Four And A Half Million Dead: XCOM 2 Stats
How many have you killed?
Firaxis have unveiled an XCOM 2 [official site] stat-tracking page that shows how many soldiers have died, how many aliens have been killed and other such details. Four and a half million XCOM soldiers dead in less than a week since launch. Good work, Commanders. Five percent of those soldiers met their end at the hands and teeth of a zombie. Really great work, Commanders, seriously. You are nailing it. The stats page currently tells me that none of you have managed to complete the game but that is, apparently, an error.
This came to my attention because of Alec's ongoing diary - he's playing on the second highest difficulty level and breezing through the campaign, with his entire squad intact (it's still early days, mind). He reckons he's just that good at XCOM. I reckon he's playing with some kind of game-changing mod enabled though. I mean, look at this. Is this normal?
That's me, confronting a Sectoid. You'll note the alarmed expression, the cigarette gripped between the teeth of a face recoiling as if it had been punched, the apparent lack of a firearm. This isn't a war; this is a Feydeauesque bedroom farce.
Along with that headline 4.5m figure, the figures that stand out for me relate to the way those soldiers died. Collateral damage killed 66% and only 23% were directly killed by an enemy. I've certainly lost a fair few soldiers to an errant [REDACTED] swipe that causes a chain reaction of explosions or the floor to collapse, but that collateral figure seems high. Is everyone bunching their soldiers together and watching them perish side by side?
I was hoping for confirmation that the Sharpshooter is the most deadly class. Go the Gunslinger route and you'll have a soldier capable of wreaking havoc in just about any situation. A good Gunslinger can average more than a kill per turn. Specialists are the least deadly though, which is fitting, because they're more interested in pretending to hack things and actually just setting off alarms rather than doing anything useful.
What I want to know is, what percentage of exchanges in the game end with the word 'Commander'? I'd say it's around 90% or more, although I may have missed the mark. That can happen with even the surest shot.
How has your XCOM 2 experience been so far? Did you plump for a lower difficulty level so you could kick back and take the fight to Advent or are you struggling through the tough fight of a long resistance campaign against insurmountable odds?