keep getting soldiers come out the avenger, so you'll never be down on firepower (even if they're injured.)

Make your first goal simple. Push up, establish your forward position. You'll want this to be a spot about halfway between your avenger and the mission target. Secure the area by clearing the enemies as usual, and hold it down. Your goal is extremely simple: If any enemies come in as reinforcements here, you need to wipe them out ASAP, preferably in one turn. Overwatch is your friend, as is making a net around the area you see the dropships come in.

The second is in actually dealing with the target. Send a strike team forward, with mobility and damage. Who actually goes is up to you; I know another comment mentioned reapers and phantom rangers, but you can deal with this just fine without any special tactics. Let this fire team be 3-4 members, or more if you're confident you can lock down the forward position without them.

This part just plays out like a normal mission. You push forward, deal with the enemies, destroy the disruptor. Enemy reinforcements start getting heavier now. Do everything you can to zoom your soldiers back to the avenger, holding your forward position until they reach or pass it. Slowly start folding your position away, but don't hesitate. Advent firepower will start to overtake yours.

I found this mission surprisingly easy to deal with. Just know what makes a target a priority; if they can deal damage to you that turn. Some enemies seem scary, but are really just like mimic beacons. Deal with damage sources quick and efficiently. Make sure you have more turn economy than your enemy. Don't get bogged down fighting the specialist aliens unless they are actively proving a threat. Good luck.

Originally posted by THE SHAMBLER:

Avenger defence isnt even a late game mision and its 100% possible, if you where unlucky and dont have a strong enough force it can be a game ender unfortunatelly.

Some tips assuming you aren't playing Long War 2 (tip 1 is most important) :

1. Use a reaper or similar consealed unit to rush next to the EMP spike to get visual, this will allow ALL your snipers to fire at it from across the map without needing to move closer.

2. Mimic Beacons are your friend and they help tons in this mision specifically.

3. Make sure you make good use of Grenadiers or soldiers with Shredder to take care of armor as most enemies at this point have some and it cuts down your damage significally.

4. Its almost imposible to win if you choose to fight straight on except if fully prepared so dont walk too far from the avenger platform except if there is some good high ground next to it. I would suggest you form a line of defence near the avenger and slowly creep forward of backoff when needed but try to not activate too many pods.

5. Bluescreen rounds and haywire protocol really helps in this mission.

Bluescreens are not unlocked yet. As you said this isn't a late game mission.
Mimic Beacons didn't seem to work half the time so I abandoned them on a previous run. One or two might shoot at it then the rest ignore it. In any case there are a lot of research lines so a player should NOT need a specific tech to not end the game, that's just bad game design.

Reaper is a DLC, why would you assume I have it?
Because the game is a bait and switch? That gets you invested then REQUIRES more money to be playable. "Oh THAT problem, well just solve with WOTC, other paid solutions, etc" Sounds a lot like the sleaze of P2W games. Get them invested then REQUIRE more money to progress.

Sorry but this just reminds me of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which sold people a 60 Euro AAA game, that REQUIRED a visit to the cash store for boosters to not have the crappiest grind of your life.

Yeah, sorry but for real, this is a crap game design if team wipe is expected when not following very precise decisions that had to ALREADY be made.

Originally posted by Stardustfire:

1. Use a reaper or similar consealed unit to rush next to the EMP spike to get visual, this will allow ALL your snipers to fire at it from across the map without needing to move closer.

and here we start right with a deathtrap 100000% wrong answer, because hey, its NOT granted you have clear los to the spike from your ship (heck i coud call myself lucky if its 5% of all this missions i have seen)

4. Its almost imposible to win if you choose to fight straight on except if fully prepared so dont walk too far from the avenger platform except if there is some good high ground next to it. I would suggest you form a line of defence near the avenger and slowly creep forward of backoff when needed but try to not activate too many pods.

i get the feeling you adviced the crutch hero for a reason in answer 1. because this answer is so not true, this mission is one of the easer ones even in legendary, and its meaned to advance with some units.
another missconceptions of your is the pods, they are the last problem you get here. as long you dont sprint blindly into them you are fine, you will normaly only activate one, two when things dont go so smoothly. and the important point: they come to you, and in a way that makes them easy targets:
as long no enemy stands in your boarding area most of the enemys will ignore attacking you to get into sayed area.

