XCOM 2 Monoclass Run: Rangers

The Berserker post is running extremely late, so for this week this XCOM 2-related post goes up. I wasn't entirely sure where I'd put it in order anyway, so stall-filler-usage is better than some possibilities.

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When I first played base XCOM 2, I noticed fairly early on that it was realistically possible to do a monoclass run without undue burden: simply build the Guerrilla Tactics School early, avoid taking Rookies into missions, and phase out your randomly-rolled classes outside your specialty as you use the GTS to force Rookies into your class of choice. You'd have a month or so of using classes outside your chosen specialty, and you might need to hire a few extra soldiers in the midgame to compensate for losses -assuming you didn't get Rookies from a Rumor or something, anyway- but overall you could do this much more readily than, say, in the prior game.

I have a fondness for testing the shape of a game's design by doing things that run contrary to how the game is meant to be played. It tends to be fun and interesting in its own right, producing novel experiences, but it also tends to be fairly educational in a way that wraps back to both my more 'normal' play of such games and gives me a stronger understanding of game design in general. I learn things I would otherwise not learn, and have fun in the process.

I ended up putting it off until much later than I'd originally expected because I found War of the Chosen such a massive improvement that it was difficult to go back to the base game, and War of the Chosen isn't nearly so friendly to a monoclass run due to the introduction of the Fatigue system and the fact that the Resistance Ring really ought to be your default first construction, rather than the GTS. But then I ended up checking out XCOM 2's modding scene, and at one point I ran across Commander's Choice; a mod that lets you pick what your Rookies promote into on level from right out the gate. That cemented that I was going to do this, now that it was realistically feasible to do it into War of the Chosen -though I still started with doing base XCOM 2 runs.

In all these runs, I use Commander's Choice to maximize the monoclass-ness. I play on Commander difficulty -primarily because I feel the base-game's Legendary tuning is Not Very Good- but with 'aim assist' manually disabled through ini editing because no I don't want the game cheating for me. Otherwise, unless specifically noted, I'm playing the unmodded game as far as actual mechanics goes -I have some informational mods enabled, but only ones that provide information one could memorize or that is possible to look at mid-mission and just isn't convenient to check.

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The monoclass run I was always most excited by and eager to give a try was one focused on Rangers: innate access to Slash so radically changes the normal rules of play that it was extremely obvious an all-Ranger squad would play very differently from a more typical mixed-team. Eliminating enemy Cover would be less valuable, positioning of the squad would be more flexible, height would be less useful to hold, but leaning into your advantages would consistently risk pulling pods sooner than intended, and there's some obvious holes in the Ranger's skillset -they're obviously a bit poorly-suited to fighting heavily-Armored targets, for example.

As such, my first monoclass run was for Rangers, because I was expecting maximum fun from them.

Early game-wise, I was on the money: it was fantastically fun, once everybody was Corporal or up so I didn't have to worry about Slash missing and leaving them horribly out of position. The entire approach to combat was radically different, requiring me to change how I thought about fights: instead of smashing Cover with explosives and then following up with shooting, Slash everything to death!

One interesting implication I hadn't considered was that Shadowstrike was actually made even more useful than in a conventional run. If you're just fielding the one Ranger, they're the single most likely soldier to be in continuous line of sight of enemies, and so while I 100% consider Shadowstrike superior to Shadowstep in the base game, its interaction with Slashes doesn't necessarily come up very often. With everybody being a Shadowstrike Ranger, though, it was routine to have multiple soldiers in each turn getting a Shadowstrike Slash in.

Conversely, this was how I learned that Shadowstrike doesn't actually get applied to Overwatch ambush tactics in the base game. That makes a mono-Ranger run much less effective at Overwatch ambushes than I'd anticipated, and means that in general play non-Phantom Rangers get less use out of Shadowstrike than I'd originally believed since it's often better to have a Grenadier lob explosives to open an Overwatch ambush, denying the opportunity for Shadowstrike bonuses on the Ranger.

