XCOM 2 Analysis: Rumors

Rumors are, broadly speaking, timesinks for the Avenger when it's not establishing contact with a new region, building a radio relay, scooping up the monthly Supply drop, or flying somewhere. You can always just scan at (an) HQ instead (Except toward the beginning of a War of the Chosen run that has Lost And Abandoned activated), but Rumors are tuned to be pretty clearly a better investment of Avenger scanning time than HQ scans; scanning at (Reaper) HQ for Intel gives you much less Intel for the day investment than Intel-providing Rumors, as the most direct comparison.

As scanning for Rumors competes with building radio relays and contacting new regions, whether you're scanning for them is dictated pretty heavily by your contact situation. At the beginning of a run, when you haven't even performed the Researches that let you contact new regions and build radio relays, you're scanning Rumors because you don't really have other options. Late in a run, once you've gotten in contact with the Forge and Psi Gate mission regions and already hit at least one Avatar Project Facility, you're liable to return to scanning Rumors heavily unless there's a specific continent bonus you want. In the middling phase where you're scrambling to fight off the Avatar Project, though, you're liable to not be able to justify grabbing Rumors unless they're particularly high-value or something else is going on like you're at your Contact limit and waiting on the ability to expand it... or in War of the Chosen you can have Resistance Network slotted in, freeing up tons of Avenger time that might as well go into Rumors.

Rumor generation can occur at two points: firstly, when you finish scanning a Rumor, the game is willing to immediately generate a new Rumor. Secondly, finishing a mission can also trigger a Rumor to generate. Initially Rumor generation is fairly consistent -in the very early game, you'll reliably see the game generate a replacement Rumor if you end up with no Rumors currently on the Geoscape, and missions are fairly prone to generating an additional Rumor apiece. In the long haul, Rumor generation slows down; it's not clear how intentional this is, but one aspect of this is that each individual Rumor can only be called by the game once per run, so the game will eventually stop generating new Rumors just because it's rolled every single one already. But even aside that, Rumor generation slows down as you progress, where I don't entirely understand the rules underlying this slowing.

Rumors do eventually all time out after generation, it should be noted. It takes somewhere over a month to happen, but if you ignore a Rumor long enough it will eventually just go away without fanfare. A nice touch to this is that a Rumor you're scanning (Or flying to) gets a bit more leniency in this regard; if you're currently scanning a Rumor, it simply can't go away in this way. Crucially, the game furthermore offers a grace period if you leave the Rumor for a bit, where even if its timer has hit 0 it refuses to vanish while unattended; this grace period ensures that missions won't steal a Rumor right out from under you. It also gives you some leeway to pop over to the Black Market or to Resistance HQ in the base game; so long as you're quick to target the Rumor again, it won't vanish on you. That said, don't try to abuse this, as it really is very brief; doing something like getting pulled away by a mission and then deciding to go to the Black Market before returning to the Rumor can cause the Rumor to time out, even if you only flew a short distance. In general, if a Rumor hasn't generated very recently, you should assume it will vanish if unattended, in the sense that if you really care about not losing it you shouldn't leave it alone more than strictly necessary. Don't be thinking you can quickly grab the Supply drop, for example.

Rumor scan time is straightforward but a bit weird. First of all, War of the Chosen slightly slowed Rumor scan times; in the base game a Rumor will take 4-7 days to scan, while in War of the Chosen they will take 5-8 days to scan. Second, this is only in units in whole days; a Rumor can generate as 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 full days (Depending on game version for whether it's 4 or 8 allowed), not, say, 6.5 days. Third, your first couple of Rumors in a run are forced to always be the absolute minimum duration, so 4 days in the base game and 5 days in War of the Chosen. Third, once you're past the initial Rumors, Rumor duration is assigned at generation of the Rumor, unrelated to its type; the game doesn't try to correlate Rumor value to Rumor scan length or anything like that.

When a Rumor does generate, you just get a one-line description of its concept plus you get told what the reward will be. Once it's scanned, you get an image, a little text blurb expanding on what happened, and of course the actual reward. The initial bit being less informative than the final bit largely doesn't matter; the game doesn't spring a mechanically meaningful surprise on you at the end of your scanning, or anything. The only extent to which it matters is certain Rumor types give vague descriptions like 'random loot' for the initial reward summary, where they have a consistent range of possible payouts but you just have to trial-and-error learning what that vague description specifically correlates to.

Or look at a site like this one, of course.

Also, one of the elements that's a bit weird about Rumor generation is that they actually generate near regions, rather than inside them. This isn't hugely important in a mechanical sense, but can end up confusing -for one thing, the routine for placing a Rumor doesn't actually try to avoid placing the Rumor inside a region in general. Rather, it picks one of the regions you're in contact with to drop it close to, and if another region you're in contact with is close enough... you can end up with a Rumor dropped inside a region anyway. If you then scan that Rumor and end up with a mission generating inside that region, you'll end up with the Avenger insisting on lifting off, flying a brief distance, and then landing -I can contrast this with building a radio relay, where if a mission generates in the region you're building the radio relay in, even though the mission may be visually placed outside the region the game will simply send the Skyranger to the mission without moving the Avenger at all. It can take quite a while to figure out why the Avenger sometimes insists on flying a short distance before sending the Skyranger out and other times launches it immediately...

One bit of mechanical significance to all this is that Rumors become subtly less efficient on average as you expand your network of contacted regions. When you have contact with only the one region, flying to any given Rumor is always a brief experience. If you're in contact with a couple regions spaced far apart, flying from a Rumor to a mission and back can add a noticeable delay to the completion of the Rumor scanning, especially if you do multiple missions placed far from the Rumor. It's not a huge thing, but it does matter, and is something that's easy to overlook when trying to figure out something like 'why didn't my 6-day Rumor to grab an Engineer finish before the month rolled over? The next month was 8 days away!' Which is to say knife's-edge planning gets noticeably less reliable as a run progresses.

As a straightforward system for giving the Avenger things to do and the player choices to make ("Do I want this Rumor badly enough to put off my next contact? Of these two Rumors, which would I prefer?"), Rumors are functional enough.

That said, there's some things I don't really get about the decision-making process here.

First of all, Rumor-related stuff is all internally tagged 'poi', which is almost certainly short for 'point of interest'. This honestly makes far more sense than 'Rumor' as a term for the system; the majority of Rumors are framed as the Avenger spotting something odd and landing nearby so troops can take a closer look at it, or as a chance encounter of some kind. Very few of them are framed as 'people say such and such about so and so area, and we investigated these stories', or anything remotely like that. So... why does the game call them Rumors?

Second, there's a pretty stark mismatch between the images used in Rumors vs how the game uses Rumors; Rumors are basically designed to be mindlessly clicked through without paying attention to specifics, with the text all irrelevant flavor and the game designing the UI flow so it's trivial to mash through without really seeing anything... but the images are clearly highly detailed pieces of art that got a lot of time and effort put into them. And then you only see them in a really shrunk-down form that makes it hard to make out more than the broad strokes of most of these images.

To be honest, around 50% of the reason I bothered to make this post is so the art can be seen more clearly by a wider variety of players. The game shrinking them down and encouraging you to click past without seeing them at all makes me sad with how much effort got put in here. Especially because there's a lot of Rumor images -they get reused some, but it's not like the game only has five of them or something.

Also, for reference, I'm ordering these by reward type. If you're just interesting in seeing the range of possible rewards, a lot of these are redundant, and you should skim.

Stadium

Supplies.

Narratively, you find an abandoned sports stadium that was temporarily used as a makeshift hospital, and stuff from its time as a makeshift hospital got left behind. Strangely, the writing tells you that Tygan identifies things of scientific value, which is usually the kind of logic invoked to justify Intel boosts, not Supply boosts.

I do like the art here. The Skyranger landed in an overgrown sports stadium is one of the more striking Rumor images, and it makes sense as a potential landing location -a large area of flat ground to land in, but with the landing zone not visible to anyone outside the building. It's the kind of place I would expect X-COM to want to set the Skyranger down in when trying to search an area without being caught, which is something I'd expect X-COM to want to do. It all makes sense and is memorable.

Disabled Truck

Supplies.

Narratively, you freak out a smuggler (The idea seems to be that they assume the Avenger is a UFO) such that they initially run away, then after you catch up you fix up their truck and they give you some goodies in appreciation. Functional enough.

This is one of the better opportunities to look at the Avenger's external design, and it... remains just as confusing as I've gone into before. In addition to what I've raised before of it not looking like a converted UFO at all, but rather as like a much larger version of the prior game's Skyranger, there's also odd bits like the needle-looking bits sticking out the 'nose'; what are those supposed to be? Sensors? Radio antennae? Why are they up in the stubby nose? Why does this craft have a flat front nose in the first place?

Every time I get a good look at the Avenger, I'm confused anew by its design.

