Editing XCOM (section)

==XCOM: Enemy Unknown by Firaxis==
[[File:XCOMGameplay.jpg|200px|thumb|An in-game screenshot of the new game.]]
And Firaxis came to the rescue, promising to return to the roots of XCOM (note the lack of a hyphen this time around, although the logo ''does'' have a horizontal stripe taken out of the "COM"). Since Firaxis has a lot of ex-MicroProse people, a lot of them have had to do with the original as well, and the original musical score will make a return. Although it's changed a few things to avoid hurting the brains of [[/v/|delicate little console kiddies]] like removing time units, removing ballistic simulation, cutting down on your maximum amount of squad members (4 at the start and 6 maximum) and limiting us to one base (though each base location gives its own unique bonus), it still somehow manages to be a good game in its own right. If the original X-COM is like Mordheim, then XCOM is like Space Hulk: massively simplified and more heavily dependent on the luck of the die, but with less micromanagement and long-term planning required.  Save-scumming is pretty much obligatory, the midgame difficulty ramp-up leaves you no time to train up a second team if your best get wiped out.

If you haven't bought the game and you're a TBS fan, everyone in /tg/ that isn't [[That guy]], would highly recommend you give it a whirl at the modest price of <strike>
$39.99 </strike> $16.49 for all the good remade XCOM games because of our father Gabe Newell on PC,
still is 39.99 for console/Non-Steam or $9.99 on mobile/tablet devices. Like always, we have footage for vidyas: https://youtu.be/qDhuZ4b51hA https://youtu.be/-SKoS5BYVuY  https://youtu.be/bxuzLyR-000

===XCOM: Enemy Within===
[[File:MectoidMEC.jpg|200px|thumb|Did we mention melee combat with exosuits?]]
''Enemy Within'' is an expansion pack (and unlike most "horse armor" tier DLCs with the name this one actually deserves it) that completely re-defines how the game progresses, compared to the original one. The game's story still progresses like the original game, but expands on it for a more entertaining experience.

It adds the "meld" resource to the game, a type of alien organic/synthetic-hybrid nanomachine that allows you to unlock two powerful technologies: MEC and genetic modification. MEC allows your troops to interface with a Mechanized Exoskeleton Cybersuit, a heavy exoskeleton that brings the heaviest of weapons to the field (Including the option for a powerfist equivalent called a "Kinetic Strike Module". Yes, make your own faux [[Terminator]] squad! Especially when the Tier-3 Paladin upgrade bulks up your suit's armor that you look vaguely similar to Termies.). Genetic modification allows you to augment your troops using data gathered from dissected aliens, making them killier than ever before. In fact, you can create your own equivalent of an Imperial [[Space Marine]] with the list of available modifications you can do (Two of these specific upgrades are a second heart and the ability of self-regeneration).  The neural dampener mod absolutely neuters the aliens' endgame trickery by giving troopers +20 will, immunity to panic, and immunity to mind control.

It also adds new aliens to the xenos' side, like a cloaking squid robot that chokes your troops to death and their own brand of exosuit troops. It also introduces another enemy into the game: EXALT. EXALT are a bunch of power-mad blokes who sees the alien's invasion as a way to gain power by adapting their technology for themselves, inching them closer to world domination. They see you as an obstacle and are determined to undermine your efforts to defeat the aliens by disrupting your operations through a number of ways and sowing panic amongst XCOM-member nations, generally making your already hectic life even more hectic. You must now defeat this new threat through a combination of [[Ork|cunning brutality and brutal cunning.]] They have most of your technologies to go toe-to-toe with you (Except for their own exosuits) and they are well hidden, so bringing them down won't be an easy affair.

===XCOM 2===
[[File:People%27s_reaction_to_XCOM_2%27s_Vipers.png|200px|thumb|Turns out they ''are'' poison glands.  Hee.]]
A direct-ish sequel to EU/EW, XCOM 2 seems to decide that what's canon is not: not "you killed all the aliens, now here's more aliens", but "you know that Impossible Ironman game you played for a laugh and got utterly stomped? That's the canon ending". (The utterly stomping part takes place in the base assault, and it is so bad that two of the most important things got taken: The Commander, and more importantly, central officer Bradford's sweater). The aliens won before humanity even got to laser weapons, taking over the world and unifying humanity (read: ruling over them in a pseudo-utopia "Brave New World"-style), and basically preparing to turn them into another of their slave races (not that most of humanity knows this).

