It’s been nearly a month since Rakuno ended his turn and passed on the save file to me. With the Steam Next Fest and other posts taking priority, and with me getting sick at one point and then procrastinating a lot, I kind of ended up forgetting about it a little bit, so uhm… here we are. Playing more XCOM 2! Yay! If you wanna check out the previous posts, you can find all of them listed over here at Naithin’s blog. The succession game series has been a lot of fun but I’m a total newbie, so I encounter new enemies left and right and don’t know how to play the game properly, so uh, it gets quite overwhelming for me and it gets even harder for me to actually start up the game once I have the reigns in my hand. For the purpose of this post, I didn’t record anything actually because of my voice being a little iffy at the moment – and because I didn’t want to edit anything… also my internet connection probably wouldn’t have made this upload take forever. I digress!
When Rakuno ended his turn with no casualties but some good advice for me. “We still have the problem of the Avatar Project advancing quickly”, after all, so the advice is much appreciated. Rakuno’s advice for me was to try to make contact with Europe ASAP. Then try to either do the main story mission there or blowing the Blacksite facility. So, since we barely have any intel to actually contact Europe, I selected the bonus that allows us to gather more intel as we scan at our base and scanned a little bit to advance time. Sadly, a UFO came close to us and we needed to avoid it by flying once all over the world and back – which was weird to say the least. Then, suddenly, we got a mission in New Mexico that would reward us with 100 Intel and 218 Supplies. Our mission “Operation Dying Reckoning” would have us neutralize a target. The enemies would feature Archons, Mutons, Elite Troopers, Heavy MECs, Sectopods, and Elite Shieldbearers. Guess we’ll do that given that it seems to be incredibly important?
The mission’s taking us to the ADVENT Surveillance Zone, Tijuana, where we are supposed to neutralize a target and capture (or kill) the enemy VIP. Our units included, Lizz (me), Bookah, Volcano, Naithin, Black Widow, and Hound Dog – so, this should go well, in theory? Well, I thought we’d just kill the enemies, secure the VIP and then evacuate but the time limit was incredibly punishing, the enemies were quite tanky, they also had a lot of people waiting to flank us and frankly, everything went incredibly badly. So, we killed the VIP and tried to make it out as fast as possible but Lizz and someone else got captured, Naithin died, and three others made it out gravely wounded. This was horrible.
Hence, I used my mulligan but to my horror, I couldn’t find a usable save file. Weirdly enough, the save files all were from the end there where everyone already got flanked and none from the start. Hence, I tried replicating my original steps from the save file before that to gather intel and just like before, a UFO showed up, we avoid it, then a mission pops up and… it’s in West Africa now. “Operation Hidden Smoke” has us neutralize a target in an ADVENT vehicle for 208 supplies and 94 intel. It’s worse rewards than before but hey, 94 intel is still nothing to sneeze at and we need to make contact with Europe, asap, right? This time around, though, the game crashed… I don’t know what’s up, so let’s try again. Scan, avoid UFO, mission pop-up. Aha! “Operation Blood-Soaked Peak”! Neutralize Target! Western U.S.! 187 supplies and 111 intel. Oh, how lovely! So, we start again. But then I failed, multiple times, and it took me four hours and a lot of save-scumming to complete my turn and make it out alive.
Edit: Naithin confirmed that we’re supposed to show some grace to newer players by allowing them to redo missions multiple times, especially this late into the game. So, “save-cumming” was alright for me to do here. It was just incredibly hard. The enemies were difficult to deal with and in the end, I basically did my best to just complete the mission without anyone dying, especially as I didn’t want any of our good units or named units to die or be captured.
But in the end, it didn’t even matter. We didn’t even get the stupid intel because the only way for me to complete that mission was to place all of my units, sneakily, into the evac zone, then I’d snipe the VIP with Lizz, and then I’d barely make it out alive with Lizz alone while being under fire by multiple enemies and whatnot.
So, that was a failure. Completely. Because after I was done with writing this post, I just wanted to get out of the game. Hence, I saved. The save file’s called “Hugs from Magi to Kluwes”, so that I could make sure that I get the right save file in the folder. Hence, I grabbed the folder, checked out the save file… and it turns out that even though I could access the save file in-game, it wasn’t saved in the folder. The folder only had the old save file that I got from Rakuno. So, I tried saving a bunch of times again on my save file with the “Hugs from Magi to Kluwes” save file and the date changed in the save file in the folder, so I figured I’d just grab it and share it with y’all but in the end, it’s Rakuno’s save file. I can’t find it in the game or on my PC. It’s just not there. So, I started up the game again to try and save again but now the only thing in the folder is Rakuno’s save file.
The point is I not only managed to completely forget about my turn but I also managed to somehow screw up this mission and break the rules to save scum my way to “victory” but it wasn’t really a victory because we didn’t get the intel in the end… and then I somehow managed to break my game resulting in all of this not even mattering. I’m annoyed. A lot. I’m laughing as I’m typing this out btw because of how silly this is. Anyway, I’ll just pass Rakuno’s save file to Kluwes and I hope that he fairs better with it.
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. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!
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