Destroyed Convoy

Supplies.

Narratively, you found an ADVENT convoy somebody else busted up, and are grabbing supplies left behind in the trucks.

Or wait, maybe you got...

Destroyed Convoy

Supplies.

... the version with the same name and graphic and benefits, but now it's explicitly specified some kind of rocket attack happened, and you're stealing ADVENT supplies unnoticed in the chaos.

Yeah, Rumors do this sometimes. It's not terribly important from the perspective of just playing the game, but it's still a little odd that sometimes Rumors have near-identical clones of themselves.

In any event, the art is nice enough.

Though it's interesting to note that the ADVENT Trooper up against the truck has left behind red blood, not the Meld-orange blood enemies bleed in the actual game. Of course, there's a wide variety of possible reasons for this; it could just be the artist forgot and nobody noticed that it's wrong in this context. But it does make me wonder if the orange blood thing came in relatively late, or something of the sort.

Overgrown Checkpoint

Supplies.

Narratively, you find a dead ADVENT Officer in an abandoned security checkpoint, and sweep the area for materials.

I should point out you can see a sign on the left that says ACCESS and below that has the odd icon used in a few Hacking icons. I really wish I knew what the story with that icon was.

The image itself is interesting mostly for how that looming structure with the ADVENT symbol on it in the background doesn't really look like anything you see of ADVENT's. It honestly makes me think more of Imperial infrastructure from assorted Star Wars media than anything else, but in any event its style is very unlike the general ADVENT architectural style. The sheer hugeness being weird can be waved off for gameplay reasons -that XCOM 2's gameplay is not well suited to significant verticality in its missions- but it's not like that's the only aspect of it that's atypical.

Nonetheless, the ADVENT symbol is there, there's an iconic Idealized Ethereal statue, and there's that weird Hack symbol in the left side. This is mostly in line with ADVENT's aesthetic. So I'm curious why it's just the building's design that's off -if this were more thorough in being subtly off, I might wonder if this was early concept art the devs liked too much to not use even though it doesn't line up with the final aesthetic. Just the building being off is just weird. Wish I knew the story there.


Settlements

Supplies.

Narratively, you find an area littered with 'post-invasion settlements' that's nonetheless devoid of human life, and end up looting the place, with a pretty bizarre reference to 'using the Avenger's computer to triangulate' where the loot is liable to be found.

I assume the idea here is that this is a shantytown built by people refusing to be a part of ADVENT, but which failed on its own or possibly got wiped out by ADVENT, leaving you with a ghost town.

Internally, this image is labeled 'Haven', which is a term the game uses somewhat erratically to refer to pockets of resistance, basically. (Retaliation missions are 'Haven Assault', for example) Notably, Long War 2 is very consistent on this particular bit of terminology, and Pavonis actually worked with Firaxis; usually I wouldn't remark on a mod's terminology, but given the direct interaction of the teams it's very likely 'Haven' is a term that got used a fair amount in development or something, and the game's final state of barely referring to it and never really explaining it is likely an oversight or accident.

It's also worth pointing out you can actually see a radio relay tower rising in the background of the image. I guess the devs really liked the radio relay tower design... the game contrives excuses to get a good look at its design more often than I'd have expected for a gameplay mechanic most players probably barely pay attention to.

Service Depot

Supplies.

Narratively, you find a bombed-out aircraft service depot, and excavate it for supplies. There's also a comment about said service depot being the only thing in the area.

Internally, this image is actually labeled 'Warehouse'. Mind, it's still depicting two different planes...

I mostly find the image interesting as part of the broader trend of XCOM 2 seeming to be starting from the assumption that much of Earth is in a state comparable to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where human influence has essentially vanished very abruptly (And not been replaced by alien influence, I should explicitly state in this case) such that human infrastructure and machinery is all over the place, abandoned and overgrown. It's an aesthetic that rather suggests that the human population of Earth was massively reduced in the invasion, and in particular that much of this population reduction wasn't actually caused in combat -you get surprisingly few images of human cities blasted by plasma fire or the like. Like yes you find buildings that have collapsed substantially, but the picture painted is that this damage is from lack of maintenance and the encroachment of plantlife undermining supports and whatnot, not from UFOs having strafed the area with plasma fire or alien ground troops getting into shootouts with human soldiers.

It's too bad XCOM 2 never really tries to give the player the perspective of the Regular Citizen On The Street. What do people in City Centers think, given that Earth's human population apparently massively contracted in response to an alien invasion and ADVENT is pressing the idea that the Ethereals showing up was them coming to humanity's rescue? How do they rationalize such a dissonant set of facts? This is an interesting question whose answer really ought to be impossible to not come up.

Battlefield

Supplies.

Narratively, you get some backstory about human forces engaging one of the first Battleships in the scanned area, and how the battle devastated the civilian populace below the fight. In the here and now, you sweep the area for salvage and grab stuff that was scattered about.

The backstory bit is interesting primarily because it explicitly specifies Spring of 2015 for the Battleship showing up. The game is perfectly happy with having the first Battleship fight anywhere in the world (Well, nearly anywhere; Rumors don't spawn in Antarctica, among other limitations), but is insistent on concrete time. It makes sense overall given how Enemy Unknown/Within was set up, but it's still interesting -I'm much more used to games being all-around vague or stating overly-specific things that are at odds with the game's intended ambiguity.

Internally, this is labeled 'fire in the sky'. I suspect it's meant to be basically a depiction of UFOs affecting the magnetosphere or something of the sort, a kind of artificial aurora borealis. Which is an interesting idea that makes sense!

Mechanically, Supply Rumors are one of the better Rumor types to go for toward the beginning of a run, but tend to fall off in value as a run progresses. There's a surprisingly large number of reasons for this; for example, the Black Market starts out inaccessible, and even once it's first accessible you'll have barely anything to sell. Thus, in the late game you can find yourself a little short on Supplies for something and just shrug and swing by the Black Market and basically-instantly have that covered without it meaningfully costing you anything, where in the early game that's not really an option. Similarly, your monthly Supply drop growing is an important factor, especially in War of the Chosen where Retribution exists; it's actually realistic in War of the Chosen to have one or two of your run's monthly drops be so low that the days-to-Supplies ratio is actually worse than a Supply-providing Rumor! But even aside that extreme, in the early game if you're halfway through a Supply Rumor, it's probably worth sticking it out and then going for the Supply drop, where in the mid-to-late game it may be better to interrupt the Rumor to grab the 400+ Supplies that you'll fully collect in three days.

Of course there's also the usual reason that Supply value tends to drop off as you progress, where toward the beginning of the run you're perpetually hungry for Supplies, while by the late game you can be sitting on a few hundred Supplies with nothing you actually want to spend them on. Why scan a Supply Rumor if you're already sitting on 600 Supplies with no expectation you'll spend even that much before the run ends?

More subtle is the consideration of unlocking access to plot missions; the Blacksite, Forge, and Psi Gate missions are all a notable injection of Supplies (Even if the Psi Gate's payout primarily exists to cover upgrading the Shadow Chamber), and can be done on a moment's notice once you've revealed them and contacted their region. As such, if you feel your team is ready to take them on and would like to be able to afford something important right now (eg a Resistance Comms), you can get an instant injection of Supplies via one of those missions. This is particularly true in the base game, where Fatigue doesn't exist and you're liable to build the Advanced Warfare Center early and so have your troops bounce back from injuries pretty readily, but even into War of the Chosen you can have things line up so you have more or less all your soldiers fresh and so be able to launch one of these missions expressly to get the Supplies -and the larger-by-default roster of WotC means injuries are in some ways actually easier to shrug off, where a mission generating immediately after you come back with a squad of wounded just means you shrug and send your B team.

War of the Chosen adds the further wrinkle of Covert Ops, and more specifically the intersection of Supply Runs existing and your Covert Op pool growing over the course of the game as you hunt the Chosen and gain Influence from doing so. In the very early game, it's actually pretty unlikely you have a Supply Run in the pool at all; once you've fully hunted the Chosen, it's a little surprising if you don't have a Supply Run somewhere in the pool. Covert Operators existing is a further layer to this, where a Supply Run performed early has good odds of taking longer than one performed late -especially if you're someone who is slow to man the Resistance Ring with an Engineer.

Taken altogether (Plus assorted bits I don't feel are worth getting into in detail, like Supply Caches existing as a Hack reward and being more likely for you to acquire late than early), an early Supply Rumor is actually liable to be a pretty high priority. In the first couple of months, I personally only rate Engineer Rumors as clearly a higher priority. By the mid-late game, you're liable to skip them as, if not worthless, than at least not a good payout for your Avenger time.

Stray Dogs

Intel.

Narratively, the stray dogs were chewing on alien bodies, which you grab for Tygan's research.

