TBH, I’m glad they have nerfed it, because it was ludicrously easy in BB5. All you had to do was kill a bunch of Crabbies and the Big Nasties went off and cried in a corner till they’d Recovered.
Looks like I’m gonna get my butt well and truly kicked when I encounter these next time - which is a good thing in my opinion. They should be hard.
Weird angles has always been a thing, and it’s not entirely Snapshot’s fault. The system tells you there is LoS even if only a tiny sliver of a target is visible from that square. Sometimes you will get there and discover that you can’t see enough of the Crabbie to take a standard shot, and when you go to aimed view some random leaf or other obstacle gets in the way. Annoying, but you learn to live with it - it’s still much better than trying to figure out whether you can get a shot by dead reckoning.
Your experience with Will is strange though. I’ve only been able to play a few hours of 1.0 so far, but I’m sure I’ve seen Crabbies (& the Synedrion infiltrators) panic due to loss of Will when their buddies died.
Not likely to get much chance to play any more until next week, but I’ll be interested to see how they’ve shifted the balance since BB5.
in this new playthrough i’m allied with disciple of anu and the first creature i manage to capture was a chiron and 3 fireworm during haven defense, DoA priest with panic on chiron and gang him with neurazer with 2 people.
I just noted that new evolution of enemies just came at 7% ODI it’s insane lost 4 poeple just for return fire of arthrons super duper armor piercing sniper machingun
For what it’s worth- chipping in as someone who’s only played the release version of the game- I’ve literally never seen an enemy break due to will loss. If it’s possible, it requires something I’ve never managed. So, if will breaking is part of the strategy for later game enemies, it does need to actually, you know, happen.
Playing on 3rd difficulty, 20% doom counter, 7 bases. Ye, I confirm there’s a problem with difficulty spike. At first things go very easy and then all of a sudden - almost impossible. The problem is with technology, which is just too bad to deal with tougher and tougher pandorans. They advance, your tech (and factions tech too) does not. Armor doesn’t defend, weapons don’t do damage. Only tactics is to lure monsters one by one and kill them with the whole squad - when it is possible. If not possible, you’re screwed.
Thanks, all useful info. They nerfed the launchers a bit, but still a must have. I just tried using rocket pack to get my heavy near the Chiron and kept using warcry so it could not fire. Duel class with Dash may work better.
Well, to be fair, they DID design the game … are you saying that this is a Unity problem? I mean does it have a built in LOS detector that is questionable?
This needs to be tweaked in two ways … first, it needs to show WHICH enemy is visible from the new position (not just a simple line that you have to guess which alien it might be, particularly when they’re standing near one another, or within the same arc) … second, it should show the ‘strength’ of the shot … are you getting a sliver, a slice, or the whole cake? Perhaps this could be illustrated by having a red line for an edge case, a yellow for a reasonable shot, and a green for wide open.
I’m no programmer, but that sounds like a big task to me.
Maybe once they’ve dealt with all the other bug fixes they could get round to it, but I think the devs have their hands full just dealing with everything else.
Bear in mind, this is a relatively small studio compared to Firaxis. They obviously released early because they felt they couldn’t push the release date back any further, but there’s clearly still a LOT to do. Slightly dodgy sightlines are probably the least of their worries right now.
But then the sightlines don’t bother me, so I’m fairly relaxed about it. As I said before, imagine what a nightmare it would be if there were no sightlines at all. People would be screaming at the devs for some clarity about what you can see from each vantage point (though there are those who argue that we shouldn’t have sightlines at all - and they did suggest an Option where you could turn the sightlines off if you wanted to).
Be nice to see a cheat mode, these sorts of games are great but they always have problems with balance and random generation that acts more like weighted distributions that favor sudden death of loved ones. Let us mere mortals adjust our fun to our liking, so we might enjoy these games on our own terms.
So I only got about halfway through this thread, then I realized most of what people were saying avoided the issues at stake here entirely.
Difficulty in this game mostly scales YOU, not the enemies. On easier difficulties everything is cheaper, and you can recruit from factions for free access to advanced factional reverse engineering.
On top of this I’ve heard that virus rifles work well against sirens. I’m also 99.9% sure that the way factional ai research versus pandora ai research works priests are unlocked before sirens actually.
So basically “easy” just means you actually have access to all your tools, hard means you will be totally gimped and randomly missing half of the stuff you’re supposed to have. The enemies are mostly the same in both cases. This is a very rare way to do difficulty.
It does mean though that on easy/normal if you were to restart your campaign and not throw away a couple of weeks you’d likely find yourself doing a lot better, or even potentially being able to afford some troop deaths, or for example to carry 6 pistols into every mission, or even maybe to be able to get some sort of anu arm regeneration recruits.
Nope, I see all of anu bases, and not one of them has elite training facilities. Just some seconds before my first siren, one faction began researching that.
Well that explains a lot … when you talk about ‘cheaper’ does that mean that research is also cheaper (and thus faster) on easier difficulties? Or is it just hiring guys, upgrading bases, building things, etc. (all of which have direct ‘costs’ associated with them)?
