Just finished the game, some final missions feedback
Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2017 6:27 am
First off, thanks so much to Pavonis for a great mod. Really enjoyed my playthrough.
I havn't seen much feedback on the final missions so here's some thoughts. Tldr they felt too easy (playing on Legendary, non-ironman but I didn't have to savescum for these missions )
Network Tower
I was pretty surprised that I got to bring 9 guys. Plus everyone gets squadsight on top of that. The liberation network towers are challenging due to the small squad size, but it's pretty hard to challenge 9 MSGTs without special mechanics. Maybe 6(7 with intel spend) is a better number for this mission? There were 31 enemies IIRC but you'll never have to fight like 8 of them because they were in the console building, activation of which instantly ends the mission.
Waterworld
I'll focus on the bossroom because before that you can crawl it and wait for all your big cooldowns every fight and it's pretty hard to balance anything for that.
Avatar HP felt too low. When the player has 12 MSGTs with plasma weapons and the commander, 50 HP and a couple armor is not enough. Not by a long shot. It was very easy to kill the Avatars in a single turn, and my only Sharpshooter was full Holo-support build with a coil weapon. I'd imagine someone who came into the mission with 2 damage sharpshooters and plasma lances would find it trivial.
Reinforcements coming out the gates might also be too few, pods of 3 is kind of weak. My Assault handled 2 spawns singlehandedly and still had Street Sweeper up for a 3rd. If the Avatars could live for more than 1 turn maybe this isn't an issue though, since you'd get more waves and have fewer soldier actions available to use for cleaning them up.
Having 13 soldiers for a mission is kinda unusual and cool so I'd rather not reduce the number of soldiers. You could also allow the reinforcements yellow alert actions but I'd imagine this would surprise people and make them very angry.
This boss fight is super RNG based depending on which gates spawn and where the Avatars teleport vs where your soldiers are, so maybe I got favored by RNG. Still though, the ayys got 1 shot on me the entire encounter. 1 shot. I can't imagine losing even with terrible RNG.
Anyways, I don't know if you even want the final missions to be super challenging. I'd imagine Ironman players would not be pleased at the prospect of losing their campaign right at the end. But even if that is the case, a bit of a difficulty bump could at least add a hint fear and tension
I havn't seen much feedback on the final missions so here's some thoughts. Tldr they felt too easy (playing on Legendary, non-ironman but I didn't have to savescum for these missions )
Network Tower
I was pretty surprised that I got to bring 9 guys. Plus everyone gets squadsight on top of that. The liberation network towers are challenging due to the small squad size, but it's pretty hard to challenge 9 MSGTs without special mechanics. Maybe 6(7 with intel spend) is a better number for this mission? There were 31 enemies IIRC but you'll never have to fight like 8 of them because they were in the console building, activation of which instantly ends the mission.
Waterworld
I'll focus on the bossroom because before that you can crawl it and wait for all your big cooldowns every fight and it's pretty hard to balance anything for that.
Avatar HP felt too low. When the player has 12 MSGTs with plasma weapons and the commander, 50 HP and a couple armor is not enough. Not by a long shot. It was very easy to kill the Avatars in a single turn, and my only Sharpshooter was full Holo-support build with a coil weapon. I'd imagine someone who came into the mission with 2 damage sharpshooters and plasma lances would find it trivial.
Reinforcements coming out the gates might also be too few, pods of 3 is kind of weak. My Assault handled 2 spawns singlehandedly and still had Street Sweeper up for a 3rd. If the Avatars could live for more than 1 turn maybe this isn't an issue though, since you'd get more waves and have fewer soldier actions available to use for cleaning them up.
Having 13 soldiers for a mission is kinda unusual and cool so I'd rather not reduce the number of soldiers. You could also allow the reinforcements yellow alert actions but I'd imagine this would surprise people and make them very angry.
This boss fight is super RNG based depending on which gates spawn and where the Avatars teleport vs where your soldiers are, so maybe I got favored by RNG. Still though, the ayys got 1 shot on me the entire encounter. 1 shot. I can't imagine losing even with terrible RNG.
Anyways, I don't know if you even want the final missions to be super challenging. I'd imagine Ironman players would not be pleased at the prospect of losing their campaign right at the end. But even if that is the case, a bit of a difficulty bump could at least add a hint fear and tension