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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   1899 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 4, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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(I have a long, nerdy post about my answer to this question below, but for those not interested in reading it, I'll start with the question itself.) So, what video games have you been playing this week?

I first played XCOM: Enemy Unknown in 2015, and became instantly hooked. Having completed it on Normal difficulty, I resolved to beat the game on Classic difficulty with Ironman mode enabled. "Ironman" means that each campaign has exactly one save file: if you make a mistake, you can't reload an old save. Every decision you make is final, so your only choices are to press on or start all over again.

It took me dozens of attempts and hundreds of hours spread out several years, but I finally did it. There's a specific Steam achievement for completing the game with Ironman mode enabled on Classic difficulty or higher, and only 2.2% of players have been awarded it.

Two years ago, I started playing the sequel XCOM 2 on Commander difficulty (the second game's equivalent of Classic difficulty) with Ironman disabled. The old addiction flamed within me once again. In January of this year I started playing the expansion pack, War of the Chosen, with the same settings enabled. I was about halfway through my playthrough when I resolved to match my earlier achievement: I was going to beat XCOM 2 on Commander difficulty with Ironman enabled, a goal I set out to achieve in earnest in February.

After 193 unique attempts, dozens of hours, innumerable ragequits, uninstalls and re-installs, I accomplished this goal at 11:46 a.m. yesterday. I marked the occasion with a snipe of prosecco. I'm not quite wearing a suit to play Football Manager but I'm certainly in the same ballpark.

So you finished a video game, so what? This post doesn't seem that nerdy.

You haven't seen the Sankey chart yet. I uploaded all 193 JSON save files to ChatGPT and got it to work its analytical magic.

The games in the XCOM franchise are some of the most definitive examples of the Early Game Hell trope. While most games start off easy then gradually ramp up in difficulty, XCOM is the opposite. The early game is so difficult that a single mistake can ruin your campaign, but by the end of the game you're killing enemies by breathing on them.

My own experiences bore this out. 193 unique campaigns sounds bad, but fully two-thirds of those (128 campaigns) were abandoned during the first mission, as I quickly realised that getting any rating other than "Flawless" was setting myself up for failure. A further 39 were abandoned before I upgraded my squad from ballistic weapons to magnetic, and another 19 before completing the first story mission, "Investigate Alien Blacksite". Looking at this flowchart of key story missions, once I reached the "Advent Forge Facility Assault" mission, it was pretty much game over.

Another way of looking at this is via time. In-game, the campaign starts on February 28th, 2035. 165 campaigns were abandoned before the end of March. 17 made it as far as April, and 11 made it as far as May-December. Once you can get over the initial hump, completing the game is very doable. But getting over the initial hump is really hard.

Of the 26 campaigns in which I successfully researched magnetic weapons, it took me, on average, 33.5 days to do so. Of the 7 campaigns in which I successfully completed the Blacksite mission, it took me an average of 85 days to do so. Interestingly, my very last campaign (the one which succeeded, yesterday) had the longest interval from the start of the campaign to the Blacksite mission in the dataset, just shy of four months.

But I don't want to overstate the ease of the endgame: it's not as if I did the last few missions in my sleep. The final mission, in particular, was a nail-biter. I started the mission with 7 soldiers, one of whom (my sole Ranger) was placed out of commission after only the second pod of enemies I encountered, forcing me to complete the rest of the mission with a squad of 6.* Of the 11 soldiers killed during this playthrough, two of them bought the farm during the final confrontation against the Avatars.

What did the experience teach me about myself XCOM 2?

XCOM 2 is a deceptive game. On the surface, its mechanics seem similar enough to its predecessor that you could be forgiven for assuming that any strategies which are viable for the first game will be viable for the sequel. This is a mistake, and my first few non-Ironman playthroughs in 2024 were dedicated to figuring out the differences between them. The big one is that the developers realised that the first game's mechanics incentivised an overly slow, cautious playstyle, and took steps to rectify this. This means that "Overwatch creeping" (advancing your soldiers through the map very slowly and placing them all on Overwatch, hoping that an alien will blunder into their cone of vision) is no longer a viable strategy on any mission with a time limit, which is the vast majority of them. On a non-Ironman playthrough, the ability to save scum and reload saves means that you can cheese your way through a mission without a deep understanding of the game's mechanics, but on an Ironman playthrough, the nuances of the mechanics have to become second nature. If you were to compare my earliest attempts at an Ironman playthrough with the one that succeeded, the main differences in how I took on the tactical missions would be concentrated in the following four areas:

  • Guaranteed damage: Every XCOM player has a horror story about firing at an alien with a 90% (or even 95%) chance to hit them, and missing them. I know that, on the lower difficulties, the displayed chance-to-hit percentage is not representative of the actual percentage, and the game puts its thumb on the scale in various ways to benefit the player. While the game is no longer helping the player in this exact way on Commander difficulty, I suspect that the actual chance-to-hit percentage might still be significantly different from what is displayed onscreen. What this means is that any attack with a less-than-100% chance to hit cannot be relied upon, and that any attack which is guaranteed to hit is an absolute godsend. In the early game, this means favouring sword attacks (provided your Ranger has the Bladestorm ability: telling a Squaddie Ranger to attack with his sword is suicidal), explosives (unlike in the first game, in which the Heavy's rocket launcher only had a 90% chance to hit, every grenade thrown or launched in XCOM 2 will land exactly where you tell it to; also, you're no longer concerned about collecting weapon fragments) and environmental damage (in addition to blowing up vehicles or gas tanks the aliens are taking cover behind, blowing up the floor they're standing on will cause them to take fall damage). In the mid-game, it means favouring your Specialist's Gremlin attacks, and upgrading your Gremlin as quickly as possible. In the late game, it means training up Psi soldiers, most of whose offensive abilities are guaranteed to hit (in my non-Ironman playthroughs, I dispensed with Psi soldiers entirely: not a viable option when playing Ironman). I believe it was only in my very last playthrough that I experimented by giving one of my Grenadiers the "Hail of Bullets" ability (an attack which is guaranteed to hit, but which uses three pips of ammunition): after doing so, I wondered how I'd ever managed without it. It also means that, when adding mods to your weapons, the humble Stocks (which damage enemies even if an attack misses) are your best friend. While the Hair Trigger and Repeater might sound more interesting, you could go on an entire playthrough without either one ever triggering (even the best ones only offer a 15% chance of doing so), whereas equipping your soldier with a Stock means that every attack is guaranteed to cause at least 1 (or 2, or 3) points of damage no matter what. One of the reasons guaranteed damage is so important is that, unlike in the first game, successfully hitting an enemy who's on Overwatch (even for one point of damage) disables their Overwatch, giving the rest of your squad much more freedom to move around.
  • Splash damage: I realised early on that the best way to initiate an ambush in the very first mission is to place all of your soldiers on Overwatch except for one, who lobs a grenade at a group of enemies. The mathematics of this are straightforward: if you have three enemies and you partially damage all three of them in the initial attack, the odds of all three surviving the ambush are much lower compared to damaging only one of them. It was embarrassingly late when I realised that this strategy remains viable a good ways into the game: for many of my earlier campaigns, after the first mission I would initiate the ambush by having my Sharpshooter take out one enemy. Any attack which does splash damage (explosives, many psi attacks, capacitor discharge) is a godsend, firstly because they're almost always guaranteed damage, secondly because the explosive attacks also destroy cover, and thirdly because, in the long run, applying a small amount of damage to a group of enemies is a safer strategy compared to possibly doing a large amount of damage to just one. Splash damage also synergises well with certain abilities: the Sharpshooter has an ability called Serial which makes any kill a free action. At full health, all but the weakest enemies can't be killed in one hit from a sniper rifle. But if they've been softened up beforehand with splash damage? Just like that, your sniper can rack up as many as six kills in one turn. The Ranger's Reaper ability is similar, but more contextual and most useful against heavily wounded enemies.
  • Bullet sponges: One of the best ways to protect your squad is to get the aliens to attack things which aren't your squad. To this end, you should research and build the Mimic Beacon as quickly as possible. It's a holographic projection of the soldier who threw it, and any enemy who has it within its cone of vision will always prioritise attacking it over your soldiers, sometimes even suicidally so. (I believe the developers described the item as a "get out of jail free" card.) Bring at least one of them on every mission, and you won't regret it. To the same end, abilities which allow you to take control of enemies (hacking and mind control) are useful not primarily for using the enemies' abilities, but simply for their utility as human alien shields. (Forget the comparisons between XCOM [the in-game organisation] and ISIS: XCOM is Hamas.) I'm not sure if it's quite as overt as the Mimic Beacon, but I get the impression the enemy AI considers mind-controlled fellow aliens graver threats than human soldiers. The final mission was a case in point. I had killed two out of three Avatars, and killing the last one would win the game immediately. However, the game had spawned in somewhere in the region of 10-15 enemies at a chokepoint, and I did not fancy having to waste time thinning the herd before I could focus my fire on the surviving Avatar again. Fortunately, in the previous turn I had both mind-controlled a Berserker and hacked an Advent MEC. The aliens wasted their turns attacking their mind-controlled allies, allowing my soldiers to focus their fire on the Avatar and win the game.
  • Rocket-tag gameplay: In the first game, armour absorbed damage, so that soldiers could take a few points of damage without being laid up in the infirmary. Not so here: any amount of damage will wound your soldiers. This is to encourage you to do everything in your power to prevent them from being harmed at all. The absolute best outcome for any mission is that the aliens never even attack your soldiers, as you kill them before they get a chance to put their fingers on the trigger. (You will be awarded a Flawless rating on a mission if none of your soldiers are killed or wounded, but I consider a mission in which the "Most Under Fire" field is null an A+.) In order of preference, the best outcomes are 1) enemy is dead; 2) enemy is unable to attack; and 3) enemy is able to attack, but unable to use special abilities. This is why attacks guaranteed to do damage are so important; it's why the second-tier sword (which has a chance to stun enemies) is more useful than the third (which has a chance to set them alight); it's why you should learn how to hack or mind-control enemies; and it's why flashbangs are utterly vital in the early game. Bring at least two on every mission. They impair your enemies' aim, prevent them from using special attacks (the Stun Lancer can't use his baton, and the Muton can't counterattack if you attack him with a sword), they disable Overwatch, and they even cancel the Sectoid's mind control. Counterintuitively, the importance of killing enemies as quickly as possible (or, failing that, disabling them) also means that most of the special ammunition or grenade types aren't as useful as they might seem at first blush. Weapons that cause damage-over-time (in the form of flames or acid) might sound cool, but what you really want is for the enemy to die the same turn they appear: if they're living long enough for the damage over time to take effect, it suggests you aren't killing them as efficiently as you could be. Weapons that cause damage-over-time are only really useful against enemies who a) you can't realistically expect to kill in a single turn and b) you have no way of temporarily disabling. The only enemies in the game meeting that description are Avatars and (I think) Gatekeepers. In every other situation, you should favour items that will cause more damage, or temporarily disable: Bluescreen ammo and grenades, Armour-Piercing ammo, Talon ammo, Plasma grenades.