I'm not sure why you don't get actual corpses out of finding corpses. It's also a bit odd that bodies for Tygan's research translates to an Intel payout; that's not a mechanic in the game (you can't liquidate corpses for Intel at the lab, only at the Black Market for Supplies), and while Intel is deliberately a little fuzzy the game largely treats it as some mix of military intelligence (Knowledge of troop positions and whatnot) and representing awareness of and influence over your fellow resistance elements. Why does Tygan studying alien corpses provide Intel, in that context?

It's also a low-key example of XCOM 2's insistence on X-COM starting the game weirdly ignorant of their enemies. Shouldn't X-COM already have a lot of experience with dead aliens? With, in fact, most of the specific variations you encounter across XCOM 2? Studying Sectoid corpses being so useful is pretty weird in context.

Lifesigns

Intel.

Narratively, you find a dying Sectoid and interrogate it before it expires. That's a bit cold, X-COM... this is actually one of the more low-key but direct examples of me being uncomfortable with the base game's handling of things. If this were a human being, I'm pretty sure most players would be uncomfortable with ruthlessly extracting info from a dying enemy, with no attempt to soften the ruthlessness of this action or villain-ify this particular individual. (That is, you're not told the Sectoid attacked your troops on sight, or rejected medical aid From Scum Such As Yourself, or otherwise did anything unpleasant that might cause a player to feel it got what it deserved) That the base game casually treats your enemies this way is... very unpleasant, and I'm so glad War of the Chosen moved away from this kind of thing.

Interestingly, this image is internally labeled 'disease' -which fits to how the Sectoid looks like something has gone wrong biologically. The text for this Rumor doesn't allude to it, though, which seems a bit odd.

Though honestly the Sectoid looks like it's dead, not like it's dying...

ADVENT Supply Convoy

Intel.

Narratively, scans spot a lengthy chain of supply trucks leaving some manner of production facility, one of which 'seems to have lost its way', leading to you looting the truck's gear.

Why that produces Intel and doesn't involve a fight is beyond me. You'd think you'd get some ADVENT gear out of the Rumor, or something.

Internally, this image is labeled 'stolen goods'. Altogether I have to wonder if at some point there were plans to be able to loot ADVENT weaponry somehow, or something, with bits and pieces slipping into the final product that were probably meant to be cut or reworked.

Scorched Earth

Intel.

Narratively, you stumble upon an area scarred by battle and inexplicably littered with 'ribbons' of unusual color that ultimately lead to a downed 'alien patrol craft'. Presumably the 'ribbons' are meant to be something unusual venting from the craft. In any event, nothing alive is in the area, so you loot it all.

Why looting a downed UFO or ADVENT aerial transport results in Intel is beyond me...

Interestingly, the image is internally labeled 'Leviathan'. Among other points, that's always the mission codename for the Alien Fortress mission. I'm not sure what to make of that commonality, but it's interesting.

The image itself is interesting because it doesn't look like any UFO design from any Firaxis X-COM game; among other points, you can clearly see a pilot's seat. Given the UFOs got overhauled, it's not a stretch that this might be a type of design they considered using... or perhaps this would've been an ADVENT aircraft design? It's interesting, whatever the case.

Abandoned Camp

Intel.

Narratively, you find an abandoned area that was using a sewer system as a makeshift solitary confinement cell for an ADVENT soldier, with your people unable to determine who did this. Then they ruthlessly interrogate the prisoner, who dies partway through or after your people are done or something, because this was written in the base XCOM 2 days where the game expects you to heroically genocide the basically-children who live in perpetual, literal mind control, as opposed to passing them off to the Skirmishers to hopefully be deprogrammed and suchlike.

It's a bit awkward this Rumor still exists in War of the Chosen...

The image is internally labeled 'solitary', suggesting it was likely drawn for this scenario, or the Rumor directly inspired by the image. Either way, this is probably the clearest look at what ADVENT soldiers are supposed to look like under their gear before War of the Chosen redesigned them.

It's easy to overlook, but the manacles seem to be intended to be connected by some red energy stuff, instead of regular chains. This is interesting, both because nothing like this is depicted anywhere else in the game, and because it seems likely it's intended to be ADVENT technology in particular, suggesting this art was imagined as depicting a rogue trooper chained up by ADVENT rather than a loyalist captured by the resistance. Base XCOM 2 is otherwise pretty thorough about taking it as a given that ADVENT soldiers are uniformly loyal, so this Rumor diverging is interesting.

Power Fluctuations

Intel.

Narratively, your crew detected signs of intermittent power spikes, and at the site of these power surges they find a wrecked apartment complex with a makeshift laboratory inside. No people around, though; you just make off with alien technology in the wreckage.

Why that results in an Intel boost is beyond me, for much the same reason as the other science-as-Intel Rumors. It's interesting so many Rumors in particular do this; the game is vague about Intel, yes, but other parts of the game don't conflate research and development with military intelligence in the way multiple Rumors do.

Internally, this is labeled 'medica obscura'. The image itself has Vahlen's name on one of the papers, with the papers depicting humanoid forms and a serpentine spinal column, while in the background a Viper can be seen in a scifi Science Jar. I'm pretty sure the basic idea of the image is this is Vahlen trying to figure out the Thin Man/Viper thing...

... though in conjunction with Vahlen's inexplicable snake hissing routine in Alien Hunters, I have to wonder if there was an intention for Vahlen herself to be a Thin (wo)Man herself, or somebody believing such, or something.

It's an interesting image, in any event.

Intel from Rumors as a whole is in a similar position to Supplies, but with a somewhat different underlying logic to it, because Intel is something you ideally have before you need it, and spend it before you strictly need to. By that I mean that if you're contacting a region in response to the Avatar Project bar getting scarily full, that's a bad process that's risking a game over, and ideally you'd have gotten to making contact with relevant regions considerably before the bar was scarily full. By a similar and in fact much more dramatic token, it's bad to be deciding that you need to contact a region soon and therefore need to start scanning an Intel Rumor now; that's a very dangerous amount of delay if it's prompted by the Avatar Project being one off from filling up.

As such, Intel Rumors are ideally prioritized early, so as to ensure you have the Intel you need before you know you need it, and become a low priority as your run progresses and you've gotten your contact needs handled. This latter point is generally less stark than with Supplies, though; Intel can usually be spent usefully at the Black Market even quite late in a run, and ideally you'll have 200 Intel reserved for when you launch the endgame, and Intel isn't something the game escalates your intake of over the course of a run. So Intel Rumors are actually one of the better Rumors to scan if you're late in a run and basically out of useful things for the Avenger to do, unlike Supply Rumors; they're just easier to skip in favor of other priorities.

Mass Grave

Alien Alloys.

Narratively, you're salvaging Sectoid Blasters for their materials.

That's functional enough, and this is a rare time the lack of usable equipment doesn't bug me at all. It's easy to imagine Sectoid Blasters aren't actually human-convenient, and it's perfectly believable they're not even powerful enough to be worth the bother; unlike ADVENT magnetic weaponry starting the game weaker than your Conventional-tier weaponry while the narrative directly states it's more powerful, there's no reason to believe the Sectoid Blaster being a weak weapon in gameplay is counter to the intent as far as in-universe strength. So I totally buy that X-COM takes them apart for raw materials instead of trying to use them as-is.

Battleship

Alien Alloys.

Narratively, you find a Battleship by virtue of an ongoing drought leading to strong winds revealing it, at which point your crew manages to enter and salvage some materials.

I don't really get why this isn't a Rumor that provides Alien Alloys and Elerium Crystals. The Rumor's narrative is also one of the poorer fits to Rumor mechanics, in that it only makes sense for a relatively narrow portion of the world when Rumors generate without regard to location... I dunno, maybe the devs were thinking of the Dust Bowl, but that doesn't really fit to 'the Battleship buried in sand' imagery (Notably, this image is also named 'Battleship', so likely this Rumor was made for this image or vice-versa), not to mention while drought was part of what caused the Dust Bowl, a larger part of it was people using environment-inappropriate farming techniques and getting rid of much of the local flora that normally prevented topsoil from being blown away by strong winds, which doesn't really mesh with XCOM 2 presenting an Earth made much emptier of human presence. (That is, the devs almost certainly do not intend for there to be a glut of farmers making environment-inappropriate decisions in the area of the Rumor)

I like the image, honestly, it's one of my favorite of the Rumor images, but this Rumor is just confusing.

Bonfire

Alien Alloys.

Narratively, you find a makeshift structure that has been set on fire, and then apparently stick around and wait for it to burn out or something because you find 'alien resources' that survived the fire. There's also a somewhat confused statement about the building having already been 'picked clean' -I'm really not sure what this Rumor is trying to say. Everything visible while it was burning was already looted? The Alien Alloys were actually hidden somewhere not accessible until the fire tore apart the structure? It's a confusing pair of statements.

The image is internally labeled 'What's in the barn'. This amuses me, though I couldn't say why.

