Xcom 2 Installing Mods
Every other Monday, Dominic gives you a reason to dust off one of your old games and dive into its mods withWelcome back, Commanders. I’ve returned to an expanded and finalised this week. Since the launch of 2017’s expansion and last year’s, things have been quiet on the XCOM front.
The game is finally stabilised, giving modders a nice static test-bed to add new weapons, aliens and features to the squad tactics sandbox. Here’s a deep dive on the boldly named “A Better Everything” – a modular overhaul mod package – plus a few fun extras to freshen up your next scuffle with Advent.XCOM 2 has an odd history of modding. The most ambitious mod for the game was one of its first, thanks to Firaxis commissioning Pavonis Interactive to produce. A sequel to Pavonis’s, it offered a wildly different experience with much more strategic management. There’s been nothing quite on that scale since the release of War Of The Chosen. A Better Everything, which we’re looking at today, is the only project to come close. Lady gaga the fame monster zip rar file. Getting startedFor the purpose of today’s breakdown, I’m going to assume you have the complete version of XCOM 2: War Of The Chosen.
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That means all the DLC, Tactical Legacy Pack included, since many mods tap into the DLC for assets. You’ll also need a couple of prerequisite mods that many others require. Restores some files weirdly absent from War Of The Chosen, and the provides vital hooks that a lot of XCOM 2 mods attach to. You also may want the, which lets you tweak some mods directly in the options menu.To experience this #content, you will need to enable targeting cookies.
Yes, we know. Sorry.The mod making everything betterby “DerBK” is probably the biggest expansion to War Of The Chosen so far, broken up into modular bits so you can pick and choose what you like. It’s not as wildly ambitious as Long War 2, but does make for a more complex, harder War Of The Chosen campaign. The dev recommends playing one difficulty level lower than you’d normally pick, and that seems fair.The heart of this pack is, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It adds tons of enemy variety throughout, but most notably towards the end of the game, where you could end up overpowering the enemy.
Now, you’ve got exploding and climbing Lost to make swarms that little bit scarier, renegade Skirmishers gone back to Advent, rocket troops and incendiary Mutons and Vipers. Worst of all are Primes, fancy lookin’ late-game variants who get extra actions when hit, similar to Rulers. It also gives enemy AI a tune-up, so don’t expect your old tactics to work.It changes the feel of the game from the very first mission.
Called Gatecrasher, it introduces you to Advent Gunslingers, Heavies and sneaky medical drones that heal enemies as a reflex action. They’re not any tougher than ‘vanilla’ enemies, but each presents new problems, especially when they’re combined. It adds some of that unpredictability that I loved in Long War 2, without making it feel like a total crapshoot.Improving your arsenaloverhauls your units, giving you new options to deal with all the new problems introduced by A Better Advent. There are eight basic classes, with complex, semi-randomised skill trees, and a wider choice of weapons before you even factor in new types. Cannibalised Advent flamethrowers stolen from Purifier units are fun, behaving like incendiary shotguns with a flame cone alt-fire that drains a lot of fuel. Also included are Smartguns, which automatically enter overwatch after firing, and SMGs which let you move, fire and move again at the expense of lower power.Some fundamentals have been tweaked too.
Shotguns are reloaded one shell at a time, while autocannons take a full turn to reload. Psionics are now granted solely through Psi Amp and Armour sets, making Templars the only dedicated psi units available. It gives all the other classes more room to breathe, and flexibility to spec into tangential psi-powers. SPARKs are easier to build now, but lack the semi-random perks on their skill trees, because robots aren’t very creative.Overhauling the Chosenis less dramatic in its changes, making small tweaks to the Assassin and Hunter, but overhauling the Warlock. He’s now a sneaky psychic arsehole, liking to hide half a map away while summoning explosive psi-ghosts near your squad.
It also makes all three Chosen more likely to tap out of combat by kidnapping one of your troopers, leading to more sneaky rescue missions, and making the Chosen just that little bit easier to hate. Consequently it’s far more gratifying when you sneak up on one of them with a sawn-off shotgun, as seen above.Other smaller parts of this pack are, which rolls back some of the power buffs that War Of The Chosen gave resistance soldiers and respecs them into defensive fighters.
They suppress and flash enemies as long as they can, buying you more time to get into the fight. Adds some DLC-only weapons and perks to Advent units, like a freezethrower soldier, a heavy melee guy with a throwing axe and self-destructing SPARK units. Nothing huge, but it helps tie everything together.Even more campaignLastly, (available in and if you want a starting squad size of six) integrates enemies and spawn rules from A Better Advent in story missions. This can make some missions easier (get to the Forge early and you only have to fight a janky prototype Sectopod), some harder (fashionably late? Sectopod Prime!), and some just hairier all round.And just to surprise me, DerBK released one more mod while I was writing this.
