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With Xcom2 I often lose someone in the first half dozen missions, but after that it's very rare. I had a recent game where Jane Kelly (using the mod that force spawns her) died during Gatecrasher, and then I didn't lose anyone else for the rest of it.
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Jun 3, 2022 02:16
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Finished my yearly campaign and wow, Reapers are still completely broken. I mean, I don't HAVE to but I'm always going to just have my reaper run around in the final mission, scout everything, and assassinate basically all but 1-2 pods before the final battle. Then have them banish the first avatar and his accompaniment.
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Jun 3, 2022 02:48
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binge crotching posted:With Xcom2 I often lose someone in the first half dozen missions, but after that it's very rare. I had a recent game where Jane Kelly (using the mod that force spawns her) died during Gatecrasher, and then I didn't lose anyone else for the rest of it. I've always felt 2 was easier than 1 because it seems like your units get very powerful towards the top ranks. It's not like high ranked XCOM 1 units were weaklings either, but in 2 you can easily end up with a squad that aggros a pod and then kills the entire thing on the same turn, even later in the game when enemies start getting a ton of health. Although honestly I wouldn't really call this a "problem" with the game - I feel like the whole "start out weak and scared, eventually get incredibly overpowered" is kind of the core XCOM progression. The entire point is that you completely lap the aliens.
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Jun 3, 2022 02:53
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Yeah, in xcom ew you could never kill a sectopod with a single action. In wotc you have to choose which way you feel like killing that sectopod in a single action.
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Jun 3, 2022 04:17
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FoolyCharged posted:Yeah, in xcom ew you could never kill a sectopod with a single action. In wotc you have to choose which way you feel like killing that sectopod in a single action. You could get pretty close with a double tap assault using an alloy cannon.
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Jun 3, 2022 09:10
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FoolyCharged posted:Yeah, in xcom ew you could never kill a sectopod with a single action. In wotc you have to choose which way you feel like killing that sectopod in a single action.  Maybe with enough crit buffs (aggression/mind merge/pheremones?) and by tricking it into walking through a closed UFO door? This sounds like an interesting challenge.
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Jun 3, 2022 21:23
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Yeah, EW you couldn't usually kill Sectopods with one Soldier. But it was totally possible in EU with a Heavy that had Bulletswarm and HEAT. EW nerfed the hell out of HEAT and gave Sectopods DR to stop that. And even in EW you could get lucky if you line up an Assault with Rapid-Fire, Run n Gun, Killer Instinct, Bring em On, and Close Combat specialist with a couple other enemies around.
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Jun 3, 2022 22:00
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Just beat XCOM 2 WOTC on Commander difficulty. I made a point to kill the chosen as soon as I could and I lucked out with magnetic and type specific weapon breakthroughs. My mag rifles were doing plasma rifle damage and my guys were wearing power armour before I even bothered to unlock plasma weapons, for that reason. It worked out pretty well overall. Now for a EW playthrough I guess.
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Jun 5, 2022 14:47
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I've been having a real problem getting a commander game going on WOTC. In the very first mission, I'm having squadies coinflip die being one shot while in heavy cover. Three different runs. Not being flanked. Not out in the open. But being fired at while in heavy cover. Veteran is too easy, especially later on. Looking for more of a challenge, but this ain't it. Also, it feels like this wasn't always this way. I have literal video footage of me playing through multiple missions in legendary without losing anyone, but that was pre WOTC. I also beat Enemy Unknown in ironman impossible, but that's not so easy to compare. I'm looking for my difficulty sweetspot, but I don't know where it is.
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Jun 8, 2022 22:18
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The very first mission is the hardest one. Took me a lot of tries to get past it and make an Ironman run at the hardest difficulty, but the first time I beat the first mission, I got through the rest of the game just fine. Not to really defend that extreme difficulty curve, but if you persist enough to pass that hurdle you should be ok, or at least in a situation where the challenge feels more reasonable and fair.
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Jun 8, 2022 22:32
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Full cover isn't full protection. If you're not hunkering down or something, it only reduces the enemy chance to hit by 40% and most enemies have a 65+% chance to hit. The best strategies involve killing the enemy pods before they get a shot off, but if you can't do that, sometimes retreating out of line of sight or hunkering down is the right move.