On the strategic layer, the big thing you need to unlearn from the first game is the lose condition. In the first game, if eight countries' panic levels rose too high and they left the Council, it was an immediate game over. This could lead to nail-biting situations early on, but once you got a few satellites up, most countries' panic levels would stop rising of their own accord, and the possibility of their leaving the council could could be pretty much ignored. The temptation is to analogise the panic level in the first game to the Avatar Progress metre in the second, assuming that contacting regions will prevent the aliens from making progress on the Avatar Project. This is a mistake. To incentivise more proactive play, no matter what you do, the Avatar Progress metre will always continually tick up. Contacting more regions is instrumentally useful in providing you with more income and allowing you to attack facilities when you discover them, but unlike deploying satellites in the first game, contacting regions does not prevent the Avatar Progress metre from ticking up.

You also need to learn the importance of assigning engineers to specific facilities and juggling them based on what's most important at any particular instance. I found a Steam guide which recommended that, in the top three rows of facility slots, you should place a Workshop absolutely dead centre. He was right: this is a lifesaver. By assigning an engineer to the workshop, you can assign a Workshop Gremlin to up to four of the adjacent facilities: the Workshop effectively gives you four engineers for the price of one. It's a testament to how different playing with and without Ironman are that I didn't build a Workshop at all in my earliest non-Ironman playthroughs.