XCOM refused to back down even after the Council of Nations ceased to exist and instead went underground, hijacking an alien supply ship to act as a mobile base for hit-and-run operations against the alien occupiers, in the hopes of toppling the ADVENT (the puppet government aliens've set up) and exposing the true purpose of their supposedly ideal society to the world. So they free the captured Commander (sans the sweater) and it's <s>gorilla</s> guerilla warfare time.

This is where the first core gameplay mechanic differs from the previous entries in the franchise. Where before now you had to push forth inch by inch before getting jumped by sectoids and surprise sectopods lurking around corners, most missions start with your strike team in concealment, letting ''you'' get the jump on the aliens. Once you execute this initial ambush, however, it reverts back to the standard formula for the rest of the mission.

New features include:

*The Assault class has been given a makeover to focus even more on [[Rip and Tear]], replacing the sidearm with a sword and changing title to the Ranger. 
*The Sniper has been renamed the Sharpshooter and given a pistol-focused skill-tree-route that turns the soldier into Clint Eastwood (literally, like you can have a stand-off by firing 3 pistol-shots in the same turn).
*The Support class has been renamed the Specialist and been given a drone to hack, heal, shield and/or zap shit remotely.
*The Heavy has been given a nice grenade launcher to act as your cover-stomper, and been renamed the Grenadier. 
*Psi-operatives are their own class now as well, and get hate-hair and [[Cadia|purple eyes]] because that makes sense and all psychically talented people look like neo-punks.
*Troops can be captured, and then rescued, which also reclaims any expensive gear they had on them (but it's never the captured troops you actually need back).
*New enemies (without spoilers), including "human" ADVENT security troops (who really love to say "bitch" and pointing towards your soldiers) with magnetic weapons who look like humans till you get their armor off, sectoid-human hybrids with teeth, thumbs, and belly buttons (which can be really creepy if you '''really''' think about it), and Snake-women called Vipers (which is what the Thin Men actually look like without their disguises).

Yes, there were snaketits on the thread that announced this to /tg/. No they are not actually tits, being venom glands. No /d/ did not care. Yes they have drawn porn of them. Yes, it will be added to the gallery. And yes... Chimera City confirmed Viper fetish as canon. Yes... There are viper bordellos are in the game.

Fortunately this is somewhat balanced out by the Archons, which seem to be the refined version of the floaters. Rather than looking like a muton that fell victim to the Borg from star trek, they look like the floating torsos of male strippers that joined the armies of the Goa'uld from Stargate. In fact they're honestly far more fanservice-y than even the vipers, in that they, unlike the vipers, give the impression of having actually been designed with fanservice in mind. Seriously, ask any fa/tg/irl who isn't asexual or a lesbian to look these up and she'll tell you they're some of the sexiest videogame enemies she's ever seen.  

Moving on.

XCOM 2 also contains an in depth explanation for the aliens' motives that many fans felt was lacking or too ambiguous in Enemy Within. Apparently, the Ethereals have some kind of fatal disease they can't cure, so they've been trekking around the galaxy culminating genes to form the ultimate bodies for themselves, while amassing a genetically supreme army. When the Ethereals found humanity, they found their genes to be so awesome and powerful that just adding some of them to a lowly sectoid turned it from a pathetic 3' tall creature you could kill with basic weapons, to an 8' tall psionic rape machine that could raise the dead and withstand salvos of bullets to the face. They then set up an alien government on Earth so they could discretely process humanity's best genetic material and slowly form new bodies for themselves that don't die called Avatars. And by don't die, we mean have copious amounts of health, teleport every time they're injured, regenerate like crazy, are guaranteed to successfully mind control anything, and are immune to any of your psychic status abilities(ie: panic, disorientation, and mind control, you can still annihilate them with psionic fire). And the boss fight involves killing three of these dick-butts and an endless wave of alien reinforcements. Using human DNA is also where their ADVENT troops came from, they grew armies of human spliced with unspecified aliens to act as their public face to the humans. But humanity wins anyway, because humans are just that fucking awesome.

