This came up in conversation on the Discord, so I’m making a record of it here so it isn’t buried, or at least as much.
Instead of the Tritons having a randomly selected weapon from anywhere, have them start out with the Independent weapons as those are the common civilian weapons. Then if that alien base successfully attacks a haven, have the Tritons take the equivalent weapons from that haven, or if an independent haven, at least some better ones.
This way facing them isn’t necessarily a sudden difficulty spike, and it provides some emergent gameplay as you can claim vengeance on a particular alien base
the thing is, if you can take out those 15 Tritons without destroying the weapons, you can loot 15 Synedrion rifles either for the rifles, or for the materials that make them up
I had a massive boost to “economy” due to selling 8+ Synedrion sniper rifles per Haven defence.
On the other side doing any without the max level units would be a terrible experience. Right now it’s just dash, dash, bam, bam, dash, dash, bam, bam, panic. Rinse and repeat.
Tritons naturally are fast, accurate and drop mist or teleport away. They are just not fun to play against for me. Mine have 180 HP, 20 armor on torso, mist and Synedrion sniper rifles or the basic PP rifle… sigh. There was a strain with “stealth on hit”, I think I cleared that Nest for the time being.
Current meta for me vis-a-vis dealing with Tritons is to move an Assault with shotgun adjacent to the Triton, take aim, and wait for its “look left/right” animation before zooming in for manual aim. This places the barrel of the shotgun pretty much right up to its head. As I cross-class almost all my Assaults as Snipers (for Weak Spot) and two of them have Expert Rifles, ~370 damage point blank with a shotty is something not even a Triton can overcome.
Too funny, I have to share.
A triton managed to come melee with one of my shotgun assault in a nest and decided to shout to paralyze him.
So my assault decided to shoot/kill him (return fire). I was on the floor, it made my day.
NB: I had 7 paralysis applied which removed 1 AP from my assault.
Btw. When we want to operate some weapon we need to have proper training and proficiency. When we want to use those weapons for a longer time we need to have proper tech to manufacture even one magazine.
Tritons operate human weapons without flaws. I’m not sure which weapon they have access to (I think I have only seen NJ Bulldog, NJ Cyclops, Syn Hera, Syn Socrates, Syn Pythagoras, Anu Reaper), but if they have to any then… Don’t you think that they at least should fumble with Technician, Infiltrator and other classes weapons? I assume they don’t have mutants specializing in such weapons.
And if they can have for example Hera Neurotoxin Pistol its count should be heavily limited as they don’t have proper tech to manufacture it, do they?
Thus I think that Tritons should be really limited to basic weapons like pistols and maybe assault rifles. Later on maybe they could have access to sniper rifles, shotguns and nothing more. Or even if equipped with something else they should fumble and should not have too much ammo.
They still have camo, they have mist and they have dangerous melee arms and they should use them early in the game.