Guide XCOM 2 : The Base Building

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Introduction

Managing the base well is essential to win a game a XCOM 2 : throwing valuable resources into unnecessary facilities can be very damaging and, without the right attention, you may find yourself at a standstill. The purpose of this guide is not to indicate a precise order of structures to be built, the ideal base does not exist and the player must make his choices based on his style and the results he wants to achieve. Instead, in these pages we try to give some useful advice by presenting the various constructions and indicating the most important ones. So let's start, have you recovered enough engineers?

Lower than that... there's only digging to do.

Before we talk about individual structures, we need to go through the pre-construction phase. At the beginning of the game you find yourself with only one free space while the others are all occupied by alien debris, alien machinery and destroyed coils. Before we start working on the individual rooms we have to remove all these unwanted objects and to do so we need a good number of engineers right away. For this reason we advise you to immediately accept missions that involve an engineer as a reward, "buying" one on the black market costs a lot of resources and, in the early stages, you can't afford to be too wasteful. Once you have the necessary manpower start digging, initially concentrate on the first two levels of the base and then, when you have enough resources and have built the first structures, start working on the last two (the deepest). Digging costs money and takes time, but it is absolutely necessary and, in the end, you also get some rather interesting rewards. Removing simple alien debris gives you some bonus reserves (not many, but still better than nothing), working on alien machinery gives you more resources (more this time) and removing a destroyed coil gives you an excellent energy bonus by building an energy hub. Yeah, energy: our base doesn't run on air and we always have to keep the energy consumption of the various structures under control. Before building something we have to make sure that we have enough joints to make everything work properly, they are practically compulsory constructions and we recommend you to place at least a couple of them already at the first two levels.
There is also another way to exploit the destroyed coils: after removing them we can also build a different structure from an energy junction and this one, using the residual energy of the coil, will not consume energy. However, we advise you to use these rooms for the joints or, if you really want to build another structure, at least make sure it has an extremely high energy cost.
Of course, the time for removal increases by switching from debris to coil machines, but you can reduce the waiting time by assigning more engineers to a given project.

Question of style

We now move on to the analysis of the structures. As mentioned at the beginning of the guide, there is no perfect construction order and you have to decide which structures to focus on immediately according to your style. Leaving aside the armory, the research laboratory, the command centre and the engineering department (present from the beginning) you have to ask yourself what kind of game you want to play. Do you prefer an aggressive approach to have soldiers armed to the maximum, with advanced equipment and very sophisticated tactics? In this case we advise you to create the guerrilla school as soon as possible: here you can study tactics that quickly put you in a position of great advantage allowing you, for example, to get more objects from the looted corpses (and when you discover the black market all the money invested will return immediately back ...). Thanks to the guerrilla school you can also choose the class of a certain recruit by subjecting them to the appropriate training and you have the possibility to increase the size of your team. These are just some of the benefits offered by the guerrilla school, it is an extremely useful structure and we recommend you to analyze well all the tactics proposed to choose which ones to use according to your style.
Another very important construction for those who want to focus on unique equipment is the experimental department. Thanks to this structure your chief engineer can provide you with a lot of interesting toys (even in the early stages of the game) and we assure you that once you go into battle the difference with the basic equipment will be felt. However, we advise you not to build this structure as soon as you get the chance, the costs for certain items are quite high and in the early stages of the game they may not really be necessary.
The advanced war centre is a fundamental structure, build it immediately or at the most after the guerrilla school. Its purpose is to allow wounded soldiers to return to operation in a relatively short time and, considering the difficulty of the game, you will absolutely need it. Recruiting new men due to a small number of available soldiers is an expensive and impractical solution in the long term, much better to invest first of all on the care of those we already have and then, over time, expand our army more and more. Thanks to the war centre, moreover, soldiers get a bonus skill unrelated to their class at the time of promotion.
In case you don't particularly like a super aggressive style, preferring instead to work in a different way to maybe get to the psionics, we suggest you to follow another way. The construction of the guerrilla school is absolutely fundamental (especially at high difficulties) and it remains one of the things to do immediately, as well as that of the advanced war centre. After having built these structures and built some energy hubs, we advise you not to invest everything you have in the equipment of the experimental department (built later) or in advanced guerrilla tactics. Put money aside, find the materials required for psionic research and, after that, build the psionic laboratory. This structure allows you, as the name suggests, to train and use psionics, useful soldiers with very special skills.

You can always improve

There are still a couple of structures to be dealt with and we need to clarify a few points. Let us start by saying that it is possible to build additional scientific laboratories in which scientists obtained on missions can be employed, and not only that. By investing in these facilities we can speed up every single research project and get to the most advanced and complex ones faster.
The workshop, on the other hand, allows us to make Gremlin drones to be used in adjacent structures or rooms, thus increasing efficiency without necessarily having to employ a real-life engineer.
Finally, it remains to be analyzed the structure for the "communications of resistance", a fundamental construction for a successful match that allows us to expand our network by increasing the number of regions with which we can come into contact. By dedicating an engineer to the structure, we can also obtain additional contacts. Don't underestimate the importance of "resistance communications", more contacts means more resources to invest in objects, facilities, people and upgrades. Without money the war is always lost and, consequently, any structure that can provide more resources (even if indirectly) is certainly welcome.
Workshop, scientific laboratory, energy hub and the "resistance communications" facility can also be upgraded and strengthened once built, the choice whether or not to proceed is entirely up to you and you must take it according to the resources at your disposal.

Conclusion

Let's try to make a quick summary. The choice of construction order depends only on your style, but we recommend that you build the guerrilla school and advanced warfare center as soon as possible. Always keep an eye on the energy level and try to build the joints on the destroyed coils (after removing them of course). Try to make the most of the benefits offered by additional laboratories and workshops, these facilities are not needed immediately and cost money, but in the long run they always pay back the investment.