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Jun 8, 2022 23:27
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Yeah the first mission is a real pain in the rear end, particularly if you're doing the Lost and Abandoned story missions and therefore don't start with a hero unit. The way of doing the mission is largely to memorize how the pods are usually placed and then to ensure that you're able to fight them one at a time and preferably with a height advantage. You'll want to reserve at least a couple grenades to deal with the Officer, and expect that any shootout is going to go poorly.
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Jun 9, 2022 00:07
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drat, thin men hurt. Just getting owned hard in enemy within. How do I play this game again? lol
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Jun 9, 2022 00:21
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Dorkopotamis posted:I've been having a real problem getting a commander game going on WOTC. In the very first mission, I'm having squadies coinflip die being one shot while in heavy cover. Three different runs. Not being flanked. Not out in the open. But being fired at while in heavy cover. You could start on Veteran and then go up to Commander once you feel ready for it. But yeah, high difficulty x-com strategies basically come down to killing enemies before they even get a shot off.
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Jun 9, 2022 00:29
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Yeah we don't have poo poo for action economy early so the only way rookies can hit anything are to surprise them out of LOS or rain explosives. Have to play rude early game while rookies suck on higher difficulties.
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Jun 9, 2022 20:44
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Christopherodd has a long rear end breakdown video for Midnight Suns that makes it look pretty fun. Like I’d still rather it be XCOM 3 but I might buy it now at least, and there are some good ideas for it to steal.
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Jun 10, 2022 02:03
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my new favourite thing is parking an assault with Bladestorm on top of a reinforcement flare and letting him chop everyone to bits as they jump out of the landing craft
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Jun 13, 2022 12:00
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Gasmask posted:my new favourite thing is parking an assault with Bladestorm on top of a reinforcement flare and letting him chop everyone to bits as they jump out of the landing craft I think the most fun I ever had in this game was taking 6 assault colonels on a mission. Idk what that mission was, but run/gun, bladestorm, rapid fire, and untouchable made it a loving blast, and a short mission
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Jun 13, 2022 12:11
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NihilCredo posted:Othercide is a smaller game (somewhere between indie and AA) and very worth playing. Compared to XCOM: This one's on sale on Steam this week, if anyone's interested. I'll definitely pick it up.
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Jun 13, 2022 12:15
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Gasmask posted:my new favourite thing is parking an assault with Bladestorm on top of a reinforcement flare and letting him chop everyone to bits as they jump out of the landing craft learn the easy way what I had to learn the hard way: don't do this on maps with Purifiers!
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Jun 13, 2022 13:51
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Muscle Tracer posted:learn the easy way what I had to learn the hard way: don't do this on maps with Purifiers!* *Unless you have a Templar with Fortress and Bladestorm, in which case you should always do this because it is hilarious, and rules
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Jun 13, 2022 13:55
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beat War of the Chosen on Commander difficulty! really fun game. last mission was much easier as I knew what to expect and made sure I packed the A-team pumped to the gills with ability points so I had All The Buttons. mvp of the campaign goes to the sharpshooter in the serpent suit who cleaned house with Death from Above basically every mission. honourable mention to the genius CI ranger who picked up every skill and wound up with such insane mobility from covert actions she could run across the entire map, bag a Sectopod and run away before the aliens knew what hit ‘em. Fantastic game would recommend to anyone still on the fence after 1332 pages
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Jun 13, 2022 22:33
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XCOM-adjacent, Terra Invicta has a demo out.
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Jun 13, 2022 23:04
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Scandalous posted:beat War of the Chosen on Commander difficulty! really fun game. last mission was much easier as I knew what to expect and made sure I packed the A-team pumped to the gills with ability points so I had All The Buttons. mvp of the campaign goes to the sharpshooter in the serpent suit who cleaned house with Death from Above basically every mission. honourable mention to the genius CI ranger who picked up every skill and wound up with such insane mobility from covert actions she could run across the entire map, bag a Sectopod and run away before the aliens knew what hit ‘em. Fantastic game would recommend to anyone still on the fence after 1332 pages Hell yeah, high movement in this game rules. One of my all-time highlights is clearing the Avenger Defense mission in a single turn with an ultra-high-movement ranger, Run and Gun, and the bonus AP moves from a batle budy and Skirmisher. Pop out, pop the beacon, zip back, lift off, enemies never even get a turn.
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Jun 13, 2022 23:10
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Mordja posted:XCOM-adjacent, Terra Invicta has a demo out. It needs a couple years of UI and Tutorial work. I spent about 5 minutes trying to find how to launch a mission.
