XCOM 2 Mission Analysis: Supply Raids

Supply Raids are the last of the standard, occurs-at-a-fixed-clip mission sets, and are the rarest, only occurring every other month. The first one also specifically occurs in your run's second month, not its first, so they're also consistently introduced to the player last out of these standard mission types. They can actually also be spawned by Rumors, but the Rumors in question are forbidden from generating initially -you can't start seeing them until sometime after your first Supply Raid generates anyway.

As with any cyclical mission type, skipping them is ill-advised, as you'll lose contact with the region they generated in if you do so. This is... pretty strange on a narrative level, and incredibly frustrating if you generate one via Rumor and then end up with a deeply problematic Sitrep on it, but to be fair I'm not entirely sure what punishment would make more sense.

In any event, this is also the final standard mission type in which you loot bodies, and more importantly Supply Raids are the primary way the game doles out Alien Alloys and Elerium Crystals: there's other ways to get each resource, but Supply Raids provide increasingly large quantities to keep up with your needs, never run out (Unlike Avenger Excavations), and are pretty predictable. (As opposed to Hacking, which can provide Alien Alloys, but you can't count on it happening, and it can't provide Elerium Crystals) The Black Market is your only other sustainable, reliable source of each, and relying on it for such is fairly Intel-hungry. (And also isn't even an option initially, and furthermore you still have to wait for the month to roll over if a given purchase isn't enough to cover your needs)

This has the result that you can pretty clearly connect your technological advancement to how many months have passed: you generally can't make the jump to magnetic weaponry until late in the second month even though you can complete the Magnetic Weapons Research sooner than that, you usually can't even start on unlocking second-tier armors because Plated Armor requires Alien Alloys to initiate, and once you've run through the Alien Alloys from your first Supply Raid any second-tier gear you didn't buy may have to wait until the fourth month. (Though not necessarily, depending on the Avenger's layout of Alien Machinery rooms, among other random elements) Similarly, even if you aggressively unlock third-tier gear in Research terms, you'll tend to have to wait on some of your purchases.

I actually do like this relatively clean need to husband your materials some. The prior game suffered some from the fact that attacking UFOs was a pretty constant thing, resulting in a pretty continuous stream of Alien Alloys and Elerium. It made expenditures of these ostensibly-valuable resources somewhat mindless, where you might as well buy things as you can because even if you're close to unlocking something important you're unlikely to be meaningfully limited in your purchasing power. I wish Supply Raids operating on a rigid schedule wasn't so narratively absurd, but this is nice for the game design, making it clearer when hard decisions are happening, not to mention making it clearer what you're choosing. ("If I upgrade my Pistols, I won't have enough Alien Alloys to get Predator Armor for two months. Yikes, not worth it")

Anyway, an easily-overlooked quality of Supply Raids is that they're also pretty consistent about including PCSes, Weapon Attachments, and Elerium Cores. Not many of them, and they're competing for 'slots' with each other (One Supply Raid might give you three Elerium Cores and no PCS and no Weapon Attachment, while another provides one of each), but still, if you're doing the Supply Raids perfectly you'll consistently get some of each of these even if you are consistently failing to pick up timed loot. Timed loot is generally a better source of these, mind -I honestly tend to forget Supply Raids include these- but hey. If nothing else, it means that you don't necessarily need to set aside Elerium Cores for a SPARK: a Supply Raid may provide a couple of those in addition to the other resources you need for the SPARK. (But don't count on it)

Oh, and of course Supply Raids provide a decent chunk of Supplies. The amount isn't as significant as you might expect -a Supply Raid might provide 200 Supplies while a Guerrilla Op in the same month provides 130- but it does mean you don't necessarily need to set aside Supplies while waiting for a Supply Raid to happen. (That is, if you're waiting on a Supply Raid to let you finally purchase Predator Armor because you're out of Alien Alloys, you don't need to set aside a full 250 Supplies to be able to buy it the second the Supply Raid is done)

War of the Chosen adds the potential for Sitreps, and does so in a strange way -as of War of the Chosen, there's five types of Supply Raid, and three of them are guaranteed to have a Sitrep, while the other two are actually exempt from the Sitrep system. (Though one of them doesn't look like it is) I'm surprised they didn't use the first Supply Raid to educate you on the Sitrep system -using your first Supply Raid would usually only slightly restrict that initial mission's options, as one Supply Raid variant is very non-standard and usually impossible that early anyway, so usually only one possibility would be getting artificially excluded. (Unlike what they actually did of using VIP missions as the introduction, where it excludes six of eight mission types)

To delve further into this requires covering individual cases more concretely, though, so on to that we go.

Raid the ADVENT Convoy

The first of the three Supply Raid types that force Sitreps in War of the Chosen, and very alike to its two peers in other ways, so much so I wouldn't be at all surprised if most players don't realize they are separate mission types.

First of all, all three of these use the Wilderness plot type, with all four biomes possible in War of the Chosen. So no civilians, for one.

Second, these three missions have zero time pressure. There's a caveat I'll get to in a minute, but there's no hard timer and there's no soft time pressure.

Third, these missions don't do reinforcements. Which is narratively quite strange, actually, but I'll get into that later. Point is, you don't have to worry about anything dropping in. Since there's no security towers, you can't even call in reinforcements via a failed Hack.

Fourth, victory is always achieved by killing everything on the map. (Except Turrets, of course; that's optional, as always)

Fifth is the major wrinkle that sets these apart: all those rewards I talked about? In these three Supply Raids, you can miss out on the full payout through mid-mission actions. They're tied to crates scattered across the map, where those crates being destroyed will cost you some portion of the Supplies/Alien Alloys/Elerium Crystals/PCSes/Weapon Attachments/Elerium Cores you're 'owed'. I'm pretty sure if you blew up all the crates you'd actually get no reward at all, though I've never actually tested that.

This aspect is actually communicated to the player by the game, but... not very well. There's actually two kinds of crates that litter these maps: decorative crates you don't care about, and crates set in a cage of gold filigree that you do care about. The image at the top of this post -which is the Supply Raid mission icon- is depicting the gold-filigreed crates you do care about. (Though not the correct color, by virtue of depicting them being amid fire)

Not helping is that both kinds of crates get used as decoration in other missions and in those missions you don't care about the distinction: the Blacksite is littered with the things, for example, but in that mission blowing up the ones in gold cages is the same thing as blowing up the ones that aren't caged. (In its case: no different from smashing any other terrain element)

Anyway, since you don't want to destroy these crates, there are a few major implications unusual to these missions: first of all, you shouldn't default to blowing up Cover with explosives. If the Cover is a gold crate, you're giving yourself tactical advantage at strategic cost. Notably, you're not even making an informed choice: as far as I'm aware, there is absolutely no way to know ahead of time what you're blowing up, and thus no ability to decide blowing up a Basic Focus PCS for tactical advantage is fine while blowing up an Elerium Core is not fine.

Second, you should be reluctant to risk inaccurate shots. In most missions, a missed shot is at worst a waste of ammo, and if you're lucky might actually destroy the target's Cover, making it easier for other soldiers to kill the target. In a Supply Raid, a missed shot can easily destroy a crate directly, or start a fire that goes on to destroy one or more crates. Better to try other tools.

Third, Incendiary Grenades, Flamethrowers, and Hellfire Projectors are spectacularly dubious tools, because once a fire starts there's not really anything you can do to prevent it from crawling to a crate and destroying it. (Just one more way the Flamethrower and Hellfire Projector are bad...) Other explosives (As well as the Shredder Gun, Shredstorm Cannon, and Plasma Blaster) can be aimed away from crates and they generally won't cause unexpected havoc. Notably, all three of these Supply Raid variants tend to be designed so the fighting concentrates near the supply crates: an Incendiary Grenade is more or less safe to toss at an enemy 20+ tiles away from all crates (Fires can't crawl forever), but there's no guarantee you'll get such an opportunity.

