At least in the early and mid game. I’ve heard there’s actually gear to deal with it in the late game but I doubt I’m ever going to get there considering I still have pretty much the starting equipment and I’m facing Arthropods with 20-40 armour on every part.
Not to mention the tougher enemies. Came across my first Scylla earlier today and that basically just means I have to let havens die now. I simply can’t damage them with anything other than a sniper rifle. And even then their armour takes off 1/3 - 1/2 of it’s damage.
The more I play this game the more frustrating I find it. The balance is just so far off.
What’s with all the dead-end research too? I’m constantly running out of research to do and I’m not getting any kind of clear upgrades for my effort.
I was having the same problem except I was using the starter cannon. I would suggest outfitting 2-4 troops with the grenade launchers and using the scarabs rocket attack until you can get some faction research/steal their goodies
To be honest, mass grenade launchers solves most problems, im looking at you mindcontrollers.
Edit: Later you will get weapons that basically negate enemy armor* It does get better.
Heavies, Berserkers, and later level Snipers are your friends here. Hel Cannon has decent shred and will shred armor on any part of a body it passes through. Grenades have some minor shred. The real deal for shredding is Armor Shred on Berserkers, though, as they can just plink an enemy with a pistol for 1 AP (and the 4 WP for the skill) to instantly render them armorless on that body part (with very few exceptions) for your other troopers. Snipers with Weak Spot will instantly remove armor on a part they break, too.
All that said, I can definitely feel what you’re saying here. There’s unevolved enemies which are basically fodder for your Assaults but evolved parts basically render ARs useless. And the enemies can evolve rather rapidly at points where you go from fighting, 80 HP baby Arthrons to 180 HP Arthrons to 230 Arthrons with armor too thick to deal with anywhere except very select spot in the matter of a few missions in a few days.
It feels like there might be merit to an intermediate evolutionary stage. Something between 50 HP arms with 0 armor and 70 HP arms with 20 armor. The first can be knicked by 2 of 6 shots from an AR and be completely destroyed while a full burst connecting from that same AR won’t even do the job on the latter. And, probably, some slower evolution on lower difficulties, if there isn’t already that factor.
How are you guys even hitting things with the hel cannon? Heavies have very little movement range and need 3 bars to fire with. Then their accuracy is just terrible. It’s honestly a situation where the phrase “struggle to hit the broad side of a barn” is literal. So you end up miles away from your targets and with poor accuracy.
I think they could balance it one of two ways. One is to leave the number of enemies as the same but then heavily nerf their armour and health values. That way the numbers are what’s dangerous rather than the individual enemies.
Two is to reduce the numbers significantly (like equal capacity to your team) and have enemies evolve to those extremely difficult to kill variants.
Essentially 6 vs 10-30 easy to kill enemies or 6 vs 6-10 difficult to kill enemies. With sirens being worth 2, chirons being worth 3 and scyllas being worth 5 or more. Tritons and Arthropods could be 1 each, mindfraggers 1/2 each and worms 1/3 each.
I hear where you are coming from. I used to have to run my heavy up to 1-2 tiles away to hopefully get a hit, it sucks for now but after you level him up make his second class a sniper. They have perks that really increase accuracy, theirs also items you can research later that will give your Hel Cannons nearly sniper accuracy. I think the starter Phoenix sniper helmet also gives a good boost to accuracy.
The difficulty spike is absolutely insane. I think you are supposed to be maxing faction reputation for their tasty research as soon as the game starts because all of my enemy problems melted away once I got some faction reasearch items. I sorta think the games a bit to easy now because those weapons really shut down the enemys super quick.
Honestly, if your in the beginning/early middle of the game I would seriously suggest equipping a few of your squadies with the grenade launchers until you can get your hands on faction tech. Build a Scarab or two if you have the resources to spare. Hell, im pretty late game and I still use mass grenades and scarabs.
Edit: An extra plus of having a Scarab is that all the enemys really like to target it, good thing its really strong. You can then safely move up while they are all plinking at it and focus fire each guy to death.
A habit I kept from BB5 on my first save is that, in large part, I abandoned leveling Heavy abilities in favour of grabbing stat points. I also swapped out their helmet and pants for Sniper helmet and pants as a large part of what makes heavies have terrible accuracy is their armor. It’s kind of sad to be doing it: as it really reinforces the notion that Heavy Armor is balanced poorly towards being useless.
Just these two things make a huge difference. Instead of having malus to speed and accuracy on the helmet and pants you have neutral speed and bonus accuracy. Additional speed stat from leveling means my Heavy can move a few tiles and still shoot. The chest I keep for the sake of jet jump but you could honestly just equip them full sniper for more accuracy and speed if you don’t care about that.
The Sniper geared Heavy loses that front line power as they become significantly squishier but, sadly, at present, heavy armor just isn’t enough to make being a frontline target viable - particularly against MG or Grenade Arthrons and even less so against their evolved variants and being able to precision shot a Hel Cannon from 10 tiles is way too valuable.
That might be an idea. Honestly, there’s no danger of my heavy even getting to the front line at the moment. So getting rid of his armour is probably a good idea.
Rifles/Shotguns just don’t work as standalone weapons - armor counters them hard. So my solution is to never equip a soldier with only these, everybody carries a Sniper or Heavy as well.
You can equip 3 weapons on anyone, with 2 class proficiencies (+extra out of class skills, if lucky), if you take ‘Ready for action’ from Assault you can even insta-swap more weapons from inventory.