Also, you can see Bradford is wielding a Conventional Shotgun with a Repeater, a Scope or Laser Sight, and an Auto-Loader attached. That's mildly interesting.

Alien Alloys from Rumors are generally most notable in the mid-early game, when you've got magnetic weaponry and Plated Armor unlocked but aren't done purchasing them; often it's primarily an Alien Alloy shortage holding up those purchases up until your second Supply Raid. This depends in part on luck with your Avenger layout; if your layout has ended up heavy on Alien Machinery, it often ends up being Supplies holding you back instead.

In any event, it's mostly one of the lower-value Rumor types in practice, as there's a pretty narrow period in which an Alien Alloy injection in particular is noteworthy; tier 3 gear you tend to be held back by Elerium Crystals, and Alien Alloys are primarily spent on upgrading weapons and armor.

Mind, if you're wanting to build multiple SPARKs, Alien Alloys tends to become a continuous painpoint: if you have plans to get yourself 4 SPARKs or more in a run, you might want to prioritize Alien Alloy Rumors a decent amount.

But usually... eeeeh...

Battle Site

Alien Alloys and Elerium Crystals.

Narratively, you find an old battlefield littered with human military vehicles from before the invasion, and then an exhaustive search finds valuable materials.

I assume the idea here is that you find alien gear hidden among the wreckage, given the rewards and that the likely narrative intended here is that this was human military forces fighting alien forces, but the Rumor doesn't actually say and it wouldn't surprise me if this was really imagined as a Supply payout with some mixup happening.

This is another one of the fairly clear 'Chernobyl Exclusion Zone' style of images, with a couple of tanks and a fighter jet just... abandoned and overgrown. It's a pretty neat image, even if I have to wonder how that plane is supposed to have ended up in the middle of nowhere in as intact a state as it is.

Cave

Alien Alloys and Elerium Crystals.

Narratively, you're investigating rumors of X-COM's HQ having been in the area, and do end up finding human and alien craft in the caves, along with a wealth of useful materials.

Internally, this image is just labeled Avenger. (Well, 'Poi_Avenger', technically) It's another relatively clear view of the Avenger's confusing design, even with the darkness. Though more attention is put on the wilderness around it, really.

Weapons Dealer

Alien Alloys and Elerium Crystals.

Narratively, you check out a traveling merchant who's operating on the barter system, only proceedings get randomly interrupted by an old woman inexplicably offering to give you valuable stuff for free if you beat her in a game of dice, which of course you win.

This is one of the weirder Rumors, honestly. I do somewhat like the comment about how you won even though Bradford refused to blow on the dice, like he was being pushed to do so for luck by your soldiers or something, but it's still a weird Rumor.

Internally, this image is labeled 'Mysterious stranger', which is a bit weird given there's an actual Rumor labeled that, but said Rumor doesn't actually use this image. Personally, they don't seem terribly mysterious to me, just dressed for nasty weather, which is reasonable given they seem to be living out of a wreck of a house. Their hood obscuring the upper portion of their face is about the extent of their mysteriousness as far as I'm concerned.

Alien Wreckage

Alien Alloys and Elerium Crystals.

Narratively, you find an area that suffered extensive casualties 'from both sides', ie a strangely-worded reference to a fight between aliens and humans, probably meant to be a fight from during the invasion, and by extension a 'slew of alien wreckage' is in the area. Then you use your 'onboard sensors' to scan the area for salvage, because scifi tech memes I guess; exactly what kind of onboard sensors is the Avenger supposed to have that this would be particularly helpful compared to just digging around with teams of actual people?

Internally, this image is labeled 'alien cache', which fits with the two prominent glowing things in the foreground -they look like they're meant to be basically scifi chests, honestly. I'm pretty sure the bit in the background is meant to be a crashed and overgrown UFO, which is a bit interesting -in general, the Rumor images and writing seem to be operating under the idea that the Ethereals didn't try very hard to clean up after their original invasion. The midmission art direction and mission design doesn't really reflect such an idea in the base game, but by the time of the Tactical Legacy Pack you've got stuff like derelict UFOs being used as part of the Shanty plot type and crashed Skyrangers and Interceptors lying around; this does a lot to contribute to War of the Chosen's tonal shift, where the player gets to viscerally see the Ethereal empire has cleaned up (parts of) the city centers, but outside that narrow slice of their newly-conquered domain they don't seem interested in taking proper care of Earth. It helps sell what the main plot was already trying to push in the base game, of the Ethereals taking an extractive approach to Earth, where they intend to rip what they want from it and probably leave immediately afterward. (Itself further supported by stuff like the Hunter mentioning that Earth is the prize for bringing back the Commander -deciding who gets to control Earth in their absence makes sense if they're going to be absent, y'know, by leaving, but doesn't make much sense if they're going to stick around and keep ruling)

I'm curious why the base game didn't have midmission art reflecting this. Was this notion actually thought up relatively late in development? Was it somehow a localized notion, where whoever was making Rumor images and writing were always thinking of XCOM 2's setting this way, but other portions of the dev team weren't thinking that way and weren't aware of anyone approaching the story that way? The final result is pretty dissonant in the base game -it's one of the more subtle things that made it unclear to me whether the base game really intended the Ethereals to be particularly villainous, exacerbated by things like the Slums plot type being really easy to not notice being actually different from the City Center plot type. The overall result was that it came across like the Ethereals were taking much better care of the Earth than I suspect was intended to seem so, which fed into other things like making it genuinely difficult to be sure how much of ADVENT propaganda was meant to be lies and falsehoods vs being true things that were in fact flattering to ADVENT. (War of the Chosen's post-mission bits of propaganda playing help a lot here, where the player gets to witness the Speaker or a newscaster flagrantly lying about the mission you just completed, more clearly communicating that pro-ADVENT statements deserve serious skepticism)

Note that there's no Rumors for generating just Elerium Crystals. This is a contributing factor to Alien Alloys tending to not be what holds back tier 3 purchases, as Rumors granting you Elerium Crystals always also provide Alien Alloys.

Also note that this set of Rumors is basically flatly superior to the Alien Alloy version. (It's possible the Alien Alloy-alone versions provide a slightly higher payout of Alien Alloys, but if so it's too small a difference to care about) This is clearly understood and intended; these Rumors take a while to be allowed to generate, minimizing the odds of you directly choosing between the two.

But if you do have both on the Geoscape at the same time -which isn't that unlikely- you should default to going for the Alien Alloys+Elerium Crystals Rumor, even if you don't actually care about Elerium Crystals right now; it's really just better.

Stockade

Gain an Engineer.

Narratively, a small town barricaded a local radio station, and your crew was sufficiently impressed by the design of the barricade they sought out and recruited the person who designed it.

Internally, this image is called 'vive la resistance', which fits to the flags; though the game never spells it out, this symbol, clearly derived from the Enemy Unknown X-COM icon, gets used as a symbol of the resistance throughout XCOM 2. This image is also another depiction of a radio relay... they really do seem to have liked that design a lot.

Landmark

Gain an Engineer.

Narratively, smoke rises from near a landmark, you do an aerial sweep, and you find an Engineer who actually was trying to grab X-COM's attention, which seems a bit unlikely but sure whatever.

The image is internally labeled 'worlds of fun', which is mildly amusing.

Engineer-providing Rumors are pretty much the best Rumor by default. This is particularly obvious in the base game, where you can buy Engineers from Resistance HQ and they cost more Supplies than you'd get out of a Supply-providing Rumor, but it's not like it's any less true in War of the Chosen. Indeed, War of the Chosen has increased your maximum Engineer needs, since the Resistance Ring ideally has an Engineer assigned.

They bring in resources via Excavation, accelerate timetables of assorted sorts (Including things relevant to letting you beat back the Avatar Project), save resources (eg assigning an Engineer to a Resistance Comms or Power Relay instead of upgrading it or building another copy), and so on; almost any benefit you can get from a Rumor has at least partial overlap with getting more Engineers, especially in War of the Chosen where assigning an Engineer to the Resistance Ring accelerates things like Intel intake that Engineers didn't previously cover.

And then they also bring just plain unique benefits, including of course opening space on the Avenger for Facilities; even if you personally feel they're, say, worse than a Supply Rumor for getting you Supplies, they're still crucial for Engineer-specific things.

This does come with the qualifier that there is a pretty clear cap past which further Engineers are worthless. So an Engineer Rumor that spawns late in a run is probably actually worthless to pursue unless your run has done really badly on Engineers... while not getting a game over... but, well, most Rumors end up a bit pointless once you're far enough in a run.