Is still early in development, but adds a few new mission types that scale through the campaign. Assassination missions against alien leaders, search and destroy missions to hunt prototype robots, plus special Chrysalid-hunting excursions. There’s more to come, but for now it’s mostly a chance for higher-level enemies to be introduced early, giving you a peek at things to come and functioning as mini-bosses, which sounds like fun.Optional extrasAs well as A Better Everything, I added some spice to my campaign with some bonus alien types and dress-up items. All of these are by “Team CreativeXenos” unless otherwise stated, who have produced.The are maddening, horrible little acid-spitting gasbags brought back from the DOS original, and I have no idea why I added them.
Granted, they’re well animated and integrated, but sometimes I find myself missing regular Advent troops. On the plus side, researching them lets you build, which look amazing and can be upgraded to later weapons tiers.A more immediately interesting new enemy to fight are the. They’re low-to-mid tier troopers with lighter guns, but higher agility and armour, and AI that makes them fight like absolute mad lads, rushing in for flank shots even if they’re exposed to counter-flank fire. Mainly, I love them because they fit in perfectly with the other Advent units, but with a little extra flair thanks to their giant caped shoulder-pads, like an ’80s anime ghillie suit.To experience this #content, you will need to enable targeting cookies. Yes, we know.
Sorry.Similarly styled to fit in are, and their beefier cousins, the, who join the fight in the later and final phases of the campaign, respectively. They’re huge power-armoured troopers with tower shields and brutal energy shotguns, and use their bulk to survive as they cross the distance towards your troops.The Exalted variants, which I’ve luckily not encountered yet, sound even meaner.
They’ve traded in some of the artillery for sleeker armour, and crammed psychic super-bastards into the tin cans instead. The top-tier Grandmaster units have open-faced helmets and even fancier looking gear, and can buff their squad for additional violence.
A good reason to carry lots of explosive, shredding or otherwise armour-piercing weapons into the endgame.I adore how the look – still the same species, but more alien. Meant to be the males of the species, they come in two power-armoured varieties.
Regular ones are immune to fire and have blast padding, while the Psi variant use the Focus system from the Templars, have a burning psionic sword, and when out of range they just shoot MIND BULLETS that bypass armour entirely.Of course, what fun is saving the earth if you don’t look fabulous doing it? The one I’ve had most fun with is the, which includes a range of serious and silly victory (and death) poses for the photo booth. Yes, you can dab now.
The and Hair Packs by “Kexx” are a must-have, adding a ton of game and movie-inspired hairstyles, including the ever-stylish Action Mullet. While sadly lacking a male counterpart, Kexx’s Female Clothing Pack adds civilian clobber for the ladies. Lads will have to make do with tactical rigging.Minor mod-wise, I can’t live without by “Krzyzyk”, which lets you use all three optional soundtracks at once. By “BlueRaja” and co speeds up combat animations, and by “Mr. Nice” forces the game to tap out if it gets stuck waiting on an animation. It’s worth checking out, which include fixes for more minor bugs that never got patched. I also swear by these jumbo packs of, and names by “James J.
Tanner” and “IBurner” for that truly international vibe.XCOM 2 modding has slowed a bit, but keep watching the skies. While not produced by Pavonis proper, Long War Of The Chosen is exactly what it sounds like; an expansion-compatible version of Long War. After a long series of internal alpha tests, they’re getting ready for a beta launch soon.
Whether that means days, weeks or months from now, I’ve no idea, but I’m expecting dizzying complexity and a seventy-plus hour campaign, now with added space wizards.You can also read about the fine details of A Better Advent/Barracks on. Because I’m nice, I’ve gathered up all the mods (including some minor ones not listed here) I use into for easy bulk subscribing with one click. This includes the ‘Plus’ version of A Better Campaign, so you’ll want to go into Mod Options (a new button at the bottom of the options panel) and increase squad starting size to 6 to compensate for the extra baddies.
Now that the new, humungous XCOM 2 expansion pack has had a couple of weeks to bed in, the game’s mod community has been steadily fixing up their tweaks to work with. Over time, there’ll be more Steam Workshop offerings which take specific advantage of the onslaught of changes WOTC introduces, but right now what I’m interested in is assorted quality of life improvements that remove pointless dead time from the game, offer more tactical detail and generally make the whole shebang slicker and quicker to use.These, then, are the XCOM 2 War Of The Chosen mods that I just don’t think I could do without. (Well, I could, but I’d be complaining the whole damn time).Quick note first – if you’ve yet to indulge in the many pleasures and improvements of WOTC, as detailed in my, but are knee-deep in XCOM 2, you’ll hopefully be not unhappy to hear that most of these mods work in the base game too.
However, they do require a separate version of each mod, so check the title and description before you install it.General housekeeping too, in case you’re new to the Steam Workshop – just click the ‘Subscribe’ button on the Steam page for any of these you like the look of, and it’ll be downloaded and updated automatically. You then need to click the checkbox next to the name of any mod you want to run from the XCOM 2/WOTC launcher the next time you fire it up.Early hours with an XCOM game tend to entail using your soldiers one by one each turn – move and shoot, next, move and shoot, and so forth. But by the time you’re a few dozen hours in, you’re thinking about them as a squad rather than a set of individuals, which means Tab-to-switch-soldier is your most-used button.
