That moment when you realise that he’s John Connor’s father.
And of course: “Fok u ass-hol!” 
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Nothing to feel like an idiot for. I remember the first time I stumbled across a Terminator Build and thinking: “Wow! How did I not see this before?”
It’s fun to play with for a couple of Missions, but then it just palls. Basically, it’s like those old Age of Empires exploits, where you could input a cheat code and have a Ninja shooting death rays, or a Floating Death with a Deathand that could wipe out anything. A bit of a laugh, but it doesn’t make for a sustainable game.
Good news: the devs are aware. They are planning to do something about it. But it will be part of a properly thought-through raft of changes, rather than a knee-jerk nerf.
But the circle they most want to square is how do they restrict Skill use without denying players like you, Icemann, the kind of alpha-striking abilities you need to survive in the endgame.
All suggestions on the back of a postcard gratefully received 
Don’t - the devs didn’t realize it either. I think it’s because the discussion was framed as ‘hardcore’ players who want something like the original X-Com and casual players who want to have fun.
And that’s what we spent 100s of hours discussing here, what would be the best way to fix this…
The difficulty is that it’s not a single build and that there is a whole squad of soldiers. And, of course, that you want to keep as much of the sandbox freedom (and fun) as possible.
Plus there is other stuff coming together too, like the number of enemies - because the swarms of enemies actually act like fuel for Terminator Builds - the more enemies there are, the closer they deploy to the player and the more clustered they are, the more APs and WPs flow back to the player to power the FTS. Thus mission design is also important, and you can kinda see where that is going with the new Lairs…
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I think if they did what I suggested of limiting it to a certain amount of times would work.
I’m thinking of it like as if this was a tabletop board game, where an unforeseen moves combo completely destroyed the balance. They’d put out a revision and nerf it. Otherwise there is no balance at all. In game design terms it’s called a “dominant strategy” which is a big no no, where by that is an unbeatable strategy that can only be at best halted, and not defeated.
See The game feels better on hardest difficulty - #22 by UnstableVoltage
It’s since been scaled back some.
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Do not rejoice in advance and again raise expectations. Ahead of DLC2, which will be another test after DLC1. 6 months are left before the release in Steam 
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@VOLAND, IMO - Kind conversations on the forum weaken the immunity of the Devs to Steam.
I hardly think they are living in a bubble. They have a presence in the Steam Community, so I would hazard to guess they are fully prepared. This is a moderated community, unlike Steam.
IMO, patient and polite conversations of this sort are the only way we can help the devs to prepare for Steam.
It has taken an awful lot of patient chipping away to get to this point - and I personally don’t think we could have got the message through if the Community Council hadn’t been created - but I can tell you that the devs are listening, and improvements are being made.
None of us on these forums are going to get exactly the game we want. But with luck and a lot of well-argued persistence, we are starting to get a game that does some of what we expected.
All I can say is: ‘keep at it’. Every time you bring a bug or a problem to this forum’s attention - every time we debate passionately about how many Pandas you should fit on the head of a pin - it gives the devs some insight into what is or isn’t working in the game, and whether they should do something about it.
A whole bunch of us think this game has great potential. Sometimes some ignorant idiot will label us as uncritical fanboys, because we leap to the game’s defence when we think an aspect of it has not been properly understood. But anyone who thinks that we’re just crying into the wind hasn’t seen the changes that we’ve managed to achieve over the last 12 months: Lairs are better; Acid has been rebalanced; Assault Rifles now have some endgame utility (even if it’s not yet enough); the Trade screen now works - and those are just a few of the things that were important to me that I can think of off the top of my head.
So keep on talking, Peeps. Keep on arguing - but do it politely - and with luck we’ll all end up with a game we still want to play 10 years from now.
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Unkind conversations will see you banned.
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I’m not sure if there is somewhere officially mentioned, but I can confirm that devs work on the solution, and asked few questions about different issues related to this topic. They don’t have specifics yet, or at least they don’t communicate it right now.
I won’t get involved in conversation what should be nerfed and what not or what options should players have on which difficulty, as I see game completely different in my book. For me skills should get you some options to enchance combat and possible actions for the soldiers, not give + % accuracy, + % damage, + speed or + armor, not to mention + action points. Well maybe some part of them should give some bonus or malus, but those should be not significant compared to basic values. Another thing is that changing skills in only top of the iceberg of changes that should be introduced to make game more engaging. Enemy should also be adjusted to complement player side and provide fair but interesting challenge.
I wonder what devs cook over there in their blazing pot of ideas and how it will alter the game for all different players.
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After reading the discussions about super-soldier/terminator and alpha-striking, am I the only one who thinks perhaps some players have just broken their own game. My point being that if some players have enough time to recognise these exploits as the developers hadn’t envisioned, is it important that the game is changed to satisfy the few at the expense of other player?
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There will always be players that work at exploiting anything and everything in a game. IMO, they are the minority. Then there are those that play to get the maximum without going over the edge. The majority play for the fun factor and don’t push the envelope. Then there are others that just get frustrated and give up and move to some other game for their thrills. No one game can satisfy them all.
