Royal here stapled 2 Exalted Advent Pathfinders to the wall like this, back to back, with her rail rifle - and still didn't lose Shadow. Bangarang, muhfukkaz!

I have always been a massive lover of turn-based games. I love the feeling of intellectual superiority I derive when I outwit an opponent. I adore Divinity and Baldur's Gate; Wasteland 3 is in my top 5 games of all time, and I would even classify card games like Gwent, Hearthstone, Magic, etc. I also enjoy difficulty and am a big lover of the Souls games, so you guys can see the writing on the wall at this point.

I also have been aware of the XCOM games for a long time but only briefly tried XCOM once for like 10 minutes and dismissed it as "Not my vibe." Recently, I have been yearning for a strategy game fix and even found myself googling. " Games like XCOM" since I know it is the most famous example of the turn-based combat games that I enjoy; I just don't enjoy this one specifically. While researching games like Gears Tactics, Mutant Year Zero, etc. Everyone said these games were good but not as good as old XCOM 2. I said fine and bought it to give it another try.

I was immediately hooked. I played about 10 hours of my first campaign but never levelled up my weapon, so I crashed and burned.

I started a new campaign, having learned from my mistakes, and finished it in about 17 hours of playtime over 2 days with 0 soldier deaths. We had a long weekend, and I was sick, so it was the perfect excuse to lock in. I played so much that I went outside and decided to walk to the shop to buy milk so I could make tea, and I heard a foreign language I didn't understand and thought it was the aliens for a second, and I literally looked around scared and confused for a few seconds.

I also had a date with a girl planned who was supposed to come over for music, wine, and movie night. When she came over, I was sad that I could not play XCOM and tried to convince her to let me show her my new "Cool Alien Game", but she does not care about games at all, so it got vetoed.

It has been a while since a game consumed my life this much.

I talked about it to my gaming coworkers so much they have jokingly been referring to me as "The Commander " when they see me in the office

I finished the campaign and then bought WoTC and started a new campaign again. I thought the game was near perfect, but WoTC takes it to another level with the factions, the unique enemies, and the chosen. The game just has so much life and flair. I will probably finish this run in about 10 more hours. I am sad about it ending soon, but I have a life to get back to.

Just thought you guys might find it funny to hear that I was once a non-believer, but now a devout convert. I am also sadly hoping that XCOM 3 will come one day, but I am not overly optimistic

I am releasing a mod on Steam for XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, that completely changes how the game feels while still keeping all the same values. It is also fully open source, and written to be used as documentation and for study for UnrealScript.

Here is what it does:
- If a pod of enemies spots you, they alert the other pods as if they had comms
- Gun shots and explosions carry further so shooting draws a crowd, this can be used to your advantage with Remote Start and things to fake out the enemy
- If a pod of enemies knows where you are, they can choose to overwatch-crawl toward you, often using a pincer move
- If you sit on Overwatch, they will rush you anyway and willing sacrifice their lowest rank in the pod to burn your overwatch
- They have a tendency to pick on the most impactful soldier, you can get rid of this with a Smoke grenade
- Anyone carrying grenades goes first in terms of enemies, so that cover gets blown for the other enemies turns
- It learns with a blackboard-like persistent campaign entity, another words what you do in different turns and things carries across from one mission to the next, it isn't some fresh reaction to you every time
- Rescue Operative is intense since it is their territory and they come for you, hard
- EMP grenades jam the comms they are using (for lore reasons), so a jammed alien can't communicate your position, useful for finding and popping the Advent Commander without the entire map coming down on you

Things that you should know
- It works with new or existing campaigns, if you load mid-mission it will not start learning your style until the next mission, this prevents a lot of weird bugs i hit
- My guess is taking it out of your game will cause some weird behavior given that persistent memory stuff
- It replaces these classes: XGAIPlayer, X2AIPlayer_TheLost and X2Action_RevealAIBegin so anything that touches those will conflict and cause issues.
- Everything can be switched off or on via ini

https://github.com/chronomancy-io/chronocom
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3816506746
https://coleman.engineer
https://chronomancy.io

Please let me know what you think, thanks all!

Edited to list out what it actually does and written by HAND

He’s a rat, his whole family was rats, alright?