Fourth, if you're using a SPARK and have taken Wrecking Ball, be very careful about moving them in Overdrive! Even when it looks like they'll path around a crate, often the game's actual internal logic will have them clip through it and destroy the whole thing. Supply Raids are in fact a fair argument for not taking Wrecking Ball at all, so you don't have to deal with this headache.

Fifth, your enemy priorities are skewed very differently from other missions. Stun Lancers are actually a relief to encounter, because their obsession with meleeing your people means they will virtually never break a crate if they get a turn. (Their Stun Rod can't break crates directly) Broadly, the more prone an enemy is to terrain destruction, the more you hate to see it in these Supply Raids: the Wall Smash trio are still top priorities (And incredibly aggravating for their tendency to smash supplies while inactive with essentially nothing you can do to prevent it: shut up, Bradford, my people don't need to 'watch their fire', they haven't even broken Concealment yet!), Mecs and Heavy Mecs are priority targets because Micromissiles are incredibly destructive to terrain, Purifiers are hugely irritating since they spread fires and explode on death... Stun Lancers, Codices, Spectres, Priests, Vipers, and Shieldbearers are all great to see because they disdain their rifles and their special abilities can't damage terrain. If you get Savage, Berserkers and Chryssalids are also positives, as they can't break terrain at all. (You'd think Berserkers could -the EU/EW Berserkers could and were smaller- but no)

Special mention to Archons and Faceless: Faceless are technically able to smash terrain, but really easy to manipulate into not smashing crates, so you probably have no one but yourself to blame if they do break a crate. Archons, meanwhile, are actually arguably your number one priority for not letting get a turn, as Blazing Pinions can easily smash half the map's crates in one use. Fortunately, Frenzy means you can often get away with just injuring them -their melee attack can't damage terrain- but if you're used to putting off an Archon for a turn because you can just dodge Blazing Pinions, do not do that in a Supply Raid. Their ability to devastate your income in these missions has no equal: a Gatekeeper or Sectopod might do worse over the course of a mission by passing through and exploding near crates, but it's just about impossible for them to do more in a single turn. (Or more precisely, their AI makes it almost impossible: a player-controlled Sectopod could deliberately path for maximum destruction, but the AI won't do that)

By a similar token, the Archon King is horrible to get on a Supply Raid, as he can use Devastate to devastate your income from the mission, where even if no soldier is hurt by his Devastate usage you can still find yourself unable to make purchases you were expecting to be able to make.

Mercifully, the Chosen are actually pretty unlikely to wreck your supplies. The Assassin can't destroy crates unless she both remembers the Arashi exists and misses the shot (I'm sure somebody has had this happen to them, but I've never had it happen in over a thousand hours of playing WotC: it's not an expected event), the Hunter is admittedly fond of firing his rifle but his special actions can't damage terrain (Even Tracking Shot isn't a concern: if the target stays in range, it hits and thus can't randomly destroy terrain, while if they leave its zone he just doesn't fire), and once you're in reach of the Warlock he, like the Assassin, has to remember his gun exists and then miss, which is a rarity.

Mind, before you reach the Warlock him spamming Spectral Zombies can be a concern, but even this can be managed: stay away from the crate zone until you meet him, and don't use Overwatch to catch the Spectral Zombies, and it's basically guaranteed they won't lead to crates being destroyed. As there's no time pressure, this is very doable... albeit it turns a bit lose/lose once the Wall Smashers are about. On the plus side, the Wall Smashers don't show up until you're late enough it's generally not a big problem to be missing out on Supply Raid resources: it's mainly the first two Supply Raids where enough stuff being smashed can doom your run.

Also, something to keep in mind is that the mission does end the very instant every non-Turret enemy is dead, and thus you can in fact prevent oncoming crate destruction with extra aggression in some cases. A Blazing Pinions going off can be prevented by finishing the mission before the next enemy turn, as the biggest example: the game won't do the realistic thing and have it hit before ceasing to model the mission.

Anyway, that's the generalities common to this and the following two missions. As for Raid The ADVENT Convoy itself...

... it's very much my least-favorite of these three.

'Convoy', in this case, means a loose collection of vehicles on a road, with crates scattered on and about these vehicles. So right away this variant adds the additional issue that many of your valuable supplies are sitting atop or adjacent to bombs doing a poor job of pretending to be motorized transportation. This makes the consequences of inadequate diligence able to spike to much larger than in the other variants, where a single missed shot or fire destroys multiple crates by virtue of detonating a vehicle. Special mention goes to the long flatbed trucks that occur more or less exclusively in this exact mission type: these can sometimes have 4+ crates sitting on the flatbed portion, and if the head of the vehicle explodes this will inexplicably destroy every crate sitting on the flatbed.

Even by the Firaxis XCOM standards of cars being Exploding Car Mimics, this is utterly insane nonsense and I'm baffled it was allowed to happen. It's especially bizarre because the actual damaging portion of the explosion is restricted to around the vehicle at the front: troops taking cover against these suddenly-gone crates won't actually take damage from the explosion!

Anyway...

Raid The ADVENT Convoy is another Corridor: The Map sort of mission. Your squad will start at one end of the map, which is one end of the convoy, and work its way to nearly the other side of the map, where the other end of the convoy is. That other end is the objective zone: it's where Alien Rulers, Chosen, Sectopods, and Gatekeepers will start by default. If you choose to stick inside the convoy, you'll find that your best Cover tends to be up against dynamite piles trucks, making this mission the absolute closest XCOM 2 comes to one of EU/EW's horrible highway maps. Fortunately, you can just wander off to the sides, and that's what I personally recommend doing: among other points, often one side is a stretch of high ground running alongside most of the convoy, so that's high ground you can leverage against the enemy. High ground that isn't littered with explosives, at that. Taking the high ground will also sometimes bait a pod into patrolling its way up there with you: twice the not-dealing-with-exploding-cars fun!

Outside the ongoing Car Bombs Are Bad, Please Don't Do This In XCOM 3 point, though, there's not actually a ton to say about this mission type as far as gameplay. It's straightforward, if annoying to actually do given the greater punishment for insufficient vigilance about crate destruction hazards.

It's another mission Reapers are great for, I guess? It's also one of the better opportunities for sniping Sharpshooters to shine: no time pressure, and high ground, though not guaranteed, is reasonably common, while the map's firing lines tend to be pretty clear if you can get the high ground. It can even be okay to Grapple up atop a truck, so long as no enemies are near.

Narratively, this is a mission type I have mixed feelings about.

The actual concept presented to you -and often supported by how the map is constructed, with the map often starting with battle damage- is that the broader resistance attacked the convoy and then called X-COM in to... clean up, I guess?

On the one hand, I do like the attempt to show the broader resistance is actually doing things and not just waiting for X-COM to save them. It bothers me how normalized it is for narratives -not just game narratives, but perhaps especially them- to present things as if the protagonist (Whether the protagonist is a single person, or a small team, or a larger organization) is literally alone in doing anything productive: many game (And non-game...) narratives end up presenting a world in which the protagonist(s) seems to be the only entity trying to do anything to Save The World (Or whatever), and only rarely does this feel appropriate to the narrative.

On the other hand, this exact example is genuinely just confusing. Armed resistance forces hit an armed ADVENT convoy, did enough damage to stop the convoy in its tracks, and then... what, fell back when there was too much resistance and then called in X-COM to finish the job for them? There's a lot of issues here. Right away is the point that fully successful raids on convoys never happen: you'll never have the Spokesman phone you up to let you know the resistance performed a very successful raid and wants to share the bounty with X-COM.