Lastly, the advice to avoid making XCOM too brittle remains as useful in the second game as the first. If you look at your roster and you have <=6 high-ranked soldiers and a bunch of Squaddies, you are in a very precarious position indeed. In the more forgiving and less time-sensitive first game, this meant sending out lower-ranked soldiers on missions accompanying your more experienced soldiers, so that the less experienced soldiers could level up. But in XCOM 2, as early as April, sending a rookie into the field is a luxury you can no longer afford. To this end, one of the most important upgrades you can buy is "Wet Work" in the guerrilla training school, which increases the amount of XP your soldiers get from kills (allowing them to be promoted faster). You should also build an Advanced Warfare Centre at your earliest convenience: in addition to healing your soldiers faster, whenever a soldier gets promoted, the game rolls a dice and potentially assigns them an ability outside of their class. Thus, building this facility sooner rather than later maximises the chances of your soldiers learning extra abilities. It also means that you should buy high-ranked soldiers whenever your budget permits. In my last playthrough, by the end of the game I had something like nine Colonels (or whatever the Psi equivalent of that rank is), allowing me to send three of them on the Network Tower Assault mission and still having enough non-wounded soldiers left over to send six on the final mission.

Right. I'm done with the turn-based thing for awhile. Maybe done with XCOM for good. Here's hoping they never make XCOM 3, or I'll be spending six months trying to beat that on Classic Ironman too.

*Despite what the game says about every decision being final with Ironman enabled, a quick Google reveals that if all your soldiers are killed in the final mission, the game will graciously allow you to try again. After making such a potentially catastrophic error so early on, I was seriously considered killing my surviving squadmates and starting the final mission over, but in the end I decided just to press on. Thus my successful Ironman run is also a "pure" Ironman run, as I never had to avail of any of the exceptions to Ironman the game carves out for players.

Grats on the clear! Classic Ironman is no joke, I assume the same is true for Commander Ironman in XCOM 2. I've tried a classic Ironman run in the first game, which came to an unceremonious end in the Newfoundland mission. I knew it to be an infamous mission but hadn't played it before, so I brought my A team... which got wiped out. This kills the campaign.

Overall I think XCOM 2 is neat, but not as good as the first game. I think the theme is a lot less interesting, and I dislike the constant pressure it puts on the player, especially at the strategic layer. And I might be unusual in this, but I actually thought the end of the story in the first game was really interesting and was looking forward to seeing where they went with it... but then they abandoned it. I don't hate XCOM 2 or anything, but EU is imo the better of the two overall.

The Newfoundland one is the one in Enemy Within with the Chrysalid infestation right? I beat Enemy Within on Classic difficulty, albeit without Ironman enabled.

I do think that the first game is a purer, cleaner, less cluttered experience. While some of the new mechanics introduced in the sequel were interesting, a lot of them (e.g. the special ammunition that causes damage over time) didn't add much. I also really liked the ending in the first game in how the aliens steadily rolling out progressively more powerful enemies over time is designed to force humanity to grow and become stronger and smarter. It was a clever way of providing a believable in-universe justification for what first appeared to be a stock video game trope. Then XCOM 2 uses the exact same stock video game trope, with only the flimsiest handwave of an in-universe justification. That part at least certainly felt like a step backwards. In terms of the characters, I preferred Bradford's portrayal in the second game, but Vahlen and Shen in the first game were more likeable and timeless than their equivalents in the sequel. Shen Jr., in particular, just screams "focus-grouped 2010s androgynous girlboss character", and her presence will date the game terribly.

Yep, that's the one. It's brutal. I've read that if you know how the mechanics of the mission work it's not too bad, but going into it blind on an Ironman playthrough went very poorly indeed.

Yeah. Basically you want to keep your Sniper(s) as close to the mission exit as you can before entering the ship, but still within sight of it. Everyone else stays next to the ship without actually entering. The only soldier who actually enters the ship is an Assault, who can high-tail it out of there once they discover what's onboard. Then it's just a matter of legging it to the mission exit, ideally using both actions to move (but using the second one to kill any Chrysalids who get too close, if necessary) while your Sniper(s) pick them off from a distance. By the time you're within sight of the mission exit, there shouldn't even be any Chrysalids left within your cone of vision.

But hindsight is 20/20: the first time I played this mission it did not go smoothly. Even the description above may not be entirely accurate: I'd forgotten you have to activate the transponder aboard the ship before the countdown starts.

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