5. Bluescreen rounds and haywire protocol really helps in this mission.

or not, because bluescreen dont does much vs viper, lancer, muton, advent units.....
it depends at what point he triggers the mission.

For the TS:
you blow up the problem way to much, what seems to be becasue you tryed to tackle the mission from a wrong angle.
1. you say you have mostly wounded soldiers. so thats no problem of the mission, thats a problem of what you have done so far before. sounds like you cash in to much hits in missions and have to less soldiers for rotation to mitigate that. if we talk WotC you shoud have 3-4 complete teams for rotation (because you must compensate for wounded/killed and exhausted soldiers at least every third mission because sayed exhaustion)

2. you dont "charge all in" , you send a few soldiers to the spike, preferable classes that operate best at mid to close combat range. sniper and heavy stay at your ships entrace to kill all that wants to enter your area and maybe support the frontteam.

3. if you have "dozens" of enemys at the field you seem to be highly undergeared for the state of the gametime. you see one reinforcement pad after a few turns, slowly growing in numbers over the battles turns passed. and even in legendary it stops at max 3 per turn (and that is only when you get the ufo darkevent in lategame and cant avoid contact) . so it is absolute manageable to kill the enemys before they mass to "dozens" if you equipment and soldier skills are not years behind the gametime passed.

like i already mentationed above, one key is to exploit the fact the enemy will definatly move to your ship, and will even sacrifce attacks for more movement into that direction as long no enemy is in that square. so as long you eleminate every enemy moveing in you have a much easyer time. worst enemy in that scenario are lancers, for obvious reasons.

Yeah he recommends a crutch hero. A PAID solution of course...

Yeah I tried my ranger going around and even with his spotting my Long Watch snipers couldn't see the objective from two different angles.

No my soldiers were not ALL BADLY wounded, you took some liberties there to take some cheap shots that aren't truthful. Nothing wrong with the gameplay so far that led to this situation.

I didn't say WOTC. I said Xcom 2.

I tried playing defensively and was simply overwhelmed by raw numbers.

It makes no sense that the fact that they sent dozens of enemies at me (about 30!) ZERO of whom were basic soldiers, somehow means that my team was badly geared. So much for max of 3 reinforcements because I counted 30 enemies.

Another totally trash part of Xcom 2 gameplay is that you have to build in a VERY specific path and technologies to not be totally screwed. Lots of stuff but not nearly as flexible as it looks. Most early game combinations of decisions you can make are bad. And that's NOT good game design when different options aren't equally viable.

Originally posted by newjeans PR manager:

I had this mission trigger on my ironman run right around the time I got to magnetic weapons and predator armour. It went smoothly and we had no casualties. Here's what I found:

This mission is a test of two things, your target priority and area control. You're going to keep getting soldiers come out the avenger, so you'll never be down on firepower (even if they're injured.)

Make your first goal simple. Push up, establish your forward position. You'll want this to be a spot about halfway between your avenger and the mission target. Secure the area by clearing the enemies as usual, and hold it down. Your goal is extremely simple: If any enemies come in as reinforcements here, you need to wipe them out ASAP, preferably in one turn. Overwatch is your friend, as is making a net around the area you see the dropships come in.

The second is in actually dealing with the target. Send a strike team forward, with mobility and damage. Who actually goes is up to you; I know another comment mentioned reapers and phantom rangers, but you can deal with this just fine without any special tactics. Let this fire team be 3-4 members, or more if you're confident you can lock down the forward position without them.

This part just plays out like a normal mission. You push forward, deal with the enemies, destroy the disruptor. Enemy reinforcements start getting heavier now. Do everything you can to zoom your soldiers back to the avenger, holding your forward position until they reach or pass it. Slowly start folding your position away, but don't hesitate. Advent firepower will start to overtake yours.

