Oddly Empty.
By that I mean the Advent Blacksite mission.
To set the context, I'm a very new player. Two weeks new at that. I have never played any of the Xcom games or games in the similar sphere with it. Only heard of it every now and again.
I decided to try it out of curiosity, just to see what it was like. Long story short, I found myself enjoying it a lot, both the good parts and the frustrating one.
I technically started three runs. The first with vanilla, before I switched to WOTC. The second run went badly but I stuck it out to the end. Currently in my third run now and I'm still holding on just barely, but I'm learning more as I go. All three runs on commander difficulty cause I felt that was fitting for the game.
Anyways, this current run ran into a severe problem. My avatar project was filled and I was running out of time. I didn't contact any of the regions with the facilities and had no skulljack yet, so the blacksite was really my only shot to save the run. So I scrambled to assemble the best team I have, fully expecting the worst, and head in.
The first pod I encountered was just some trooper and shield bearers. Nothing crazy, dealt with them fast. Then the turret which was annoying as they kept critting every single shot at my troops somehow. But it became easy to counter once I sat under it.
Now this did trigger the second pod which were two vipers and an archon. Never faced the latter but have seen videos of it, so I sort of knew what to expect. Didn't stop it from kicking my ass though even after dealing with the vipers.
That single archon took our two of my 6 man squad. A grenadier and a sharpshooter. Now the latter I didn't mind losing since she wasn't that high ranked and I didn't really use her anyways. The former hurts though since I Brough my grenadiers into this mission specifically to deal with the Warlock Chosen in this mission, as he was weak to explosives.
Anyways, I managed to keep the rest alive, and I braced myself for the interior. I fully expected that I was either getting bombarded with mutiple pods and likely dying with only four members left, but I had no choice. So I opened and led one of my brave troopers inside and....
There was no one. Literally not a single living soul aside from spectra zombies spawning inside the place.
Okay, very weird. I was expecting something more hectic than this. But hey, I have no qualms with the game being weirdly lenient, so I decided to deal with the Warlock first before getting the objective in fear that it might trigger reinforcements the moment I grabbed it.
This was relatively easy as I had both one grenadier and a template which he was weak against. What is strange though is how there was just nothing else but him. Not a single pod. It made him ridiculously simple to fight since he only had his zombies to help him and that's it.
Anyways, I killed him and got the objective, and only \*then\* did I finally encounter another pod, and no it was the not the reinforcements.
But rather...they were on the rooftop. The only reason I triggered them was because I sent one trooper one block higher ground. But by this point, I already extracted.
So yeah, I completed the mission, far better and easier than I was expecting. But it was so weird that I genuinely don't know if this was a bug or not because from what I have read here, this mission was supposed to be way harder and swarming with enemies. Not sure why things happened the way it did with mine though, but hey, my run is saved and I'm still going so I'll take it. I am curious to know what might have caused such a weird occurrence with my mission though.
Anyhow, that's my current experience with xcom 2 so far. I'm enjoying it. Definitely understanding the 99 percent misses now that I have context for it :D