Then there's the issue of the ADVENT response: if the raid did do meaningful damage to the convoy's guards, I'd expect them to call for backup. XCOM 2 is premised under you being the guerrilla fighters: it's okay for you to strike where ADVENT is weak and win, but realistically the convoy should shortly be an infeasible target. Crucially, this makes the aspect of making off with all the supplies you don't blow up hard to swallow: if I imagine the Avenger got here first is all, there should still be heavy reinforcements on the way, so heavy your squad will need to book it before they can load everything on the Skyranger.

This also calls attention to things like the lack of ADVENT combat vehicles. To be fair, the evidence is the devs intended there to be ADVENT vehicles and it got dropped before release due to being in an incomplete state, but my actual point is that it's pretty weird how lightly-guarded these convoys are in general. Among other points, it's a recurring idea in XCOM 2 that ADVENT doesn't try to hide their full military capability when not needing to worry about civilians getting worried about how well-armed their police state utopia is, and the most sensible explanation for these convoys -where their particular use of the Wilderness plot type implies they're in the middle of nowhere- is that they're carrying critical supplies to off-the-books facilities like the Blacksite. I'd expect a very heavy armed escort for such, no pretenses of being 'peacekeepers'... and instead we get ADVENT cop cars mixed in. Huh?

It doesn't help any that there's multiple Rumors that are pretty much literally this Supply Raid variant in concept, but those aren't actual missions because?...

Fortunately, the next two Supply Raid variants aren't nearly such big narrative strains.

Though all of these do also retain the issue of 'why aren't we using stolen ADVENT rifles?'...

Raid The ADVENT Train

It's the convoy variant, but with a train instead of a bunch of cars.

This alone does a lot to improve things, as the supply crates aren't strongly prone to being beside armed bombs passing themselves off as cars or trucks. It still happens, mind, as Raid The ADVENT Train tends to have a few forklifts about and it's not unusual for crates to be adjacent to them, but it's not a constant issue hanging over the entire mission the way it is with the convoy variant.

There's a temptation to compare this to the Guerrilla Ops that are train missions and leave it at that, but the map actually tends to be quite different -not just in the sense that the Wilderness plot type gives different surrounding terrain than the Small Town and Slum plot types, but also in the sense that the train itself tends to have a different makeup. Raid The ADVENT Train still includes what I think of as the 'standard' ADVENT train car, but it almost never makes up every non-engine car the way the Guerrilla Op variants are prone to: the back portion is usually at least two cars of flat segments with crates piled on and around them, and sometimes no standard train car exists on the map at all.

Among other points, this means it's much less consistent about dividing the map into distinct halves than the Guerilla Op train maps; it can happen, as for one thing the game is perfectly happy to have you start from the front of the train instead of the back and the front train car is always the engine car, but you can easily start by the train's rear car and be dealing with a pretty open map for most or all of the fighting.

Similarly, there's a train car that shows up rarely that can be shot and explodes in a massive area if destroyed (Note that the game won't let you target it unless an enemy has ever been in its blast radius while your squad had sight on the train car; this is standard with environmental explosives the game lets you directly target. It's also weird in details, as your squad doesn't need to see the enemies that would get caught in the explosive, allowing you to know roughly where an unseen pod is via UI spoilers, whoops!), and I'm not sure I've ever seen it in this mission; it's at minimum even rarer than in the Guerrilla Op variants, where it's already a rare sight. (It should be noted this exploding train car is prone to having pods patrol up onto it and then at least one of them decide to stand on it after the pod activates, as it's actually a nice little chunk of defensible high ground for some reason, its outer edges ringed by Low Cover: if you don't mind risking blowing up timed loot, this is pretty abusable)

Turrets are also noticeably less common than in the Guerrilla Ops with trains, as generally only a small portion of the train in this mission is any of the train car variants with sockets atop them: it's not unusual for you to see no Turrets except atop the engine, and sometimes no Turrets generate at all.

Anyway, you still shouldn't be too aggressive with explosives, be more reluctant to take shots liable to miss, etc, but if you slip up the costs are generally lower than with the convoy variant, and it's less likely to go wrong in the first place. (Because eg a missed shot generally has to hit a crate directly, instead of being able to destroy a crate by hitting the much larger target of an adjacent truck, which then explodes and takes out the crate) Even a Wall Smasher wandering in the darkness is much less likely to break crates -the Wall Smashers tend to be around or a bit past the opposite end of the train, and if you started by the rear car this means no crates nearby the pod, as the engine doesn't get crates around it.

It even holds up much better narratively!

The narrative is still that the resistance has created an opportunity for you, but in this case the implicit story is that the resistance did some act of sabotage that forced the train to stop but never attacked the train itself: a common sight if you start by the engine is for the tracks just in front of the engine to have a hole punched in them, the ground torn up, and the supplies being scattered around is clearly meant to be something like the train came to rapid stop and supplies got thrown off as a result. The implicit story is that you're arriving in the middle of ADVENT getting the supplies loaded back aboard the train, performing probably-temporary repairs to get the train going again, with some troops being vigilant in case an actual attack is going to follow up but not necessarily particularly expecting such an attack.

This is basically perfect for creating a situation in which X-COM can swoop in on a target that has armed defenders but only relatively light protection, and where it's believable ADVENT isn't already sending reinforcements or going to have a hair-trigger response to an attack -I can totally imagine a lightning strike preventing the ADVENT troops from getting to the appropriate part of the train to let the broader ADVENT forces know trouble is here. This in turn makes it a lot more plausible for X-COM to actually load up all the crates with relatively low time pressure, as it would genuinely take a bit for the broader ADVENT government to get sufficiently suspicious to check in more directly.

It gets a little strange late in a run, when you've got Sectopods ad Gatekeepers escorting the train -where were they loaded, exactly?- but I'm able to easily overlook that. It'd be nice if the trains were larger or something to make this more readily sensible, but the progression of your enemies has plenty of narrative strangeness attached if you try to take it too literally, and it's good for the gameplay: I'm fine with that.

By far my favorite Supply Raid type, both in narrative and in gameplay.

Raid the ADVENT Troop Transport

If the image didn't clue you in, the 'troop transport' being identified in the name is specifically the aerial vehicle that drops off reinforcements throughout XCOM 2, and not a ground-bound APC or the like. As such, even though the name might lead one to believe this is going to be just another convoy mission, it's actually pretty different!

First of all, the map is actually square, instead of the corridor design the convoy and train variants use. You generally start in a corner and are intended to advance to the opposite corner, but enemy pod placement is more unpredictable than the other variants: advancing straight to the opposite corner can result in you successfully ambushing one pod and then having another patrol in from one of your flanks. I don't really consider a Reaper high-value for this mission, but they're certainly higher value than in the prior two Supply Raid types.

Second, instead of (relevant) crates being strewn here and there across a sizable chunk of the map, they're concentrated in a fairly specific part: the landing area for the transports, fenced and monitored by ADVENT watchtowers. (Too bad enemies have no concept that these watchtowers are useful locations to fight from...) Among other points, this makes explosives and fire much more binary: if you're fighting in the landing area, don't use either at all if you can avoid it (Too many crates too close together: careless use can do a lot of damage to your payoff very fast), but feel free to use them liberally if you're fighting a pod far away from that area. By a similar token, mid-to-low-odds shots are okay to take if they're not aimed in the direction of the landing area -which you'll be able to tell whether they are or not since considering a shot gives you an over-the-shoulder view, and XCOM 2's fog of war doesn't actually hide even far-off terrain when doing this. (Not that it hides it very well even in your default bird's-eye view, mind...)