I found this mission surprisingly easy to deal with. Just know what makes a target a priority; if they can deal damage to you that turn. Some enemies seem scary, but are really just like mimic beacons. Deal with damage sources quick and efficiently. Make sure you have more turn economy than your enemy. Don't get bogged down fighting the specialist aliens unless they are actively proving a threat. Good luck.

Yeah well I got this mission right BEFORE unlocking magnetic weapons, and predator armor. Too bad the code isn't clever enough to have a few requirements, and to NOT put you in an impossible situation.

I didn't see any reinforcements come out of the Avenger. Pretty sure it was just the original team. Could be because I have a couple mods, and half the mods I tried don't even work on vanilla Xcom 2 anymore. They install fine, but just don't work. Besides I have a small team of about 10 because it USED to be that ranking up an 'A' team was more useful than having a bunch of low ranked squaddies. Apparently because Xcom 2 has practically zero in common with EU/EW, they just want to screw you on every decision that used to be rational. Because if it ain't broke fix it! Is Firaxis mentality. You have a high rated game so be sure to change literally everything for the next one. Can't wait to see Xcom 3 it'll probably be a card deck game knowing these devs!

I tried save scumming and it's not possible to push up, at all. My team is simply overwhelmed by dozens of enemies of the highest difficulty the game has to offer so far.

Seriously Firaxis- NOT COOL.

and my already injured soldiers have to fight dozens upon dozens of the strongest...

THIS^^ sounds like you got mainly wounded soldiers, no liberty on my side.

as a side note, WotC is no pay to win, and not a cashgrab, its a full fledged Expansion (yeah i know, old word) . it dont makes the game outright easyer (not like EW done with EU in 1) because yes, it introduces the 3 "Hero" Factions, but brings at the same time the choosen and the Fatigue System, and this last point revamps the whole game. you must rethink all you learned about striketeam building and maintainance, because you soldiers will wear out after a few missions and you need replacements for the time they need to recover. so you cant any longer do the thing with "one team from start to finish"
i dont called the Reaper a crutch hero because it is from wotc, more because many ppl overglorify him (and thats seem to be mostly players who cant deal with unexpected eneyms showing up) , when he isnt the best hero. he only is a scout drone with a late game onetrick pony ability and some situational solutions. to not loose his scoutdrone abilitys he mostly cant attack, what limits the teams firepower in many "normal" missions

Originally posted by Stardustfire:

and my already injured soldiers have to fight dozens upon dozens of the strongest...

THIS^^ sounds like you got mainly wounded soldiers, no liberty on my side.

as a side note, WotC is no pay to win, and not a cashgrab, its a full fledged Expansion (yeah i know, old word) . it dont makes the game outright easyer (not like EW done with EU in 1) because yes, it introduces the 3 "Hero" Factions, but brings at the same time the choosen and the Fatigue System, and this last point revamps the whole game. you must rethink all you learned about striketeam building and maintainance, because you soldiers will wear out after a few missions and you need replacements for the time they need to recover. so you cant any longer do the thing with "one team from start to finish"
i dont called the Reaper a crutch hero because it is from wotc, more because many ppl overglorify him (and thats seem to be mostly players who cant deal with unexpected eneyms showing up) , when he isnt the best hero. he only is a scout drone with a late game onetrick pony ability and some situational solutions. to not loose his scoutdrone abilitys he mostly cant attack, what limits the teams firepower in many "normal" missions

Yeah 1 point off of 3 of my 5. Wow major failure on my part, especially considering I JUST came out of another mission, and was ambushed by the unavoidable UFO attack which gives you ZERO choices. Totally my fault as you said.

And EW was just a better game than EU, you got more customization of characters but then there were also enemies with more dangerous abilities. EU was only especially hard when enemies in fog teleported. Both had 2-3 hard maps, but I'd say they were about equally difficult on challenge.

