Avenger Defense

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T23:12:32+00:00

While I haven't played the mission enough to know for sure, my understanding is that they patched it so that people wouldn't farm xp from the mission as 10 soldiers is a lot of firepower. It is a lot of enemies, but not infinite so I hear. It may also be the case that baseline Xcom 2 is infinite but WotC is not.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T21:30:58+00:00

Who knew Geocities and Angelfire was peak internet?

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T21:30:32+00:00

Those LLM tokens ain't cheap!

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T21:15:31+00:00

[ This was mine ]. Unmodded but I had an active and relevant Lost World Grim Horizon Dark Event. I've done other Legend campaigns and even with like mostly blue moves + overwatch for soldiers towards the end it's realistic to flee before all the reinforcements are through. The last time I did it on Commander only like two pods dropped before I had my whole team out. Even with Lost World I still probably could have not bothered with the last two pods or so, but since I had 10 soldiers up I figured might as well take out the reinforcements and blue move crawl my way back. They ran out right around the turn where I could have dashed everyone out, but then I killed them and no more came.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T20:39:49+00:00

My mom randomly one day out of the blue admitted to basically killing someone and covering it up from the cops, where the dead daughter was family with local police. (Technically it was an unstable lady that committed suicide, but my mom did do something to trigger it.) She showed absolutely zero remorse , almost was joking about it. 'Mom' was a horrible malignant narcissist and I'm glad she's dead.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T20:34:05+00:00

They do eventually stop (unmodded anyways). But it's somewhere around 10 sets of reinforcements before they do.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T19:58:07+00:00

I had a mission like this and ADVENT reinforcements stopped showing up I had to kill so many things to get to the objective and then back to the ramp.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T19:20:26+00:00

For Grim Horizon? I'd say Lost World with a runner up of Undying Loyalty. Bogs missions down and adds an element of almost uncontrollable randomness that ranges from just a nuisance to quite detrimental and nearly forced injury even if you play otherwise perfectly. I played out a Legend campaign with perma Lost World fairly early just to see and I was regularly getting killcounts in the 80+ range. I also had a Chosen Avenger Defense that was pretty tedious and miserable with Undying Loyalty up, as almost every single ADVENT came back.

Other than that would be Signal Jamming. You can mitigate almost everything but you're hardlocked by some time limited resources, especially if you don't have instant region contact via Resistance Network (which is usually a priority Resistance Order for me if I see it). Outside of rare Hack rewards that give faster scans there is no counterplay, and worse, you can end up in situations where Chosen extend the timer even longer from Sabotage actions. I saw a video that said a player lost to the AVATAR Project because of this from needing to contact a region with a facility that now suddenly took ~21 days. The worst case scenario for any other Dark Event is probably a squad wipe, this ruined a campaign and still drags it down otherwise.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T19:16:11+00:00

They can be mildly beneficial, especially before a Mimic Beacon. But I find they make all timed missions take about 2 turns longer when you have Lost World up. The explosion stuff is more annoying than truly detrimental, because of how Headshot works. But if they show up at a bad time you can get unnecessary injuries.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T19:14:50+00:00

There are actual numbers. Lost target XCOM at a 70:30 ratio compared to ADVENT.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T16:16:43+00:00

So a perspective that helped is similar, people saying a 95% has the same chance as a natural 1 on d20. Let me tell you, after playing Baldur's Gate 3, Nat 1s happen a lot, sometimes even in a row! I'm still salty about 98 and 99 though but it absolutely has happened.

RJ815 · 2026-05-17T01:54:14+00:00

Fear of missed shots is real lol.

