XCOM 2

Woolygimp_sl said:

Gavin, does cover not directly adjacent to you still have an effect?

The two examples I'd like clarified are:

|=|=|=| there's a long wall
X if you stand in the middle, are you protected by the cover on the square to the upper right, and upper left?

What if you are standing two tiles behind high cover? What if you're standing behind a low guard rail that's directly behind high cover? It shows you under low cover when you move to the square, but they have to shoot through high & low to hit you. Do you gain 60% 40% or 20% bonus defence?

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I'll answer this the best I can based on what I know of how cover worked in EU/EW, and near as I can tell very little or nothing changed with cover.

For starters, if you are not directly adjacent to cover, you are exposed, which is the same as flanked. Certain aliens (Archons, Mecs, Andromedon Shells, Sectopods, Gatekeepers) have a special property that makes them incapable of being exposed. If you have this property, you can't take cover either.

High cover blocks line of sight, but by being in full cover you are granting line of sight to that square. Behold my peerless paint skills!



Red is an advent trooper, black is a full cover pillar, the other 4 are your troopers. Blue and Yellow are in high cover from red, although red gets a bonus to hit yellow due to the aiming angle being close to a flank. Orange is exposed, which is essentially the same as flanked (except for one specific situation in EU/EW that may not be present in XCom 2). Green and red theoretically do not have line of sight to one another.

If Red advanced directly forward to the cover, he would be flanking (and be flanked by) yellow, he would have LoS to green who would now be exposed, blue would still have high cover. If he was one square to our right, yellow would now be flanked, green would be exposed, blue would still be in high cover.

One fairly important aspect of the enemy AI with regards to cover: Enemies will never voluntarily leave themselves exposed, enemies will never knowingly move into a flank, and enemies will always attempt to move out of a flank.



As for your second question, whatever your trooper is directly adjacent to is the level of cover he is in. If you are in low cover directly behind high cover, the high cover blocks some LoS but does not provide any defense bonus.

That is indeed a much better and more accurate way to describe how high cover works. Basically when you're in high cover, the enemy doesn't have LoS to the square you're in, it has LoS to your step-out squares. Which occasionally created some really dumb LoS failures in EW/EU but they seem to have been fixed this time around.

Just had my first failed mission. 2 turns to get the VIP from the truck to the evac zone. Moved max distance both turns, missed it by 1 fucking square. The evac is on top of high buildings way too much.

Were you blue moving then yellow moving, or just dashing from your start point? Doing your blue move first frequently gets you an extra square of distance on your yellow.

Which makes zero sense, but thanks for the info.

It's because mobility doesn't directly translate into how many squares you can move, although I don't know the exact math behind it.

If anything blowing your yellow should grant you additional movement since it is far more dangerous

Agreed. Whatever the math is, it's dumb. I don't really care about losing the VIP, but if I had lost Bradford or one of my majors, Ida been pissed.

It was a bit funny, too. The evac zone was on the roof of a three story, one corner of it at the first square off a short ladder, all my guys are in the zone, and the VIP is sitting at the bottom of the ladder, as we zipline away. Shoulda tossed her a nade.

Oh I learned something about the avenger defense mission on that playthrough as well. If you haven't already had an avenger defense, completing the codex coordinate mission (or maybe it's how many story missions you do, i always did blacksite-blacksite coords-codex coords) spawns a hunter UFO. I'm making that assumption because on my savescum playthrough I got the avenger defense super early and didn't get an immediate UFO when I did the story missions in the same order. Fortunately I was ready for the end game at that point and had about 2/3rds of the world contacted, so I was able to avoid it until the shadow chamber research was all done and assault the radio tower before it caught me.

I can only guess how nightmarish a late game avenger defense would be with no squad size upgrades, although I had a decent number of high ranking troops that I had never used from various rewards so it's not like I would have been stuck with rookies, just a bunch of dudes with no extra gear beyond grenades and no weapon upgrades. Only had 6 soldiers that I'd actually leveled up, my initial 4 and my two psi ops. I did have a backup grenadier for when someone was wounded before my psi ops finished cooking, but I needed him for few enough missions that I think he was only an LT.

Avenger defense is easy. Send a ranger down to get sight of the tower, or mind control/haywire an enemy, let your snipers do the rest, lift off. Unless you want/need to farm some kills.

I wasn't using a sharpshooter. 2x grenadier, 1x ranger, 1x specialist until my psi-ops were ready. Snipers are just plain terrible early on, which I suppose is balanced by how awesome they get later.

Yeah, that would make it a bit harder. Still, a haywire and some suicide rookies could handle it, the beacon is easy to down.

I'm not sure how I feel that I never had to defend the Avenger. The one time a UFO found me I managed to escape? I had the defense room upgraded and manned too.

It's not very memorable. It sure as hell isn't the ballbuster that OG/EW base defense was, that's for damn sure. It's hardly different from the 'destroy the transmitter' guerrilla ops, except you have to move back to the beginning to extract instead of killing all enemies, and if any enemies get into the deployment zone it's game over, although looking at youtube you can restart the mission which may also be available on Iron Man? Reinforcements show up faster and faster until they're coming in every turn, but since it's an extraction you don't get to take the bodies with you.

I would have been much more excited if it was like OG base defense, where the enemies are inside your base and the terrain is generated by your base layout, or at least EW where the aliens are attacking a static part of the base unaffected by base layout.

This game is fun and difficult.

Gavinmad_sl said:

It's because mobility doesn't directly translate into how many squares you can move, although I don't know the exact math behind it.

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I believe how this works is say your soldier can move 21 tiles in a turn, when you full dash you can go all 21 tiles, but if you blue move first, it rounds the 10.5 down to 10, then you get another 10 tile move with your yellow move, resulting in only 20 tiles covered instead of the 21.

Raes_sl said:

Avenger defense is easy. Send a ranger down to get sight of the tower, or mind control/haywire an enemy, let your snipers do the rest, lift off. Unless you want/need to farm some kills.

Click to expand...

Of course I got an Avenger defense layout yesterday where the damn tower was behind some tall ruined building. Had to get people right on top of the goddamn thing to shoot it. I was peeved.

Thought I might lose the war on my first playthrough I'm still going through because I didn't have enough intel because I killed a walker mech near a car, blowing it up; which in turn killed the nearby vip I wanted to extract. But I was able to get to one mission within the remaining 20 days and knock off 5 bars of progress and I just did another dark mission preventing them gaining two bars so hopefully the war isn't lost yet.

Yeah that 20+ day timer completely resets every time you knock a bar back off. I don't know if you can actually go indefinitely (Firaxis said you couldn't before launch) but you can definitely drag the game out an incredibly long time if you wanted.