It’s time for my turn! After prioritising other posts and procrastinating a whole bunch and after not finding the time to play XCOM 2 again, I finally found myself in a world full of Aliens, Humans, Robots, and a boss that never shows his face. I’m honestly confused how we can trust this big guy that phones us every now and then so much when we don’t even know what his eye colour is. That’s gotta be an alien! 100%! Either way, I ended up procrastinating a lot on this because I was hesitant. I wanted to read up on the other posts first but then there’s also university stuff, my streams, mental health stuff, my plans on starting art commissions, the mountain of games that I still have to review, and many more things and I just kind of ended up forgetting about the XCOM 2 Succession Game series… and then when I got done with half of the stuff that needs to get done, I remembered this and uh, here we are now.
I played my turn. I was kinda successful… but more on that later. I’d first like to voice a problem I’m having with this collab: I’m new to the game. You might think that I could just learn the ropes or that I’m doing well or whatever but in essence, that means that I encounter a robot and that I don’t know how to deal with that one… or I encounter an Egyptian Alien and it blows the house to pieces and nobody told me about it… or rather, I may not have exactly understood who or what that enemy is or they may not have been encountered yet in the other people’s playthroughs. Either way, since I’m only getting to play the game every few weeks, it ends up feeling a bit tedious and frustrating because I miss out on so much… In essence, I think I should start my own proper playthrough (maybe on YouTube?) and basically learn the ropes there and experience the story to understand what the fuck is actually going on in there. But I’m still having fun. As always, I did plenty of things. I was being quite productive. The game’s going good. I think! It probably is not going good at all but since nobody died this time around, I think we’re good? I’m not entirely sure.
So, today, I decided to start playing my turn after Rakuno played his turn a while back. The video for that will be uploaded later tonight… I won’t go into much detail but essentially, I made contact with New Brasil because that Avatar Project is in West Africa and we need to get there, I think. We’re at 6 pins right now. I’ve been told that 7 pins is when we do something about it. I’m sure it will be fine. Either way, we need to make contact with West Africa next. That’s important! But to do that, we need more contacts… and to do that we need to upgrade our Comms Station or build a new comms station. For the upgraded Comms Station, however, we need more power… and I’m not sure who did it but there was a Shielding Power Coil available so I started building a Power Relay in there. The reasoning for that is that rooms that get built in a Shielding Power Coil room basically cost no Power Upkeep at all! Power Relays, however, are an exception because they produce power instead of using up power… So, in the Shielding Power Coil room, they produce more power, meaning that I can use that to our advantage. I think that was smart of me to do. So, that’s gonna take 6 days and the second Shielding Power Coil that has yet to be built is gonna take another 8 days because I took one engineer and moved it to the Power Relay building process. That second Shielding Power Coil should probably be used for the construction of a Shadow Chamber Facility as that’s our main objective. Either way, once the Power Relay is done our first priority should be to unlock the upgraded Comms Station so that we can make contact with West Africa and take care of that stuff over there!
When we made contact with New Brazil, a UFO came close to us and being the super-good 1337 mega-smart and omega-talented player that I am, I gracefully avoided them by clicking on a button that said that we should avoid them. I’m just that good. We got some money by scanning another place and oh, suddenly a mission popped up! Exciting! In this mission that I’d like to title “Open the fucking door”, we have to rescue and evacuate a scientist within a limited amount of turns. Before that, I obviously had to colour-code everyone before noticing that I didn’t have to do that in the first place and… to raise the team morale, I gave them the Power Ranger colours because why the heck not? I’m sure the alleviated team spirit is gonna help us in this difficult mission!