Indeed, I feel Engineers-from-Rumors are overly-swingy. A run that gets an Engineer Rumor in its first month is very noticeably better off than a run that doesn't see one until they're busy building radio relays and contacting new regions, to an extent no other Rumor comes close to doing, with the impact being felt strongly until quite late in a run. War of the Chosen eases this a little in one sense, since you can get Engineers from Covert Ops instead, but it's still the case that an early Engineer -or two!- is really high-impact in a way that's unfortunate for the design. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are players who savescum early game Rumor generation until an Engineer one spawns -I know it's possible, from times a crash lead to me loading an earlier save and different Rumors generated. Indeed, your first Rumor isn't actually decided by the game until you first click into the Geoscape!

So that's not ideal design.


Fire Axis

Gain a Scientist.

Narratively, Firaxis is including a self-insert, because this is a tradition stretching back to Alpha Centauri.

... okay, more seriously you find a local resistance cell (Calling itself Fire Axis...), one of your soldiers knows these folks, and this somehow leads to you recruiting one of their scientists. Though this leads back to my self-insert comment: why does this resistance cell have a scientist, specifically? Because Firaxis self-inserts tend to be characterized as science people, that's why.

Interestingly, the image is internally labelled 'field science'. It looks to be an autopsy of a Sectoid, though I suppose it's possible that's meant to be a human arm -even blown up, the image isn't detailed enough for me to be sure. Regardless, as far as I'm aware no Rumor using this image actually runs with the apparent idea, strangely enough.

Distress Beacon

Gain a Scientist.

Narratively, you investigate a distress beacon, and find 'survivors' one of whom is described as having scientific skill and expresses an interest in joining X-COM. Straightforward enough.

Internally, this image is actually labeled 'Radio Tower'. Mostly it's a desert sunset depiction. I assume because people insist that sunrise and sundown are particularly beautiful. It honestly feels out of place to me... you can only barely see the building that's the obvious reason for X-COM to care, which is to say that in-game this just looks empty of a reason to care. Not ideal.

Scientists from Rumors is generally a low-to-mid value reward. In the base game in particular it's entirely feasible to reach the endgame with every Research completed without trying to stall and without making any particularly strong effort to accelerate Research; getting to that point faster is still useful, but getting more Scientists won't be letting you get more tools ready for the endgame or some such. More Scientists is more appealing in War of the Chosen, where you've got more Researches to do and Instant Autopsies don't occur so readily, but not enough to make Scientist Rumors a particular high priority outside of the early game -if only due to the diminishing returns on stacking Scientists.

In theory it could be significant due to the Minimum Scientist Requirement mechanic in Research, where for example the game simply won't let you start the Sectoid Autopsy if you're down at zero Scientists, but in practice the tuning of that mechanic is sufficiently lax that if you're only getting Scientists from VIP missions you'll still basically never see this mechanic mattering. You'd have to be actively failing some of those missions for this to come into play. I'm sure there's actual players who've had that problem, but my point is that Scientist Rumors are, at a baseline level, not letting you get ahead of the curve; they might get you back on track if you've fallen behind the curve, but that's a different point.

I suppose if you're a player who consistently struggles with VIP missions, you should prioritize these Rumors more?

Abandoned Colony

Provides 2-4 Rookies.

Narratively, you investigate an incomplete, abandoned ADVENT settlement, where somehow 'scans' (Seriously, why does this keep cropping up?) conclude it was caused by a local resistance cell, who are immediately interested in joining up when you approach them.

That all seems a bit weird to me, but okay.

Intact Structures

Provides 2-4 Rookies.

Narratively, you find a bunch of relatively intact buildings, so you get on the radio or some such and broadcast, with some people in a warehouse coming out in response and coming aboard.

And yes, that's two Rookie-providing Rumors that use the same image but have a (slightly) different narrative attached.

The image itself is probably the best example of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone vibe to Rumor imagery, showing a clearly urban area being overtaken by plantlife. (It's actually a little weird the Abandoned City plot type didn't run with this kind of imagery)

Note that with all Rookie-providing Rumors you won't know how many soldiers you're getting until you complete the scan. This makes make unusually gamble-y, as there's a pretty wide difference between two free soldiers and four free soldiers.

Rookie-providing Rumors are generally one of the lowest-value Rumors. For one thing, they compare pretty directly to a Supply-providing Rumor, in that if you loot 75 or so Supplies from a Rumor you could instantly buy three Rookies (Which is to say it would be literally just as fast as a Rumor providing 3 Rookies directly), while the Supplies can alternatively be converted into something other than Rookies. A Rookie Rumor low-rolling and providing 2 Rookies is simply awful, and even a high roll of 4 Rookies is merely okay.

Which version of the game you're playing changes the context, but doesn't significantly change this final conclusion. In War of the Chosen, you can readily pick up free pre-leveled troops from VIP missions intermittently, including your first VIP mission being guaranteed to be one of the mission types that does this, plus your initial pool of troops is large enough you can take a few casualties and still be basically set for the entire run, plus you'll get four free Resistance class soldiers over the course of the run, all of which makes it a bit difficult to get excited about some Rumor Rookies.

In the base game, things are really tuned under the expectation you're continuously fielding a single A-team with limited backup to sub in when soldiers are injured. You start with a low enough count of soldiers a few extra can be genuinely nice, but for one thing there's multiple ways to get pre-leveled soldiers, and as a run progresses Rookies just aren't going to cut it, even considering you'll use the Guerrilla Tactics School to make them Squaddies before they see actual combat. A Rookie Rumor in the early game can be a nice safety net to make you more resistant to early deaths (Which is notable, to be clear; early game is where it's hardest to reliably avoid deaths), but past that it tends to be a waste of Avenger scanning time; if you need more soldiers, you should be trying to get pre-leveled soldiers, so they can actually contribute competently against serious threats.

Regardless of version, you can also get pre-leveled reward soldiers from Guerrilla Ops, so that's one more reason the Rookie Rumors tend to underwhelm.

Indeed, I'd tend to argue this is generally the lowest-value Rumor set, aside maybe the PCS+Weapon Attachment set. Certainly, it's the one I'm most prone to simply skipping in a run.

It's at least less awful if you're up on Legendary, where Rookie purchase prices are higher? I'd still say it's one of the lowest-value Rumors even there, though. Probably better than Supplies if you're thinking of buying some Rookies, but otherwise... eeeeh...


Special Forces

Gain 1 pre-leveled soldier of a random core class.

Narratively, you're actually chasing a rumor! Holy crap, a rumor in the Rumor mechanic!

Seriously, for being called Rumors, very few Rumors involve investigating rumors. The vast majority of Rumors are either checking out something obvious of interest, or are presented as X-COM kind of stumbling into something or someone basically at random. I really don't get why they didn't call them Points Of Interest.

Anyway, more specifically the rumor being chased is that supposedly a special operations team successfully fought off aliens late in the invasion days in the area, you investigate those rumors, and you eventually find the last surviving member of the team living off the land in the area. Said grizzled veteran living in the woods is plenty willing to join the fight, thus your pre-leveled soldier. Straightforward enough, if a bit silly when you consider that this can produce a Specialist; a highly experienced Gremlin-user doesn't really track with that backstory. But hey, whatever. Frankly I'm surprised Rumors don't have more 'if you think about it, this has issues' bits.

Firefight

Gain 1 pre-leveled soldier of a random core class.

Narratively, you're investigating what's probably meant to be a fight between alien forces and human forces when a veteran soldier shows up hoping to sell stuff they'd salvaged, but your crew manages to convince the veteran soldier to join in the fight against ADVENT and all instead.

Mechanically, Rumors providing pre-leveled soldiers are initially forbidden from spawning, which is understandable given they scale the rank of the soldier with the length of your run -an early Squaddie would be an incredibly underwhelming reward, pretty clearly inferior to the Rookie Rumors since they provide more soldiers and the Guerrilla Tactics School lets you get Rookies to Squaddie for free.

Mind, these still tend to be underwhelming if they spawn as soon as they're allowed. A Corporal is not a great reward for several days of Avenger scan time.

Actually, in general this Rumor type tends to work out poorly. Around the point these start being able to give you respectably-leveled soldiers, you tend to be busy rushing to build radio relays and contact new regions to stave off the Avatar Project, where you can't really spare Avenger time to get one mid-level soldier. (Especially since you won't even know what class they are until you're done with the scan) By the time your Avenger time is freed up and they can give decently-high-level soldiers, you should have a pretty solid endgame team already.

On the plus side, it's one of the Rumors that has relatively high late-game potential, where so many Rumors are difficult to care about when you're a month or so off from launching the endgame. A free Major can fill a gap if one of your Colonels manages to die, or give you a relatively 'disposable' soldier to send into the network tower mission, where you don't mind if they end up wounded because you weren't going to send them into the final mission anyway. This has particularly high potential in the base game; in War of the Chosen you're liable to have 9+ Major-to-Colonel soldiers by that point, where the base game encourages you to have 6-7 such soldiers, and so in War of the Chosen it can easily be overkill to add another.

