[General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post Reply
Saph7
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 167
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:00 pm

[General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Saph7 »

I did a campaign feedback post a week or so ago here. Just finished the campaign as of today, here are my thoughts.

Class Balance

Now that I've had a chance to play with them at Master Sergeant rank, my revised opinions on the classes:

Gunners & Grenadiers: Still super strong. Cooldown gunners are the best all-round damage dealers, they have a skill for pretty much everything. Grenadiers with Full Kit basically never run out of ammo, and once they get Advanced Grenade Launchers they become the ultimate AoE class.

Snipers, Specialists, Shinobis: Still strong but situational. Snipers start pushing into 'overpowered' once they get Serial – one plasma grenade from an experienced Grenadier + a Serial from a tooled up Sniper can total an entire pod. Specialists are always useful and Full Override is one of the best capstone abilities. Shinobis play pretty much the same role as they did early.

Assaults, Technicals: Still very outclassed. The few times I brought my Assault MSGT along in the lategame, he spent most of his time sitting in my battle line doing nothing very important. Sure, he could do a ton of damage at close range, but by that point I'd learned that I didn't WANT to get to close range – if I was engaged at close range against multiple enemies, I was doing something wrong. The only guy weaker than him was my MSGT Technical.

Rangers: This was the one class that I changed my mind on. Overwatch Rangers at Tech Sergeant and below are mediocre, but once they hit Gunnery Sergeant and pick up Rapid Reaction, holy shit do they hit a power spike! With Hair Triggers/Cool Under Pressure/Grazing Fire they hit basically every overwatch shot they take, meaning they're taking 3 shots per turn (and getting at least one crit, too, since their targets are usually out of cover). Throw in Threat Assessment from the Specialist and some Dragon Rounds, and my Ranger was killing or disabling half a pod by himself.

Psi Ops: Well, after a ton of work I managed to train two Psi Ops up to Magus. It wasn't worth it. I brought one along to Waterworld, and all she did was pick off the odd weakened enemy with Soulfire and use a Domination in the final room. Due to the RNG nature of psi training, she never got Null Lance or Void Rift, meaning her offensive strength was badly lacking. Given that she was in a team where the Snipers were mowing down entire pods with Serial, the Grenadiers were chucking out Incendiary Bombs that covered half the screen, and the Rangers were routinely dealing 30 damage with Overwatch fire on the enemy turn, a one-shot mind control just didn't cut it. I never once got any use out of Solace, nor of Bastion. My Psi Ops soaked up more resources than any other class in my campaign, yet accomplished LESS than any other class in my campaign.

Tech Balance

A few quick points:

• Lasers and Coil feel a good bit stronger (relatively speaking) than Mag and Plasma. Mag feels as though it could use a slight buff – maybe +1 ammo per magazine, to match the +5 aim of Laser or the +1 AP of Coil?
• Pretty much all the Proving Ground grenades (Gas, EMP, Acid) are underpowered. Incendiary Grenades, by contrast, are overpowered.
• Armours feel well balanced.
• Mimic Beacons showing up with Psionic Gate research made me laugh. You guys did that to troll us, didn't you? :)

Research and Rendering

Like the strategic layer, this is super clunky.

Me: "Finished Plasma Rifle research. Hmm, I'm short on Elerium and cores. Better render some corpses . . . but which ones can I spare? Research screen doesn't show the corpse count, I'd better go to Engineering to look at the Inventory—"
UI: "WARNING! NO ACTIVE RESEARCH SELECTED!"
Me: "Whatever, just let me change screen."
Tygan: "Commander, we don't have any active research projects. It's essential that we—" (Please note that due to some weird bug, every time Tygan or Shen start one of their pointless monologues, the game pauses for about 20 seconds before the audio clip starts playing.)
Me: "Shut up Tygan. Okay, I've got a spare Sectopod, let's use that."

(12 hours later)

Me: "Research finished . . . Dammit, now I've forgotten what other corpses I can spare. I'd better go to—"
UI: "WARNING! NO ACTIVE RESEARCH SELECTED!"
Me: "Yeah, yeah, whatever."
Tygan: (after yet another 20 second pause) "Commander, we don't have any active research projects. It's essential that we—"
Me: "Shut UP, Tygan."

(12 hours later)

Me: "Maybe if I just check to see how many cores—"
UI: "WARNING! NO ACTIVE RESEARCH SELECTED!"
Me: "I KNOW. SHUT UP."
Tygan: "Commander, we don't have any active research projects. It's essential that we—"
Me: "GOD ****ING DAMN IT TYGAN I HATE YOU SO MUCH."

