If time pressure means you can't actually wait a turn, it may be best to simply take the first shot and then fight the pod as normal, instead of going for an Overwatch ambush. ![]() If the pod leader is in High Cover relative to your squad, it's alarmingly likely that you'll waste a lot of your shots on misses, even if your squad should be able to cleanly kill the other pod members. This also means it's much more important to pay attention to whether the pod leader is in Cover relative to the rest of your squad or not when considering whether to initiate an Overwatch ambush or not. ![]() A secondary implication of this is that it's often smarter, when initiating an Overwatch ambush, to actually have the first shooter target one of the weaker pod members, particularly early in the game when most of your classes are guaranteed to kill ADVENT Troopers with a successful hit. Regardless, typically, albeit not always, a pod leader will be the most durable member of their pod, potentially by a wide margin, and thus it's surprisingly uncommon for you to completely eliminate more than one enemy with Overwatch unless your firepower is complete overkill for the pod. This is a point that's somewhat opaque in actual play since the game is perfectly happy to animate the resolution of multiple simultaneous Overwatch shots in a completely different order from how the game expended them internally, and furthermore it's not necessarily obvious that the reason an ADVENT Trooper got shot instead of the ADVENT Officer by exactly one of your squad members is because that soldier never had a line of fire on the Officer. There's a bunch of internal stuff to do with how the game organizes pod generation involved in this, but the primary reason I mention it is that pod leaders are always prioritized for Overwatch fire when the pod activates, and thus will usually absorb Overwatch fire before their podmates. On the note of leading pods, there's always a member of the pod that is considered the leader. Thus, the Sectoid can be quite a bit tougher than a basic ADVENT Trooper, show up just as early, and yet not lead to insane swinginess the way it would in the prior game's model. That's a much more reasonable 14-18 HP to deal with -especially since XCOM 2 has raised your damage a little, so that an early-game four-soldier squad will output a minimum of 12 damage if every shot hits but does not crit, where in the prior game their minimum damage would be a meager 8. In XCOM 2, however, an early-game Sectoid won't show up with a buddy or two of its own species, but will instead be leading one or two 4 HP ADVENT Troopers. That would be completely insane to have in the prior game, as three such Sectoids (ie a pod of standard size) would be literally as durable as a Sectopod, an enemy you're really expected to fight with endgame weaponry. ![]() This has a variety of implications, such as different enemy types being able to synergize with each other and this actually matter without requiring the player pulled multiple pods at once, but one of the more subtle implications that the game uses to good effect is that enemy durability and overall threat level can be much more uneven.Īs a concrete example, on Legendary Sectoids will have 10 HP, and can show up from the very beginning of the game. You can still encounter pods of only a single enemy type, and indeed some enemy types will normally refuse to share pods with other enemy types, but it's much more typical for a given pod to be two or three different enemy types. There's some key details that radically change things, though, some not very obvious if you don't play the two games close together.įirst, the relatively obvious: pods are now mixed by default, instead of mixed pods being restricted to specific cases like Cyberdiscs always coming with Drones in the prior game. XCOM 2 is, in many obvious ways, operating on a broadly similar system to the prior game: enemies come in pods that are 'inactive' normally and activate when they see your squad (With the new caveat that they don't activate in response to Concealed troops), at which point the pod scrambles for Cover as a free action but doesn't get a chance to shoot at your forces if they activated during their own turn, etc.
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