I first moved all the units forward. Because of some intel we got earlier, I thought that we weren’t concealed at the beginning of the mission, which is why I let Bookah barge in through a window. Turns out that we were actually concealed and that I missed out on setting up an ambush. “Oops.” Rakuno then spotted some units. Endalia missed a shot while on Pistol Overwatch, resulting in us not getting an early hit on an Egyptian-looking Robo guy without nipples called “Archon”. The Archon ended up moving up on the same level as Endalia and Rakuno but because his nipple-lessness didn’t intimidate us in the slightest, Rakuno decided to blow the enemies’ cover, quite literally, using a precise Frag Grenade, dealing some damage to a bulky boy and destroying the panel they were hiding behind in the process. This also shredded the bulky boy’s armour, which is gonna be nice later down the line. The Archon flew up into the air, using Blazing Pinions on us… an attack that I thought would just reveal our positions but as it turns out it actually deals a lot of damage and destroys half the building we were standing on! Rakuno successfully dodges an attack and another Archon drew in closer. Next turn, Lizz “Magi” Winterfield took a shot at the flying nipple-less archon and dealt some critical damage to it, leaving it at only two HP upon which the archon entered a “Battle Frenzy”. Before I could figure out what the Archon’s “Battle Frenzy” exactly does, it got shot down by Endalia. Martina Schneider drew closer to Rakuno to give him support but sadly got caught in the enemy’s overwatch… although they clearly couldn’t see Martina and they clearly couldn’t hit her. I call hacks! Black Widow used her healing drone on Martina to secure our front line and give support in this critical mission. After all, there are only ten turns left before we get forcefully extracted and we can’t afford to lose any people in the process. Bookah drew in closer, hacking a tower and gaining immunity for two turns in the process. Now, the Blazing Pions destroyed the building, everyone took damage, I quickly repositioned everyone, took some measurements to heal everyone up, and we quickly cleaned the floor with some of the remaining idiots, including two soldiers, an Archon, and one bulky boy. Thinking that Bookah’s hacking was actually successful, I then basically moved everyone forward, not caring about the poison cloud that still did damage to everyone DESPITE US BEING IMMUNE FOR TWO TURNS! When the game says that we’re immune to damage for two turns, I’d imagine that we can’t take damage for two turns and yet somehow some people are affected and others aren’t and I’m just confused. Not really intuitive, honestly, but whatever. In the video, you’ll see how it works and doesn’t work at the same time.
Since there were no enemies left and since we only had 7 turns remaining, I then tried to open the door to get access to the room next to the VIP/scientist. It didn’t work. Bookah stood next to the door. Martina joined Bookah in the process of not opening the door. My last hope was Endalia who also didn’t open the door. Alas, three people were standing in front of the door, having a little chat or something while the time is running. If this was Game of Thrones, they’d do an amazing job at holding the door. So, I basically tried to right-click the door again and it didn’t work. Spamming “V”, as a quick google search mentioned, didn’t help either. I then discovered that if you speak the magical formula of “open sesame”, turn three times in the mirror and just click on the “open/close door” button,… Well, then it magically gets opened. It doesn’t seem all that intuitive to be honest, especially as the “open/close door icon” doesn’t look like a door button at all, but hey, I’m not a game designer, so what do I know? I only discovered that after blasting a hole into the wall next to the door, tbh. We then hacked open the door for the VIP’s holding cell and freed our deer scientist, Dr Sheng Zao, from his entrapment, moving him ahead to a place where he could hopefully duck down and be successful in not getting hit.
Obviously, securing the VIP wouldn’t be that easy though, so there had to be more ADVENT troops as well as reinforcements in the form of two idiots and a robot. Rakuno, the red power ranger, ended up suppressing their movements and dealing some damage. We finished them off and quickly evacuated them afterwards. All in all, it was successful but we didn’t quite earn any promotions, which was a bit of a bummer especially as all of our units were gravely injured, resulting in a lack of personal for the next few days.
Now, I’d love it if we could get Comms sorted in the next turn, over at Red’s blog. By passing time at the HQ’s base, we can heal our units faster and skip ahead a little bit to gain more power. We could then build the upgrade for more Comms, assign an Engineer over there, and make contact with West Africa to work on that Avatar Project that is looming above us. I don’t wanna backseat a lot but that’s essentially what I had in mind at the end of my turn and I figured it’d be helpful to know that that’s what I’d do if I was playing the next turn, wink wink. But obviously, I’m not playing that turn, so Red can do whatever he wants there.
Either way, I hope you enjoyed this post. Again, I’m not the best player in the world and since I’m new to this game and since I only get to play every few weeks, it’s a bit hard for me to understand stuff like opening doors or being immune for two turns and still taking damage or nipple-less robots called Archons with their sunbeams and stuff! I guess what I should have done is play the game past the tutorial mission and essentially keep up with the posts by having my own playthrough of the game. I’ll probably end up doing that after the Succession Game series because I really love the premise and idea of the game. I’d love to appreciate it more, which is why such a playthrough would be amazing to do as time goes on. Last but not least, you can find all the missions and information over here on Naithin’s hub post and the next turn will be played over at Red’s blog.
Cheers!
This post is part of the Blaugust 2021 event. For more information on that, check out this post!
This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.
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