After playing for a few days throwing a some thoughts out there.
Manticore lift capacity down to 6. Depending on how moddable the final release is, this will be the first value put back to 8. Size 6 squads was one the things I really disliked in Xcom.
Recruitment cost. I was going to say maybe this was too high, but as it’s for an equipped soldier, I don’t know. It’s just one of those things that seems out of whack. Especially as they have this no super soldiers, disposable ethos going on (the latter one of the things I don’t like about PP) 50/50 on this one.
Build times. Some of the equipment build times seem a bit wonky especially when compared against the time it takes to build some of the base facilities. We aren’t going to have production lines going, just grabbing a new weapon after a battle loss maybe, so not sure why they were given such lengthy times.
Skill Tree. A lot of this might be subjective but will see. Personally I think the heavy is basically useless until you can add assault at level 4 and then it just becomes another assault class with heavy skills 1 and 7 with heavy armor. Body slam might be somewhat worth the skill point cost but the others are too situational to sink any in, especially since we now have the cap limit of 500. When it comes to sniper and assault I tend to pick most of their trees, with a couple of maybe’s depending on what randoms are available. The assault options are just too useful not to choose as a secondary track and that’s not a request to nerf them, but maybe take another look at the heavy skills. I can’t see any benefit in creating a heavy/sniper.
Random Skills. I thought at first the limit of 3 was a good idea, based on what it was like in BB4. Now with the skill cap limit of 500 I wish you would go back to having all random slots available. Thinking this would give a bit more nuance in what builds are out there and having to make choices. This should probably be the section where you have to make the hard choices about speccing out your soldiers. For example, do I grab the ok L1/2 options or do I wait and put the skill points in that really good L5 one. The basic builds seem to have narrowed way down and yep I know we are limited with types right now, but i would have thought we would have had more variation even now.
Last thought, wondering if ti’s intentional that the crabmen get replaced so quickly, they seem to last 2 to 3 missions then it seems to be wall to wall Tritons. Hopefully it’s just because it’s BB5 and not the final release.