[General Feedback] Thoughts after first full playthrough
Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2017 11:10 pm
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!
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!