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I’m pretty sure it was already broken when I got to play with it 
It is important to remove exploits. It won’t affect how majority of players play as they don’t use these exploits. But the fact that exploits exist should lead to changing at least few concepts.
For me right now it is irrelevant if it will change or not as I don’t like many of current skills, so even when they will set limit of 1 use per turn, it won’t change my attitude greatly.
Of course I will probably play the game but not to great extent. I haven’t finished this game even once. I find it boring in many cases except that current lair missions and some of haven defences are fine. But they still lack many of things that should be in this game since the beginning. So I will wait for mod support to make this game more interesting for me and maybe for others.
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So, only with certain unique combinations there are exploits. To most players that don’t recognise the extreme benefits, they’re not exploits. I personally never buy Berserkers because I perceived them to be mostly pointless. But after watching a ‘Terminator’ video I realised that I haven’t discovered enough potential class development combinations.
But, many years ago when I had more time, I recall a situation with a JG game, Lords of Chaos on the ZX Spectrum. Playing two players against each other and we both found some mana flaw in the game. It was our choice to exploit but we ruined the game for us both upon realisation that the other player knew it too.
So yes if we had the Internet to report the bug we would have reported the issue, but it wasn’t a flaw with the game concept itself. But we had nothing better to do with our time other than test every single combination of possibility. Yet this game does provide a similar situation.
So the classes could be changed and weakened as was clearly done with dash. Now many players will adapt, but ultimately with Dash the movement range principle remained the same. Assuming that the development team can find a similar resolution - then all is well. But many players strategies may depend on components of the ‘Terminator’ build without knowledge of it’s shocking potential, or at least give value to using the different classes as I had done.
I respect that certainly a solution could be possible, but it would be a shame at the cost of frustrating the majority of other players. Yet, I don’t doubt that the development team are making considerations, but they’re weekly meetings must last a long time with the amount of feedback Snapshot receive. But nobody wants Acidgate 2.0, even though I still suspect the greater issue there was the combinations of new acid, new Pandoran weapons and Bionics all released together.
One of the main reasons that “Terminator Builds” were never considered a priority is because of this very reason. We’ve always known that they existed - but they affected very few people. Only a small percentage of our players were using different skill combinations in these ways (and even when they had these builds, they wouldn’t be using them consistently). It does still remain a small amount of players that are using these builds - but they were never intended to be as strong as they are.
The challenge here is to remove the potential for exploitation whilst ensuring that builds and abilities are still useful, and don’t handicap less experienced players.
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Absolutely agree.
The trick will be to remove the exploit without destroying the ability. I don’t think anyone who has raised this issue wants Skills to be removed - or even wants what each skill actually does to be nerfed. It’s the ability to chain and re-use them almost infinitely that’s the problem, which is why we tend to suggest limited uses and Cooldowns (which are clearly a no-no in this design philosophy).
So the other circle to square is making sure that the process of limiting these Terminator Skills doesn’t disadvantage those players who rely on their alpha-strike abilities to survive. But I’d argue that if ‘only a small amount of players are using these builds’, then the builds themselves are clearly not essential for most players’ survival.
Like I say, I have nothing against being able to Jump (or Dash) a Heavy/Assault up to a Siren, Rally him back to 3APs, switch on Rapid Clearance, blow her head off (or Rage Burst her into the ground), then use the 2APs earned to Dash for cover. That’s what these Skill combos are there for, and figuring out how to achieve that is a large part of the fun of this game.
What I object to is then being able to do that 10 more times, because that simply breaks what is otherwise an excellent tactical game.
But you guys know that and are doing something about it, which is great.
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I do think Walan has a point, though:
I know that if I’d seen a video like that while I was assessing whether to buy the game, I’d have simply switched off, knowing that it’s not for me. And the same goes for the player reviews on Steam or Metacritic. I’m sure I’m not the only one who reads those forensically, to see whether a game has the kind of gameplay and philosophy that warrants my precious little free time.
Thing is, the TBs misrepresent what this game is really like, and that can’t be a good thing.
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I don’t think that it’s a no-no in the design philosophy. Isn’t the limit in how many Will Points that the soldier has? I’m not entirely sure, but giving additional Skill Points at the end of mission may have exacerbated the situation. Either way, perhaps a lower cap on SPs is a solution? Or perhaps limited repeats of a skill per turn? Implementing a Cool-down would certainly work, but the important point is to limit certain builds from having this ridiculous feature.
My concern is that certain skills in a difficult situation can be very useful, not exclusively the build. But maybe I’m just building semantics.
Are you sure about that?
EDIT: Maybe I will say something more. You are telling above that some players require such builds to be able to progress through the game.
Don’t you think that this is kind of wrong approach? I mean that, basically what you suggest is, that those exploits and powerful skills should be retained to overcome broken balance issue. If the game wouldn’t throw too many enemies at once, then not even one player would need such skills to be able to progress further. And that should be addressed. Not the “We will keep those broken skills so everyone could enjoy our game”.
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