Once I hit the midgame, there was a fairly dramatic shift. I was already peripherally aware of this shift with Rangers, but it was a lot more obvious with my entire squad being Rangers: between mass Run And Gun, Hunter's Instincts being purchased, and how guns benefit more from improving technology than melee weapons do, the early-midgame had Slash fall pretty heavily to the wayside. I still used it, but it was often more to save ammo or avoid having to spend Run And Gun just yet; if I really desperately needed to push damage onto a target, Run And Gun flanking shots were vastly more effective than Slashes. And if one action was enough to get a flank... yeah, just shoot 'em.

The endgame cemented this transition, between Stormguns being a bigger improvement than Fusion Blades and the widespread unlocking of Rapid Fire -among other points, while I normally prefer Reaper on a Ranger, there's not really any point to having six Reaper-capable Rangers. Two might make sense if I ended up needing to Reaper again shortly after the first Reaper activation, but six? Reaper's cooldown isn't even six turns, and no, you never need to use Reaper literally every turn in the base game!

The single most surprising thing about the run was the difficulty curve. I'd expected a certain amount of strategic gains from the fact that I wasn't having to pay for weapons from all four core classes (Plus potentially Psi Operatives and SPARKs!), but I'd figured the tactical end would be overall harder from not having various important tools provided by other classes, since there's limits to how far resource savings can bolster your squad.

And... no.

For starters, the squad moved fast. Mission timers were never an issue for the Ranger Corps, because they advanced constantly as a natural part of combat. Where a normal run might expect to be 1-2 turns away from failing the mission when a Specialist got into position to hack an objective, the Ranger Corps regularly had a solid four turns to go, giving them the ability to approach the objective with some caution and prepare for the inevitable waiting-near-the-objective pod, instead of pulling it while desperately trying to avoid failing the mission. Where a typical VIP extraction would be 1-3 turns away from timing out when the last soldier got out of the battlefield, the Ranger Corps repeatedly had six turns left when they evacced, and it was only that slow because I was paranoid about letting the VIP get close to combat.

For another, widespread Untouchable, once it came online, meant the squad could be fairly fearless in general and manipulate the AI in specific ways. Sure, that ADVENT Mec could lob its Micromissiles at this soldier in Low Cover who is low on HP from a prior fight... or the Mec could spend its turn futilely trying to shoot the Untouchable soldier standing in the open. Though I didn't realize it in this run, I was also benefiting from the AI's preference for spreading its fire; instead of piling fire onto an Untouchable soldier to overcome their protection, if there were multiple surviving enemies they were probably going to split their fire and very possibly both waste fire on an Untouchable.

For a third, Rangers are powerful, much more so than I'd fully grasped before doing this run, and the tuning of the game doesn't leverage what opportunities it has to give them real weaknesses. In theory the Ranger Corps should've struggled with Armored targets, but in practice Armor doesn't really get high enough to overcome how ridiculously lethal Rangers are -Andromedons were particularly silly in this regard, as a soldier with no AP Rounds and no Shredder ability could simply Rapid Fire them from a flank and expect that one Rapid Fire to kill them.

It didn't hurt that I got lucky, rolling Shredder on a soldier before enemy Armor became widespread and rolling AP Rounds as my first Experimental Ammo project, but I often didn't need to bother with using that combination. Just Rapid Firing late-game enemies was astoundingly lethal all on its own, even when it was a Sectopod or Gatekeeper where Hunter's Instincts didn't apply.

The Alien Rulers also ended up being much easier than I'd expected. The Viper King wasn't a huge surprise, as he's pretty easy to do damage fast enough to drive off, but an element I hadn't considered with the Berserker Queen was that I was able to fish for repeated Stuns with Arc Blades. That it worked out and I got a couple in my first encounter with her was, in part, luck, but on the other hand it's an option that wouldn't have been available to a more typical run -and with 6 soldiers, a 25% chance of a Stun expects to happen at least once.

The Archon King was a bit more problematic, since Icarus Drop and Devastate both take him out of melee reach and Rangers don't have built-in means to force a disruption on Icarus Drop. I had to lean pretty heavily on the Serpentsuit -fishing for Frostbite Freezes- and the Hunter's Axe. and I was also lucky enough to have a Hail of Bullets soldier by the time the Archon King entered rotation, so it could potentially have gone pretty badly... but I also had widespread Bladestorm, so the Archon King's preference for running through your squad got him cut up pretty badly in a way a more typical run would be unlikely to experience.

