Makes your soldiers all different, and gives you more to think about on this front. This will allow you to train rookies and make them whatever class you want, rather than leaving this up to the whims of fate (recommended: Get the “Second Wave” mod, which brings back the “not created equally” and “hidden potential” elements. Obviously then, the faster and more efficiently you expand, the bigger your income, the more cool stuff you can buy and do, and the easier the game becomes, right? So here, after tons of hours of play, is the fastest way I have found to expand:ġ)ĝay one, build your guerrilla war center. Of course, those facilities are in regions other than the one you start out with, so…you need to expand, or lose the game.Įxpanding into other regions generates more income for you, and you need income, because the way you get better gear for your troops is by conducting research, and building facilities on your stolen alien ship that unlock new and powerful abilities for your troops. The aliens are working on this thing called the Avatar project, and the way you set it back is, you blow up alien facilities. You need to expand your network because of the overarching story of the game. It takes intel to reach out and make new contacts in other regions, and thus, expand your network. There are essentially two “kinds” of currency in the game. The enemies you’ll be facing are just too tough to handle without lots of tools and tech backing you up, and that’s what your support staff makes possible. Make no mistake, you cannot win the game without the strategic layer. There’s actually a lot to that, and the game does a decent job at modding the behind the scenes stuff that the support staff is doing. The real purpose of the strategic layer, besides just killing time between epic on-the-ground battles, is to get your troops ready for the next fight. Either way, I hope you find the read an enjoyable one. Maybe you’ve thought of it, and maybe you haven’t. I’ll step through the two major areas, and let you in on stuff that really works well for me. You need to be good at both if you want to do well in the game.Īfter having put a few hundred hours playing in, I now feel as though I know enough to write something meaningful about the game, which is what the rest of this guide will actually be. The strategic layer is basically all the other stuff that happens between battles. Tactics are employed on the battle map, where you guide you little soldiers around and blow things up.

The tactics are easy enough to comprehend, but it takes practice to get them right, and the game is quite punishing if you make a mistake. It’s an intriguing war game with both tactical and strategic layers. Let’s start with the basics then: What XCom 2 is, and isn’t. Okay, so…since it seems that more people are reading and getting something out of this little guide, I figured it was time to whip it into better shape and get it a little more organized.

Xcom 2 strategy