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Jun 14, 2022 00:50
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How did you all like Gears Tactics? Been feeling an itch for turn based squad poo poo but I've too recently done an Xcom 2 run and want to try something new.
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Jun 14, 2022 01:06
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MikusR posted:It needs a couple years of UI and Tutorial work. I spent about 5 minutes trying to find how to launch a mission. Game gets delayed 420 times and still comes out with an awful UI and tutorial, a tale as old as videogames
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Jun 14, 2022 01:27
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:How did you all like Gears Tactics? Been feeling an itch for turn based squad poo poo but I've too recently done an Xcom 2 run and want to try something new. it will definitely scratch the xcom itch. it's pretty good i think despite me having no fondness for the gears setting or designs or characters whatsoever
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Jun 14, 2022 02:03
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:How did you all like Gears Tactics? Been feeling an itch for turn based squad poo poo but I've too recently done an Xcom 2 run and want to try something new. I liked it a lot. It doesn't have the replayability of xcom, but it's good fun for a single run. It's got a much more in depth overwatch system than xcom. It's still rewarding aggressive play, but overwatch plays a mich bigger role. Just don't put it on the highest difficulty, it is absolutely not designed for that and it will ruin your fun.
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Jun 14, 2022 03:51
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Thanks! Think I'm going to give it a go.
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Jun 16, 2022 02:53
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Nthing Gears Tactics, it's the first game that feels like a real evolution on the formula with how slick and more "realistic" everything feels and animates. But yeah, no metagame whatsoever, and a little repetitive.
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Jun 16, 2022 03:15
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MikusR posted:It needs a couple years of UI and Tutorial work. I spent about 5 minutes trying to find how to launch a mission. I don't understand how you could miss that, the tutorial makes it pretty clear. What I'm confused about is, like, what should my goal be. I'm trying to control as many countries as I can (as it happens I was able to snatch Germany, France, Portugal early, and soon Spain, which is sweet) but other ones (like the Alps-whatever which is a merge of Switzerland and Austria) resist and I have no loving clue how to improve my chances. I'm still early in the game, I spent maybe 3 hours on it, but I'm already missing more "hands on" things like infiltration missions or things like that. The game so far feels like Long War But Longer. Which is okay I guess, but I wish I could see what the Long Game is here. And also I'm surprised nobody created a thread for that game that I could find. I need people smarter than me figure out how to play. Where the gently caress are you, Beaglerush.
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Jun 17, 2022 22:57
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Last I saw of Beaglerush, he was playing Enemy Within on stream and having no fun ever.
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Jun 18, 2022 06:40
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Apparently he's gotten his X2 twitch integration working so he's been rolling with that. And a bunch of Gears Tactics. That's about it, nothing on Terra Invicta.
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Jun 18, 2022 07:02
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Bogart posted:Last I saw of Beaglerush, he was playing Enemy Within on stream and having no fun ever. A classic problem of streamers/content creators who got famous playing one game/series to death and got sick of it but their attempts to branch out into other games didn't go well.
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Jun 18, 2022 07:35
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Furism posted:What I'm confused about is, like, what should my goal be. I'm trying to control as many countries as I can (as it happens I was able to snatch Germany, France, Portugal early, and soon Spain, which is sweet) but other ones (like the Alps-whatever which is a merge of Switzerland and Austria) resist and I have no loving clue how to improve my chances. I'm still early in the game, I spent maybe 3 hours on it, but I'm already missing more "hands on" things like infiltration missions or things like that. The game so far feels like Long War But Longer. Which is okay I guess, but I wish I could see what the Long Game is here. The Demo is turn limited, so you're unlikely to engage the aliens in the time limit we have. Which means what you'll be doing in the demo is mostly solidifying your foothold on Earth. France is the capitol of the European Union in-game, your next steps should be to bring other European countries into the EU to reduce your Command Point usage. Assign a councilor to National Policy in France/EU. Choose Unification targeting a EU country you control all of the Control Points in. This will bring it into the EU. If there is a country that you can't unify , but the EU has a claim on (like the UK), you need to set their diplomatic status to Ally first, then Federate them after the diplomatic timer expires, then you can Unify them. I have found three effective ways of taking Control Points from the AI; 1) Crackdown and Purge. In stable countries, your best chance of taking countries is by playing