Third, this is the only base-game Supply Raid that can have entire ADVENT buildings on the map: there's usually one adjoining the landing area. Oddly, no supply crates are ever in this building, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a pod in or on it, but Turrets are a regular sight and you can potentially use it for high ground advantage yourself, so it still matters to some extent.

Something I find funny is that this Supply Raid is nonetheless the one you generally spend the most time in open wilderness. The other Supply Raids are designed so you're right on top of ADVENT stuff and have little reason to stray particularly far from it. Here, though, you can easily have two -or three, once four pods are a thing- fights occur out in the wild portion of the map.

Unsurprisingly, the landing area is where the objective zone is placed: that's where Alien Rulers, Sectopods, and Gatekeepers will tend to lurk, as well as where the Chosen will initially spawn in. This is... pretty unfortunate, since it means this is the Supply Raid where Sectopods and Gatekeepers are most prone to smashing crates before you even have a chance to see them, and similarly if the Archon King jumps you when you get this Supply Raid variant he's liable to punch a great big hole in your intake with his first Devastate if you aren't careful to pull him away from the landing area. (Which is not something you can reliably, easily do) They do all at least take a while to show up, but the Archon King shows up earliest while being the biggest threat to your resources: one more reason why Integrated DLC really should be your default.

In spite of its issues late in a run, I do actually enjoy this Supply Raid a fair amount. I think the train variant is better-designed overall, but this is a nice change of pace. Among other points, it's surprisingly rare for Wilderness maps to have you spend much time fighting in... you know... wilderness. So right there it tends to be an unusual experience.

Narratively, this is probably the least clear of the Supply Raids. What's happening here is basically entirely implied -there's no dialogue to explain what's going on here. Some elements are obvious enough to not really require an explanation -this is clearly some manner of ADVENT outpost, probably specifically to service ADVENT aerial transports- but what's going on that this is supposed to be an adequately vulnerable, adequately valuable place? Nothing is said. Is ADVENT in the middle of ferrying a bunch of supplies somewhere, with this being a refueling point on the way to their actual destination? Do these isolated mini-airfields just habitually carry a bunch of supplies so the place can survive for weeks without resupply? (If so, are we hitting just as they're dropping off the next few weeks' supplies?)

It's not like it's a narrative with contradictions or holes, but that's because there's not enough information, period. It's pretty weird for XCOM 2.

I certainly like the idea of touching on some of the unusual logistics of a technologically-advanced regime: ADVENT's aerial transports appear to be VTOL of far greater competency than anything that exists in reality, and efficient VTOL does realistically open up options like very compact mini-airfields like the ones seen in this mission. I actually wish XCOM 2 had a bit more of this kind of thing, instead of leaning so heavily on the usual scifi thing of 'future technology fits into society exactly the same way current technology does, but it looks cooler'. (Plenty of elements of City Centers go for that 'it's a modern urban city, but sleeker' approach. Holographic mannequins for advertising clothing, but not having the holograms moving or otherwise doing anything mannequins don't already do. That kind of thing)

But I am left with not a lot to say about the narrative aspects of this mission, because the pieces that set it apart from other Supply Raids are so unclear in their exact details.


Secure The Disabled UFO

Yes, Secure The Disabled UFO is a Supply Raid variant. This is occluded in-game by it being announced differently and having a different mission icon (The above image), and then is further occluded by it operating under special rules for mission generation. Specifically, it's not allowed to generate until you've completed an Avenger Defense. (Chosen-caused variants don't count)

It's further hidden by the fact that Secure The Disabled UFO's rewards are, as far as I'm aware, not affected by anything that happens in the mission. The UFO has gold-filigree-cage crates, but Bradford won't get on your case if any of them get destroyed, and no matter how careless I am with Blaster Bombs and the like I've never had this mission's payouts be conspicuously gutted. If there is a way to win the mission with a reduced payout, I don't know what it is.

Said payout otherwise follows the same format as the other Supply Raids: a good chunk of Supplies, Alien Alloys, and Elerium Crystals, plus a random mixture of PCSes, Weapon Attachments, and Elerium Cores, where those last three compete for a limited number of 'slots'.

This is one reason why an early Avenger Defense tends to be a good thing: if you're struggling to avoid losing any loot from other types but are doing fine at winning the missions, a UFO is an assured opportunity to get 100% of the loot. This gets less significant as you get better at Supply Raids, but it's not as if it ever gets less valuable than alternative Supply Raids.

Anyway, it's worth noting that Secure The Disabled UFO will more or less always supplant the next Supply Raid once it's unlocked. I'd normally assume this was caused by the game trying to avoid repeat missions, but this happens even if you get an Avenger Defense so early it replaces your second Supply Raid. (I've never had it replace the first Supply Raid. I'm honestly not sure if that's even mechanically possible)

Past that, I think it just enters standard rotation as part of the Supply Raid pool, but Supply Raids occur sufficiently infrequently throughout a campaign I'm not 100% sure about that. I've had Secure The Disabled UFO occur twice in a given campaign, anyway... conversely, I've never had a Supply Raid-generating Rumor produce this, and suspect that's forbidden from happening. (The Rumors that can generate Supply Raids make zero narrative sense to down a UFO, for one, and for two it'd be simpler to just code them so they can't than to code them so they can but only once it's legal) I could be wrong, though: Supply Raid Rumors are sufficiently uncommon it could easily be pure chance I've never had that result.

As for the tactical gameplay, Secure The Disabled UFO does share with its fellow (Base-game: War of the Chosen's addition is a bit different) Supply Raids that it uses the Wilderness plot type, all biomes are valid, victory is achieved by killing everything on the map, and your squad starts Concealed. It's a bit weird beyond that, though, among other points not picking up Sitreps in War of the Chosen.

The big, obvious thing is that once you break squad Concealment, a 5 turn timer kicks in and an object near the center of the UFO gets marked while Bradford informs you that the UFO has sent up a distress signal and you need to stop it. This is a Hack objective, and actually completely optional: the consequence of failing it is that one whole pod of reinforcements will spawn in. That's it.

In the base game, you should at least take a look at what Hacking the distress beacon console will give in case it's offering something you really want (Maybe it's offering Enemy Protocol and you really want your Specialist taking over Sectopods), but honestly, 'failing' this objective is usually desirable: a pod of reinforcements is easy experience and another shot at more loot, after all. War of the Chosen's Fatigue system makes it more worth considering preventing it; in the base game, I default to failing this objective, while in War of the Chosen I default to succeeding at it.

This particular Hack objective has the unique distinction that destroying the console will also succeed at the objective. Normally, destroying a Hack objective is mission failure: in this one case though, it's a perfectly acceptable alternative to Hacking. The game will still ask if you're sure you want to blow it up, insisting it's a 'friendly object', but you can ignore that. If you're getting bogged down by combat, a Shredder Gun, Shredstorm Cannon, or Plasma Blaster can actually be fired from outside the UFO, right through a wall, to blow up the console. (A Blaster Launcher has the reach and pathing behavior to do this, but the game won't let you fire it into the darkness: you'd need someone able to see somewhere nearby the console)

The whole thing is interesting as another example of XCOM 2 experimenting with missions having degrees of success, where you can fail a mission partially, but this particular example isn't terrible compelling. I won't miss it if XCOM 3 fails to bring it back.

Anyway, Secure The Disabled UFO maps are pretty consistently square. As there's no time pressure to start (Unless you're laboring under the effect of High Alert), you absolutely can circle around to whichever side you like before starting the fighting. There's not much point to doing so, as the UFO is basically symmetrical as far as its outsides, no matter how you want to cut it. The inside is less symmetrical, but trying to get a look at the inside before committing to a spot to attack from is difficult: even a Reaper has pretty good odds of a pod patrolling into them if you try to scout the inside.

