Also, let me show you my XCOMs
Observations
- The first 4 or so Haven retaliations I got were all of the variety where you have to wait for Evac and round up the civilians. I thought they were difficult at first, but they got much easier. Then the next 4 or so Haven retaliations were all of the variety where the evac point is fixed at the start and the advent are killing civilians from the beginning. I never saw the first type again.
- My single liberated region never got attacked! It got attacked twice during my last campaign in 1.2 on rookie difficulty. But honestly I was pretty glad to do without it- liberation should keep a territory pretty safe.
- Acid and Gas grenades both seem completely pointless, and Plasma grenades were available so late that I hardly used them either. Incendiaries all the way. I would advise the devs to focus on making incendiaries available later rather than nerfing them too hard, and to buff the other two grenade types- especially acid.
- Serial has insane killing potential, but I feel that in its current state I really prefer the reliability of Double Tap. Haters gonna hate. Haters also gonna point out that I'm only playing on Veteran.
- Whirlwind seems like the most useful Shinobi ability and should probably be moved to Master Sergeant.
- SPARKs are pretty weak. I personally think they just need quite a bit more HP. Maybe lengthen the repair time to balance it out and make them an asset you can only utilize occasionally. The cost of their late-game upgrades is absurd.
- Stealthy officers are the way to go. The only time I got significant use out of officer abilities was when I sent my Shinobi officer or my Phantom-Gunner officer. Getting a Gunner with Quick Study and Phantom was one of the best strokes of luck in my campaign.
- I never actually learned if sources of Rupture stack or not. They didn't seem to. If not, then this means players will always regret taking Rupture late-game, which especially seems like nerf to Rangers who aren't specced for Overwatch.
- War Suits are such a huge investment that they really need to confer more survivability.
- Psionics. Oh baby. They're way too good. It's a welcome change from 1.2, but I'm sure the nerf hammer is coming in 1.5. I think the biggest thing that makes them powerful now is how little time it takes to train them when you have a fully staffed lab. I like psionics being powerful once their leveled, so I would hope that their training time gets lengthened if anything.
- I focused on recruitment early on, instead of putting my starting region on intel and relying on missions to staff the region with rescued civilians. I feel like I shot myself in the foot early on by doing this.
- Even with Red Fog turned on, Medics are pretty lackluster. I put one on nearly every squad, and I feel like the useful moments of my various medics were few and far between. Meanwhile my single Overwatch specialist was absolutely killing it.
- I was convinced that Chain Lightning was the best thing ever and I specced all three of my assualts for it to some extent. It's good, but it's not that good.
- I should've definitely focused on getting a Field Commander straight away for the alloys/elerium perk. My late-game was entiely dictated by how much elerium I could scavenge. Thank god I did all those haven infiltrator missions- faceless corpes were a lifesaver.
- I never liberated a single region other than my starting region. I attempted one liberation right at the start of January, and it wound up being the only time I save-scummed the entire campaign. It was a strength 6 region, and the mission was just too difficult so I restarted it with a console command and evacuated. Given another shot I would definitely focus more on liberation chain missions, especially now that I know they lower infiltration times for golden path missions.
- I didn't focus on the acquisition of essential corpses. I never autopsied a single Sectopod, and I never built any items that required Muton Elites or Gatekeepers.
- I never found a landed UFO. I miss landed UFOs. Another reason to pay attention to the liberation chain I guess.
- I never made a pistol specialist, or used pistols at all for that matter.
- I never initiated the Alien Hunters chain. The frost bomb, boltcaster, and axe served me quite well though. I just see no reason to add alien rulers to my early game experience, and by the late-game, the last thing I want is to encounter a ruler and a Gatekeeper at the same time. It's just too much pressure.
- Supply retaliations are silly right now. I think this is a known issue. I literally just used them to level up soldiers, so they were always welcome. One time near the end of the game I got cocky and sent a very underlevelled team with psionics- I had to evac that one. I think it's fine for all retaliation missions to be pretty difficult, since you should always be sending some of your best soldiers.
