I ask because I am stuck unable to get enough tech to be able to progress in the game. Almost no-one else seems to have much, either via raiding or trading. Rewards for dealing with alien raids are miserly, with them barely returning enough Tech to cover costs (and I’m not profligate). Resource crates are hard to find. I can get enough Materials and food, but I’m having to sell most of them to buy Tech…
So I struggle to activate bases, build better weapons, armour and vehicles and the game is more constrained by resources than combat difficulty.
I used to use the food production building to boost trading abilities, but that’s gone.
I think I’ve probably missed something in gameplay and driven myself down a dead end.
Once you have rep there is an anu research that reduces the amount of food your guys eat.
once you have alien containment there is another research that lets you make pandoran burgers.
this becomes a double whammy with the syn vehicle as you can just stun and eat entire missions.
when trading food for resource x make sure to use the correct faction for each resource to get the best return for your food. for example i think its bluetech from NJ, if you buy it from the other 2 it costs your more food per unit.
send the maximum size team you can to scavenging missions and send them with lots of empty inv space (4) empty slots each minimum. do not evac anyone who has an empty slot. put something into it. all those crappy clips and stuff you don’t use can be broken down.
haven defences are your best income for food.
at the begining of the game you should raid each faction a few times to build up a nice stack of resources and ships. i know this counter intuative to saving the world but thats how it goes in PP you have to kill lots of people as well.
explore with 1 fast ship and 1 guy in it just flying round opening stuff up. you can then send a tailored team in a big ship to each mission.
There are many ways how to get tech, materials or food. 1) Exploration 2) Missions (Haven defense, scavenging missions, diplomacy missions, clearing ancient site gives you 1000 materials, independent haven missions) 3) Scrapping items 4) demolishing buildings 5) capturing pandorans and harvesting them for food 6) trading
Not at all, you need an Anu research to get the tech to build these food plants.
But they are almost not worth it, you spend too much resources to get only +8 food per day. If you would trade the same amount resources as the plant cost for food then you have a break even for over 60 days (after that you can get profit).
Some tips:
You get tech at best at Synedrion heavens, they sell it as cheapest, NJ and Anu are more expensive.
In general:
Tech from Synedrion
Food from Anu
Materials from NJ
Anu and NJ trades materials for food or vice versa for the same course (4:6).
Do Scavenging sites always with a vehicle. The APCs have also an inventory where your soldiers can drop anything when they are inside of it (cost 0 AP, taking something from the vehicle inventory costs 1 AP). Get a soldier in a vehicle and drop all of his current equipment, drive to a crate, jump out of the vehicle (cost 2AP), get all what is in the crate and jump back into that vehicle (cost 0 AP) and again drop anythig. Assaults with Ready for Action are best for this, because they can also take anything from crates for 0AP, but this also works with any other class as long as you can drive close enough to the crates. Repeat for every crate and this way you not only get all resources but also a bunch of equipment that you can sell or use by your soldiers.
Some personal mentions to the 3 APC:
The Scarab is a very good damage dealer throughout the whole game, his rockets can easily cripple many enemies. Its downsides are, it is the slowest of all APC, has only 4 shots, one shot costs 3 AP and it is very inaccurate on distance (go closer for good hits).
The Armadillo is faster, has the most armor and HP and can shot for 2 AP. But his MG has problems with anything that has good armor, even when it has a a good shred value, and you have to go as close as you can to hit.
The Aspida is very special, lowest armor and HP, but it is also the fastest APC. Its weapon can paralyse enemies pretty easy (40 paralysing) for 2 AP or heal completely one your squaddies or vehicles for 3 AP (inclusive complete limb restoring!). It can also only take 1 passenger, the other two can take 4.
Actually the Aspida is my favourite for scavenging because I can also capture many Pandorans on these mission to make food. I have one Helios with an Aspida, one Technician to additionally remote control the paralysing weapon of the Aspidas and one Assault as a Passenger with an Neurazer to also help paralysing, but mainly to empty the crates. It takes some turns to complete a scavenging site, but for me it is worth it.
Yes, but the point here is that no-one has more than about 50 tech for sale, and at 8-10 to 1 typically. NJ, Syn both pricing similarly. Anu are so pissed off with me they won’t sell, but they don’t have much. I’d been hoping to arbitrage, but the trading mechanism makes it virtually impossible to compare prices without a notepad and paper. A typical raid only returns 25-50 tech. That’s a lot of raids if I want to build something expensive.
I think perhaps I should have started raiding earlier in the game, but I was being Mr Nice Guy and clearly it’s not paid off.
Interesting that food tech is Anu, wasn’t it originally available as part of PP tech?
There is not so much to note, the courses stay the same throughout the whole game and it only differs between factions.
Out of my head the most important courses:
Buying 6 food for 4 materials at NJ and Anu heavens.
Buying 6 materials for 4 food at NJ and Anu heavens.
Buying 2 tech for 8 food or 8 materials at Synedrion heavens.
Buying 12 food for 2 tech at Anu heavens.
Buying 12 materials for 2 tech at NJ heavens.