Still, it can be nice if the first pod you spot is somehow unappealing as your initial ambush target. (Maybe it's a group of Spectres and you actually want to take advantage of a Guardian-backed Overwatch ambush) There is also nearby terrain to consider: it's not unusual for one section of the UFO to have a cliff overlooking it, which can be nice to fight from to start.

The objective zone has the unusual quality of being placed a bit beyond the center of the UFO, relative to your squad, or just on the other side of the UFO: a 'boss routine' Sectopod or Gatekeeper will often be in sight of the distress beacon computer, whether by starting there or by patrolling right through the walls to get there. (I've occasionally seen a Gatekeeper on top of the UFO, but this is rare) The Chosen generally teleport in right on the other side of the UFO. I don't have a good sense of where Alien Rulers prefer to spawn: I've not seen them on this mission anywhere near often enough, and their willingness to patrol means that the variability in where I've encountered them doesn't necessarily mean anything as far as their initial position.

On a different enemy note, ADVENT Turrets are possible on this mission. Not on the UFO itself, oddly, but by virtue of ADVENT prefab walls and whatnot being nearby and sometimes studded with Turrets. Sometimes the placement suggests the UFO crew threw up a crude defense line in a hurry, but sometimes you'll get an ADVENT checkpoint a screen or so away from the UFO that has Turrets, as if the UFO just happened to land nearby some Turrets. It's a little weird, especially because you'll never see evidence inside a UFO of it carrying inactive Turrets or unused ADVENT infrastructure.

Terrain-wise, it should be noted that the UFO itself is a strange mix of tough-but-destructible elements and completely indestructible elements. The entirety of the roof is completely invincible, notably, which is really bizarre: XCOM 2 generally only has raised ground indestructible if there's no pathable terrain underneath it. Similarly, there are High Cover structural elements scattered throughout that are completely invincible, probably to ensure the roof is never just arbitrarily floating in the air. These are not the bits you might expect, as they're actually inside destructible chunks of the UFO. Some of the big pillars and the like that you might expect to be invincible will actually be destructible, either fully or just leaving the High Cover strip once the rest is destroyed. It's all very weird.

I'm really curious if this is a deliberate callback to the prior game -even by EU/EW's standards of terrain destructibility, the UFOs stood out for how much of them was invincible- or driven by some other issue. XCOM 2 was rushed: it's entirely possible they meant for UFOs to be more vulnerable and didn't finish making relevant art assets or whatever and so we ended up with unusually invincible UFOs. There's also the consideration of the green energy fields found on UFOs: the game dodges the issue of what to do with them if stuff is destroyed by making their anchors invincible. On the other hand, UFOs are supposed to be impressively durable: in the prior game, the first UFO you shoot down gets your support staff shocked at how intact the UFO is given it was shot at and then crash-landed, as the most explicit example.

Whatever the case, this means you shouldn't assume you can necessarily smash a given enemy's Cover when fighting inside the UFO: it might work, or they might be leaning up against one of the sections with an indestructible strip inside. The game previewing terrain destruction won't help here, as it'll highlight such a wall in orange because the outer portion is destructible, even though this is effectively a lie as far as whether your explosive will leave a given enemy vulnerable or not.

Overall, I like Secure The Disabled UFO as something of a cute callback to UFO missions from EU/EW. The UFO's weird mix of indestructible and destructible terrain -handled in a manner seen nowhere else- makes for an unfortunate learning curve issue, but once you're past that hurdle it's a straightforward enough mission, yet still different enough to be an interesting change of pace. It's not the best-designed of XCOM 2's missions, but it's solid enough.

Narratively, this mission is a bit confused. The actual mission popup describes it like it's a UFO that landed for whatever reason, was discovered by the resistance, and you need to hurry and attack it before it takes off. Once you're in the Skyranger loading screen, Bradford instead informs you that the resistance disabled the UFO -there's a funny thing here, in that XCOM 2 has a lot of its dialogue diverge slightly between the voice acting and the text, but this case in particular is very divergent. Voice Acting Bradford informs you that the resistance 'disabled' the UFO, framed so ambiguously it could mean just about anything. Text Bradford instead informs you that the resistance shot down the UFO -I call this funny because Text Bradford says "... somehow." as if he's not really sure how they did it, himself.

So right there the final product is giving you three different stories for what's happening here. They're broadly similar, yes, but the connotations of each are fairly different. A UFO being kind of randomly landed fits the actual gameplay reasonably well, and honestly there's any number of perfectly sensible explanations for why this might be happening. They could be landed to repair something that normal wear and tear got to unexpectedly, for example; that'd easily justify them landing somewhere, not doing anything in particular.

A UFO being somehow ambiguously disabled by the resistance fits less well. You can argue it explains why the UFO doesn't just take off once your squad attacks, but there's plenty of other explanations available for that (The crew could be going "It's X-COM! Catch them, kill them!" as just one example), and it's difficult to imagine how the resistance is supposed to have 'disabled' the UFO.

A UFO being shot down by the resistance is a more direct explanation, but isn't supported by gameplay -the UFO is always in mint condition- and fits poorly with the broader depictions of the resistance. In EU/EW the best jets in the world have to fire multiple times on even the smallest UFOs to knock them out of the sky, and XCOM 2 is reluctant to depict the resistance as having more than small-arms weaponry: no, resistance camps are not supposed to be defended by AA batteries capable of shooting down a UFO. (And if they were, the question of where such came from would be a significant issue)

I basically suspect the devs started from the basic idea of 'landed UFO as a mission type', and revised their exact explanation multiple times as development progressed, and then didn't catch every bit of evidence of their change in concept. I'd guess it progressed as 'shot down->disabled->landed for its own reasons' specifically, but who knows.

In any event, the distress beacon is, unfortunately, a more fundamentally strained bit in narrative terms. We're not told the UFO is, say, powering up its communication system: we're told they flipped on a distress signal, and we need to shut it off before reinforcements actually arrive. That makes zero sense: no one assumes a distress signal cutting out means everything is fine and you can abort your rescue, not unless somebody actually calls you up to say that everything is fine now and explain what happened. And even if somebody does do that, investigating a distress signal is probably still good practice: if some X-COM soldier did take it upon themselves to call up ADVENT and try to claim that everything is fine, it would probably be taken as what it is: an enemy combatant lying.

With the explanation we're given, you really shouldn't be able to prevent the reinforcements at all, or more accurately shouldn't be able to do so except by destroying the console before the timer appears.

Similarly, not only is it gameplay-underwhelming for the distress beacon to draw exactly one pod of reinforcements, but it's narratively pretty bizarre as well. If a UFO is as valuable as the game implies, you'd really expect a disproportionate retribution -twenty pods of reinforcements arriving at once, time for X-COM to run.

By a similar token, this being a Supply Raid variant is... pretty weird from a narrative perspective. In EU/EW, you're an organization backed by much of the world with all that entails: when you down a UFO and get a ton of materials out of it, this is an abstracted representation of teams being sent in to secure the area and disassemble the UFO over, realistically speaking, probably weeks or months, with the materials funneled to the X-COM Project. In XCOM 2, you... don't have that kind of backing. There's crates in the UFO, mind, which is probably meant to be what you're grabbing, but part of my point is that the expected retribution, the fact that XCOM 2 implicitly positions thing as 'your squad shoves the loot into the Skyranger', etc, makes it pretty difficult to believe you can make off with so much loot without ADVENT swarming in to stop you.

Alternatively, if they do just give up on the UFO as a lost cause... um... why aren't we trying to take it for ourselves?