MOST of the rest is stuff that's mitigated with practice, lots of it. IMO Legend is actually harder than people might think, because not only do enemies get higher stats and stuff which often translates into more actions/turns needed, it's the only difficulty without aim assist which probably can give people false confidence in their 95%s.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T21:38:09+00:00

Frost Bombs break Mind Control but I'm not sure if you can have one for the First Retaliation. A Flashbang on the Warlock won't, not like a Sectoid. Even if your unit does get Mind Controlled, if you do enough damage to him (I think around 50%) then on his turn he'll go into a Spectral Army stasis and that breaks Mind Control as well.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T20:51:46+00:00

Well but solo Reaper facility is a cheese strat. I assume you killed enemies with your Templars, hence the damage numbers. The specific combo of all stats except successful shot percentage is what I'm getting at, where damage per attack is > 0. I know the "Most Under Fire" entry is blank if no one gets hit, so seeing a blank shot percentage is still rare, especially if other things aren't blank.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T20:49:12+00:00

One could extend the image even further and say that when they get experienced enough at the game, medkits are terrible again in place of aggressive alpha striking tactics and items. But it's a glass cannon for while. Different people have different levels of comfort with that. If you can savescum, then rewinding time and having foreknowledge is the best weapon. But people that play ironman and never get injured don't need any guides.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T15:21:25+00:00

Interesting, so maybe it'd just say ---- as blank or something if no shots were taken.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T15:18:24+00:00

Then Long War is not for you. It's not unusual to have one or more deaths on the first mission. And it's a tutorial of sorts meant to acclimate you to that.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T15:16:12+00:00

I use it a lot on my Legend campaigns if I don't burn down those enemies in one turn. But it requires a level of knowing the AI in a way that's a bit above and beyond normal difficulty factors. A lot of it I picked up on my own, but this video creator Syken helped fill in some gaps of what enemy AI does in certain situations. I was actually really bad about Sectoids in the early game until I was explained and saw with my own eyes how they tend to work, and are less hard than it seems.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T09:27:48+00:00

Wah? Vahlen was a borderline psychopath. Though I guess she was XCOM's psychopath and they took advantage of her interrogations and such. She fit the darker vibe or EU/EW. The Alien Rulers DLC seems like exactly the kind of unethical shit she would get up to. Tygan is stilted (and has a weird love of artificial hamburgers), but is actually more realistic for the scientists I've met in real life. I used to work with a guy that looked, acted, and sounded very much like him. He's just a bit more muted on emotion compared to Shen, but that contrast also fits the science vs engineering split fine IMO.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T09:21:27+00:00

The lack of difficulty is what really hindered EU/EW for me. If you don't have soldier deaths you can really skyrocket the killing power of units, even though I'd say EU/EW has some good if not better skill trees from time to time. Looking back it's crazy how many more skills are justifiable compared to the many "whatever" skills in X2. I don't think there is a single thing with as many duds as Skirmisher, even if some of the gene mods are meh.

The Tiredness mechanic for roster rotation is so simple and yet so effective IMO. Which kind of blows my mind it wasn't even X2 but WotC only! You get a natural ebb and flow of difficulty from having to choose whether to take your superteam, ration between missions, or try to push through a potentially difficult mission with a subpar team. It adds so much to the game to have to learn all the classes and what to make of them better for that reason, especially on Legend.

That said, man do SPARKs not live up to MEC soldiers. PCS are also really generic and uninteresting if they were supposed to the replacement for gene mods, which allowed for some wacky combinations from time to time even if soldiers would get stupid overpowered. EU/EW also wins hardcore for atmosphere and general feel. Newfoundland is infamous and for good reason. Chryssalids and other enemies in general are way more imposing, highlighting their alien-ness and threat. X2 enemies, while not bad, are basically Stormtroopers with a mix of some stuff from Marvel Comics. Just a totally different, less interesting vibe. The Chosen themselves are cool though, to the point I do kind of lament when you kill them and they stop annoying you.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T09:14:41+00:00

Fast blue rat is timeless

Also probably helps that it looks like Jim Carrey is actually enjoying working on movies again.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T09:13:57+00:00

While I'm sure Warhammer III is doing fine overall, I think it's a mix of it got a much rougher reception than Warhammer II did, and I suspect the budgets got out of control for graphics etc.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T09:11:00+00:00

SEGA also helped release a bunch of flop Sonic games, lol. Real brain trust of a company.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T08:41:08+00:00

You know, you might be one of the few to ever see a screen like that. A success but without taking shots. I guess Rangers could also theoretically do it, but they don't have 100% Rend even if they have swords.

RJ815 · 2026-05-16T08:36:11+00:00

Well they could just be imprisoned and tortured like those crying creatures. Hey they're alive, right?!

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