You're expected to start being challenged once the switch to Advanced occurs. As such, Advanced Troopers being such a big spike in difficulty compared to Basic Troopers is misleading you're not expected to find Basic Troopers a problem.
Several ADVENT units just have a basic form and an Elite form, and the time frame in which you're facing Basic-tier enemies is really brief, being less 'this is the foundation of combat' and more 'this is the game babying you while you get to the point that you're not throwing Rookies at things'. One thing worth pointing out, however, is that ADVENT's forces really basically start from the Advanced tier. As such, there's still a few cases of early-game interesting threats falling by the wayside, but it's less consistent an issue than in the prior game, especially since early-game Aliens are consistently positioned as fairly elite and powerful for that point in the game, allowing the late game to reuse them without them being completely sad. Interestingly, the actual Alien forces do not have equivalent progressions there's no elite Sectoid to contend with, and indeed the Sectoid Commander doesn't actually have an XCOM 2 equivalent. in XCOM 2, ADVENT's forces 'level-up' as the game progresses, with most of their units having 2-3 versions of increasing quality. Where in the prior game your enemies all operated at a fixed strength, with the progression aspect primarily being handled by displacing weak species with overall more dangerous ones, leading to unfortunate consequences like 'Thin Men are a threat with a distinct dynamic that stops mattering past the early game because they're pathetic and there's no replacement', with only Heavy Floaters, Sectoid Commanders, and Muton Elites providing higher-tier variations of prior Aliens. Though hey let's back up and talk about that whole 'Advanced ADVENT Trooper' thing. Everything you do when fighting most enemies. Try to flank them, try to destroy their cover, try to get high ground on them, etc. Overall, though, ADVENT Troopers don't require special tactics. and are still early enough in the game to be fighting Basic Troopers.) This usually isn't useful in practice because they'll just move before taking a shot, but there's edge case situations it actually matters in, such as if you're playing War of the Chosen and have Tactical Analysis and triggered it.
High Cover is always good to take, of course, but the effect is more pronounced the lower an enemy's Aim is, and this level of bad Aim becomes less and less common as you progress through a run, albeit not as dramatically as in the prior game.īy a similar token, if you're in Cover of any kind and Suppressing an ADVENT Trooper, they're not hitting anyone. That's their entire thing.ĭo note that their Aim value means that High Cover is a fairly substantial step up in protection from Low Cover, taking you from a 45% chance of being hit to a 25% chance. They have no interesting qualities beyond bare minimum XCOM 2 enemy functionality, having neither passive abilities nor active abilities nor bonus qualities not directly alluded to by the game. I'll still be providing the actual tile counts in parentheses to make it easier to understand the actual meaning of the number.īasic ADVENT Troopers are the weakest, most generic threat of the game.
It still takes 2/3rds of a Mobility point to walk in a straight line, and a full Mobility point to walk diagonally, though apparently the game doesn't round down anymore so 12 Mobility now translates to 8 tiles of straight-line movement instead of 7. 12 is the default Mobility of X-COM's agents, so if an enemy has more than that you're not going to be outrunning it, and if it has less than that you can kite it forever, or more accurately until you hit the map's edge. Mobility works much as it did in the previous game. For Damage, the number in parentheses is the damage on a crit, just like when I did weapons. As with my analysis of the prior game, stats are provided either as a set of four numbers or as one number: if it's a set of four, it correlates to the effects of difficulty level (In the format of Rookie/Regular/Commander/Legendary), whereas if it's one number the stat is the same on all difficulty levels.