(eg you start in North America, an Avatar Project Facility spawns in Asia, so you cut through Europe and incidentally unlock its continent bonus, which happens to be Pursuit of Knowledge) Pursuit of Knowledge is overkill, and the only reason to get it is if it happens to be essentially on your way to something that actually matters. Even if you don't put any effort into earning additional Scientists -don't hire them from Resistance HQ when they show up, don't pursue Rumors that provide Scientists when they show up- you'll still tend to have finished pretty much every research by the time you hit the end of the game, so long as you basically avoid Autopsies for any enemy that you'll naturally hit the Instant threshold on over the course of normal play. Unlike in War of the Chosen, in the base game Pursuit of Knowledge is honestly basically terrible. Like Suit Up, it even remains a possible continent bonus. War of the Chosen brought this back as a Resistance Order, no other changes. The Laboratory provides an additional 20% improvement to research speed. and SPARKs, if you have Shen's Last Gift) Having both together is, of course, ridiculous, making literally everything except the Skulljack and one-off ProjectsВ build instantly. It's largely inferior in practice to Fire When Ready, note, so if you can get both about as easily as each other from your current position you should prefer to prioritize Fire When Ready. Suits and Powered Heavy Weapons online before the final missions. Regardless, Suit Up is one of the better continent bonuses, and potentially worth pursuing even if it's fairly out of the way just so you can rapidly get W.A.R. It's not like War of the Chosen added any new armor projects for Suit Up to affect. Unsurprisingly, this also means there's not a lot new to say relative to its War of the Chosen incarnation. It even gets to be a continent bonus still. Suit, Icarus Armor, and Serpentsuit all complete instantly. Only the north Asia starts can potentially reach Oceania within 2 contacts! (Because if you start in South Africa, it won't have a connection to South America)Д®xperimental Armor, Spider Suit, Wraith Suit, E.X.O. (Which, if so, would make the New Arctic oddity even more of an error) This is particularly frustrating in Oceania's case due to its limited number of connection points in spite of requiring only two contacts to unlock, the Oceania bonus is my rarest to unlock after Asia, because only two possible start locations have it reasonably accessible: you can't start in South America to have it accessible from there, and if you start in either of the southern Asian regions you will be forced to connect to Oceania via South America, pathing through two entire continentsВ to get started. I suspect this is to prevent you from getting your first continent bonus after your first contact, though it's possible it's actually to ensure you have a choice at the start of the game while ensuring you stay within your starting continent initially. The game is willing to start you in anyВ of the North American, African, and Asian regions, but the two-region continents are all forbidden as starts: you will never start in South America, Europe, or Oceania. On that note, also worth noting is that your starting location is randomized, but there are fewer possibilities than you might expect. If you start in North America, whichever specific region you start in will have its connection to another continent snipped, keeping only its connections to the other North American regions. The list of possible snips is non-random, and designed to herd you toward earning your initial continent's bonus: for example, each North American region is naturally in contact with the other two North American regions and then additionally has a connection point to another continent. Instead of the game forcing you to start in one of the exceptions, such as the Australian region, it will permanently snip a connection, so your initial region only has 2 regions to contact instead of the 3 you'd expect. The primary reason I'm bothering to mention this at all is an additional wrinkle to this wrinkle is that the exact distribution of connections is not completely consistent across different runs: the game always endeavors to ensure that you have exactly 2 possible contacts at the start of the game, even though most regions naturally connect to 3 different regions.

In XCOM 2, each region has a fixed list of regions it can allow you to reach: if you start in the New Arctic region, you can't immediately contact the South American regions, for example. In the prior game, you could launch a SatelliteВ at any funding nation in basically any order you liked.

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