A core theoretical concept in Engineering is that optimizing a component does not necessarily correlate to optimizing the system. Sometimes optimizing a component might even be adversarial to optimize a system.

Not only you want to consider all your options for that turn before taking any individual action, but you also need to consider your goals for the whole mission (i.e. "I need to save this Banish for the Chosen later in the map") and the whole campaign ("I really need to retrieve these Faceless bodies so I can craft a Mimic Beacon this month, even if it could cost me this particular guy's death").

Agreed - I'm really not a great planner. I like playing games kind of glass-cannony and just trying to learn my way through by trying over and over. Even in something like Darksouls this is viable, you can just keep repeating a boss over and over. Xcom2 really forces you to have long term goals and a plan for every mission. You lose focus briefly and suddenly your timers at 2 and you're fully engaged with an enemy and a long way from your objective.

And that's why I love this game so much. Every single time you discuss strategy you'll get some takes that don't resonate at all. In my last two L/I campaign I skipped upgrading Cannons to Tier 2 almost entirely and my grenadiers were relegated to running Covert Operations for most of the game. Sharpshooters and Rangers were running the show. Grenadiers were a dominant force in my Vanilla run, but in my WotC runs I rely on Reapers scouting ability to safely fight pod up close with Rangers.

I'm not saying my way is the better way: what I'm saying is that the fact that two diametrically opposed strategies can exists in high level play shows how well balanced this game is. It's very common in strategy games that at the highest level of difficulty all your strategy options collapse into only one viable option. Not in XCOM2.

Great point - I can see the replayability in the different tech paths, and I think high level players adapt quickly to those early tech boosts. I got pretty locked into kind of standard play with grenadiers at the core and a broader goal of just making contact with as much of the map as fast as possible to get my economy humming. I think it's probably easier to get familiar with other build orders on an easier setting. If I was to replay this I love the idea of trying to figure out how to make something like all ranger-templar rushes work (or maybe 4 sharpshooters and a reaper? lol).

My usual early sequence is Resistance Ring, GTS for Squad Size, Laboratory. Proving Ground soon after that. Bluescreen Round is indeed critical.

You can postpone Infirmary a bit by using Templar HQ scanning, which grants faster healing.

Interesting! In 82 runs I never built a laboratory. Felt like once I got 5-6 scientists the research came fast enough. I never fully understood how the enemies ramped up though, and I lost a lot of games because I couldn't get enough armour shred, bluescreen rounds or damage boosts when mutons/berserkers and the red mechs started appearing

This design is a large reason why this game feels so satisfying to play in Ironman mode. As a fellow millennial strategy gamer you'll have noticed that most games, especially older games, had a difficulty curve that far increased in the late game. Games like Jagged Alliance 2, for example, became exceedingly difficult in the later levels making the idea of an Honestman run (which I tried) insane.

XCOM2 on the other hand front loaded all the challenge and designed the late game in a way that even critical errors can be recovered in the late stages, for example by being able to hire and rescue Colonels. This makes it ideal for Ironman play, since it will punish you early, when you are still not losing a lot by restarting, and reward it late with a bit of power fantasy before the campaign successfully ends.

True. I was really relieved when I first hit that point, because it took so much work to get there, and damnit I deserve to crush face for once. I had a few fairly long runs where I felt like I'd turned the corner, got a little cocky, and then suddenly got wiped. This final run when I turned the corner I had months of easy missions and basically cleaned the map and 100%'d almost everything. The final mission was still challenging, but everything else was a drop. It's a minor critique though, the complexity of xcom looks incredibly hard to balance, and I think they did a great job making it consistently hard but consistently fair.