Though even there, it's worth noting that the Chosen Avenger assault lets you send 10 soldiers. Getting a free Captain or Major can help get you through a late Chosen attack more easily.

Gathering Mob

Spawns a Supply Raid or Supply Extraction mission upon completion.

Narratively, you stumble on two groups of people gearing up to kill each other for reasons the Rumor doesn't specify, and then manage to talk them into attacking ADVENT instead, which is apparently effective enough to trigger a Supply Raid. That's a bit silly, but okay. (Actually, you 'deploy your forces' to 'dissuade them from further conflict', which is pretty easy to read as a euphemism for 'threatened to shoot all of them if any of them started anything', but I'm honestly not sure if that's intentional or if the devs would be horrified to hear that reading)

Interestingly, the image is labelled 'refugees'. If somebody told me the image's name before I got a look at it, I wouldn't have remotely guessed at its contents -these refugees are well-armed, for one. The winter-wear is also a little interesting to me, as video games have a notable tendency to comport themselves as if an environment isn't cold enough to justify warm clothing and whatnot unless there's snow and/or ice visible, even though in reality it can be dangerously cold without snow or ice forming. This is actually one of my favorite Rumor images, actually, in a low-key way; others leaped out at me more immediately, but this one I liked the more I looked at it.

Mechanically, this Rumor type is heavily impacted by whether you're playing the base game or War of the Chosen. In the base game, this is one of the best Rumors and usually worth pursuing: more Supplies, Alien Alloys, Elerium Crystals, PCSes, Weapon Attachments, corpses to sell and/or trigger Instant Autopsies, and more experience? Fantastic, sign me up!

In War of the Chosen it's something of a gamble. First of all, Fatigue means you're risking overloading your soldiers and either sending under-strength soldiers into the resulting Supply Raid or into a mission or two just around the corner, and regardless of the details that can be a disaster. This can be substantially offset by your run having 2-3 SPARKs, but is very much worth pointing out as a concern.

Second, the introduction of Sitreps adds a further element of gambling, in that you won't know what the Sitrep is (If there even is one) until the mission actually spawns. Getting Low Profile or Surgical can be an unbearable disaster you're better off skipping...

... oh wait, if you skip a Supply Raid contact is broken with the region it spawned in!

That can mean losing Continent Bonuses, or even mean an unavoidable Game Over depending on Avatar Project Facility placement and so on. That's some pretty serious risks!

The rewards are still great, yes, but this is a Rumor than can go very badly wrong, and if you're not sure of your circumstances you may wish to default to skipping it in War of the Chosen. No other Rumor type can actively backfire the way mission-generating ones can; spending time scanning some other Rumor certainly can't make things worse.

Speaking of Rumors that generate missions...

To be done later

Spawns a Guerrilla Op mission upon completion.

Guerrilla Op-generating Rumors are rare enough, and I committed to doing this Rumor post late enough in my overall process, that I didn't manage to grab some examples before this post was largely ready. This will be updated with, y'know, actual examples and images and so on when I actually get a run to generate one again.

As a category, Guerrilla Op-generating Rumors are similar to Supply Raid-generating ones in terms of being a gimme in the base game and notably riskier in War of the Chosen, for pretty much exactly the same reasons; Fatigue and Sitreps being added.

Guerrilla Ops from Rumors is a bit more interesting than Supply Raids from Rumors, though, because a Guerrilla Op generated by a Rumor actually interacts with standard Guerrilla Op generation. Say you finish scanning your Guerrilla Op Rumor before your regular monthly Guerrilla Op set hits, and successfully complete the mission: this will block one Dark Event, and when the monthly Guerrilla Op generation triggers you'll actually only get two mission options instead of the usual three. Similarly, once the month rolls over, you'll have two hidden Dark Events because you blocked two Dark Events (Assuming you succeeded at both Guerrilla Ops, of course), instead of the usual one hidden Dark Event.

This is a big contrast with Rumor-generated Supply Raids, which only interact with regular Supply Raids by virtue of XCOM 2 preferring to cycle through all mission variants. A Supply Raid from a Rumor won't affect the schedule of regular Supply Raids, or anything like that.

And to be completely explicit: a Guerrilla Op from a Rumor only generates one mission, with it being random which Dark Event it will block, not the three that Guerrilla Ops normally do past the first month. This is another way it's a bit more interesting than a Rumor-generated Supply Raid.

Mysterious Stranger

Random PCSes and/or Weapon Attachments, at a random quality loosely correlating to how far your run is.

I've also seen ADVENT Datapads and Alien Data Caches from this type of Rumor, though rarely; it's usually just a couple of Weapon Attachments, or a Weapon Attachment and a PCS.

Narratively, somebody 'reaches out' to the Avenger (somehow), saying they helped X-COM during the invasion and want to give X-COM a gift -the game never straight-up says so, but it's pretty obvious the idea is that this fellow is sketchy and your crew is expecting a trap or something, with the Rumor putting the word gift in quotes, positioning the 'helped in the invasion' statement as a 'claim', and saying 'After risking a meeting...' when describing actually meeting up with the individual.

Then the stranger comes through with loot stolen from ADVENT forces, the general implication being that they're being completely honest and genuinely just want to help.

I actually like this mini-story a fair amount. Pop culture is often very guilty of having character expectations almost always basically precognitive unless the story is specifically trying to instill a moral lesson, where characters aren't allowed to be understandably skeptical but pleasantly surprised by nothing going horribly wrong. I wish I saw this kind of bit more often from pop culture.

Internally, the image is labelled 'Traveler', which fits with their kit including a bedroll and so on. It's straightforward enough; a man in a raincoat, wearing sunglasses, clearly prepped for the worst the weather can throw at them, warming himself in front of a fire.

Mysterious Stranger

Random PCSes and/or Weapon Attachments, at a random quality loosely correlating to how far your run is.

Narratively, some weirdo gives you goodies.

I'm not sure why there's two different 'Mysterious Stranger' Rumors that have the same basic benefits, and both use a campfire image, but one of them has no person visible in the image. It's pretty strange.

Road Traffic

Random PCSes and/or Weapon Attachments, at a random quality loosely correlating to how far your run is.

Narratively, you find an 'illegally-operating' truck whose driver is nowhere to be found (How do you know it's operating illegally, exactly?), and it turns out it's loaded with stolen ADVENT weaponry!

... this is one of many little things that has me wondering if at some point a more fully loot-based approach to progressing was ever intended/considered. This Rumor would make a lot of sense if progressing to Magnetics was supposed to take the form of looting ADVENT weapons and equipping them directly, but is extremely strange for providing the loot it actually provides.

Or it could be just a 'writer making different assumptions from the rest of the team, with inadequate processes for catching such inconsistencies', I dunno. It's bizarre, in any event.

In any event, random PCSes and/or Weapon Attachments is pretty variable in its likely value. In the base game, it can be okay but is usually a bit low-value; you don't need very many PCSes or Weapon Attachments in most base-game runs for your squad, and you'll pretty reliably loot more than you really need if you're not picky about the type. And if you are picky, you'd be better off buying what you want from the Black Market.

But! Sometimes your run will just generate a very low count of one or the other or both (I once had a run that ended with over a dozen Elerium Cores unused, while half the squad lacked PCSes and the Weapon Attachment situation was almost as sad), where additional examples is legitimately useful.

In War of the Chosen, by default these are a bit more consistently worth going for; you don't have Vulture guaranteed and so most runs will loot less of both than in the base game, Fatigue pushes you to have more soldiers you actually use in a given mission and thus want more PCSes, and your overall Weapon Attachment needs have been raised by Reapers and Skirmishers having their own unique weapons, as well as Ambushes and Chosen attacks on the Avenger raising how many Weapon Attachments can be usefully tied up at any given moment. If you have Shen's Last Gift, this contrast is even starker, since War of the Chosen gives SPARK cannons access to Weapon Attachments.

On the other hand, if you have the Tactical Legacy Pack, this can lead to you actually caring a lot less in your WotC runs than your base game runs, since the TLP weapons coming with Weapon Attachments that improve with them substantially reduces your Weapon Attachment needs. This doesn't affect the PCS end of things, but honestly, PCSes are overall lower-impact than Weapon Attachments; Perception is one of the most useful PCSes, and is almost always a worse boost than a Scope of equivalent strength, especially against targets in the open. Perception does have the edge of affecting what attacks use accuracy without being fired from your firearm, but my point is I can very directly compare the overall best PCS to one of the best Weapon Attachments and say the PCS is usually less impactful; I'd usually prefer giving a soldier a Superior Scope to a Superior Perception PCS.

You can stack them, of course, and there's benefits to doing so, but the point remains.

Chosen weapons cement this point in the late game, of course, since they're absurdly good and don't accept outside Weapon Attachments; if you have the Tactical Legacy Pack, even doubling up on a class in a mission will often just mean you give the Arashi to one Ranger and the TLP Shotgun to the other Ranger.