I got a Haven defence mission with 3 Sirens and a Chiron who bombarded me with acid slugs. Had to restart that mission several time. Got lucky with all the Sirens gathered. Took down armor with grenades and shoot with my Soldiers, lost my sniper. ( at 7% doom counter) Three things I need, 1) Is a Manticore that can take 8 people, I dont know why its 6 people now… 2) And the Sirens need to be nerfed at armor, or they should lose control of they captured subjects the same as when losing overwatch, is insane that they can keep control when get 1 or 2 grenades on them. 3) Stealing research dont seem nice of your allies, must be a better way, trade or any. (plus recruits need to be cheaper, plus I need to see what Im buying, assult etc.
I’m about 40 hours into my game, on the 2nd highest difficulty. There’s a lair I’m attacking, so no buildings to take cover in whatsoever, and there’s two bomb chirons in the back of the field. It’s absolutely ridiculous how strong these things are. I have no problems with sirens actually, they require special attention and some consideration but I’ve been fine with them. The bomb chirons, on the other hand, are actually ridiculously busted, when there’s two of them in a lair. There is almost no real way to take cover, and these things will absolutely decimate you while being very difficult to get to due to the lair layout + massive amounts of tough enemies and often terror sentinels in your way. Only thing I could do with that mission is just reroll it so there’s no bomb chirons next time, which really tells me these things need a massive nerf. One volley can easily instakill a soldier from full health, and they almost always destroy your weapon when they fire too.
I’ve been only playing on hard myself, but I think it’s only things with direct costs. In fact… if research cost less, it might make the game harder, since things like sirens have to be researched by the enemies, but I would’ve assumed elite training facilities researched by faction ai would get any same bonus that was across the board to research, but hey, maybe that’s what’s wrong? (the elite training faction upgrade window seems to be roughly day15-day20). Although in order to ensure you get access to the elite class you want you’ll wanna have explored at least one continent by then. Although if you 2nd satelite uplink has reduced cost compared to hard, I’d assume you could be even a tad bit more aggressive on exploration, at times, especially since only ambushes are FORCED upon you. Although it can be hard to remember which scavenge missions you skipped, if you skip any (I don’t skip them because I’m ocd, but skipping them at night might be a valid strategy if you can remember to return to them at day)
If player and only player research costs went up slash down it wouldn’t really matter because honestly on hard most of the time I have nothing to research because it’s so much harder to obtain reverse engineering on hard, I guess on easy/normal it’s much much much easier to obtain these reverse engineering items, but well, the research lab itself should cost less and allow you to have more research points. two labs works twice as fast as one, etc.
Precisely this Azimuth. The main problem with sirens for example, is it takes an entire squad to bring one down, while it often has multiple, just as tough and nasty friends backing it up. The crabs for example, while the “basic” pandoran unit are JUST as lethal. That machine gun? If it hits it hits you hard, and then don;t get me started on its grenade launcher arm, or those fish snipers with huge move distances and the ability to take out a body part with one shot (like their PP counterparts.)
The problem I see is as you said, armor and weaponry. Its stagnant. Yes you can still often disable a Pandoran by removing parts, but often times it feels like assault rifles cant hack it unless very close (and by then the pandoran has probably wrecked your squaddie with a grenade that immediately disables multiple arm parts or destroyed your weapon) but your precious soldiers (yes I say precious, because they are ridiculously expensive, even on easy I often can only afford to buy one or two before moving off to try and get more supplies).
Anyways I digress. Pheonix soldiers need to get tougher more than just “moar Hp via strength stat” because the pandorans out armor, out damage you in every way. Better armor, weaponry that doesn;t feel like Im shooting pea shooters at a brick wall. It almost feels like everyone said the game was way too easy in the rpevious backer build that PP got nerfed into the ground, while the pandorans got buffed to the point of frustration. I would like to see better balance, and feeling like my soldiers arent paper tigers. (The only one I dont is the sniper, as their weapons can take out body parts easy)
+1 to this. I’m halfway through my first game, and I’ve restarted so many missions, I can’t count them. Some represent the kind of indefensible difficulty that isn’t really fun to deal with - it’s just frustrating. When you finally get through, the cost in either deaths, downtime due to injury, and replacing ammo and medkits, is far too high. All this against the backdrop of personel being so expensive, it’s becoming a bit of a drag.
in the early stage this game present enemy with mutations that adapt and react to your playstyle of course is bullshit it just advance in tier like any other game. But it happen too soon, around 5% ODI you can encounter all maximum mutations on arthrons and tritons. Meaning haven defense and scavenging site you must play hyper aggressive 2 turns and they can blow up everything. A single arthrons with evolved machingun in the firing distance of 2 crates can oneshot them in a single turn. just dumb. need fix asap.
I’m playing in rookie, I have a haven defense of energy thing, so big stationary target.
I’m up against 2 bombardment chirons, and then several small fry. I tried several times but it was just impossible. I need to kill both chirons in two rounds, or they kill the objective. Once I manage to take them down by splitting up my team, next round the small fry swarm the objective and kill it.
I reloaded, and now I’m up against three sirens and a bomb chiron.
On rookie. With 11% ODI.
Early game is fun, but as soon as lair missions or bomb chirons start showing up it’s just becomes frustrating as hell.
I am also do not like the sharp spike in difficulty, at one moment the word becomes big and missions hard, before it was too easy, now too hard, nothing in the middle.