The real answer is 'XCOM 2 never had any intention of that kind of gameplay', of course, but my point is this is a cool mission type to play but much harder to accept as making sense when you look at it from an in-universe perspective.

... still less strained than the convoy Supply Raid, though.


Extract ADVENT Supplies

The one and only Supply Raid variant added by War of the Chosen, Extract ADVENT Supplies is noticeably different and fairly weird.

First of all, it should be immediately noted this is almost like two different missions, as it not only uses the usual Wilderness plot type but can also use the Abandoned City plot type, and the two are quite different in practice.

The Wilderness variant is a fairly rigid map -the loading screen image above shows a sizable fraction of the map, with the main bit of significance that's not visible being a train that's always present. Even by War of the Chosen's standards, this is shockingly limited map variety. The crates still have partially-randomized placement, as do enemies, but still. Curiously, it's another biome-using mission that can't use the Xenoform biome, even though every other Wilderness-using mission in the game is allowed to use the Xenoform biome. (And this can use the other Biomes just fine: the map is very rigid, but it still leverages XCOM 2's procedural generation some) For extra weird...

... there's a loading screen in the files depicting a Xenoform variant! Given most loading screen images seem to be in-engine screenshots, that's... pretty confusing. And too bad, as the Xenoform variant looks pretty cool!

The Abandoned City variant is much more variable. You'll still have a certain amount of 'I recognize this' if you play more than a handful of runs, but it's not literally one map the way the Wilderness variant is.

As usual, the Abandoned City variant forces the presence of Lost, and indeed you'll normally be able to predict which plot type you're getting based on whether the game informs you of Lost presence or not. Since this mission doesn't use real Sitrep rolling, it's only if you have the Lost World Dark Event active that Lost being announced doesn't unambiguously inform you that it's Abandoned City.

Note that while I say these two variants are basically two different missions entirely, the game internally considers them one mission type, and this matters because of the mission pool cycling. If you get a Wilderness Extract ADVENT Supplies as your first Supply Raid, you're not going to be seeing an Abandoned City version for at least seven months, unless you generate one or more Supply Raids via Rumor. And it'll be longer if you trigger the Avenger Defense before that point, which you probably will. Indeed, most runs will only ever see one of the two versions of this mission, given how slow Supply Raids are to cycle through their pool.

Anyway, as far as Extract ADVENT Supplies goes, broadly it's comparable to the first three Supply Raid types in that you have a maximum amount of goods to collect that can be lowered by things like being careless about destroying the environment... but with radically different details and a much better core idea, if more obviously choppy execution.

Where the crates in the base-game Supply Raids are non-obvious (Even once you know the gold filigree marks them out, it's still easy to mix up which crates are relevant...), in this mission they're much more visually distinct and are marked directly by UI elements. This alone is a huge improvement, even before considering that the game will give you friendly-fire warnings for these crates. (Which it does not do for the crates in the base-game Supply Raids, annoyingly)

This is nice, but also pretty clearly driven by Extract ADVENT Supplies having a more dynamic, interactive approach to the crates. Instead of the entire dynamic being 'you loot anything that doesn't get destroyed in the chaos of combat', instead you need to get soldiers adjacent to crates to mark them (conceptually, this is so the Skyranger can pick them up) and the following turn they'll be grabbed. You do still automatically pick up any crates on the map the instant every enemy is dead, mind, but this marking still matters...

... because ADVENT is also marking crates for pickup, and any crate they pick up is lost to you permanently.

ADVENT's crate-marking is a lot more game-y than your crate-marking. First of all, they don't start marking crates until you break squad Concealment. There's no narrative justification for this, but it's nice from a gameplay perspective, since it means you're not pressured to rush hugely to start. Do note that marking a crate automatically breaks Concealment, even if a Reaper is the one doing the marking: you can't sneakily mark all the crates before initiating combat to cheese the mission.

Second, ADVENT's crate-marking is completely disconnected from their forces, and in fact is more connected to your forces: every other turn, starting from the first enemy turn after your squad Concealment is lost, two crates will be chosen at random to mark themselves. Crates you've already marked can't be marked by ADVENT, and the game endeavors to pick crates within your squad's vicinity: unless there's no crates nearby your soldiers, the game pretty consistently endeavors to only mark crates that are within at least one soldier's ability to reach, if only through a Dash. As marking a crate is a free action that can be done even when out of action points, a Dash actually is adequate for reaching such a crate -and the marking priority extends to your soldiers being able to mark crates ADVENT has already marked to overrule their mark.

Altogether, this has some slightly-strange incentives. First of all, when you're at the step where ADVENT will mark crates once your turn ends, you should generally actually avoid marking crates but still try to have people end their turn adjacent to crates, as every once in a while the game will mark crates your soldiers are standing next to, and thus you'll get to immediately cancel ADVENT's mark 'for free', where if you'd marked the crate beforehand you'd probably have to expend actual soldier effort on reaching the marked crate(s), risking activating pods prematurely and/or potentially having to choose between a soldier marking a distant crate or contributing to an ongoing fight. (Reminder: you can manually end turn by pressing the X in the upper right of the screen. You'll need to do so to be able to perform this trick) Among other points, the game pushes you to a specific crate to start (It gets an objective icon even in the fog), and you should not do the natural thing of immediately marking that crate -it's disproportionately prone to being marked first by ADVENT if you haven't marked it yourself, and therefore you can ease the time pressure fairly consistently by not marking it first thing.

The exact timing for pickup is, for both your marks and enemy marks, the start of the turn after the turn in which the crate was marked, which is to say crates you mark vanish at the start of your next turn while crates marked by the enemy vanish at the start of their next turn. This subtly favors the player due to the 'directionality' of mark-overruling -an enemy might take cover against a crate you marked, only for it to vanish at the start of your turn, leaving them in the open. The same can't happen to you, because if you're using an enemy crate as Cover you can just mark it, and there's no reason to skip doing so.

A further wrinkle is that crates come in two types: black crates, and golden crates. The majority of the crates will be black, but a few will be gold: these gold crates are valuable and are directly tied to the 'slots' I keep alluding to for PCS/Weapon Attachment/Elerium Core rewards, where if you fail to collect any golden crates you'll get no PCSes, Weapon Attachments, or Elerium Cores after the mission. The game doesn't actually tell you that golden crates are significant, which is a little unfortunate, but it's easy enough to guess. So if you see a golden crate marked in the distance -they're thankfully very visually different even when out of sight per se- it's more worth going out of your way for than a black crate getting marked while being inconvenient for your squad to reach.

Altogether, this is a huge improvement in concept over the base-game Supply Raid variants, and if XCOM 3 has anything remotely Supply Raid-like I very much hope Extract ADVENT Supplies acts as the foundation for such.

That said, for War of the Chosen itself it's a bit awkward. The game doesn't do a good job of tutorialing the player on it -even with the Tutorial or Lost And Abandoned enabled, you don't get an in-depth explanation- and so the majority of players almost certainly have a rougher time with it than with the base-game Supply Raids, even if they, say, had never touched an XCOM game before, went straight to War of the Chosen, and got Extract ADVENT Supplies as their first Supply Raid: if you don't know the framework it's operating in, it's really easy to just end up with half your supplies taken from you, where the base-game Supply Raids usually require a player flagrantly disregard Bradford telling you to be careful after one crate is destroyed to lose anywhere near that much. (Usually. I hate the huge flatbed truck so much...)