The game is also notable for abandoning the usual conditions for losing. The norm for the series is for your funding to get cut if too many countries lose faith in XCOM. Since you're fighting a guerrilla war and your support are humans fighting to survive outside the aliens' control zones, that isn't happening. Instead you lose if the aliens complete the Avatar Project, their goal to mass produce the bodies for the Ethereals. If they do you get treated to a scene of almost all resistance being crushed because the Avatars are dangerous enough in small numbers and an army of them would unstoppable. You can slow progress, but can only stop it by finishing the game.

So far there have been recently four DLCs for XCOM 2. "Anarchy's Children" added new customization features for your soldiers, most of which you wouldn't ever really use. "Alien Hunters" adds a new mission, weapons, and alien rulers who you have to hunt down. The alien rulers get to take an action every, single, time, one of your soldiers takes one of their own (this was slightly nerfed in War of the Chosen to only trigger on all non-free actions taken within the Ruler's sight, because firaxis realized it was bullshit. Squadsight Snipers and Grenadiers ''will'' be your friends here). This is even more infuriating then it sounds. Some more customization options are added too. "Shen's Last Gift" adds another mission and the SPARK class soldier. SPARKs are robots you have to make in the proving ground, functioning extremely similarly to the MEC soldiers from Enemy Within. In Vanilla XCOM 2, they were very undertuned for the resource investment required to make them. War of the Chosen rebalanced them in a way that makes them significantly more viable; the addition of weapon mod slots for their primary guns can allow them to perform substantially better right out the gate and their immunity to exhaustion and  hostile non-damaging psychic powers (namely mind control and insanity) combined with their ability to deploy on missions even when grievously damaged gives them a slight edge over their meaty counterparts in terms of consistency. Having said that, they still require a fairly heavy resource investment per unit to build, as in "do I go ahead and build a SPARK, or should I just upgrade my weapons to the magnetic/plasma tier?" Optional mods have improved their balance to outright making them a super unit if you wish. 

And here comes the fun part; if you read the developers blog, their idea of "balance" is to actually nerf plenty of stuff...so the game is harder after having a buffed-up alien lord chase your dudes all over the game. Was old-school really this hard?

You think that's bad, the end game unlocks second wave options, like increasing all Health by 50%, having your guys get worse as they get injured, have their stats rolled at random, so you can make the game even HARDER! Because dying is ''fun''.

And finally, if you find yourself bored with the vanilla experience, XCOM 2 has a very healthy and active modding community adding anything from extra voice packs to full on reworks of the entire game akin to the famed Long War of the original game. Do you want Bob Ross to lead your squad to victory? Want to bring back weapons and MECs from the EU and EW? How about rival third-party factions of Storm Troopers or Geth to turn what's seemingly a stealth mission into a chaotic three-way bloodbath? Your own custom [[Deathwatch]] kill team? The possibilities might not be ''endless'', but you can ensure no two games are ever the same. A warning though, due to how easy it is to create and add mods to your game, care should be taken when implementing them, [[rage|as conflicting or poorly made mods can crash the game or corrupt your saves.]] Additionally, unoptimized or script-heavy mods can make lower-spec computers run like absolute ass. Unreal Engine 3.5 has annoying stability issues as well. You read that correctly. [[Derp|It runs not on the latest version of Unreal Engine 4, but a modified version of Unreal Engine 3.]] [[Fail|Not even the DLCs or WOTC itself have fixed these issues]]. Even a high end gaming machine will experience game crashes due to the age of the engine. With a higher chance if one is running over 150+ mods. Care should be taken when concurrently running a large number of them. Damn it, Firaxis patch your damn game!

