The 10 best Xcom 2 mods you should be using to enhance your gaming experience
XCOM 2 is a fantastic turn-based strategy game. Anyone who has tested themselves in this game knows it is fun and challenging, but you can make it even more interesting and challenging to play with these mods.
Modding is the remodeling of the games original content to create new gameplay aspects. You can make the game run and operate in a totally different way. These changes can be made by any Xcom 2 player, and changes the core gamplay.
Let’s take a look at the best 10 XCOM 2 mods, and how to mod your XCOM 2 gaming experience.
How To Mod Xcom 2
10 - Long War Perk Pack
The Long War Perk Pack was created and designed by Long War Studios.
Long War Studio’s Long War Perk Pack graphical view of custom moderation’s.
This XCOM 2 mod implements over 70 new and adjusted abilities for you to assign to your soldiers. It also provides additional UI support when deciding between 3 perks per soldier.
Long War Perk Pack mod introduces 7 new and reworked classes: Assault, Grenadier, Shinobi, Sharpshooter, Ranger, Gunner and Specialist. Each class has 3 talent trees instead of 2.
This mod will also redesign the HUD so that it is capable of handling more than 14 abilities at any one time. Users who have installed this mod will have more flexibility in designing their own soldier classes using the abilities provided in this mod.
Take a look for yourself: Long War Perk Pack
9 - Show Enemies on Mission Planning
XCOM Soldiers ready for battle. Top left hand corner - Objectives and mod showing the enemies detected on upcoming mission.
This mod to the game allows the user to see the quantity of enemies they will be facing in the upcoming missions on the load-out screen (once you have the shadow chamber). It saves you the effort of having to remember these details, or having to back track to the Geo screen to take another look at the expected enemies.
See here for more information: Show Enemies on Missions
8 - ShowMeTheSkills
The smaller bottom perk icons are displayed like this with ShowMeTheSkills.
ShowMeTheSkills enables the perks of each squad member to be visible on the loadout screen. This means there is no more deep searching for that one soldier with the right perks you need for the mission, you can easily find him/her without the hassle.
The mod allows a customize option to work it the way you want, enabling you to display the number of perks and stats per soldier or individual soldiers, and where to display these details; on the bottom or side of their detail box.
Take a look for yourself here: ShowMeTheSkills
7 - Stop Wasting My Time
A very handy mod to the game for anyone who wishes to just get on and play!
Stop Wasting My Time - by BlueRaja.
The main purpose of this mod is to speed up certain aspects of the game; it does this by removing needless and pointless pauses like animations and other time wasting aspects.
- The mod removes pauses from the in game combat system such as:
- Time wasted after soldier has shot, thrown a grenade, or used other abilities.
- 1 second pause after a soldier has been killed
- Time lost when soldier moves into a covering position
- In game voice overs during combat
- Cinematic when enemies have been revealed by your squad
And many more.
It also increases the movement speed of the “Avenger” on your XCOM 2 global map, and decreases the fade in time of the extremely slow colour picker.
Take a look here: Stop Wasting My Time
6 - True Retroactive AWC
True Retroactive AWC is a very useful moderation to implement upon you XCOM 2 experience. Designed to make sure you do not miss out on useful perks!
XCOM 2 Advanced Warfare Centre (AWC).
The Advanced Warfare Centre (AWC) gives soldiers the ability to gain a randomly rolled perk which is achieved at a random rank.
This can cause problems, for example; if the predetermined perk for you soldier has been randomly rolled to a level below his or her current status, then the ability will be lost.
This mod to the game changes this and ensures that you do not miss out on important abilities for your soldiers. It changes the requirement to a rank higher, even if the AWC rolls a rank lower, your soldier will still gain the perk ability.
Take a look here: True Retroactive AWC
5 - Long War Alien Pack
Another mod pack brought out by Long War Studios.
Moderated enemies designed by Long War Studios in there Alien Pack.
Long War Alien Pack adds a variety of new alien enemies into XCOM 2. It is an update from the previous “Muton Centurion Pack”.
This new and improved mod includes:
- Muton Centurion - a leader with an ability to boost the morale of his team
- Muton Elite - extremely powerful soldier designed to dominate fights
- Advent Drone - a small robot that search’s for hidden enemies and implements crowd-control
- Advent Sentry - specialized in “overwatch” abilities
- Advent Rocketeer - a soldier specially equipped with a rocket launcher
- Advent Grenadier - equipped in battle with a grenade launcher
- Advent Gunner - specialized in suppressing enemies with shooting
- Advent MEC Archer - a machine designed for long range bombardment
- Ninja - a specialist in sharpshooting
- Sidewinder - a very fast and nimble soldier alien for skirmishing
- Sectoid Commander - a soldier with abilities to deal area-of-effect damage
- Chryssalid Soldier - a bigger, tougher upgrade to the previous Chryssalid
- Hive Queen - a monstrous and enormously big Chryssalid
Take a look at the mod here: Long War Alien Pack
4 - Increased Enemy Squad Size
Birds eye overview to increased enemy squads.
Want to make the XCOM 2 more challenging, increase your tactical awareness and reap more rewards (corpses and XP)? Increased Enemy Squad Size might be the mod you have been looking for.
This mod will increase the spawn pod squad size of the alien enemies you will be facing in your encounters. This will usually increase the number of enemies per pod by 1, unless there is only a single member in the squad pod - then it increases the number by 2.
Have a look at this mod here: Increased Enemy Squad Size
3 - Perfect Information
Perfect Information displaying graphic and visual information about the combat system.
Perfect Information is a statistical mod to the game, by this I mean it clearly displays; hit rate, miss rate, critical hits and dodge percentages. It also shows Alien stats including Aim, Hit, Defense, etc.
Find out more here: Perfect Information
2 - Lifetime Stats
Lifetime Stats is another statistical mod, but a lot more in-depth than Perfect Information.
XCOM soldier ready to kill! Lifetime Stats displayed towards the bottom left hand corner of the image.
This is an ideal mod to the game that I would recommend to anyone who is interested in knowing just how good their force is.
Lifetime Stat will track your characters stats from all of his or her combat experiences and display them for you, this way you can choose your best team. Here are the features this mod tracks and displays:
- Every enemy killed during combat
- Each shot fired by your soldier
- How many times a soldier has hit or missed a target
- How many of those hit shots have been a critical hit
- The average percentage hit rate of all shots fired
- The average percentage of critical hits
- Provides a “Luck”%, by comparing Avg hit% and total hits
- The number of tiles a solider has moved during each combat experience
- Number of executions made by a soldier
- The total amount of damage dealt by a soldier
- The total amount of damage received from combats
- The amount of damage dealt that was blocked by enemy armor
- The amout of damage received that was blocked by your soldiers armor
Find out more from this link: Lifetime Stats
1 - Show Health Values
Getting tired of second guessing or having to count enemy HP all the time?
Displays the health of operators by graphically displaying it in bar form.
This mod to XCOM 2 is a very simple idea, but is very useful. It was so frustrating having to count enemy HP, especially sectopod’s!
The mod will graphically display on screen the enemies HP in bar form, making tracking it and prioritizing where to deal damage a lot easier to do.
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