It actually doesn’t. Hovering over the class icon gives you flavor text about Training Centers, and one line about the specific faction’s tech.
It’s not beyond simple for new players. How are they supposed to know which classes they can’t equip? Also how are new players supposed to know what each class’ icon is?
If you’ve been playing from BB1, yeah, maybe all this is common knowledge. However I choose to go in fresh and this game does a horrible job at informing the player about how things works.
I literally checked to confirm the class name is mentioned in the tooltip before posting.
They can tell which classes they can equip by looking at what gear they can manufacture. All of it is sortable by class. Additionally if they don’t know anything about the game they shouldn’t be playing on max difficulty in the first place.
Yeah I find it absolutely retarded that on Legendary your new recruits come without any gear at all. That isn’t difficulty, that’s just plain stupid. It doesn’t even make sense from a lore perspective. Not all classes can use all weapons, and some of the other classes are completely useless with the default PP gear. This was an extremely stupid move on Snapshot’s part. There are far better ways to make the game more difficult than to give you naked soldiers in a game where weapons are class specific, and most of which are locked behind faction favor.
Digging through multiple screens (Haven->recruit, several pages of inventory) in the UI to check compatible loadouts is just madness.
If your Manticore is full, the recruit will be teleported into a Phoenix Base. Probably the best way would be to farm/facture his underpants while he is in a training facility.
Still, I think it’s a rather stoopid mechanic. Atleast add some blackmarket shop where you can get low amounts of faction stuff if you really depend on it.
I like that system. You have to plan what recruit you will get and manufacture their gear in advance. On all specific soldier only one is a problem: the infiltrator.
Berserker can use a pistol, specialist come with turret to use or to research. The priest can use his mind. All can use grenades and medkits. They are not fully useless. But that force you to plan in advance.
In another hand the recruits only cost you food no materials. What you gain in material can be used to make them equipement or for any other purpose. You can also get equipement in missions.
Personally I like the fact that your recruits come unequipped on the harder modes. As someone in this thread said earlier, this game is all about hard decisions.
Where I agree with the OP is that soldiers should have SOME weapon they can use immediately. I’d advocate giving every class Proficiency with Pistols - stick a Nergal’s Wrath or a Synedrion pistol in someone’s hand, and they can be pretty useful as backups in my experience.
Since you can cross class equip armor at lvl 1, the armor problem can be solved by building some PP assault armor. For weapons this works as well, but the trainee might have a chance to fumble, I believe. So to level up a new soldier to lvl 4 to cross class properly, do the following trick: let him carry a lot of grenades so he can join the missions and do useful stuff.
Also, I must agree with the Ramzi, the soldier symbols are a terrible design choice. I took me like half the first playthrough to know at first glance which class is which. E.g. the class filters in the store or manufacturing queue say: toggle on / off it should say toggle {class} or something similar.
Just look at he symbol of a berserker/assault and a heavy/assault … do you immeaditly see who is who? I ended up looking a the weapons instead of the symbols.
Yes you have to plan and to plan you need to have an idea of what you are doing and what are your choices. Which is a complete unknown till you played for some time. What is the point to talk about something that player with experience can do if OP is talking specifically about first playthrough.
The game is riddled with issue like this. Almost like it expects you to be at least a BB5 player to know how to do basic things.
Reminded me of one weird strategy game that really wanted to be like Settlers but had zero clue on what made Settlers fun. You see that you are low on food, so you think - I just build a farm. Welp you need a wheat farm, a mill, a depot for wheat, a depot for flour, a baker, a bread trader, a water well, a water storage and guys with jobs to carry all that around. On top of that, baker and trader where some high level buildings that you have to unlock. Introducing production chains like this, for something that would be a logical first step of the player is maybe just incompetence or lack of gameplay testing. A proper design would make it obvious to choose something with much shorter production chain and lock wheat growing under the same level as baker. Issues like this are not necessary easy for designer to see upfront, but this is why testing with live audience is important.
I agree with half of what you say. I think that it is too hard to know what each faction have to offer the first play through. You cannot know either the difference between the difficulty modes. But the fact that soldiers come without equipement is only true with the hardest modes. So using those difficulties for your first play throught is taking risk.
I have just done that but before I saw few videos with that difficulty and read a wiki to get information. Not enough to know what I can expect but enoughtto be too surprised by what happend in the first month. At least I can start in good condition.
But you can? Same was in original UfO. You recruit bodies but have to outfit them. I understand how it can be a surprise when recruiting for the first time but after that it’s not. This being tied to difficulty is a weird one, as I feel getting recruit with full gear to be rather powerful as it grants you an abity to gain faction’s tech, while getting naked recruit can be awkward as you may not be able to equip them with the gear they are proficient with.
Of course, one can recruit only ones you can equip yourself. That requires meta knowledge, though someone who plays on hardest difficulty might be expected to know how the game plays already.
I don’t think Veteran says anything about you need to be an experienced PP player. I might be wrong.
There is another part to all this. I don’t think the game rules should be different if you change difficulty. Changing rules is a modifier, like Ironman, or “weapons can’t be looted In battle”, or “no reinforcement” and etc.
In this particular case, Veteran is somewhat easier than previous level of difficulty as soldier are cheaper as you don’t get equipment. On top of that you most likely know what weapons you want to give them instead of having a roulette of what game decides to give you. Yes, you don’t get items for research so you would have to obtain them in a different way which is not necessary more difficult.
You can recruit soldier for no materiel and no tech and put them to train in facilities.
This way you can recruit early and have more experienced soldiers once you decided to invest into some equipment for them.
The way you can currently teleport your equipment from one soldier in New Zeland to one in Italy enables you to have only few pieces of equipment and save on materiel & tech.
This is all doable when you know how it works and assembling additional team. In the beginning of the game, it gets you by surprise as you have just few guys and need to get more asap. I’ve ended up giving pistol to new guys for few missions as I anyway make pistols for everyone. This is not about how to deal with this situation when you know it will happen but discovering that this is how things work in a game on Veteran level. If you already played a campaign on previous difficulty level, it will catch you by surprise. To me it looked like a bug, not as a feature. Some classes I never even tried, so I would have no clue what equipment I need to get/steal for the Priest for example. Or I’ve got an infiltrator, that I vaguely remember what he needs. This just adds confusion instead of a meaningful interaction.