While most of the character customization mods introduced (like the Halo: Reach MJOLNIR armor, Mass Effect Turians/Asari/etc, Star Wars Clone Troopers n' such) are entirely cosmetic, one particular mod bears special mention for you elegan/tg/entlemen out there. Armors Of The Imperium is a Warhammer 40k mod that adds fully fledged Space Marine power armor into the game, including a standard set, an Assault variant, a Terminator variant, an Apothecary variant, a Techmarine variant and a Librarian variant. For the ladies in your army, they have access to the Sisters of Battle power armor alongside the Seraphim variant. These armors can be upgraded much like the standard armors ingame and offer significantly better protection than the vanilla equivalents (as you would expect), with the specialized armors offering additional benefits to their wearer. The customization available to your personal Space Marines is ridiculously expansive, allowing you to mix and match virtually any version of the armor from Mk. II through Mk. X and enough additional bits and bobs that'll make any kitbasher weep with envy. The inhouse customization doesn't quite end there either, as the pack comes with dedicated Space Marine Chapter "nationalities", letting you perfectly recreate a significant number of popular or well known Space Marine chapters down to the last detail. Combine this with the available voice packs, bolter and plasma weapon mods to create your very own personal Space Marines to defend holy terra in style!
Mods that aren't Space Marines or Chaos are mixed bags and some even downright offensive to the eyes. As most of the armor and weapons look like they are made of plastic for some reason [[fail|and seem to be ported from mobile games.]]

When 2K rolled a bunch of Firaxis' games into their own custom launcher (XCOM included), it initially [[Fail|didn't have mod support]], meaning that you were unable to activate or alter any mods installed post launcher update. This was adjusted, thankfully, but many older mods didn't take too kindly to the new launcher and don't properly load when launching the game. There are a few alternate XCOM game launchers that you can find and download that restores the game to pre-2K launcher, so there is a way around that inconvenience.

====XCOM 2: War of the Chosen====
This brand new expansion gives us three new allies to aid us. It's actually more than large enough to be a game into itself.

*Reapers: Stealthy hunters who wear [[Shadowrun|trench coats and gas masks, despise the aliens so much they reject the use of any of their technologies,]] eat Muton flesh like they are on a southern BBQ and are armed with nothing but a rifle and explosives. It's enough. Reapers are ''the'' defacto masters of infiltration and assassination and right out of the gate have a dramatically buffed state of concealment called "Shadow". When in their "Shadow" mode, Reapers are virtually undetectable and can only be revealed by the enemy if they literally run into them by sheer dumb luck. Yes, you can have your Reaper sit ass out completely out in the open in the middle of the street and the aliens will be none-the-wiser. Reapers can and will begin to reveal themselves on the offensive, however, as they have an exponentially increasing chance to reveal themselves after every shot they take. Upgraded reapers can mitigate this slightly by taking a perk that prevents the odds of being revealed from increasing if they kill the target they shot at. [[Dakka|They also have an ability that lets them shoot at an enemy until they run out of ammo.]] Long story short, these guys are only slightly less powerful than the Reapers from Mass Effect.

*Skirmishers: ADVENT defectors who are armed with a grappling hook that can pull them to a rooftop and pull themselves to the enemy or vice versa and at max level allows them to have the [[Awesome|alien rulers ability to gain action points every. Time. The. Enemy. Moves.]] Except it only works three times a turn, and doesn't trigger on non-move actions. [[fail|The game doesn't tell you this.]] Their Bullpups have lower range and damage over the standard rifle, but make up for it by being able to shoot multiple times a turn and being wielding by dudes using grappling hooks to zip between buildings like Spiderman. Despite the longer barrel would give it the same stats and longer range. Once again you need download a workshop mod to fix this.

*Templars: [[Grey Knights|A resistance group made of only psionics]] that wield psi blades and machine pistols, but you'll probably never use those. They're fast, hard to kill, and hit like a brick. And like any good psi-based unit, they can fry their enemies with lighting from their hands. They're like the [[rip and tear]] half of the Ranger, but with psionic powers. They have access to some rather obscene powers (like being able to teleport your allies and enemies across the map or summon lightning storms to disintegrate several enemies at once), but this is tempered by them needing to build up Psionic Focus by killing enemies in melee in order to use them. They're also fantastically hammy and roll their Rs.