Checking, checking, checking – who can do what, who still has actions left, which skills have recharged, who’s wounded or otherwise vulnerable Tab, tab, tab, tab, tab, many times before you commit to any moves at all. If only XCOM 2/WOTC had an at-a-glance way of seeing everyone’s sitrep, and jumping directly to specific units. Well, here you go.It takes up a bit of screen space by shoving a row of soldier faces, overlaid with various statuses, at the top right, but it’s well worth it for the time saved.
I use it less for switching straight to certain units, and more just as a super-speedy reminder of who’s still in play – it saves a ton of time each turn, and strikes me as something the official and weirdly fragmentary X2/WOTC UI could really benefit from.Yes, yes, the ‘ant’s nest’ base mode is an impressive sight, especially with WOTC’s various room, propaganda poster and soldier costuming additions, but by God 98% of the visual side of it has zero bearing on playing the game. Slowly panning and zooming around it eats up so much time (exacerbated by the sheer number of interruptions in global view mode), and all it really means is that you’ll see the animations thousands of times across the course of a campaign. This mod rips all the room transitions away – click on a button and you’ll go directly to, say, the Research or Engineering screen. It’s less fancy, and I’m sure it breaks a few artists’ hearts, but it’s so much more efficient. I’d love for this to simply be a togglable option in the game’s official settings.A returning favourite for many of us XCOM 2 vets, and I’m frankly staggered that WOTC didn’t include an official option for this. All it does is add one extra button to your soldiers’ action quickbars. All that button does is immediately and simultaneously trigger evacuation (er, to a chopper, not of bowels) for any of your units who are currently stood in a mission Evac zone.If you’ve ever been through the pain of solemnly clicking Evac seven times on hostage/VIP missions, you’ll know what a tiny godsend this is.
The cherry on top is that seeing your whole squad boost into the skies in tandem makes for a far more dramatic finish to a mission than doing it one by one.Given that XCOM 2/WOTC is supposed to concern a global resistance against evil alien overlords, your soldiers hail from a rather small pool of countries, and it’s not long before their names start to become rather homogeneous. This mod adds dozens more nations into the database, as well as many more names to pull from when the game auto-generates new recruits. A Russian soldier will, by and large, have a more Russian-sounding name now, for instance.Visually, this is only really apparent in the little flags that appear in Armory and soldier bio screens, but it really amps up both the planet-wide feel and the variety of your resistance effort.N.b. This mod is a combo of two other modders’ efforts – More Nations Mod 1.0 by Astograph and Immersive Names 1.4 by DaggaRoosta, so you could as an alternative install one or both of those separately.Forgive this its passive-aggressive title – it’s an extremely welcome, if not vital, time-saver for anyone who, like me, has put hundreds of hours into XCOM games by this point. While a combination of patches and WOTC itself has shown the worst of XCOM 2’s weird mid-mission delays and pauses the door, many more still remain. Oftentimes these involve the game telling an attentive player what’s already perfectly obvious, or making too much fuss at showing certain outcomes that, again, a seasoned player can take in with a glance.SWMT says goodbye to the likes of post-grenade pauses, not-exciting-the-four-hundredth time enemy reveal cinematics and a few of Captain Obvious Bradford’s unskippable observations, as well as speeding up Gremlin and Avenger movement times. Frankly, ‘Stop Making Me Lose My Mind’ might be a better title for this essential.More about tidying things up than adding or removing things that should/shouldn’t be there, but with the net result of making WOTC feel more unified with XCOM 2 than a layer on top.
In the unmodded expansion, soldiers have one of two different skill upgrade screens, depending on which part of the game you’ve reached it from, plus some skills can only be bought with Ability Points if you access the screen from a particular room. This makes it so that the new, slicker, horizontal skill screen is what you see wherever you go, and if you want to buy bonus powers with AP you no longer have to perform the base view dance first to do so.This one’s a lot more useful for less experienced XCOM 2ers than monstrously battle-scarred veterans such as I, but it has saved me from a few complacency-based fatal errors nonetheless. Essentially, what this does is add a few interface elements that give you a better sense of what situation one of your soldiers will find themselves in if they move to a square you’re hovering the cursor over – if they have line of sight to or will flank an enemy, if snipers’ squadsight will activate, if they’re going to trigger an enemy’s overwatch and similar.
It takes a lot of the guesswork and memorisation out of things – though, if you played X2 through a couple of times before tackling WOTC, your guesswork and memorisation should be pretty reliable anyway. (Plus, patches + WOTC have already introduced a few more ways of seeing what’s going to happen before you commit).For me, Gotcha’s additional quality of life additions, such as directional arrows for VIP locations and hackable stations, are the big win.There are and will be many more best War of the Chosen mods, of course – please do point ’em out below. Or, if none of these sound like they’ll make the XCOM 2 to your taste, see if you can find a more appealing meat grinder in our 50 round up. Dlt drive recommendation for mac.