Xcom 2 vanilla is a train wreck that you just HAVE to pay to WOTC your way out of.
Base building isn't fair. No clues as to how to arrange them until you unlock something and suddenly learn that you built it 'wrong' so far. Which is stupid because you had no way of knowing, but you start over anyway. Some research is so much more important than others and there's no way to tell. Etc. Xcom EW you could play straight through the first time making imperfect decisions that still worked, because the game was fair. This game is not fair. There's things you just have to know in advance, and sorry but that's lazy dev work.

And then there's cheap unfair missions like this that you have to try half a dozen strategies until you find one you can save scum your way through. That's not challenge, it's just lazy dev work.

And the solution to everything Xcom 2 is 'paid expansion'. Kind of convenient...

Originally posted by snugginz:

Originally posted by Stardustfire:

THIS^^ sounds like you got mainly wounded soldiers, no liberty on my side.

as a side note, WotC is no pay to win, and not a cashgrab, its a full fledged Expansion (yeah i know, old word) . it dont makes the game outright easyer (not like EW done with EU in 1) because yes, it introduces the 3 "Hero" Factions, but brings at the same time the choosen and the Fatigue System, and this last point revamps the whole game. you must rethink all you learned about striketeam building and maintainance, because you soldiers will wear out after a few missions and you need replacements for the time they need to recover. so you cant any longer do the thing with "one team from start to finish"
i dont called the Reaper a crutch hero because it is from wotc, more because many ppl overglorify him (and thats seem to be mostly players who cant deal with unexpected eneyms showing up) , when he isnt the best hero. he only is a scout drone with a late game onetrick pony ability and some situational solutions. to not loose his scoutdrone abilitys he mostly cant attack, what limits the teams firepower in many "normal" missions

Yeah 1 point off of 3 of my 5. Wow major failure on my part, especially considering I JUST came out of another mission, and was ambushed by the unavoidable UFO attack which gives you ZERO choices. Totally my fault as you said.

And EW was just a better game than EU, you got more customization of characters but then there were also enemies with more dangerous abilities. EU was only especially hard when enemies in fog teleported. Both had 2-3 hard maps, but I'd say they were about equally difficult on challenge.

Xcom 2 vanilla is a train wreck that you just HAVE to pay to WOTC your way out of.
Base building isn't fair. No clues as to how to arrange them until you unlock something and suddenly learn that you built it 'wrong' so far. Which is stupid because you had no way of knowing, but you start over anyway. Some research is so much more important than others and there's no way to tell. Etc. Xcom EW you could play straight through the first time making imperfect decisions that still worked, because the game was fair. This game is not fair. There's things you just have to know in advance, and sorry but that's lazy dev work.

And then there's cheap unfair missions like this that you have to try half a dozen strategies until you find one you can save scum your way through. That's not challenge, it's just lazy dev work.

And the solution to everything Xcom 2 is 'paid expansion'. Kind of convenient...

REALLY sounds like your just here to complain about "P2W" and things being "Mathematically impossible" (Despite thousands of people clearing these missions without issue both vanilla AND wotc) under the thinly veiled guise of asking for help. If it's so impossible, asking for hidden tricks or tips are useless, because its "mathematically impossible" so why are you still playing? You've already made up your mind.

If you ACTUALLY want help and are just upset at the game and taking it out at forum people trying to help, im gonna give you some very GENERAL tips that apply to the entire game, instead of one mission. Be aware, with these in mind, avenger defense should be the same as any other mission in difficulty.

1) Think multiple turns ahead. If you take this shot, and it misses, are you in a safe enough spot that the enemy wont kill you next turn? Are you even willing to TAKE that chance in the first place? Are you in full cover? Can you make it into full cover and still shoot? Can the enemy flank you next turn? Will changing location prevent them from flanking? Will you use a grenade to overkill an enemy and "Waste" a grenade to remove them? Can you kill that strong enemy if you remove it's cover?

2) This kinda goes along with the last one, but never ASSUME a shot will hit. Have a backup plan in place if it misses, like having another dude with a grenade ready in case you miss and that enemy NEEDS to be removed.