But these new allies come with a catch as you now have to fight the titular chosen who can adapt to your soldiers' abilities with their own strengths and weaknesses, and the Lost ([[tarpit|zombie swarms]]) that attack both you and ADVENT. Along with these new allies and enemies is trying to get the three resistance groups to work together, as well as a new fatigue and relationship system.

The faction leaders are voiced by actors from [[Star Trek|Star Trek: The Next Generation]]. [[Fail|They do pretty good job except for Marina Sirtis poorly performed lines.]] Good thing the game allows players to switch to a better voice for your first Reaper(and their other soldiers).

====Tactical Legacy Pack====
A mini expansion pack that adds 4 mini-campaigns detailing some of the adventures of Bradford and Lily Shen during the tumultuous days of ADVENT's takeover, adds new weapons to your WotC playthrough for each of these mini-campaigns you beat, allows you to choose between three soundtracks, (X-COM 1, X-COM 2, and Legacy Remixes), allows free access to all of the 100 challenges rather than the random daily challenge system, and even allows you to make your own challenge missions. Also has more than a few bugs and oddities that needs to be fixed with workshop mods. However it isn't as a glitchy broken mess compared to some [[Fallout|other games]]. 

The missions themselves range from awesome to just plain bad. Blast to the Past has central explain what happened after XCOM EU/EW. Finishing it unlocks the TLP weapons from EU/EW. The worst campaign a long drudge of several levels makes up It Came from the Sea. With respawning Chrysalids and Faceless. With the reappearance of the worst character in any XCOM game. Jake Levy aka the DJ. Who goes on annoying rants and the reason everything in the mission is happening in the first place.(He may be a hand in the Bugtown Massacre mentioned in Chimera Squad. Since he can't keep track of his shit, its very likely.) The only reason to play it is unlocking basic cosmetic armor for each class(i.e. variants of Predator and Warden armor, what you use until building the good stuff.) No one would blame players for cheating and modding the game to get a high score either. As its just that bad.

Avenger Assemble is Lily Shen's logs about how she collected parts for the Avenger. XCOM's current base into a flight worthy state. It has some great lore bits and at the very least is not as bad as the previous campaign. Her personal Gremlin, Rov-R isn't as overpowered as it's depicted in Shen's Last Gift to preserve game balance.

The last one Lazarus Project, is just pure fanservice. All the canon characters are playable for the first and only time on the same squad. Including Peter Osei and Ana Ramirez who died during the tutorial missions of XCOM 2. The last two levels of Lazarus Project are only two missions besides Operation Leviathan to allows players to have more than six soldiers, without mods. The second to last has the first canon appearance of Doctor Tygen. Whose callsign is Hamburglar. Referring to a recurring gag from the main campaign. The fact that he is mentioned early on in Avenger Assemble by Lily means those two campaigns take place outside of chronological order. Unlike the second campaign, there good enough to play at once without mods.

While their supposedly canon, there are some strange oddities. As the magnetic and plasma weapons used by the Reapers, Skirmishers and Templars were invented by XCOM, so are Psi-Amps. Thus they shouldn't exist yet. You can fix that on your own with some mods and text editing with Notepad+. The last is the Avatars that show up on the final levels of every campaign. Central says he fought them or "something like it" but the real reason is that Firaxis didn't bother to make a new model for it. 

IT WAS Free until Dec 3rd, 2018, for all WotC owners. Though it's still a cheap buy at $7.99 on Steam. The ability to switch between three soundtracks alone is worth it.(remixes of classic XCOM tracks, the OST from Enemy Within and the vanilla War of the Chosen soundtrack. )

=== XCOM: Long War ===
The big daddy mod for XCOM: Enemy Unknown made by a small developer known as Pavonis Interactive that is single-handedly responsible for XCOM 2's thorough mod support (alongside Firaxis [[Blood Ravens| "borrowing"]] some notable aspects of this mod for the actual sequel), Long War is a ''very'' extensive rework of the entire game from the ground up. While the mod greatly expands the classes, perks, weapons and armor players can gear up their dudes with, it also greatly enhances the aliens' arsenal, which now adapts and evolves to combat the player the longer the game goes on. The number of changes made to the game is well into the hundreds and the difficulty is so stepped up that it makes the vanilla game a walk in the park comparatively. This mod is almost universally praised, to the point that not only did Firaxis make it a point to make the sequel as mod-friendly as possible, but they actually partnered up with the Pavonis team to help develop the core XCOM 2 game as well as the first wave of miscellaneous mods to showcase how easy it is to plug-and-play community made content into the game.

