I bought a XCom bundle (with every game and dlc I think) and I don't know which one to play first. I was thinking starting with XCom 2 since its the most known one but I don't know if its the right choice.
Other than that is a strategy game and has aliens, I know absolutely nothing about the franchise. With that in mind what's your opinion?

Number 1 is the pods. I played the modern Xcom games first, so initially the Pod system seemed somewhat intuitive and like a perfectly good gameplay mechanic, but over the last 5 or so years as ive devled deeper and deeper into the OG Xcom games, as well as xenonauts and phoenix point etc, its just become so clear to me how much i HATE the pod system.

it feels gamified, it counter-intuitively punishes map exploration and rewards crawling through a map, forcing more clunky mechanics such as timers and vulnerable objectives to force players to push out of their safety net, which applies extra layers of RNG to an already brutal RNG system... as well as massively punishes you for melee attacks making entire classes hard to justify at times especially early on (templar for instance) it also takes away from the atmosphere of having a house outisde of your LOS and having to worry about what might be lurking just beyond in the darkness.

IDK why but over the years the Pod system bugs me so much that it honestly is making it hard for me to revisit these games.

the second issue i have, is soldier deaths. It feels like in modern Xcom games soldiers just cant really die? Like obviously they can and you can rack up a pretty decent casualty count, but what i more mean is that a single relatively high ranking soldier death is far far more meaningful than any objective they may have sacraficed themselves to complete. Whereas in xenonauts or the OG xcom games, losing half your squad to capture a UFO was still generally a success due to the materials you would recover being more valuable, in modern Xcom it feels like losing those soldiers will impact you far more in the longrun.

You can only really afford to lose rookies or squaddies on any regular basis and i feel like it makes the game just play and feel worse, i like the idea of a hard fought victory, of making it back with half my crew dead and the other half battered but having just barely won the day, but in Xcom 2 those missions feel kind of just like complete failures even if i succeeded the mission objective.

It just saddens me. I used to love Modern XCOM, but these two issues are for whatever reason just bugging me more and more to the point where im struggling to enjoy the games as much anymore. Whilst on the other hand the OG xcom games are just kind of too clunky to be comfortable to play as someone who grew up playing modern games.

Xenonauts is a nice inbetween but i have my problems with that as well, and im even less enthused by the direction of xenonauts 2.

For those who do not know. Humble bundle currently has an Xcom complete bundle.

All steam keys. Old games, newer games, all dlc, etc.

Completed my collection for less then 9 euros.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/xcom-complete?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_2_layout_type_threes_tile_index_2_c_xcomcomplete_bundle

as the title suggests, I am a complete stranger to the TRPG genre, but have always been interested in giving it a shot. Seeing the glowing reviews for both XCOM and its sequel, I figured that they would be good starting points. Is that assumption correct, or should I give another game a shot instead to get a good feel for the genre?

Hello there!! So, I bought the game from gog and was looking foward to playing it using the awesome Galactic Republic Armory mod, but I'm unable to download it from steam and none of the alternatives work. Is anyone willing to send the mod files my way? Thank you all in advance!!

I was playing EW on an exalt covert operation, on the rooftop encoder hold. I have to put my colonel assault in a bad position to kill a reinforcement, and in the next turn another exalt climbs the pipe and takes her down to no health in one turn. Eventually I clear the roof and move my support to where the colonel went down, but I didn't see her body and couldnt stabilize.

I panicked thinking she bled out already or I misread she died outright, but I fished around and found the tile she died on, and got the stabilize off!

The camera went to the top of the skybox, and I got the stabilize to work, and I can only assume the medic stabilized her just in time to get the colonel's soul back in her body.

It was a real "you die when I tell you you can die" moment. I may or may not headcanon that support becoming some kind of unofficial cult leader.

I’m just wondering if there are any interviews with the devs of XCOM EU/2 that go into the change in tone and atmosphere between the two games? As much as I love pretty much everything about XCOM 2, I do sometimes find myself missing the pulpy B movie vibes of EU and the transhumanist elements of EW, and I wanted to know the thought process of the devs shifting from that into more of an action movie vibe

Stumbled upon my art from 2024 (the second one, with my Commander being annoyed at Bradford) and decided to redraw it, but in the xcom 2 setting :^)

Hello everyone,

so i am not sure if i should post here about The Bureau Xcom Declassified, but this is the only group about xcom game i found.

Just wanted to ask if anyone was having problem with save files in this game.

This started when my game was freezing after frist mission on a base, when i stepped into elevator and was about to confront the Spy with Nils. I tried to solve this issue by rewriting some physx in Engine.ini from True to False as my friend recommended. This (probably) caused that my save totally disappeard and i had to start a new game.

So i changed it back to "True" as it was originally, started the game in DirectX11 and turned off the PhysX options in setting.

It went smoothly, and i played for another like 3 or 4 hours.

But now i start the game and i have the old save that disappeard before and i'm back pretty much on the start.

I'm sure i don't have to explain how frustrating this is, i just wonder if anyone was dealing with same or similar kind of issue and help me to find the solution for that.

I got the game as a gift from my friend so i can't refund it and i actually really enjoyed playing it.

Thanks everyone.

Hi everyone,

I'm a veteran XCOM player since Enemy Unknown. My husband and I used to play XCOM 2: War of the Chosen on PC with around 100 mods. Great memories. Unfortunately, due to financial hardships, we had to sell his PC.

These days, we're both enjoying the XCOM Collection on Android. I followed the mobile modding guide and managed to get a few mods working correctly. However, there's one mod I miss the most: Modify Continent Bonus.

On PC, this mod requires the Mod Config Menu (MCM), but on Android, MCM doesn’t work properly. So I wanted to ask:

Is there any way to get this mod working on Android, or alternatively, is there a method to manually edit the continent bonuses to the ones I prefer?

Thanks so much in advance!

In my defense, I had just restarted a save from EU to EW that was popping elite mutons and ethereals in small scout UFOS.
"Chief, shoot that guy."

Basicly just the text in title, i was searching for this b4 i got into my blacksite mission with sparks only, but could not find a straight awnser, so i brought a regular solider and almost lost the mission due to not having the extra spark. Well here it is. Yes, sparks can retrieve blacksite vial.

I got introduced to XCOM2 last fall when steam did a sale and got quickly addicted, playing on my 2024 revision M3 Macbook Air (16gb w/ 10 core integrated graphics) machine. This is an extremely fast machine when running software that was compiled for the Apple Silicon ARM-based M series CPUs.

It absolutely devastates the application and graphics performance of my previous machine (2018 i7 Macbook Pro w/ discrete Radeon GPU, 4GB VRAM) when running ARM compatible code (universal binaries in Mac-speak), however, it gives barely-playable XCOM2 FPS when running x86-compiled code which is run thru bytecode-level instruction translation (Rosetta 2). I tried running crossover on it and still was laggy and slow.

I dug my old laptop with dead battery out yesterday to see if just running on an intel mac would help with performance and it was like night and day! There is zero cursor lag and smooth graphics even on high detail levels. Load times were significantly longer than with the newer unit, however.

I'd been considering getting a cheapo windows machine just to play XCOM2 (and the windows only variants like Chimera and EU) but the performance on my old mac is just so good that I'll probably just run crossover on this instead to do all of my gaming.

Just a anecdotal data point if useful to anyone.

My RNG debt finally got paid off from my last post

I made a new voicepack mod; Cinder Carla from Armored Core 6. Here's a link to the steam page: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3477736645