How To Improve Combat Efficiency in XCOM Legends!
Improving combat efficiency in XCOM Legends requires the understanding of the fundamentals that surround the battle mechanics in the game. While the game might seem straightforward in its simple combat system and turn-based style, there is a lot of strategy involved in battles, especially once you reach the higher levels of the game where the enemies are on par with or stronger than the units that you own. Once that happens, you’ll need to learn how to fight manually using real-time strategies.
During the early stages of XCOM Legends, players mostly manage to survive even if they just play the entire game on auto-mode. This is because players can level up their characters to a point that they just rollcan simply roll through the campaigns and competition in the lower ranks of the Shadow Arena. Once a player progresses long enough, the gap between characters starts to close in, making playing purely on auto-mode a quick way to lose your matches from bad sequencing.
The Starting Lineup
One of the most important parts of pre-battle setup that a player needs to consider is deciding how to arrange their starting lineup. During the setup phase, players are allowed to arrange their characters to determine which characters go in the front line and which ones stay safely in the back. In some stages, the game will also tell you which units will be placed behind cover so that they’ll have a positional advantage once the match starts to gain the defensive edge over your opponents.
A good way to set up your starting lineup is to place all your high health characters at the frontline with the tank/s in places without cover. Your healer and highest damage characters should be placed at the back with the healer prioritizing cover. The other damage characters might also want a position where they’ll get cover, but if that isn’t available, just make sure that your highest damage-dealing characters aren’t in places where they could get sniped by an enemy unit.
Moving Your Characters Around
Setting up your starters will ensure that your characters get the positional advantage, but plans almost never go your way. There are matches where the enemy just gets lucky and annihilates your strategically placed characters, even if they’re well-hidden behind cover. As a reminder, there are characters that can use abilities that pass through cover. If your enemy has one of these, they could one-shot one of your characters that don’t have a lot of defense, putting you in a very awkward position.
Luckily, XCOM Legends allows you to move your characters once every seven turns. When one of your characters dies, it’s important to place them in a more strategic position. For example, moving a damaged character from the frontline to the backline makes them less likely to be targeted by the enemy. Switching a character that’s about to die with a character that’s hidden inside cover can also be a good strategy to buy more time for the character to get healed up or live a few more turns.
Using Skill Rotations
One thing that beginners often like to do is use their ultimate ability at the start of the match to deal the maximum amount of damage. This is something that the AI is also guilty of doing. In PvE mode, it doesn’t matter how you use your skills, but the higher ranks of the Shadow Arena require players to go manual because they’ll have a significant disadvantage as the attacker. Using your skills in rotation will help you climb the ladder a lot more reliably.
Players should prioritize trying to hit their AoE abilities at the very beginning of the match unless there’s a global healer on the enemy side. Single-target attacks – like focus – blast through covers, and so are reserved for high-priority targets. It is also unnecessary to heal your units if they get damaged instantly, especially if you’re expecting one of your units to take heavy damage from the opponent. Make sure that you place shields, buffs, or enemy debuffs at the very beginning of the match.
Choosing Target Priority
We mentioned “high-priority” targets at the previous tip. When choosing targets for your attacks, it’s important to categorize them according to how high they are in the kill list. The higher the priority, the earlier you need to kill them. Characters like healers and high AoE damage characters are first on the priority list because they can disrupt your entire game plan or make it difficult for your team to sustain through five full attacks from the enemy team on their turns.
When choosing a target, you might also want to look at the enemy’s speed bar. If you don’t have a definite unit on your priority list, you might want to kill an enemy that hasn’t attacked yet so that you can reduce the amount of damage that you take during their turn. A general rule that you should follow when choosing an enemy unit to kill is that you should always kill the enemy tank last. Tanks don’t have any offensive value or sustain against real-time combat so you can take them out last.
Making Use of Type Advantages
Another useful feature in XCOM Legends is that every unit is categorized under a specific type. Each type is strong or weak against another one so you should keep this in mind when choosing a target for your abilities. When you’re choosing a priority target or using your ultimate ability on an enemy, keep in mind if the character you’re using is strong or weak against the other unit. If your unit is weak against it, you might end up wasting your ability since it won’t deal a lot of damage.
It’s generally a good idea to build a team that contains every type in the game so that you have coverage against the enemy team. If both units are on equal levels, it’s always a good idea to avoid trying to hit enemies that have resistances against you. It’s also a bad idea to only hit enemies you are strong against because you don’t want to spread damage evenly against enemies unless you’re planning to hit them with a heavy AoE ability later on.