3) Stay together, but not TOO together. It is very easy to load everyone up behind a log or something and eat a grenade from a captain or slammed with MEC missiles. If that happens you have a big problem, and it's going to be hard to get everyone out alive, when you could avoid it in the first place.

4) And finally the last tip and probably the hardest one to learn: Be prepared to cut your losses. Whether that be letting a dude bleed out because it would require you to send another one into the meat grinder to get him, EVAC'ing the mission and forfeiting rewards or losing contact with a region because it would require you to sacrifice too much, or even restarting the WHOLE CAMPAIGN because you didn't strategize enough early on. All are things I've done and will most likely do again.

You are playing modded base game. No idea what the mods are but they may have messed with the mission.

Without mods, the mission is only triggered if you have completed one of the second set of story missions or elect to have it by not countering a dark event. If the dark event is active you should be careful about sending your A-team on missions because of the risk the mission triggers while you have wounds.

Without mods, you should receive a 6-man team and every two rounds receive a reinforcement until you reach 10 soldiers (not sure on this number, may be 12). One thing the game doesn't really tell you is that it is best to make sure your soldiers lower down the roster are properly equipped.

AFAIK, you get one enemy reinforcement pod every other turn after a bit which increases to up to 2 pods each turn after you have destroyed the objective.

You don't state the difficulty you are playing at but I assume Veteran or Rookie for a first, blind, playthrough.

Originally posted by mk11:

You are playing modded base game. No idea what the mods are but they may have messed with the mission.

Without mods, the mission is only triggered if you have completed one of the second set of story missions or elect to have it by not countering a dark event. If the dark event is active you should be careful about sending your A-team on missions because of the risk the mission triggers while you have wounds.

Without mods, you should receive a 6-man team and every two rounds receive a reinforcement until you reach 10 soldiers (not sure on this number, may be 12). One thing the game doesn't really tell you is that it is best to make sure your soldiers lower down the roster are properly equipped.

AFAIK, you get one enemy reinforcement pod every other turn after a bit which increases to up to 2 pods each turn after you have destroyed the objective.

You don't state the difficulty you are playing at but I assume Veteran or Rookie for a first, blind, playthrough.

Yeah it's hard to say about the mods, if they are causing bugs, but I can say at least two of the mods recommended don't work on vanilla Xcom 2.

-Stop wasting my time - Doesn't Work
-Color coded action buttons - Doesn't Work

No reinforcements arrived even though there were some available in the pool.

BTW I finally save scummed the stupid thing by managing to get my Ranger around to the back of the objective and then my sniper took it out from a very particular angle with Longshot.

The Ranger spotting it from the side, and several angles with the sniper did not work even though it looked like most of the trees were cleared by that point. Extremely annoying mission BTW. The enemy spawning was relentless with Bezerkers and Mechs and Leader soldier spam. Ended up killing my favorite soldier and the Avatar project is up to 8 so basically I'm screwed and it's start over time.

I really don't want to berate this game. I want the developers to get their heads out of their backsides, and DO BETTER next time.

And don't dismiss me as some troll. It takes a big time fan to be this disappointed.

Where did you get your mod recommendations from? "Stop Wasting My Time" isn't an available mod. There is one that adds "Legacy" to the name and one that adds "WOTC".

Originally posted by Crabulon:

Originally posted by snugginz:

Yeah 1 point off of 3 of my 5. Wow major failure on my part, especially considering I JUST came out of another mission, and was ambushed by the unavoidable UFO attack which gives you ZERO choices. Totally my fault as you said.

And EW was just a better game than EU, you got more customization of characters but then there were also enemies with more dangerous abilities. EU was only especially hard when enemies in fog teleported. Both had 2-3 hard maps, but I'd say they were about equally difficult on challenge.