Convoy Ambush

A random Experimental Grenade and a random Experimental Ammo.

Narratively, Shen uses the loot from a convoy that got ambushed to make some stuff. Why this specifically results in an Experimental Ammo and an Experimental Grenade is not something the Rumor attempts to justify.

Note that this is specifically pulling from the Experimental Projects; it will never generate Bluescreen Rounds or an EMP Grenade.

As XCOM 2 is buggy with Experimental gear in general, this Rumor will actually sometimes fail to generate one of its rewards -I've personally only ever seen it fail to generate Ammo, consistent with my experience that Experimental Ammo is most prone to wasting an Elerium Core out of the Experimental projects. But I wouldn't want to claim the grenade is guaranteed; these Rumors are uncommon, and some of the loot not generating is also uncommon. It may well be simple luck that I've always had it be Ammo getting eaten.

A bug unique to this Rumor type is that if you've finished Advanced Explosives before scanning the Rumor it's unreliable about actually updating the grenade portion of the reward to be a Bomb variant. In the event that this happens, there's no fix; I usually just sell off such a grenade. (Qualifier: in the base game, Incendiary Grenades are only slightly weaker than Incendiary Bombs, so I usually keep them)

When it's not being buggy, this is a pretty nice Rumor if it generates early enough that you're either still converting Elerium Cores into Ammo and grenades or possibly haven't gotten started on them at all. The exact context depends on if you're doing a run of the base game or of War of the Chosen; in the base game, this is a bit of a gamble-y Rumor if it generates really early, as the potential value of the rewards has an extremely large gap between the least useful payout and the most overall useful payout; grenades-wise, an early Incendiary Grenade is absurdly powerful, doing bizarrely high damage on impact and being a hard-disable to dedicated melee enemies, while a really early Acid Grenade takes a while to have its improved Shred actually matter. (Unless you have the Alien Hunters DLC, mind; then an early Acid Grenade can make the Viper King and Berserker Queen a lot more manageable) Ammo-wise, early Dragon Rounds is once again a hard-disable of dedicated melee enemies (And for that matter will prevent Mutons from using their really nasty abilities... and Suppression, unfortunately), while Venom Rounds makes it noticeably less likely a survivor will actually hit your troops, vs AP Rounds is prone to being literally worthless for a while and Tracer Rounds are always a bit underwhelming.

In War of the Chosen, this Rumor is a bit more stable in its fundamental value -Incendiary Grenades are no longer the clear winner to get early, AP Rounds can actually help early on- but that cuts both ways, where you might feel like skipping it because even its best-case scenario isn't all that great. The addition of 3 more base Power and the Advanced Warfare Center being broken up and overhauled also contributes, in that it's much easier to fit in the Proving Ground early in War of the Chosen, where you're a lot less likely to have the Rumor spawn before you can make any grenades or Ammo Items yourself. Though of course playstyle and per-run luck elsewhere is also a factor -a run of the base game that gets Hidden Reserves as its initial Continent Bonus is going to have an even easier time squeezing in an early Proving Ground than a typical War of the Chosen run, for example.

Regardless, this is a nice Rumor to get early on, but not a strategic gamechanger like some Rumor types are, and drops off the further you get in a run. It's also a little lower in value if you have Shen's Last Gift, since SPARKs can't benefit from either grenades or Ammo; this is a little less true if you're playing War of the Chosen with Integrated DLC since you won't get a free SPARK, but still applies if you intend to build one. An individual run can also end up with an abundance of Elerium Cores and instant manufacture of Experimental Grenades and Experimental Ammo regardless of version, and in such a case this Rumor is very low in value indeed.

Faint Signal

Gain a Facility Lead.

Narratively, tracing a faint signal leads to a crashed UFO, which 'Dr. Shen's team' hacks to get some info out of. You'd think we'd strip some Alien Alloys and Elerium from the thing.

This is a bit of a recurring issue with the Rumor system, that its mechanics are built as a given Rumor providing a clear, singular reward, but then they want to provide a more detailed narrative and many Rumors are a bit eyebrow-raising that they only provide the one thing. Even a lot of the ones where it's not in your face that the narrowness of the reward doesn't fit the narrative, a little bit of thinking will still tend to arrive at 'wait, why does that only provide the one type of reward?' Having people join the Avenger, for example; realistically you'd expect a certain rate of such folks bringing some Supplies with them, but the mechanics are strict. Only a handful of Rumor types cross categories, and those are often a bit strange from the other direction -why does Shen always manage to assemble exactly one grenade and one Ammo Item, and not sometimes two grenades or two Ammo Items?

In any event, Facility Leads from Rumors is in an awkward spot. In theory, grabbing a Facility Lead from a Rumor can be a nice little safety net, where you can respond to the Avatar Project meter getting dangerously full by Researching the Facility Lead and thus hitting a Facility faster than you can currently manage via contacts. In practice, scanning a Rumor takes a similar amount of time to contacting a new region or building a radio relay, so by default advancing your contact chain is almost always going to be better. Similarly, jumping on such a Rumor because the bar is getting full might sound like a plan, but it has the problem that scanning the Rumor and then Researching the Facility Lead all takes a fair amount of time, where if you turn to this as a last-minute plan because the bar fully filled the game over may hit before you're able to attack the Facility.

The safety net plan also has an element of being possible to have things work out so your decision appears to be validated, but where if you'd spent that time making contact with new regions instead of Scanning the Rumor you wouldn't have needed the safety net of the Facility Lead. ie it's possible for it to look like this was a good Rumor to pursue in your run, where actually it was a mistake. 

Also not helping is that Facility Leads take a few weeks to be allowed to spawn. If a Facility Lead Rumor was one of your first three or so Rumors, you'd grab it for lack of anything better to do, and the safety net aspect would get to seriously apply. As-is, Facility Lead Rumors tend to spawn around the time you're busily contacting new regions and building Radio Relays, where it's difficult to spare the time.

War of the Chosen erratically helps this Rumor type, in that for example if you have Resistance Network the Avenger has a lot of time freed up to spend on Rumors, but conversely it also so significantly boosts your ability to beat back the Avatar Project that you're a lot less likely to care about a Facility Lead in particular. Among other points, Resistance Network makes it a lot easier to reach Avatar Project Facilities, so even if Resistance Network freeing up Avenger time leads to you being able to justify scanning one of these Rumors you may end up never actually using the Facility Lead. Why use a Facility Lead if you can contact the region directly?

It's really unfortunate the game's decisions are so consistent about conspiring to make Facility Leads dubious...

Black Smoke

Halves the Intel cost of contacting your next region.

Narratively, you follow the smoke, find a bunch of fires that were apparently set to interfere with construction of an ADVENT 'colony', and then find the protestors and encourage their continued resistance.

This is pretty confusing of a Rumor. What's an ADVENT 'colony', exactly? Is this supposed to be a reference to city centers? Also, what's supposed to be the connection to its mechanics? Like yeah the Intel resource is pretty abstract in general, but it's still a bit difficult to draw a connection between 'we encouraged protestors to keep protesting' and 'we had an easier time reaching out to a region's resistance cell'.

I dunno, maybe this is just 'a writer got told to come up with a narrative justification for reducing contact costs, and then struggled to think of something that made sense at all'? Because I'll admit I'm not sure what would make sense, between the Intel cost being somewhat strained on the narrative end and the general abstractness of Intel.

Amusement Park

Halves the Intel cost of contacting your next region.

This is a weird bit of worldbuilding, where you get told that ADVENT had early plans to build holiday areas away from city centers, with strict monitoring of visits to them. Then the project got abandoned, and now there's a small settlement hanging out nearby a partially-built amusement park. Approaching these people somehow reduces how much Intel you need to contact your next region.

Much like my commentary on the prior, this is clunky but I'll readily admit I'm not thinking of a more sensible explanation.

The Rumors that reduce contact costs are an interesting idea but a bit clunky in execution. To get best results from them requires deliberately organizing your contact situation so that you get to contact a place more than one contact out after doing the Rumor, which is fiddly when Rumors time out, the Avatar Project pressures you to contact aggressively in the midgame or risk a game over, and so on; it's entirely possible to try to set up such a scenario only for the Rumor to time out, or for the Avatar Project to fill faster than you expected and now you can't spare the time to go for the Rumor first. In the base game I rate this Rumor type as dangerously close to being a trap choice.

In War of the Chosen it has more potential to be worth pursuing. Resistance Network frees up tons of Avenger time and makes it a lot safer to try to use one of these Rumors even if time is tight; if you run dangerously low on time, you just shrug and instantly make contact with a region and launch a mission. Covert Ops often providing a way to directly kick back the Avatar Project, and the Sabotage Resistance Order offering another avenue, both buy time so a run may actually have the breathing room to spare Avenger time on one of these Rumors. Other changes like being able to get Contacts from Covert Ops can improve your timetable enough you're more likely to have the time to spare, because you started your contact chain a couple weeks earlier than you otherwise would've.