Repeat ad infinitum.

Lategame Missions

These actually got really enjoyable! As some people have noted, as you get into the mid-late game, the focus of the missions shifts from 'race the timer to the evac zone' to 'kill everything and take home the bodies', since I was mostly running Troop Ambushes and Supply Raids during this period. I didn't do JoINrbs's 0% infil tactic, so I was probably playing the missions the way they were supposed to be played, and I found them tough but doable, and a lot of fun. It helped that the ambushes/raids meant that I was finally pulling in a decent amount of supplies, alloys, and elerium, which was a nice change from the early missions where I felt perpetually broke.

Other than that, after some trial and error I figured out what most of the good LW2 players had already learned, namely, that if you weren't sending in a 7-man squad to kill everything you should be sending in a 1-2 man stealth team to complete the mission without firing a shot. The game fell into a routine of blow-up-everything kill missions alternating with Shinobi/Specialist stealth ops, which enabled me to win the strategic layer pretty easily.

Playing Defence

The big midgame negative for me was the Retaliations. I don't know if I'm the only one to feel this way, but as I progressed from midgame to mid-late, the protect-the-haven missions started to get REALLY tedious. I'd spread out widely, and as a result, it started to feel like a game of Civilisation where I had to manage so many cities that I couldn't remember what was going on in them anymore.

So, there are two types of Retaliations, the terror type and the 'wait 8 turns for evac' defend type, and I grew to hate them both, for different reasons. The terror type Retals are frustrating because even when you win, you lose – even if you sweep the mission flawlessly you can expect to lose about half the haven, and usually it's more like 2/3rds, since ADVENT is happily shooting resistance members to death one at a time while you're still trying to fight your way out of the evac zone. The defend type are the exact opposite. They're incredibly easy, since all you have to do is spread your troops out on overwatch with good lines of sight and wait for the reinforcements to drop, at which point it becomes like skeet shooting – they drop in, you kill 1 or 2 with OW fire, clean up the rest on your turn, go back onto overwatch and repeat. This would be okay (if not exciting), but what really makes these missions excruciating is playing sheepdog with the 13 Resistance members in the haven, finding them one by one and sending them back to their sheep pen next to the evac flare, which takes bloody forever because there's always the two dumbasses who for some reason have decided to wander off as far from the evac point as possible, meaning you have to sweep the entire map to find them. Oh, and once you've got them corralled, you can't put them on standby, meaning that every single turn you have to cycle through 13 useless characters to get to your troops. It's really boring.

The worst thing about the Retaliations is that there's no sense of progression. Even if you ace the mission, you get no loot, no corpses, and no strategic benefit – your sole reward is a bit of mission XP. It's pretty frustrating to fight an hour-long mission and feel at the end as though you're no further on than where you started. At least with Faceless hunts you can do them fast and get a bit of loot and corpses as a consolation prize. I get the strategic logic of playing defence, but if we're not going to get any reward out of these missions then it would be nice to have some kind of auto-resolve feature, since right now they really feel like a chore.

In the end my solution to the endless Retaliations was just to put 4 rebels on supply in 11 out of 13 of my ADVENT region havens and stick all the other rebels on hiding. This was strategically suboptimal (since the hiding rebels ended up being useless all campaign, and after all, I could beat most of the Retaliation missions easily – being active would have given me more resources) but I just couldn't stand to do any more of the things.

Firefights

One thing that I think you guys have really improved over LW1 (and over vanilla XCOM for that matter) is the offence/defence balance. One of the things I liked about early-game LW1 (as compared to high-difficulty vanilla) was that you could actually have dug-in firefights against the aliens. In vanilla XCOM and XCOM2 on Legendary, you simply can't have shootouts with the aliens, ever. If you try, they'll shoot you right through cover, and frequently crit and kill you in a single shot. In LW1, one shot usually wouldn't be an instakill, meaning that sitting in low cover with an activated alien nearby was something other than a death sentence.

Unfortunately, with LW1, the balance shifted as the game progressed, until by the late game it was basically rocket tag again. This was actually what made me stop playing LW1 the first time around. Muton Elites were the worst offender in this regard – whenever you had two Muton Elites active at once, the first would chuck a plasma grenade from half a mile away with Bombardier to blow up your cover, and the second would take a Heavy Plasma shot with 100% accuracy to finish you off. It got to the point where you simply couldn't leave any aliens activated, ever, unless you were willing to risk losing a soldier who'd taken 20+ missions to level up.