- Intel retaliations became quite brutal near the late game, just as “defend the objective” missions became near impossible in the late game in vanilla XCOM 2. The objective's HP should probably scale up as the game progresses, and the same could probably be said for the relays in “destroy the relay” missions.
- Reinforcement farming is an issue. I don't use perfect information or any mods like that so I don't know exactly how beneficial it is to my soldiers, but it seemed to do quite a lot. It seemed to have a major impact on intel once I started doing it. It also makes it trivial to get resistance MECs and skullmining opportunities. If I played a campaign again I would definitely exploit this to farm xp for my soldiers early on, instead of just doing it for my psionics.
- Fishing for Facility Leads is annoying. Is there any way to tell whether a “Find a Lead” mission is likely to result in a Facility Lead? Early in the game I was finding them randomly, but late in the game I had plenty of Intel and doing random Find a Lead missions was a burden. I suppose it creates an element of randomness, which is always good. Without knowing how many leads I was gonna find, I didn't know exactly how fast the doomsday clock was ticking.
- I noticed when you research a Facility Lead, it can possibly be a lead to a facility that wasn't built at the time that you found the lead? I'm pretty sure, at least. It was a bit frustrating, because instead of finding a facility with 4 Avatar pips you get a fresh one with 0 Avatar pips that isn't even worth attacking yet.
- There were a few times when AOE abilities wouldn't hit units that were clearly in the blast radius- namely Andromedons when they enter their 2nd stage.
- As I menioned in an earlier thread, the Avenger Defense mission wouldn't let me pull soldiers out of training in the AWC and GTS, even though it allows you to deploy wounded soldiers and soldiers in psionic training. Seemed a bit silly.
- In the final mission, I wanted to bring both of my Field Commanders. One of them had the Combined Arms perk, and the other was simply an excellent soldier. Unfortunately, the Field Commander without Combined Arms was registered as the commander of the operation no matter what- possibly because I promoted her to Field Commander first? I'm not sure how the game determines who is the commander of an op, but I figure it should be whichever one I add to the squad first.
- There were many performance issues in the late-game, but I'm pretty sure that's due to the plethora of Audio and Visual mods that I'm using. It's just not XCOM 2 without pop culture references dominating my character pool.
- I feel like civilians should be able to contribute something other than supplies and intel in the late game. My game ended in May, and by December I was only interested in Supply Drops because that meant that the Black Market would restock their alloys and elerium. Maybe create different types of Supply jobs? Such as stealing from Advent (riskier, but yields alloys and elerium) or just collecting supplies? Intel could follow the same principle, with the ability to emphasize either locating missions or creating the intel resource. You could remove alloys and elerium from the Black Market entirely if the acquisition of those resources was more dependent on civilians.
- I like that you can't see where reinforcements are coming from in the current build, as it made it too easy to take them out with overwatch. But could we possibly bring back the ability to see the red reinfocement square as an officer ability, or possibly a psionic ability? Either would make sense thematically.
- I feel like a way to “nerf” psionics to some extent would be to simply add a bunch of random not-so-useful abilities that they might get instead of null lance or mind control. I would personally welcome a degree of RNG to which psionics you get. These abilities could include healing, precognition, AOE buffs and debuffs, shields, creating and destroying cover, etc. As it currently stands my regular soldiers with awesome AWC perks are more interesting and unique than my psionics, and I feel like that shouldn't be the case.
- As much as I feel that psionics in particular need to be enriched, and not simply nerfed, the AWC perks could also be made a bit more accessible. I think I'm not the only one who enjoys getting highly unique combinations of perks for individual soldiers, and it would be nice if the training time didn't take them out of action for so long.
- I'd really like to see some of the country/continent bonuses from LW1 added to LW2. Some of the continent bonuses currently are just boring, like the one that gives you increased Avenger power, or extra supplies from the black market.