X-com 3 manual

This is known as concealment. Your squad begins most missions in concealment; use this advantage to engage the enemy on your terms. Your primary and secondary mission objectives are tracked here. The primary objective for most missions is to kill all enemies, but your secondary objectives vary with each mission.

These buttons can be used to end your turn, switch between squad members, rotate the camera, or call a Skyranger for evac. This shows detailed information about the currently selected soldier, including health , armor, action points , cover , overwatch status, concealment , and any other positive or negative effects.

This shows all of the actions available to the selected soldier. To find out what the effects of performing an action would be, click once on the action icon. Actions that cannot be performed are greyed out; a number may be displayed indicating the number of turns before the action can be used again. This shows the name, class and rank of the selected soldier, as well as any special actions that they can perform.

Most tactical maps in XCOM 2 are procedurally generated, which means that every mission is a unique experience. Medikits are built by engineering ; to use one during a mission, you must equip it on a soldier before the mission begins. Soldiers killed in combat are permanently removed from your squad: they cannot be resurrected. Your soldiers can attempt to evacuate the bodies of dead, unconscious or critically wounded comrades using the Carry Unit action.

If you successfully evacuate a dead soldier, you keep any weapons, items, and equipment that they were carrying. Critically wounded soldiers heal over time and will eventually rejoin your squad. These are represented by chevrons on the unit flag and can be used to move, attack or use an ability. Different icons are displayed to indicate that moving through a tile will break concealment by making too much noise e. To do so, hold down the Control ctrl key while selecting tiles.

This allows you to avoid moving through hazards or tiles that would break concealment. Use concealment to set up ambushes and engage the enemy on your terms. Most physical objects provide some form of cover, which is represented by shield icons on the map: a half-shield represents low cover, while a full shield represents high cover. Positions with high cover provide the greatest defense to your soldiers, but even low cover is better than none at all.

NOTE: A yellow shield icon indicates that an enemy is currently flanking the soldier in the direction of the shield. A red shield icon indicates that the unit will be flanked if they move to that location. Flanked units are exposed and are especially vulnerable to attack from the flanking enemy. Actions are commands that members of your squad can carry out during a mission.

All soldier classes share a number of basic actions:. Fire Weapon: The soldier attacks their designated target. Reload: The soldier reloads their weapon. Overwatch: The soldier remains in position and automatically attacks any enemy that moves within their line of sight, but with a penalty to their accuracy.

If overwatch is used during concealment, the soldier will only attack once concealment is broken. Hunker Down: The soldier gains a boost to their defense, but their line of sight is reduced until the next turn. To attempt to hack, move a squad member within range and use the hack action. The rewards for a successful hacking attempt are ranked in tiers: higher tiers are more difficult to achieve, but offer much greater rewards. Interact: This action is used to open or close doors, plant explosives, or for any action that requires interacting with the environment.

Loot: When defeated, enemies sometimes drop loot, which contains resources and equipment. When dropped, the loot appears on the map with a radius marker and a turn timer. Move a soldier within the radius marker before the timer expires to collect the loot. Loot may be destroyed if the enemy is killed using an explosive.

Any loot left on the map when the mission is completed will be recovered automatically. Evac: Evacuation zones are used to rescue VIPs and fallen squad members, or to end a mission by extracting all of your soldiers. You can set an evac zone by using the Call Skyranger action, found in the top-right corner of the screen.

A colored grid will appear, on which you can place the evac zone. Red areas indicate invalid locations; you can only place the evac zone in an area where the grid is entirely blue.

Some missions have pre-placed evac zones. Carry Unit: This action is used to pick up a dead or wounded solider. If you successfully deliver a dead soldier to an evac point, you recover any items and equipment they were carrying. If you deliver a wounded soldier, you prevent them from bleeding out. Other Actions: Each soldier class has several unique abilities, and additional abilities are unlocked each time a soldier gains a rank.

Certain facilities also provide additional abilities that can be used in the field. Each class has several unique abilities that can be unlocked as soldiers gain ranks. Rangers are experts at remaining undetected and are highly effective in close-range encounters. The Scout specialization focuses on abilities that maintain concealment. Specialists use the Gremlin drone to assist their squad in the field.

The Battle Medic specialization focuses on abilities that heal allies or grant them bonuses. Grenadiers like to hit hard with big, heavy weapons and things that go boom.

The Sharpshooter is an expert with sniper rifles and pistols. The Sniper specialization focuses on long-range attack abilities. Psi Operatives rank up through training in the Psi Lab, rather than as a result of their performance in the field. You begin with only a few basic facilities: the majority of rooms in the Avenger are filled with alien debris. As the need for new facilities arises, you can assign engineers to clear these rooms, gaining valuable resources in the process.

Research: Research and development happens here. You are prompted to visit when new research projects become available. Only one project can be researched at a time. You can also view research archives and a list of your current scientists. Armory: View and manage your soldiers: give them promotions, customize their names and appearances, recruit new soldiers, change loadouts and apply weapon upgrades.

Engineering: You can build new items, weapons, armor and facilities here. You can also view your current inventory and a list of your engineers. You can also view a memorial to fallen soldiers here. Living Quarters: Soldiers, engineers, and scientists live here. Visit the quarters to view a list of your personnel and their current assignments. You can assign scientists, engineers and Gremlins to specific rooms to provide bonuses, such as reduced research times or increased healing for wounded soldiers.

Engineers are required to excavate new rooms in the Avenger before new facilities can be built. You can scan for hostile alien actions, contact resistance cells, seek out valuable resources, and move the Avenger. You can counter their progress by choosing certain Guerrilla Ops missions. Rumors from the Resistance: Investigate rumors in the hopes of discovering valuable resources and information. Your squad is not deployed on these missions: instead, the missions are completed after a set amount of time.

Defend the Avenger until repairs are complete. You can also play local multiplayer matches over a LAN. Over the years, XCOM has always had fixed heroes, but to have an entire fixed squad feels limiting, and takes away from the impact of permadeath. Generally, having a more story-centric approach to XCOM is a fine idea, as long as you always have the option to play random matches whenever you feel like it.

Taking away player-made characters, however, retroactively removes a bit of player agency and an overall very enjoyable part of the overall XCOM experience. Thanks to its city setting, the world of Chimera Squad is a lot more compact. No more inching across the map in Overwatch mode! Instead, you enter a room in the most impactful way when breaching and so announce your presence.

The fact that the squad member doing the breaching is temporarily stuck where they are adds another interesting strategic layer to proceedings. In light of having less room to fight in, introducing a turn order to XCOM certainly made sense. Depending on how XCOM 3 may shake out, whether it goes with bigger or smaller areas, it would make sense to keep the turn order. Since aliens and humans work together in Chimera Squad. This could be a good decision in the long run, as Chimera Squad does away with the theme of rebellion against an alien threat — an important mainstay of the series.

In Chimera Squad, each member of your team is essentially their own class. Their unique abilities make for great gameplay variety, too. Yet, XCOM 3 could easily take some of these special abilities over, for example by making them a goal in squad training. As a Japanese speaker, she enjoys Japanese pop culture and is always on the hunt for the next game from the Land of the Rising Sun.

She also particularly enjoys narrative-focused games and cute indies, and always seeks to learn more about the business-side of the gaming industry.