Couldn’t agree more, and that’s what I tell Snapshot’s devs in far more detail than I think they really like every time they ask us in the Council what we think of the game.
But that still doesn’t alter my point that the game as it stands is either ludicrously easy to the point of being broken (which is a word I have used more than once to the devs) if you can figure out how to make the various skill combos work to your advantage, or so difficult that it becomes an impossible chore if you don’t.
There is a middle ground, which I am constantly campaigning for, which curbs the excesses (of both PP and the Pandas) in the game and can create a very tense and compelling campaign. That’s the game I play, using all the self-restrictions I have listed here: What Self-Restrictions do you Use?
But we live in the real world - and in the real world Snapshot have made a game that is equally loved by people who like stupid, over-the-top superheroes as by those who loved the Julian Gollop original back in the day. So every time Snapshot’s devs try to put the genie back in the bottle by, for instance, readjusting Rage Burst so that it does what it was originally supposed to do rather than the ludicrously OP Sniper Scylla-killer skill it became, there is a cry of outrage from those who like the OP skills, claiming that Snapshot have ‘ruined the game’ (and that’s a direct quote).
So Snapshot now have two mutually opposing audiences they need to please - those who like super-soldiers and those who don’t. The only way they can ultimately square that circle, in my opinion, is by creating a set of Second Wave Options that allows players to tailour the game the way they like to play it - in the crudest possible fashion: with Super-Skills ‘ON’ or ‘OFF’.
And as you can see from my list of self-restrictions, there’s a whole load more than that which needs to be done before this game is properly balanced and can be seen as a worthy successor to X-com. At the moment, it’s a pretty good successor to XCOM, though in my opinion it has tipped the scales in the wrong direction towards cartoon territory, rather than turn-based-tactics & strategy.