politics. Build popular support with Public Campaigns (Persuasion), then Crackdown on an enemy Control Point (Command, I believe), once you've gotten a Crackdown, use Purge (Espionage) to flip that point to you. 2) Coup d'Etat. If a country has high unrest, you can use the Coup d'Etat action to flip some/most/all of the Control Points to you. 3) War. You can declare and invade countries if you have the military. Be sure to check the target's alliances first, you don't want to be dragged into a war with a bunch of countries. And don't do it against nuclear powers. They can, and will, use nukes. The AI will do all of these to you, so make sure you use Defend Interests on all your countries and keep a reasonable military power. Here's a Let's Play series that I found to be pretty useful. Before time ran out in my last game, I controlled the EU, Eurasion Union, Canada, US, Mexico, Turkey, and most of Mars. Filthy Lucre fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 16:47
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Filthy Lucre posted:The Demo is turn limited, so you're unlikely to engage the aliens in the time limit we have. Which means what you'll be doing in the demo is mostly solidifying your foothold on Earth. I decided to make one last run where I min-maxed with all the knowledge I'd picked up and tried to outpace the demo time limit, it turns out you can do pretty well tech wise when your secret society speed runs control of the US, Russia, China, and most of the EU. I ended up building up a decent but low tech force of warships, my plan was to use lots of missiles to make up for the otherwise abysmal handling of my ships (.18g acceleration and low enough delta-v, 5kps, that going from intermediate to low earth orbit where the aliens were hanging out was a one way trip without refueling). I built up a small fleet, designs incrementally improving as my tech advanced, and once I had 8 ships I quickly converted a research station in LEO to refuel the fleet and decided to go after an alien ship that was on a recon mission. It was in fact highly inspired by that LP you linked, though I didn't follow it step by step. It didn't go so well. On paper the missiles had better acceleration than the alien ship (5g vs 2.5g) but it charged straight at my fleet and a little below, causing the missiles to slide just over it and slingshot past as they tried to come around and catch up, then it blew up more than half the fleet as it flew by. It came around on the other side and started to accelerate back, at which point a few of the missiles actually managed to catch up and did some damage, but by then my remaining ships were out of reloads and it finished them off. The LP/other players have reported doing much better with missile heavy fleets, so it may be I made a mistake or there's some randomness. And honestly damaging a far superior alien spacecraft with a ragtag fleet of low tech human ships felt like a bit of a victory anyways. That was February 2027, so about four and a half years in to the seven year demo. I almost certainly could have rebuilt a better fleet and tried again, but the game ended up crashing not long after (to be fair, it was my first crash despite a lot of play with the demo), and, well, no saves. Overall I don't think I've enjoyed a new game so much in years and I'll definitely be picking it up when it releases, which will hopefully be relatively soon. Bremen fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 17:11
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A really good game folks might like is Desperados. If you ever played the old Commando game it's like that - it's real-time but you can pause and go back as much as you want. It's a stealth-based strategy game where you're generally working with 2-3 characters with powerful skills trying to go after guarded objectives. The trick comes from examining patrol routes, identifying weak points, timing actions, and using your limited-use skills at the right times to progress. You may come across two guards who are staring at each other so you throw a coin to distract one. While he's turned around you creep out of a bush and knife the other guy, who is no longer watched, and drag him into the bush. The first guy looks back and comes to investigate where his buddy went so you wait and knife him too. It gets crazy complicated as you introduce multiple overlapping fields of vision, units and squads on patrols, line of sight blockers, interactable environments, and more experienced enemies who will either not fall for your traps or see right through them and come right at you. If you've ever activated 2 pods at once in X-COM 2 early in the game and felt that puzzle itch as you try to work out who to prioritize and how it really scratches that itch super well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_qim8Z7FTE Tom Tucker fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 20:51
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Awesome guidelines, thanks! And thanks for the LP, I'll watch it in hope to understand the game mechanics in more depths (eg: when is best to try a Crackdown or Purge, or better off Coup D'état, and how to set up the conditions etc). I Kickstarted this game whenever that was, and didn't have much hope (I'm not at all a fan of Long War, although I do recognize its qualities, it's just not for me in the context of XCOM/2) to be a honest. But from what I've seen from the demo they really seem to know what they're doing so I'm now hopeful for the final release.
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Jun 21, 2022 10:35
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First ABA of this run. Marauder heard some chryssalids running around past the bridge and went to investigate. 
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Jun 21, 2022 20:22
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