LW2 is much better in this regard. If I kill most of an alien pod, but leave a couple uncontrolled, then the usual result is that I get one soldier hurt, maybe badly hurt if they scored a crit. However, I pretty much never get the 'full health/behind cover to dead in one turn' result any more. Between armour and defensive abilities, I usually feel as though I get some chance to react to bad events before my soldiers start dying, which is a big improvement.

Overall

The mod's very good, and a lot of fun. I'm already looking forward to trying another playthrough, this one on Commander. Please get 1.2 out soon!
Jacke
Posts: 623
Joined: Sat Jan 28, 2017 1:10 am

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Jacke »

Thanks for giving the feedback, dude.

I've already getting to hate that warning whenever leaving R&D without a research project selected and I don't even have the 20 second delay you do. Too bad it can't be changed to warn when about to go to Geoscape and time to advance, which is when it really matters. Have an inventory display in R&D would be even better. Just skimmed through Steam Workshop but could find no mod that does that.
aimlessgun
Posts: 66
Joined: Tue Feb 07, 2017 2:22 am

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by aimlessgun »

I feel you on the retaliation spam. For the last 2 months I had the same thing, with a bunch of defend the datataps as well. Definitely a case of the Civ disease, since they are interesting/tense early on when you only have a few regions. They apparently don't give corpses for balance reasons, but for the type1 missions I don't know if people are going to deliberately induce missions which regularly get half your haven killed just for some corpses.

At least they are avoidable, and at the point in the game where they get oppressive you probably don't really need most of those havens doing anything anyways (well except to find particularly nasty DEs).

Agree on the poison, EMP and Acid grenades being weak. I actually used poison for quite a while but it just didn't do enough so I eventually stopped bringing it.

Disagree on Assaults. Yes they spend a lot of time not doing much, but when you can unleash them, their power level is so much higher than any other class. Nobody else can solo pods like Assaults can, or put out the damage they can. One example that comes to mind is a pod my shinobi spotted on Waterworld: 2 Sectopods, 2 Superheavy Mecs, 2 Heavy Mecs, 2 Longbow Mecs. They weren't moving so no overwatch trap. No problem, Assault Runs and Guns, sprints up to them, triggers Close Combat Specialist a few times then follows with a Street Sweeper, leaving just two half HP sectopods and one 2 HP Superheavy Mec. This is over 200 points of enemy HP erased in a single turn. Then later she solod an entire side of the bossroom.
Saph7
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 167
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:00 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Saph7 »

aimlessgun wrote:I feel you on the retaliation spam. For the last 2 months I had the same thing, with a bunch of defend the datataps as well. Definitely a case of the Civ disease, since they are interesting/tense early on when you only have a few regions. They apparently don't give corpses for balance reasons, but for the type1 missions I don't know if people are going to deliberately induce missions which regularly get half your haven killed just for some corpses.

At least they are avoidable, and at the point in the game where they get oppressive you probably don't really need most of those havens doing anything anyways (well except to find particularly nasty DEs).
Yeah, once I switched my havens to 4 supply rebels and everyone else hiding, the game got much more fun. I didn't miss the extra supplies, since 4 rebels x 10 havens plus two liberated regions added up to more supplies than I really needed anyway. I was still running short, but that was because I was spending a ton of supplies on stuff I didn't strictly need like extra relays, extra stuff from the Black Market, and suboptimal Proving Grounds projects.

I actually didn't notice much difference on the Dark Events. They seemed to always be the same throughout the game – you'd catch maybe 2 out of 5, the other 3 were impossible to stop, but I never found them as impossible as some people on the forum evidently do so I just put up with it.
aimlessgun wrote:Agree on the poison, EMP and Acid grenades being weak. I actually used poison for quite a while but it just didn't do enough so I eventually stopped bringing it.
Same. When I got the Gas Grenade project I was hoping it was going to be like LW 1, where the acid grenades counted as support grenades and benefited from the support grenade perks. Once I realised that a plasma grenade was better than a gas grenade in almost every situation I switched to bringing plasma/fire grenades and nothing else.
Poobah
Posts: 34
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2017 3:20 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Poobah »

I generally agree with your post but disagree strongly about gas grenades. Their area of effect is massive and the aim penalty from the poison debuff is the same as a flashbang (I was surprised to discover this) at 25 which makes them effectively a better flashbang since they also do damage and shred armour. Poison doesn;t provide the will penalty and has a slightly lower mobility penalty vurses disorientate but hey, you can stack both if you really want to make some enemy units worthless for a turn or two.
nightwyrm
Posts: 260
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2017 4:52 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by nightwyrm »

But it doesn't seem like being poisoned shuts down dangerous non-shooting abilities that flashbang does. Not affecting Sneks also makes it worse.