It's still not a great Rumor type, but it does, on average, get a bit more opportunity to shine in War of the Chosen. It really is impressive how often War of the Chosen manages this on things it doesn't directly touch.

Clinic

+3 Avenger Power.

Narratively, you help a doctor 'shore up their defenses', and the doctor insists you take some ADVENT power cells.

Why that results in a substantial boost to the Avenger's Power supply is beyond me (This would be a bit like expecting a pack of batteries to seriously help with an apartment complex's electrical needs), but okay.

Power Rumors are fairly high-value Rumors, particularly in the base game where you have less Power to start and less ability to work around Power limitations. +3 Power is exactly enough to build assorted key Facilities (Most notably: Resistance Comms), so it's a very nice number even though it can look a little underwhelming to a learning player. It's especially appreciated if you get one really early on, before you're getting around to developing the Avenger's Power generation, but even later on it can let you shift an Engineer off Power generation, or start another Facility early, or upgrade a Facility earlier, or restructure your plans to get a Facility online before building your next Power Relay instead of after.

Indeed, in the base game I rate this as one of the few Rumors that's meaningfully competitive with Engineer-providing Rumors, particularly in the early game; a Power Rumor can substantially improve assorted important timetables in a way that even an early Engineer can't actually replicate. I will in fact risk missing out on an Engineer Rumor if I get a very early Power Rumor in the base game; getting both is the ideal scenario, of course, but if I can only have one of the two Engineers are a little easier to get 'on demand' in the base game.

In War of the Chosen Power Rumors are noticeably less vital, but they're still one of the better Rumor types. The improved initial Power situation in particular makes the earliest Power Rumors take longer to really matter -you have to Excavate your fourth room for additional Power to be mattering, generally speaking- and very late Power Rumors are genuinely unlikely to matter, but a Power Rumor in the early midgame can still be a big help.

Heat Signature

+1 Contact.

Narratively, a warehouse is producing way too much heat, and investigation finds an 'overloaded' alien power supply. Strangely, Shen is able to use this to boost the Avenger's comms, rather than its Power supply.

I genuinely don't get some of the choices with Rumors.

Air Strip

+1 Contact.

Narratively, you find an abandoned airfield littered with planes, and extract the radio equipment to somehow improve the Avenger's own comms.

That's a pretty eyebrow-raising explanation, but I'll admit the Rumor system seems to be operating under rules that make it pretty hard to come up with a variety of good explanations for increasing your Contact limit.

Contacts from Rumors are of course some of the highest-value Rumors in the game. Scanning one of them takes less time than building a Resistance Comms does -even if you assign an Engineer to the Resistance Comms- while not costing Supplies, not requiring Avenger Power, and not requiring space on the Avenger. An Engineer tends to be better (They provide more Contacts if assigned to a Resistance Comms, while being able to do so many other things), and you shouldn't necessarily prioritize Contact Rumors over actually contacting new regions and building radio relays, but if you're looking at Rumors it's easy to pick one of these over other options.

Even the Engineer comparison point isn't actually a clean win in favor of Engineers, since they require Resistance Comms slots open to provide Contacts; if you're at your Power limit and have no open Resistance Comms slots, +1 Contact will immediately let you contact a new region, while an Engineer will have to wait until you've got more Power online to have any chance of adding Contacts. If you're trying to knock back the Avatar Project because it's dangerously full, or you want a really good continent bonus as fast as possible, then you should probably be going for a Contact Rumor over an Engineer Rumor. (In the event you have such a choice, of course)

Contact Rumors are great, in short.

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The following three images are used in-game, but for previously-covered reasons I haven't gotten around to connecting them to Rumors that use them. This will be corrected as I get to it.

internally labeled 'contagion'

I'm curious what the thought process behind this particular Rumor image was. My first impulse is to interpret it as an attempt to depict alien flora, which would be interesting in that the in-engine alien flora, even into War of the Chosen with the Xenoform biome, actually stays away from green as a color scheme, defaulting pretty heavily to purple with orange, blue, and white as supplemental colors. But 'green glow' has also just become one of several related pop culture visual shorthands for sickness concerns, be they radiation, germs, major bodily parasites, or whatever, so I'm not sure how much 'in-universe' significance to attribute to the color here.

internally labeled 'transmitter'

The image is a radio that's clearly seen better days. It's fine. I really don't have anything to say about it in particular.

internally labeled 'unsafe'

I'm sort of curious if the artist had anything in particular in mind for this image, as far as why the area is 'unsafe' while looking merely a bit run-down. A Chryssalid infestation? ADVENT left behind mines?

I kind of suspect the artist didn't have any particular explanation in mind, but I'm still curious.

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The remaining Rumors are all special, non-standard Rumors.

Black Market

The Rumor becomes the Black Market, permanently.

The Black Market Rumor is of course very non-standard. It only takes 3 days (Even in War of the Chosen), it offers no direct reward, and its location becomes the Black Market location for your run, including that completing the Rumor immediately opens the Black Market screen. It also has no alternate variations, never times out, and is the most blatant Rumor about refusing to repeat itself. (Unless Go To Ground triggers in War of the Chosen) It's also forbidden from spawning initially, but will spawn reliably in the second month.

It does overall operate off of regular Rumor mechanics, though, including that it generates in response to completing a mission or finishing scanning a Rumor. Which can be a bit inconvenient, actually -it generates so early it's often dubious to actually visit it, where you may well be wishing a regular Rumor had generated and resent that it effectively ate a regular Rumor generation opportunity.

Also, it's funny that the Black Market image is clearly depicting a weapons dealer, given you can't buy weapons from the Black Market. Evidence of a shift in concept? Or just the devs having their minds collectively go to weapons when thinking of a black market, such that nobody thought about whether it fit to the actual game? It's funny, however it happened.

Locater Beacon

Grants you one Bolt Caster, Hunter's Axe, Shadowkeeper, and Frost Bomb, as well as allowing the Nest's Rumor to generate.

This will only generate if you have the Nest enabled, and is how you acquire all this gear in such a run, instead of building them at Supply costs. This is overall a favorable trade, as Locater Beacon is providing more than 100 Supplies worth of goods, which is more than you'll usually get out of a Supply-providing Rumor.

Interestingly, this is labeled 'Alert_Downed_Skyranger', rather than being prepended with 'poi' like the base Rumor images. The Alert prepend gets used primarily for mission images, not Rumors, suggesting you may have been intended to do a mission to retrieve the loot from the Skyranger at some point, or something of the sort.

Narratively, you find a bunch of dead young soldiers still strapped into their seats (I'm not sure why the game explicitly specifies that they're young?), no sign of the pilot, I guess so players can imagine Big Sky from Enemy Unknown is still alive? Plus a crate marked with X-COM insignia containing the Alien Hunters gear. (You can in fact see such a crate in the lower-right corner of the image) Straightforward enough.

Triangulated Position

Unlocks the Nest mission.

This of course only triggers if you have the Nest enabled in your run. It's a 3-day Rumor whose payout is the Nest mission, simple as that.

It's also one of many bits suggesting Alien Hunters got rushed, as it just uses the generic Resistance iconography image that normally gets used primarily for when Rumors spawn, rather than having its own dedicated Rumor image.

Narratively, you somehow triangulated Big Sky's origin point (How?) and the area has a broadcast from what sounds like Dr. Vahlen, so it's time to rush in just in case she's alive. That's really it.

Encrypted Signal

Enables the Lost Towers mission.

This only triggers if you have Shen's Last Gift turned to 'on' at the start of your run, naturally. It's a 3-day Rumor whose payout is the Lost Towers mission.

There's really all there is to say about it on a raw mechanics level, given I've been over it in detail already.

Narratively, this Rumor very possibly doesn't meaningfully exist. Completing the Rumor gives you a summary of the cinema that spawned the Rumor: somebody got a signal to the Avenger through ROV-R, and your team is convinced it has to be papa Shen. Notably, the Rumor doesn't explain how this leads to finding the tower, nor does it justify needing to scan the Rumor: it's not presented as you tracing the signal or investigating the area it's coming from. (The mission summary mentions tracing the signal, but not the Rumor) It's easy to mentally fill in with such a scenario, but usually Rumors are pretty explicit about this kind of thing. I suspect this is another casualty of rushing.

Much like Triangulated Position, this Rumor's image is yet more evidence of rushing, in that the Encrypted Signal Rumor doesn't have its own dedicated Rumor image. It's less obvious about it than with Triangulated Position, but it's just the same image used for Lost Towers' mission icon -which is efficient and sensible, but still not how the game normally operates.

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And... we're done with XCOM 2!

I'll probably come back to it some more at some later date, but for the moment? We're done, and moving on to a different project.

See you then.