Overall, I think the skill selection was a bit more boring than in EU. There was the possibility of getting a single random skill from the advanced warfare center, but it was an extremely minor aspect of the game. If you’ve lost a good ranger, it’s not much a problem, since you can just obtain a colonel and spec him the exact same way. This was made even worse by the fact that you regularly get high-ranking soldiers as rewards. Your soldiers didn’t feel that unique based on their skillset. There’s little incentive to pick shadow strike or rapid fire for your ranger if you’ve picked blademaster earlier.Īs a result, you had essentially two builds for every class and rather little other choice. Thus, it becomes a non-choice after you’ve locked in one archetype. That’s a cool idea, but most of the times, the skill choice is between two different archetypes. Every class is built such that it can focus on its primary or secondary weapon. In XCOM 2, a different problem exists in terms of skill choice. Overall, the soldiers felt quite different in a satisfying way, but after the first playthrough, the sense of discovery in the skills was largely lost. And Mec troopers meant you completely change the way a soldier operated.Īs such, the game allowed you to design your own soldiers and find some interesting combos. The gene mods made it so you could choose some soldiers to have specific new abilities, which was amazing. In EW, two new ways to bring something unique to your soldiers were introduced. The telekinetic field and mind control are two extremely strong abilities, which really change how you play a soldier, no matter what your skill choices were before. One thing that I loved about EU was how it included psionics as a way to add something totally new to the possibilities of some of your soldiers. As such, different builds of a class were viable, though they really only had slight differences in most cases. There were some really cool and interesting choices, though, like In the Zone vs Double Tap, which are both extremely powerful, but play very differently and require a change in tactics. A similar thing can be said for rapid fire vs flush for assaults.

For example, squadsight was probably picked for 99% of snipers because it’s just so much better than snapshot. In some cases, the strength level between those perks was laughably lopsided. It only had two perks to choose from during most promotions. XCOM:EU had some pretty interesting things going on with classes, but it suffered from a few issues. In this post, I want to address the skill trees you use to level up your soldiers. XCOM 3 remains a theoretical possibility, so let’s talk a bit about what it could look like.

Xcom enemy within tech tree