Critically, while War of the Chosen has re-tuned a lot of stuff (Mostly indirectly, but not all of it), Supply Raid payouts and what you spend them on are one of those cases that hasn't actually changed a ton, which is to say that the base game and War of the Chosen are tuned around the expectation that you get 100% of Supply Raid loot, or at worst only get, like, 90%. Not 50%. A learning player who gets Extract ADVENT Supplies as their first Supply Raid can end up seriously screwed by the learning curve here, which is pretty unfortunate. If XCOM 3 brings this back, it would need to explain it a lot more clearly, or overhaul it so explanation is less important, or adjust the strategic tuning so that a player missing out on a lot of their Supply Raid income isn't so devastating a problem. (If only on lower difficulties)

Still, now that I have a good handle on it, I like it a lot more than the base-game variants. It's objectively harder, but not by as much as it can feel to a learning player, and it's far more engaging than the base-game Supply Raids. It also generally feels a lot 'fairer' when you do miss out on supplies -I'm always infuriated when, in the base-game variants, Bradford scolds my squad, because 90% of the time the crate destruction that triggered the dialogue had nothing to do with throwing around firepower carelessly. It'll be a Wall Smasher patrolling into a crate in the shadows, or an enemy missing its shot and smashing a crate, or a fire started by a safe-enough missed shot creeping to a crate (Or explosive environmental object...) and destroying it, or otherwise something dubious to be presenting as my (squad's) fault. 

Whereas with Extract ADVENT Supplies, I can pretty reliably get 100% of the crates if I'm not just careless, and in particular anything worse than one or two crates being lost is pretty clearly me somehow failing to prepare for the mission properly or failing to manage the combat properly or an intersection of the two.

(Caveat: Beta Strike makes Extract ADVENT Supplies noticeably more luck-based, since it's so much harder to prevent pods from doing things. It's still primarily skill-based, but there's a lot more potential for you to play essentially perfectly but end up with someone KOed by a Stun Lancer anyway and the knock-off effects of that unavoidably lead to you missing out on 3 or more crates, that kind of thing)

So, as occurs a decent amount with War of the Chosen content: I like it better than base-game equivalents, but yikes that initial learning curve.

Note that a Reaper is great for helping you get a handle on this mission in relative peace, even though having them personally mark crates is less than ideal. Just don't have their scouting separate them too much from the rest of the squad, though, as you'll be giving the game the option to mark crates only your Reaper can reach -potentially two such crates in one turn, which is generally flatout impossible to grab at that point!

Anyway, I even like this mission more from a narrative perspective than the base-game Supply Raids! It's slightly unfortunate that you're expected to kill everything on the map in this 'get in, get stuff, get out' mission -but even then, it's actually optional! If you mark crates, let them get picked up, and then Evac the squad you'll still get the crate loot! You should still endeavor to kill every enemy so you can loot their bodies, not to mention get the kill experience, but this is a nice step in the right direction.

The exact mechanics are silly, and the implied stories raise some questions (Why are there ADVENT supplies being airlifted out of an Old World city swarming with Lost?), but the basic idea of X-COM opportunistically jumping in to collect some poorly-guarded supplies is fine, and it's nice to see the ADVENT aerial troop transports doing something other than ferrying in reinforcements. (The first time a crate marked by ADVENT gets picked up, you'll get the 'reinforcements flying in' type of cinema, but minus troops hopping off the aircraft, transitioning into a claw popping out of the sky to grab the crate) Notably, this is consistent with the presentation of Raid The ADVENT Troop Transport, where we get lots of such transports on the ground in a landing zone, surrounded by supply crates, only instead of just implying they get used to carry supplies War of the Chosen is actually depicting it!

And honestly, given how rushed War of the Chosen blatantly is, it's a lot easier to forgive narrative weirdness in its content. If War of the Chosen had gotten more polish, likely Extract ADVENT Supplies would've had at least some of its narrative oddness polished away.

It's too bad my impression is most players hate Extract ADVENT Supplies. It's not unjustified, but it does leave me a little bit concerned Firaxis might take such dislike to heart and thus, instead of polishing this good idea into a good execution, drop it in favor of polishing the inferior idea that is base-game Supply Raids. (Or inventing yet another idea, and likely ending up with it running into unforeseen issues from being a new idea...)

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Next time, we move on to the 'golden path' mission chain -the plot missions you must perform to be able to complete the game.

See you then.

Comments

  1. > So, as occurs a decent amount with War of the Chosen content: I like it better than base-game equivalents, but yikes that initial learning curve.

    Probably the biggest issue with XCOM 2 is the learning curve; despite most of the mechanics being actually very fair and well-tuned, it's often completely opaque or even downright unintuitive. I think the community consensus is that new players should start out with vanilla XCOM 2 to learn the basic mechanics, and then move on to WotC for the good stuff. While I actually think WotC is superior to vanilla in every single aspect, I think this is actually good advice. That's because, somehow, WotC manages to introduce new mechanics that significantly improve the tuning of the game, and yet make these new mechanics even more opaque and inscrutable.

    > It's too bad my impression is most players hate Extract ADVENT Supplies.

    I did hate the Extract Crates mission the first couple of times, but then I realized the actual optimal strategy was to grab the crates the moments ADVENT marks them and not before. Prior to that I played it like the vanilla Murder Everything While Avoiding Blowing Up The Good Stuff mission, and spent way too much time setting up ambushes, etc. which meant I lost too many crates.

    It's still not my favorite mission type, but it's okay. Just like all the other non-(hard or soft) timed missions in XCOM 2, the Vanilla Murder Everything Supply Raid is boring anyway.

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    1. I certainly think a run or two of the base game to get up to speed is best -the jump has a few fiddly bits to relearn, like Faceless self-reveal mechanics and how powerful Incendiary Grenades and Dragon Rounds are, but overall the base game is a solid intro to the overall framework. Regular difficulty in particular escapes a lot of the late-game tuning issues the base game has, simply by being too player-favorable for these problems to be liable to cost a campaign.

      And yeah, base-game Supply Raids tend to be boring; time pressure is too essential to XCOM 2's design, and they don't have any until Wall Smashers are about, which is clearly not intentional time pressure. They retain the UE/EW problem of optimal play revolving heavily around inching forward with Overwatch walls, albeit less extremely tan in EU/EW, too.

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    2. It seems to me that a big reason why the Extract Crates mission is so unpopular is because it's "unfair"; you have to come up to a crate to mark it, but ADVENT can mark crates seemingly at will. The big thing that is often missed out on is the fact that you can counter-mark a crate; ADVENT can't. This, plus the fact that marking is a free action means that you actually have a lot of agency to counter-mark. For example, you can step next to an unmarked crate, overwatch/hunker next to it, and then in case ADVENT marks it you can grab it practically for free next round. Or if you are confident that you won't trigger a new pod you can dash to a marked crate and then grab it at the end of your turn. And so on...

      XCOM 2 is full of these mechanics that _look_ quite unfair on the surface, but are actually well-balanced, often subtly favoring the player. I recently had a discussion with someone who complained about the aim mechanics, specifically how you lose accuracy with distance but the aliens don't. I explained how this isn't actually a big deal, because a) the aliens' aim is actually generally quite terrible (quite apparent if you have Double Agent or hack/mind control an enemy unit), and b) YOU get aim _bonuses_ for getting up close (on certain weapons, anyway). I then explained that it ends up being advantageous to the player because it means that your positioning only has to avoid being counter-flanked (plus triggering new enemies), without worrying about keeping distance. This, plus the way the game generally positions enemies between you and the objective means you fighting is also your squad advancing towards the goal. Cue all the complaints about timers from players who haven't figured this out. Although to be fair, Alien Rulers exist, but they are unique in having terrible integration with the other of the game mechanics.