What? Probably you mean sabotage missions?
If you really raid for tech you get crates as in scavenging sites and each tech package is equivalent to 100 tech. You can raid for much much more than only 25-50 tech.
I don’t raid and I’m fine with the resources I have.
But I do some sabotage missions in the early stages to get ASAP supportive with every one.
As with a lot of things, it depends heavily on RNG and what you do in the beginning. @MadSkunky your view is biased by being an experienced player, and by exploiting the sabotage missions in the beginning.
Playing like @PorkyCat said, being nice to everyone, is more difficult and more RNG reliant. In one of my playthroughs I also had problems with tech, while in other ones I didn’t. It became clear that my tech reserves were heavily tied to the number of SYN haven defenses I got.
I agree, I also play this way for a long time, no raids, no stealing aircraft’s or researches and this way is heavily RNG based.
But, @PorkyCat does raids, he wrote …
As I understood it was out of necessity, not that he was planning on doing it.
I’m not sure if this heavy RNG reliance is that bad. I like it that you cannot reach a single strategy that’ll work in every campaign if you try to play the same way. Sometimes you won’t be able to, and you’ll have to either play a harder game than what you chose as difficulty or change your strategy. There are two big problems with this though:
1 - You end up with a difficulty that can be very different than what you selected. That’s problematic for new players that get bad RNG.
2 - It’s impossible for new players to see this as I’m describing, they’ll just think the game is broken / badly designed. Specially for a firaxcom crowd, where everything is neatly tied together.
These 2 points could be taken care of the same way firaxis did, by manipulating difficulty in the background. Things like making it easier or harder depending on the player’s achievements. I’m not talking about the tactical part, but the geoscape. Like, stablish what a good amount of resources acquired by each week (or each pandoran evolution) would be, and if the player doesn’t get that, tune the numbers or the encounters so that rewards are higher. This, of course, in lower difficulties only, specially easy.
Another option is a “new game+” that someone asked about already. Your first campaign in a lower difficulty option would have more resources at your disposal, more loot, etc, and after that you would get a “new game+” that would let you toggle some mechanics to make it easier or harder. Or, choosing to have a tutorial could enable those bonuses.
I’m not a fan of such unclear manipulation but it’s a two-edged sword just like heavy RNG reliance. I’m discussing it because PP for a newb is a totally different experience, and also may be either an easy or a hard one, on the same difficulty level. That leads to a few people loving it, but also a few (probably a lot) just tossing it out and bad-mouthing it.
I’m not a big fan of too much RNG, especially on the strategy level. I like it, when I can plan more ahead instead mostly reacting to things that happens constantly (for me a main difference on the strategy level between FXCom 1 and 2, the first allows more planning, the second is more reacting). But there should not be the one dominant strategy that always let you lead to victory, that would be boring and has limited replay ability for me. I liked the good mix that Firaxis hits with their first XCom, many different global strategies to win the game and almost none of them too dominant (2-3 are probably better than the rest but IMO really not that dominant).
In short: Too much RNG kills the strategy layer for me and PP is a little too much for me on this point.
RNG brings change but I agree that PP could be less random, specially in lower difficulties. The 2 options I presented are not that great though, I didn’t like how firaxcoms did it, since I was a major alpha striker and almost never lost a soldier, the game kept throwing strong pods at me and it was like playing a puzzle… “let’s see, how can I kill this pod in one turn?”. Also, it meant that I could almost never take on 2 pods at the same time, and thus if I accidentally enabled 2, it was save scum time
I don’t know if firaxcoms did that in the strategic layer. I also liked xcom 1 way better than xcom 2 in this aspect.
What I mean in FXCom 1 with lesser RNG on strategy are such things like choosing your start region, the globe was always the same with fixed continent bonuses and income etc. You can plan ahead because of all this that was fixed set.
FXCom 2 was almost anything RNG driven, you can’t choose your starting region, the continent bonuses are distributed randomly etc … Almost no way to plan ahead, but mostly reacting on situations that the game is throwing at you.
I hope this explains to you what I mean? (My English is probably not the best to go in more details)
On tactical it was not that different IMO, kill the pods separately in one go and all is fine
Yeah I understood you, I was talking about a different thing, manipulating both incoming problems and their outcomes for being easier or harder depending on how you did before. firaxcoms do this in the tactical layer, I don’t know if they do this in the strategic layer.
About your point, I guess that firaxcom 1 having less RNG made it also less replayable, or at least less different between playthroughs. Maybe they found out that few players chose different starting regions than the best ones, and things like that, and chose to RNG it more to force different challenges in different playthroughs.
AFAIK they do this also in strategical, at least in XCom 2. When you’re short on engineers or scientist then you often got a VIP mission or something similar. IMO they manipulate on all levels. But I think that’s okay, it’s a good balance for too much bad luck by RNG.
Yes, probably replayability could be the reason to also make the strategical layer more RNG driven. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t like particular this descisions that much
I really like XCom 2, especially with WotC, but some things were a step backwards for me compared to the first part.