As said previously, this is pretty much ''the'' XCOM mod.  It's such a big mod that a lot of other XCOM mods are metamods designed to modify ''this'' mod!
==== Long War Rebalance ====
The largest Long War sub-mod, Long War Rebalance completely overhauls everything drastically for the 3rd time, from base management to even air combat. In terms of difficulty, LWR tries to maintain the sweet spot between bullshit (early-game Long War) to cake walk (late-game Long war) while reducing the tedium in base-game and LW. One of the most boring parts of LW (and vanilla impossible) was overwatch creeping, which was the solution to prevent a possibly game-ending pod activation. While XCOM 2 alleviates this with concealment, LWR removes the ability to overwatch hidden enemies (only OWing visible enemies), and activated pods activate nearby pods (An Outsider pod may alert every pod on the map!). Before you shit your pants, UCross (the main dev) made pod activation much less punishing by giving Your Dudes a free movement point if they have no action points, similar to how aliens can scramble if activated. This produces a much more fast-paced game, allowing you to dash to your content.

Despite how horrible it sounds to face two or three pods, they're never as large as LW, and classes have been reworked to shoot multiple times (Infantry can hit 4 times with correct build). Even then, most pods can't be instantly wiped like X2, thanks to innate DR in cover for both XCOM and xenos (~30% DR in half, ~60% DR in full), so the enemy will usually have a chance to hit, and they can hit hard. Every alien (and EXALT) unit is now a serious threats in the battlefield, with even the weakest units having serious potential. For example, Sectoids now have Psi Panic and a buffed Mindfray in the beginning, making them fantastic in annihilating rookie brains, and Drones have the ability to Holo Target and heal a Cyberdisc back to half health with Master Mechanic. In LWR, there are less aliens, but they can be serious threats in themselves.

=== XCOM: The Board Game ===
From [[Fantasy Flight Games]], there's a board game adaptation of XCOM (in fact, ''XCOM: Enemy Unknown'' was quite inspired by board games, with the two-actions-per-turn system instead of the old 'time units'). There's a companion app for smartphones, tablets, and computers which controls the aliens and informs players of events, a bit like a [[Game Master]], but without exposing the players to too much bookkeeping.  Amazing what games can do with computers these days -- just imagine if such a thing had been available for [[FATAL]]! On second thought, don't.

Players (1-4) take on different roles in the XCOM organization. The Commander keeps an eye on the budget and allocates interceptors. The Chief Scientist directs research efforts. The Central Officer works the app and solicits input from the others (if there are any) to make decisions (many of which are time-critical). The Squad Leader manages troops and base defense. Together, they need to allocate their resources, judge when to push risky but rewarding avenues (inviting retribution from the aliens if they fail), and defend humanity. Like the games, successes are rare -- a die only has a 1/3 chance of coming up with a success, and tasks may need multiple successes. There is also an "enemy die", a [[d8]] that is rolled against the number of times that task has been attempted. If it rolls equal to or under that number, something bad happens. So, do you pool resources for critical tasks (neglecting anything else, and hoping that your priorities are correct), in order to most likely be successful before the threat level climbs too high? Or do you stay flexible but push your luck? Your call, commander.

