Pavonis Interactive Forums

Coming near an end to a campaign, I realize just how much cool tech there is there ends up just being useless. Which is a shame, because late game, once you have lots of resources (i'm a Veteran scrub, I don't go anywhere near Legendary), you want to test drive all the shiny toys. But many of the lategame ones just aren't useful.

Grenades: Only the fire grenade does anything at all. Gas is not much better than flashbang, Acid is like fire, but doesn't disable attacks. The bombs only add one AOE tile, which is useful for the fire grenade (but you have to jump a lot of hoops to get it). Proximity mine doesn't hit hard enough. Flashbangs and smokes are useful, but those are free to start.

Armor: Warden is the only late game armor I bother with, for the large HP. Since EXO suits can wield Shredstorm cannons, I see little use in developing WAR suits. Likewise, the Shadow Armor, while cool, isn't really necessary, given how expensive it is.

Plasma Blaster: It is just worse than Shredstorm cannon. Given how late it comes, it should really be amazing. Or, it should come free with a WAR suit.

Where are my jetpacks? - It is a shame we don't have Archangel armor anymore, but that is Firaxis's fault. Maybe a DLC could add it.

You can add to the list mimic beacons, arc blaster, blaster gauntlet, the muton ablative armor, and several other items. They're very expensive, don't really provide much bang for their buck, and come in rather late in the game.

While we are at it: can we talk about Chameleon Suits? I know they were slightly overpowered in 1.1/1.2, but they are kind of worthless right now. You can leave an equipment slot empty on your soldier to shave off 1 hour from most infiltrations, or you can spend a significant amount of supplies and other ressources to equip one of these babies for a whole whopping 2 hours of reduction.

Someone post that haiku about lw2, and everything being expensive.

I don't know if I'm just mis-remembering lw1, but it definitely felt like there was more progression in that game outside of the weapons. On paper lw2 may have the same number of toys to play with, but in practice it seems like too many are inaccessible for various reasons. Either thye're extreme late game tech and you use them for like 5 missions (mimic beacons), or they require super rare corpses (dragon rounds), or they're too weak (poison grenades), or they're an expensive side grade (psi).

Not sure what to do about it though.

Well, some of the toys were intentionally nerfed to the ground:
- Mimic beacon. Since the AI could not handle them and Long War also makes use of grazing, they decided to take the easy way out and just leave them for the late game, where the AI can one-shot the hologram. A better solution would be to simply improve on the AI, though that would take a lot of effort.
- Proximity mines. If you take a look at some of the streams from Long War 1 done by Beaglerush, he managed to waltz through Legendary difficulty thanks mostly to proximity mines. They went overboard with the nerf though.
- Poison rounds/ grenades. It would help if there were enemies that were susceptible to them, for example Advent soldiers.
- Late game weapons and armor. They really went overboard with the cost, to the point that players would stop at Coil weapons and not upgrade to Plasma. Even with the new extra ability to Plasma weapons I am not sure that it makes up for the cost of them.

In general, prices and item requirements need to be revised so players can viably use all of the Xcom arsenal.

I see two general directions for solving this without tweaking the gear itself:

1) Extend the lategame. I've never reached it myself, but I keep hearing how lategame is "omg Sectopods and Gatekeepers in even bread and butter missions - may as well not do anything while waiting for Golden Path missions". Perhaps around October you could have a new type of mission spawn: "stop this else UFOs will start hunting Avenger frequently". Might be just a "Destroy Alien Relay" objective. If you want to get creative then maybe a map of a UFO being built/supplied in a base with objective "plant X4 inside the UFO before it launches". Basically something to force players to keep using their B-teams while the A-team is on Golden Path marathon. Make it spike vigilance up faster than Propaganda missions so you can quickly create 4+ Str regions for easier lategame Troop Column availability.

2) Make the rare corpses available faster. Seed Troop Columns with rare corpse command pods starting around August. Or make Supply Raids easier to detect around that date onwards.


The impression I'm getting is that the first half of the game is "rush to Coilgun before August" and then things get... streamlined. Your A-team has an easy time (because bleeding edge gear and epic soldiers) and your other teams have a hard time doing routine stuff. There may as well be a distinct shift in mission types to reflect this turning point in the meta. Maybe leave GOps free of the extreme enemies like Sectopods (so C-teams have somewhere to level up) while adding something like the above "X4 on UFO" that your B-teams need to keep doing to suppress frequent Avenger defence missions.

I am in the late game right now, and I am doing nothing but troop columns/supply raids, smash and grab, counter dark event missions and the odd intel granting mission to boost more troop/supply missions, all the corpse grating missions are saturated whit basic mutton,snake,mec and troop corpses, whit at most either about 1-3 elite mutons, 1 gatekeeper and 1-2 sectopods, Andromedons are unbelievable rare.

Meanwhile even an extremely light hack the computer has gatekeeper/sectopod pods.

I could have won the game a few months ago but it takes about 60 days to research all the plasma weapons whit about 10 scientists.

Thanks to smash and grab missions its not even the resources that are delaying me, but these unbearable legend difficulty research speeds, the same can be said about the proving grounds, build mine on month 3 and worked it non stop whit 2 drones and I still have a dozen project to complete, its kinda of bullshit how not only you have to do advanced explosives you also have to research every single grenade one by one and they don't even upgrade the old ones, you have to build brand new ones... and I even cheated the research time of the alien ruler armors because they would take like 10 days each to make a single piece of unique armor, long war 2 starts really fun but late game is just bullshit, no wonder all the streamers rush the victory whit only coil weapons.

8wayz wrote:- Poison rounds/ grenades. It would help if there were enemies that were susceptible to them, for example Advent soldiers.

I think most of the ammo items are fine, actually: at least AP, Talon, Trace, Redscreen, Bluescreen, and Shredder are.

The 50% chances for Dragon and Venom ammo make them a bit unsatisfying. At least Venom Rounds should have a higher percentage chance of applying (because Burning is more powerful than Poisoned)... 67%?

Some ideas for the others:
Needle
Current: Does +1 damage and an additional +1 nonrobotic ADVENT.
Proposed: For nonrobotic ADVENT, +1 damage and 50% chance to stun for 1 action (half a turn).

Stiletto
Current: Does +1 damage and an additional +1 to nonrobotic aliens.
Proposed: Does -1 damage to targets but imposes -4 Mobility

Flechette
Current: Does +1 damage and an additional +1 to unarmored targets.
Proposed: Does +2 damage to targets at full health

Viper rounds are getting cheaper.

Gas grenades are getting AoE and damage buff.

Vests are getting hp buffs.

Troop columns at high FL are getting a chance to have all-alien pods instead of rainbow pods, so they are harder but more likely to give you corpses for high level toys.

I think PI doesn't like mimic beacons on principle. I guess they were reluctant to remove content entirely , but they priced it into irrelevance instead.

gimrah wrote:Viper rounds are getting cheaper.

Gas grenades are getting AoE and damage buff.

Vests are getting hp buffs.

Troop columns at high FL are getting a chance to have all-alien pods instead of rainbow pods, so they are harder but more likely to give you corpses for high level toys.

I think PI doesn't like mimic beacons on principle. I guess they were reluctant to remove content entirely , but they priced it into irrelevance instead.

There are mimic beacons in this game?

Agree. Too much unused cool staff. Simple solution: add all those items to PoI rewards!

That would be an interesting solution: A Weapons Cache that has a few of your current tier weapon, chosen at random. Or an Armour Cache with a few suits/vests. Or Ammo Cache with specialist ammo or grenades.

How about making the Advent General on HQ missions drop a corpse that you can use to build whatever item you want, like a corpse wild-card?