Xcom 2 vanilla is a train wreck that you just HAVE to pay to WOTC your way out of.
Base building isn't fair. No clues as to how to arrange them until you unlock something and suddenly learn that you built it 'wrong' so far. Which is stupid because you had no way of knowing, but you start over anyway. Some research is so much more important than others and there's no way to tell. Etc. Xcom EW you could play straight through the first time making imperfect decisions that still worked, because the game was fair. This game is not fair. There's things you just have to know in advance, and sorry but that's lazy dev work.

And then there's cheap unfair missions like this that you have to try half a dozen strategies until you find one you can save scum your way through. That's not challenge, it's just lazy dev work.

And the solution to everything Xcom 2 is 'paid expansion'. Kind of convenient...

REALLY sounds like your just here to complain about "P2W" and things being "Mathematically impossible" (Despite thousands of people clearing these missions without issue both vanilla AND wotc) under the thinly veiled guise of asking for help. If it's so impossible, asking for hidden tricks or tips are useless, because its "mathematically impossible" so why are you still playing? You've already made up your mind.

If you ACTUALLY want help and are just upset at the game and taking it out at forum people trying to help, im gonna give you some very GENERAL tips that apply to the entire game, instead of one mission. Be aware, with these in mind, avenger defense should be the same as any other mission in difficulty.

1) Think multiple turns ahead. If you take this shot, and it misses, are you in a safe enough spot that the enemy wont kill you next turn? Are you even willing to TAKE that chance in the first place? Are you in full cover? Can you make it into full cover and still shoot? Can the enemy flank you next turn? Will changing location prevent them from flanking? Will you use a grenade to overkill an enemy and "Waste" a grenade to remove them? Can you kill that strong enemy if you remove it's cover?

2) This kinda goes along with the last one, but never ASSUME a shot will hit. Have a backup plan in place if it misses, like having another dude with a grenade ready in case you miss and that enemy NEEDS to be removed.

3) Stay together, but not TOO together. It is very easy to load everyone up behind a log or something and eat a grenade from a captain or slammed with MEC missiles. If that happens you have a big problem, and it's going to be hard to get everyone out alive, when you could avoid it in the first place.

4) And finally the last tip and probably the hardest one to learn: Be prepared to cut your losses. Whether that be letting a dude bleed out because it would require you to send another one into the meat grinder to get him, EVAC'ing the mission and forfeiting rewards or losing contact with a region because it would require you to sacrifice too much, or even restarting the WHOLE CAMPAIGN because you didn't strategize enough early on. All are things I've done and will most likely do again.

Well when you say 'just' you dismiss every valid criticism that I made and turn it into a personal attack.

Sorry but the criticisms of this game are valid and if WOTC didn't come out with some serious solutions to this ridiculous and uncalled for difficulty spike over EW, the franchise would be dead.

And it's not just the difficulty it's how you need a darn guide for everything from soldier builds to base building, none of which was required on previous installments of the game, which compared to this mess, was actually very intuitive and easy to learn on one's own. Whereas this game you make one bad decision about what building to make first, or one or two bad early research investments (without you know- first Googling the tech tree) and you're SCREWED.

I think the Xcom 2 experience actually gets better the more you practice with it and learn it's nuances, but EU/EW were far better at letting the player just figure things out, which is half of the fun of games like this.

And that's not even getting into the world map game which absolutely requires a specific path to not get overrun by the spammy and annoying Advent timer. Oh well start the whole run over and Google a guide! No messing around with various options there!

And literally EVERY time you are scanning a location you are interrupted by an EMERGENCY which is super annoying.

And then there's the always cool, stoic and dependable Shen replaced by his annoying teenage daughter who bursts on the scene berating everyone saying "Why are you all just standing around!" who (somebody?!) put in charge. WHY? She behaves like she's 12 instead of like an adult who should be in charge. It's ridiculously stupid.

Originally posted by mk11:

Where did you get your mod recommendations from? "Stop Wasting My Time" isn't an available mod. There is one that adds "Legacy" to the name and one that adds "WOTC".

Well what would 'Legacy' Xcom 2 be? Vanilla right?
I already disabled it, and the color coded skills mod since neither of them worked and that UFO mission was seriously not fun. But seriously, that UFO mission was jank either way...