===XCOM 2: Long War 2===
If you thought XCOM 2 was ''already'' hard, thanks in part to the involvement of the original Long War modders in the game's development, said modders come back with a sequel mod for the game. Not only does this go even further than the first Long War in going into a lot of detail, such as new graphical touches, significant rebalancing and completely overhauling the global map to be more reminiscent of classic X-com. But the difficulty is amped up even more, with missions even requiring you to send in potentially fatal scouting parties to make sure your ''other'' squads don't die on the spot. Also, rather than launching parties directly into battle, missions spawn on the geoscape with an expiration timer.  The player ''can'' launch immediately, but the enemy presence will be drastically increased!  Instead, the idea is that the squad can spend time infiltrating, to let ADVENT get complacent and draw troops elsewhere.  Having more Resistance folks working Intel increases mission expiration times, but the bigger and heavier the squad, the more infiltration time is required.  And vice versa -- short-staffing a squad can allow a player to infiltrate to high percentages on short notice... but now you've only got like four guys on the ground, and that might not be enough firepower if activations go badly...

This mod requires dramatically more strategic thought and care. Weapons, armor, and equipment are all purchased individually, forcing you into decisions like 'do I continue the rollout of my newly available armor-piercing coilguns, or do I buy armor for the two rookies I've trained up?' and 'do I send my last seven man team to secure me an engineer, commit them to a long infiltration to wipe out an advent tower, or hold them in reserve for a better opportunity?' The difficulty is likewise much higher, but you have dramatically expanded options to combat it with special weapons, squad leaders, extra inventory slots packed with flashbangs, veteran troop skills, choosable bonus perks, a psi advancement training regime that makes some actual sense, and many, many more troops and mission opportunities. Minor reinforcement on that last one, in fact: in stock XCOM 2 you'll likely end the campaign with fewer than twenty soldiers, whereas here it's pretty common to have a hundred active-duty troopers at a time. 

The Shinobi ([[Derp|all the Ninja IRL schools have closed up shop]]) is the most overpowered class. Making missions easier then they should be as he can [[derp|bypass Overwatch]] and has a very low impact on infiltration. Making missions unrealistic for players who hate RNG and want a pure stealth game.

The devs of Long War have said they will not be making a Long War for War of the Chosen. The reasoning for this is two-fold; sifting through all the new/reworked code introduced in WotC would take months, if not a year or more just to ensure compatibility with the expansion, much less add to it. The second and more important reason is that Pavonis is focusing heavily on their own X-COM type game (Terra Invicta) and would much rather put their time in that project (understandably).

Some faggot on reddit, however, has recently (as of late 2019) made some impressive strides. While Long War of the Chosen isn't ready for primetime and is missing some important features, anyone can download the beta for it here: https://github.com/long-war-2/lwotc

===XCOM: Chimera Squad===
A surprise entry into the XCOM series, being teased on April 14th and coming out 10 days later. It was supposed to another expansion for War of the Chosen. However, since XCOM 2 was already bloated, Chimera Squad was turned into its own game instead, at the healthy and low-budget price of $20 (and preordering or buying it on sale reduces it to $10).

The game takes place 5 years after the human victory achieved in XCOM 2, and centers around City 31. So you'll have to wait until XCOM 3 to see 2s sequel hooks resolved. In this city, former aliens and humans live together in a tentative peace, and you take control of the namesake Chimera Squad composed of both alien and human agents, lead by the Irish Ranger Jane Kelly who is the one of the survivors of 2's tutorial mission(alongside Bradford), making her canonically survive the events of that game. It's their job to clean up the remaining remnants of ADVENT as well as other violent troublemakers around the city, while solving the mystery of the beloved local mayor's recent assassination. Gameplay-wise, Chimera Squad seems to play more like ''Final Fantasy Tactics'', rather than the modern ''XCOM'' entries, in that units move on a timeline rather than using block turns. There is also a bigger emphasis on individual agents, as you fail a mission if any of [[Your Dudes]] die. And the team's composition ranges across all human ethnicities and even other Alien species, including [[Monstergirls|a sassy Viper]], a gentle giant Muton and a smartass Sectoid.

It's more or less a combination of ''Alien Nation'' (the aliens are former slaves) and <s>Brooklyn Nine-Nine</s> ''SWAT''/''Police Quest'', while being a loose remake of XCOM: Apocalypse.