Most of the time, if I want a debuffing grenade, flashbangs are better, if I want a damage grenade, plasma or fire is better. Gas just sort of half-ass both jobs.
Saph7
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 167
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:00 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Saph7 »

But by the time I get gas grenades they aren't competing against regular flashbangs. They're competing against Bluescreen Sting Grenades from my support grenadier, which go further, have a 50% stun chance, and hit mechanicals as well as bio enemies.

I suppose I could use gas grenades on my non-Grenadiers, but then you have to deal with the issue that Poison doesn't shut down abilities in the way that Disorient does. Which means that that Rocketeer or Grenadier can still blow you up, that Muton can still grenade you, that Snek can poison spit, that Sectoid can use psi . . . lots of things that don't need aim.
Solitas
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2017 11:21 am

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Solitas »

Completely agree on retaliations, they're such a chore. Xcom is one of those games that very much falls into the vein of 'just one more mission', retaliations actually make me stop playing because I just do not find them enjoyable, let alone rewarding.
It's doubly frustrating when a good portion of the rebels that need rescuing were fighting alongside an advisor not one week ago, but have now suddenly developed stage fright and can't perform in front of a xcom proper. Not to mention the sudden bout of haven wide flue that's dropped their health down across the board -_-

With regards to the grenades, given how many varieties there are the majority feel either surplus to requirement or too niche. I don't think it's that plasma, incendiary and flashbangs are too powerful, but that the others are just honestly a bit rubbish.
Gas is outclassed by flashbang completely. It's only real usefulness is to be stacked with the aforementioned nade. After all I'm using flashes more for their ability to lock down abilities (or stun in the case of sting nades), than aim/mobility.

EMP is basically a more accessible bluescreen bomb. Sure it can help control/dispatch a mech unit, but then I could bring plasma for better coverage and just load redscreen rounds on someone if I really want hack defense debuff on an enemy.

Acid I'm tempted to say is the worst. A dot (which I've never seen last more than a turn), with a terrible radius, and no (apparent) debuff. Again a plasma would give me better coverage, and whilst less shred, makes up for it by being able to destroy cover (potentially exposing someone for a kill) and spreading damage onto more targets thanks to a much larger radius.
Just my opinions, this is all based on L/I playthrough if it matters.
justdont
Posts: 113
Joined: Wed Feb 15, 2017 2:36 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by justdont »

Acid shreds lots of armor, but AoE armor shredding that starts at -3 armor isn't terribly useful in LW2, and there're lots of other abilities and equipment to do minor armor shredding, so having a grenade dedicated to armor shred is meh. Explosives for -1 and -2 armor can be useful, but at -3 and -4 it starts being too much - not many enemies have that much armor, and even when they do - it's single enemies like gatekeepers, not whole packs of them.
Saph7
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 167
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:00 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Saph7 »

That, and the fact that plasma grenades shred 2 armour already. So against anything with 2 or less armour, plasma is strictly better, and against the rare enemies with 3+ armour, plasma is usually still better, since it does more damage and can take out their cover.
nightwyrm
Posts: 260
Joined: Mon Jan 30, 2017 4:52 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by nightwyrm »

I find a Gunner with shredder and chain shot shreds so much better than any grenade, especially since you get Acid grenades so late.
User avatar
johnnylump
Site Admin
Posts: 1262
Joined: Wed Nov 11, 2015 4:12 am

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by johnnylump »

Thanks for the feedback, Saph. Good read.
cdocasualty
Posts: 6
Joined: Fri Feb 10, 2017 10:12 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by cdocasualty »

I find a stun oriented assault operative to be critical. Chain lightning with an arc blaster has saved my bacon many times. The same for a protective grenadier. If you have a leader with combined arms, that single point of damage can help extend serial and reaper triggers. I actually don't like the gunners much, probably just due to my style of play.
Saph7
Long War 2 Crew
Posts: 167
Joined: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:00 pm

Re: [General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough

Post by Saph7 »

cdocasualty wrote:I find a stun oriented assault operative to be critical. Chain lightning with an arc blaster has saved my bacon many times.
I did have a stun-gun Assault that I was trying to level up, but she never made it to MSGT to get Chain Lightning. It feels as though Chain Lightning should be really good, but stun-focused Assaults aren't that impressive before then.
Post Reply