      The reaction was (sadly and predictably), "Well, it's still unfair, is there a mod to 'fix' it"? *sigh*

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    3. Yeah, I don't tend to think about it nowadays, but there are indeed a lot of mechanics that favor the player to varying degrees of extreme and obvious, but where it's either a non-obvious tradeoff (Crate-marking is a case I initially took as player-hostile, myself, and only much later concluded that the player's ability to overrule enemy marks was more significant an advantage than the disadvantage presented by needing to physically approach crates) or where the game occludes the mechanics so a player has a difficult time getting an informed understanding. (My initial response to learning enemy accuracy is unaffected by distance was also 'that's unfair', because Shotguns, Pistols, and Sniper Rifles can all suffer Aim penalties... but not all player weapons can get Aim penalties, and only Sniper Rifles can't get Aim bonuses: enemy weaponry only clearly has better behavior than Sniper Rifles, and notably the Hunter is the only Squadsight enemy in the entire game... and his Darklance behaves the same in his hands as yours aside damage. But if you haven't cleared the game and thought about enemy composition in detail, it's easy to be SURE some enemy is, in fact, cheating by having flat accuracy)

      More generally, I think part of the issue is that XCOM 2 has a lot of the trappings of a game in which the enemy is a kind of player-equivalent (eg your default RTS design), leading to an assumption of equivalency between the player forces and enemy forces. Meanwhile, the game design has more in common with your typical JRPG sort of design, the kind where a small crew scythes through hundreds or thousands of mooks who, sure, broadly share stat block basics like HP, but no they aren't meant to be fully equivalent to the player's team. Since the game doesn't either blatantly signal this (There is no major mechanic the game calls out as player-exclusive or enemy-exclusive) or blatantly require major breaks (eg RTS campaigns invariably involve the player fighting increasingly entrenched bases while often still starting with just the bare minimum: it's really obvious that if the AI behaved as a player seeking to win, these later missions would be completely impossible), it's possible to retain the conviction that this is a game in which enemies are and should be equivalent to the player forces.

      Tied to this twice over is the connection to classic X-COM. After all, classic X-COM did actually shoot for your enemies defaulting to being plausible player-unit-equivalents (With only a handful of major breaks from this premise, such as how psionic aliens don't need a Psi Amp... unless they're currently being controlled by the player), and so players expect X-COM games to cleave to such a dynamic. Furthermore, XCOM: Enemy Unknown actually did recreate a lot of the components of this (eg you can literally equip any enemy weapon that is held in their hands), and so bake a certain amount of this into its design -a design XCOM 2 is a refinement of. (Enemy Within adding EXALT didn't exactly shake this, what with them mirroring your own classes...)

      One of the things I'm most curious about with XCOM 3 is thus whether it's going to more clearly and fully abandon the 'player/enemy equivalency' design, or what.

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    4. > Since the game doesn't either blatantly signal this...

      Well, Shen's Last Gift and Alien Hunters definitely gave me some JRPG vibes. As in, it set up the expectation, "Oh, if the game asks me to take a special member of the crew, I'm going into a marathon dungeon level that has an anime-style boss with exclusive mechanics and five health bars at the end of it."

      I was in fact a little disappointed, at least at the beginning, that XCOM 2 didn't do that anywhere else. But I was totally new to the series and to the genre and didn't really know that it was, in fact, a break in the usual conventions. On my second run, now on WotC instead of the base game, I kept those missions on, just to see how well I'd do a second run with them. Third time around, I just integrated the DLCs, as I realized all the fun stuff in the game was in the regular missions anyway.

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    5. What I mean by 'blatantly signal' is that there's a range of non-equivalence that doesn't necessarily imply a break from PvP-style design in favor of PvE-style design. As a concrete example, in the original Command & Conquer, the AI does not play by the construction rules the player does: you have to build structures 'in contact' with existing structures, while the AI can build buildings far away from other buildings. In this case, this is the AI cheating while ostensibly being identical to you: it does not matter whether you play GDI vs Nod or Nod vs GDI, the AI construction works differently from yours.

      Conversely, in Red Alert 3, if you boot up Skirmish and pick Random for your faction and Random for the AI opposition, there is a non-trivial chance a similar break will occur, where you need to place structures near existing structures while the AI is dropping them all over the map -but in this case, it would be because you're playing as the Allies or Soviets and the AI is playing as the Empire of the Rising Sun, not because the AI is cheating.

      Returning to X-COM, classic X-COM is comporting itself broadly as if you're playing as The X-COM Faction while fighting The Alien Invader Faction, where it's possible to imagine instead playing The Alien Faction while fighting The X-COM Faction. There's breaks from this premise, but for one thing many of them aren't obvious in relatively casual play. (ie the aliens aren't operating on resource limits, but if they were you wouldn't be able to tell unless the game provided a way to see that information)

      And XCOM 2 still, at first glance, seems to be staying in that sort of range -an impression exacerbated by details like it including a competitive multiplayer scene in which players can use alien/ADVENT units!

      War of the Chosen is a bit clearer on this point: in spite of all the parallels between the Chosen and Resistance factions/core classes, it's really obvious that nonetheless they're Boss Enemies. As a community-side example, there's mods that let the player field alien (Playable Aliens, which started in the base game) or ADVENT-based classes (Project EXVENT), but there's no mods for Playable Warlock or the like. (Mods that give you more interesting loot from them, yes. Mods that let you give your troops Chosen-inspired aesthetics, yes. Playable Chosen of some sort? No) For that matter, on the opposite side we have Long War 2 giving ADVENT multiple clear player equivalents. (eg Grenade Launcher-carrying ADVENT troops that work much like your own Grenadiers)

      (I'm interested in Phoenix Point in part because it seems to have much more strongly, clearly embraced the PvE design, in spite of Julian Gollop being involved)

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    6. Apologies, I actually understood your point perfectly, but my brain saw "blatantly signal" and "JRPG" and immediately went into a "Biggest False Impression XCOM2 gave me as a noob" tangent.

      Anyhow, more to your main point; there's also the fact that as XCOM you can take control of enemy units via Mind Control or Hacking, and you even get your own Avatar at the end (although it behaves somewhat differently).

      On another note, do you have an existing or planned upcoming post discussing the Avatar Project on the Strategy layer? I'm doing my first Commander run now and almost lost the campaign; I had a new facility spawn with two blips right off the bat, and then a week later get another instant two blips. There was no Major Breakthrough dark event. That led to the doom clock ticking down, fortunately I was already in the process of contacting the region that had a Facility as well as the Forge mission so I got saved pretty much by the skin of my teeth. I've never gotten multiple blips on one go on lower difficulties besides Major Breakthrough, is that an actual thing on higher difficulties or was I just unlucky?

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    7. 2 dots on a new Facility is specific to Commander difficulty. It's a 1/3 chance to occur on each new Facility; I discuss this in the Difficulty Levels post. Commander difficulty also forces the first Facility to generate 3 Contacts out and causes all other Facilities to generate 1-6 Contacts out vs the 2 Contacts out that lower difficulties are restricted to. Legendary actually has less strategic pressure, removing the 2-dots possibility and forcing the first Facility to generate 2 Contacts out again. (Though later Facilities generate 2-6 Contacts out; Legendary can't randomly be merciful with an immediately-adjacent Facility)

      I'm actually not a fan of Commander difficulty's strategic tuning precisely because your experience can happen, but usually won't; it's not a skill bar you're forced to hurdle consistently, but if you don't prep for the extreme worst-cases there is a small chance you'll get a game over more from raw RNG than from bad play. (Alas, I don't feel it's realistic to recommend Legendary difficulty as a better entry point, even though on this particular topic it absolutely is)

      And yeah, the ability to take over enemy troops is another solid example; PvE games are willing to offer limited control over enemies, but it's usually not an equivalent level of control as you have over your own people, where PvP games usually just use their existing framework of control. (Many, many RTSes do this, for example)

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