The individual maps are considerably smaller, and mostly divided into "rooms", with each room usually containing a set number of enemies (there are exceptions; endless reinforcements can, and will, arrive on certain mission types). Each mission starts with you breaching the "room," taking a free move or attack action, and letting enemies hunker down (if you caught them by surprise) or take their overwatch fire (if they were expecting you), before the game goes to turn-based mode, and once you've cleared out a room your agents heal a set amount of their HP based on difficulty before you breach the next room, and move on to the next "encounter".

All agents have a dedicated melee attack called "Subdue" which deals a small amount of damage (3 - 4), which, if it defeats the enemy knocks them unconscious instead of killing them,  potentially allowing you to gain bonus Intel after the mission is over. Multiple agent abilities are dedicated to making it easier to "arrest" enemies for this intel boost, although with the number of captures that are happening in a single week, you got to wonder what they're doing with all of those prisoners... <s>Soylent green</s> <s>Advent burger</s>Burger Palace anyone?  

And it has Vipers as fetishized [[monstergirls]] with exclusive sex worker locales as canon and anime style advertisements featuring the various aliens. Make of that what you will. There is a also Sectoid conspiracy theorist Floyd Tesseract.  But unlike the IRL douchenozzles Floyd is actually intelligent and locates the hostages of a terrorist cell before Chimera Squad does. [[Fail|Compare this to the moronic DJ from XCOM 2 who accidentally created Chryssalid Lures before the events of the main campaign]]. Dude even sounds like someone doing a semi-accurate J.K Simmons impression. [[Marvel_Comics|
One wonders if he annoys XCOM (or at least Bradford) with frequent calls about a certain wall-crawler.]]

A few have joked that the whole game is actually happens in the mind of your XCOM agents whenever they get mind controlled, and why they fight with the aliens against humans. Which if true, says a lot about XCOM agents regarding their attitude towards Vipers. [[/pol/|Though it's mostly the usual morons whining about diversity.]]

Major sore spots on an otherwise-popular game include balance issues among available teammates and the fact that you can't get them all on one playthrough, balance issues among resources (Intel is better than almost everything else, and it's rarely worth spending valuable time getting anything on the tech tree but better guns and armor), and Tranq Ammo being by far the most useful of the ammo types because shooting the fuck out of enemies instead of messing around with subdual makes it trivally easy to take lots of prisoners and therefore lots of extra Intel.

Also currently buggy as fuck with the game defaulting to integrated graphics before the only patch released in May 2020, agents would lose their loadouts, along with the standard freezing and crash to desktop. So you're better off waiting for further patches or downloading Workshop mods to fix them if you want to play Ironman. The impatient should keep the Task Manager open on another monitor just in case.

Since Firaxis doesn't have DLC or expansions to work on and instead are focused on Civilization VII, any bugs that persist after the May patch will likely never be fixed. Compare this to XCOM:EU and 2 when all the DC was already released before the end of the year in the same timeframe. So if you want a 100% bug free experience, you'll have to search for fanmade patches on the Steam Workshop. It is also lacking on the mod front compared to other games.

There are a few saving graces here. A required level states that XCOM are working on making new Interceptors, that EXALT or a group like them will surface and the Elders (aka Ethereals) will be back. Which is why XCOM would wants any human or alien with combat skills they can recruit. As those bastards won't play nice next time. 
However the next XCOM could be delayed, as their working on an Avengers spinoff. At the very least it'll be better than
Eidos's shitty game. Also stop asking for a Terror of the Deep remake/reboot. Jake Solomon (the guy currently in charge of the franchise) hates that fucking game and it's never going to happen.

===Marvel's Midnight Suns===

A weird kinda-sorta X-Com spinoff, Marvel's Midnight Suns is a curious attempt by Firaxis to make a X-Com type game set in the Marvel Universe. The results are frankly weird; to start with, the miss mechanics are [[Pun|missing]], replaced with a card draw mechanic that limits your possible actions this turn. There's also the fact that verticality has been completely removed. We mainly mention it here because the game is probably going to be considered a minor part of the X-Com legacy--for delaying X-Com 3, if nothing else. Also, it was apparently such a commercial failure that Jake Solomon (the director on XCOM reboot) is leaving the company alongside the president of Firaxis, Steve Martin.