Even the endgame proved surprisingly easy. I'd expected to run into trouble from pulling multiple pods, and technically that did happen, but Reaper saved the day both times, and of course in the final part of the mission pod activation wasn't a concern at all. Similarly, I was worried about Mind Control, but it didn't end up mattering: the squad was too lethal and too mobile, letting me arrange flanking Rapid Fires repeatedly, completely bypassing Mind Control by virtue of the potential controllers all being dead before they could act.

Before I did this run, I was confused as to why War of the Chosen made a few overt nerfs to the Ranger. Given how eg Phantom and Conceal are incredibly underwhelming, I would've expected buffs, if anything.

After I'd done the run, I was honestly a little surprised War of the Chosen was as conservative in nerfing Rangers as it was. This run was vastly easier than a normal mixed-class run -and, notably, was the only monoclass run I did for the base game in which this was true. Other monoclass runs got to benefit from eg not spending resources on other classes' gear, certainly, but were consistently at least a little bit harder than a normal run.

Interesting and fun, overall.

Comments

  1. I wonder, a bit, if they were playing around with team size when they were balancing classes in the base game. One of the balancing points for ranged vs melee is the relative ease of focus fire when you don't have to get everyone up close, and the value of that can vary a lot with team size.

    (Insert math nerdery here about Lanchester multipliers)

    But yeah, the AI probably never got tested under conditions of an entire team with Untouchable, and I can't imagine it coping well.

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    1. It's worth noting that base XCOM 2 has built-in support for larger squad sizes, up to 8 if I recall correctly (War of the Chosen obviously has to support at least 10, given Chosen Avenger Defenses let you send 10), including that eg the Skyranger can display more than 6 soldiers in it. I've always assumed that was out of the (correct) assumption that Long War 2 would happen and want larger squads, but it could be both, and there are a few bits and pieces of base XCOM 2 that have always struck me as a little strange if squad size was always 100% committed to 6 in the core game, even with Long War 2 being officially endorsed and involving Pavonis working with Firaxis. Squad-wide weapon upgrades, for example, are kind of silly in the base game where you're expected to have only 2, maybe 3 copies of any given weapon type carried into a given mission, as the base game clearly intends for you to field a minimum of one copy of each core class; even if you then triple up on a favorite (Or double up on Specialists and bring a Psi Operative along) that's still only 3 copies, at which point bringing down purchase cost but making each purchase only one copy would work out to much the same except minus effectively a surcharge paid against hypothetical any given run isn't benefitting from. (That is, each purchase is effectively tuned to be 'fair' if you field three copies of the relevant class, but in a normal run only one of your classes at most will have that true, and you're effectively bilked for other classes' upgrades) And Long War 2 forces the system back to single-instance purchases, so it's unlikely Long War 2's larger squad sizes is what prompted this switch.

      Whereas if they experimented with, say, up to 10 soldiers, I could easily see them coding the squad-wide upgrade system to streamline those upper numbers, and just not seeing a reason to switch back when they ultimately decided they didn't want to raise squad size, or something in that general vein.

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    2. The squad-wide upgrades was almost certainly a question of minimising inventory management. It was just busywork in XCOM:EU. Unfortunately XCOM2 also introduced single-use weapon attachments, walking much of that improvement back, and making it even worse with alien ruler/chosen loot. But given how little in-universe sense it makes, I see no other explanation. I hope future games lean even further into squad-wide equipment upgrades.

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    3. I actually don't. On the face of it, squad-wide upgrades seems like a nice quality-of-life improvement, but I'd argue this is only actually so for armor, where there's no equivalent to weapon attachments and you spend a good chunk of the game with little or no alternate armors, and the design space doesn't have a ton of room for interesting armor variations. XCOM 2 increasingly added in unique gear like Alien Hunters gear and Chosen loot, and this makes perfect sense to me -the squad is a lot more interesting when you're figuring out who is best-suited to using an unusual piece of gear instead of just mindlessly upgrading generic gear, and I hope XCOM 3 leans into something like... I dunno, Diablo-esque prefix/suffix mechanics, where you loot gear with varying interesting qualities and pass different bonuses to different soldiers based on the kinds of roles you want them to fill. Epic Weapons in Chimera Squad, but more variety. That sort of thing.

