I was originally under the impression that Commander is the "vanilla" difficulty in XCOM 2 - just like Civ 5's Prince difficulty, neither you nor the AI recieve any bonuses or assistance from the game. As Legend completely overhauls the game by doubling build times, vastly increasing wound times, and dropping more pods in a mission, it seems intuitive to think that Commander would be a difficulty setting which provides a non-overhauled variant of the game with no limitations on the AI or with any benefits for you, in contrast to Legend which buffs the enemies up a fair amount.

In fact, Commander actually cheats for the player in two subtle but very significant ways. Firstly, there are miss streaks. Secondly, there are restrictions on pod behaviour. I'll devote a section to explaining each cheat and its implications for gameplay, and then provide a section on how to remove each; resulting in a Commander difficulty which neither cheats for or against the player.

Before I go on, the main credit for this guide goes to Mirado at the Giant Bomb Forums[www.giantbomb.com] for bringing this to light for me. This guide is just a repost of what he brought up.

On Rookie and Veteran, the game provides a hidden 10% bonus to aim on all shots that have a 50% chance to hit or over for every shot that turn for every shot that has missed. To quickly explain this, let's take an example.

• Soldier 1 misses a shot at Alien 1.
  
• Soldier 2 has a declared chance to hit of 50% against Alien 1 or Alien 2.
  
• If Soldier 2 takes a shot on the same turn that Soldier 1 misses their shot against Alien 1 or Alien 2, then Soldier 1's actual chance to hit is 60%.
  
• On the same turn, Soldier 2 takes a shot against either Alien 1 or Alien 2 and misses.
  
• Soldier 3 has a declared chance of 50% to hit Alien 1 or Alien 2.
  
• If Soldier 3 takes a shot on the same turn as both Soldier 1 and Soldier 2's shots, then their actual chance to hit is 70%.

This way, the game attempts to minimise infuriating miss streaks. Which makes sense on Rookie or Veteran, but on Commander the intuition for me is that you should be in a scenario where you're relying on guaranteed ways of getting enemies if you wish to preclude the possibility of miss streaks. To my surprise, though, Commander actually includes this modifier - not only that, but it's actually higher on Commander than on either Rookie or Veteran: 15%.

On Rookie, if you are engaged with four enemies or more, the game will act to direct all inactive pods away from the player. On Veteran, this number is increased to six. This is put in place to allow players on easier difficulties to be more liberal with their movements and thusly have to think less about where they move during an engagement. Since the game is working to try and keep engagements at four or six enemies or less, the player is less likely to be in a scenario where they are overwhelmed with enemies.

In Legend, this restriction is not in place at all. On Commander difficulty, though, it is there, and at at the same level as that at Veteran - six. If you are engaged with six enemies, then all inactive pods in the level will be directed away from you to give you some breather room. Thus, there is some breather room for the player given to stop themselves from making a bad move to let themselves get overwhelmed.

First, go to your XCOM Configuration directory. For everyone on Windows, the path to the Config directory is this:

Documents\My Games\XCOM2\XComGame\Config

You want to open the file XComGamecore.ini. Preferably with software like Notepad+ so you can easily browse the file. After doing that, you want to find the line which reads "MissStreakChanceAdjustment=15". To remove miss streak cheating in Commander, change the 15 to 0. Alternatively, if you want to simply reduce it, pick any value greater than 0 but less than 15. As you may notice in the file and the annotation below, all difficulties can be configured to have their miss streak chance adjustments at any value you'd like.

To remove or alter the pod control mechanic on Commander, go to your XCOM configuration directory again and head to XComAI.ini. Near the beginning of the file, you'll find a line which begins with "MaxEngagedEnemies[2]=6"; the comment to the side indicates that this is the number of engaged enemies before pod control kicks in on Commander difficulty. To remove pod control, change 6 to -1.