Ok, now with the game officially out the argument “not fully implemented yet” won’t fly, therefore it’s time to talk why classes are bad.
Soldiers in PP are not Fira soldiers. They are meant to be more expendable. Expendability is achieved through less attachment and easier replacement. Ask anyone who played PP if he’s ready to lose a level 7 multiclassed heavily invested into soldier and replace him with a rookie. In current PP the answer is obvious. It worked well in Fira because it was designed with less expendability-more attachment in mind. It doesn’t really fly in PP when lategame forces you to manage multiple squads (fira had squad rotation, while PP doesn’t by design).
The gear as it’s now is not distinct. What is the difference: a point of accuracy here or more speed there? Were you to defer the skills to the gear instead of soldiers, it would define a soldier’s role in a more approachable way and make the gear matter more. A NJ assault would play differently from Anu’s assault or PP assault or synedrion assault if anu’s pants had dash, nj’s had rapid reload (extended magazine), synedrion had return fire etc. You already have a glimpse of this system with heavy’s jet jump or priests’ helmets. So why add another layer on top of that? Why conflate the two systems? Weapons are more distinct, btw. I wonder whether you’ve got a fira advocate in your team? I’d like to look him in the eye.
Level ups without classes – you just pump up attributes, pick a weapon proficiency or opt for perk from a randomized perks pool similar to the second wave of the first fira. It worked fantastic, yielded some hilarious results at times and it was simple while staying diverse.
I’m not a fan of classes either.
It would be nice if different soldiers had different aim. But since “aim” is not a stat…
I would have liked some kind of abilities tree. A better granularity (more than 7 levels) would be better (or even simply use experience as points).
You can unlock abilities using points just like now.
My main concern however is that we have supermen that can bend time (which is by the way necessary against the opposition).
I fear that they could not decide themselves to copy some abilities from FiraXCOM like “rapid fire” (shoot twice but less accuracy). “dash” is sort of “run and gun” like (but more flexible). In fact it would be nice to list the abilities in FiraXCOM and see how they could transpose into PP (guess devs did that, but funny to try). Need to find some time though.
The problem is a soldier cost to much to buy in the beginning. You should have civilians that cost a fraction of now, and have 1-2 levels with out any specialisations at all for that to work.
And if you look at a larger scale?
The current balance, IMHO is aimed at beginners and experienced. But there is a small audience who want a challenge within the framework of a larger *realism, like XCOM-EW vs LongWar1.
Need to discuss how to implement this, can create a new topic from veterans of the forum?
A classless (and even mostly perkless) system is something that I’ve wanted in recent games like this for a long time. It’s something I plan to look into modding in once I’ve finished a vanilla playthrough.
I do prefer the classless, level-less system, in the original XCOM games. Where stats go up more naturally. From this game, I really like the random few perks that each character comes with. I much prefer each unit being unique and not just hyper interchangeable.
Making my units more expendable, though, would kill the game for me and I would never play it again.