      And indeed part of my point was the part where squad-wide upgrades does surprisingly little to improve the quality-of-life in the base game -and even into War of the Chosen, honestly- where they'd have mattered more if the max squad size was made higher.

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    4. Note that squad-wide upgrades does not mean boring upgrades. It's not like Wraith armor is strictly better than Warden armor, for example, and it's a valid question to figure out who should be wearing what. But for some reason one is squad-wide, the other isn't. It would also be perfectly fine to have had a weapon attachment system that upgrades all weapons of that type (e.g. attach extra magazine size to the mag cannon, now all your mag cannons have it).

      While there is a case to be made that the squad size is not so large that this matters in the base game, it is /would be a huge improvement for WotC, in which fatigue means you're constantly switching your soldiers around. And every single time you have to equip them again. So for example getting the katana means now you have to equip whichever ranger is going out with the katana at the beginning of every mission. Rinse and repeat with every unique or finite piece of equipment. None of this is interesting. Once you've figured out the best loadout for a soldier, forcing the player to equip them every mission is just busywork. It's also really annoying for those few missions in which you're fielding more than 6 soldiers.

      So I'm either for more squad-wide upgrades, or adding a "preferred loadout" for each soldier, so you can just click on a button at the beginning of every mission to auto-equip all your soldiers. Or both, if keeping fatigue/large squad sizes but still want the occasional legendary item.

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    5. I wasn't suggesting squad-wide upgrades are inherently boring. My point was that a full squad of six soldiers will, in fact, switch instantly over to six Predator Armors upon purchasing that upgrade, making it much more obviously different from if you instead purchased Predator Armor suits one at a time, and that the game doesn't really have room for something like Ranger Armor That You Purchase Separately From Specialist Armor the way the Ranger's offensive toolkit leads to you making purchases for 1-2 squad members in practice, even though they're technically squad-wide upgrades.

      The Weapon Attachment system isn't really suited to squad-wide permanent effects, either. You'd have to fundamentally overhaul the entire concept of Weapon Attachments, like make it a series of Proving Ground Projects that provide permanent upgrades to individual weapon categories to really make a permanent concept work. (Which could've been interesting, mind, but my point is it would be a VERY different system, not a nearly-pure improvement on the current system)

      War of the Chosen introducing Fatigue does mean you cycle out soldiers, but the only part of it that's significant to the squad upgrade mechanic mattering more is the vastly greater likelihood that at some point you'll end up fielding a lopsided force from Fatigue mismanagement. (eg you're down to the dregs, and so end up fielding 4 Specialists because that happens to be the class makeup of your neglected set of troops) Like, yes, if there weren't Weapon Attachments and there weren't unique weapons you'd get to skip some busywork in equipping soldiers, but honestly that's a commentary on the fact that XCOM 2 was designed under the idea of barely any change in the squad over time, and War of the Chosen building atop that engine in an obviously rushed way: I'm quite certain that if XCOM 3 brings back Fatigue or something similar that the game will release with better squad automation, like how Long War 1 strips soldiers who are Fatigued but remembers what they had and tries to re-equip them once they're ready for duty again, in the same way that base XCOM 2 fixed a bunch of UI/squad management issues from the prior game.

      So to be clear, when I say I'd rather see a return to individual purchases and maybe randomized loot or something, I don't mean a return to Enemy Unknown's inventory management issues, but rather that said preference is under the assumption that the busywork problems would be handled by better squad automation systems. There's really no design reason for War of the Chosen to not have soldiers stripped of gear by default and auto-assigned best guesses the instant they pop into the mission prep screen; that right there would clean up a lot of the busywork of having to constantly shuffle the Katana from one Ranger to another.

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