So, after postponing the latest two lairs as my first experiences with them has been less than stellar, decided to finish them yesterday. I ended up spending near 7 HOURS in total over the day in those two. There’s much to be criticized including their overly labyrinth-like setup and AI using murder holes, (sirens lying in wait across walls in holes for you to climb or jetpack) unbalanced unit composition, (3 sirens in 4 tiles? more likely than you think) chitons, (I actually had to demolish walls to get to them without being caught by sirens mentioned before) today I’ll talk about reinforcements.
My experience was that every crab, fish and other seafood that died was replaced the next turn, all rushing towards my team in droves. These weren’t even the cannon fodder or earlier missions either, they were better armored and had higher HP than my teams. Mind you, I tried to play without a “scout ahead, reload when spawnery is scouted” method, like, legit. I tried to find it across a labyrinth over 3 hours while getting hammered across all over the map because there not a single turn that reinforcements have a break. The map was littered with bodies by the end.
After the dreadful experience of this, I explored my avenues into ‘cheesing’ the next lair as this was a part of the game that was begging to be cheesed. I was willing to resort to anything short of cheating and I learned 100% stealth infiltrators were one method. Okay, I propped up a recruit and sent her over to hunting the spawnery. And it worked good enough as I kept the rest of the team bunkered at the start. Then she comes across a mist that decloaks her while she’s surrounded by a plethora of seafood. Ouch. She has NO alternate route, only one possible is if a tile of moss that is like 75cm high is broken down.
So I sent the rest of team to break that wall. By the time I got close to it, all hell broke loose. One could argue it was a reeactment of Aliens harchery scene, other could say it was a turn-based Left4Dead spin-off. What was definite however is that it was hellish, tiresome, boresome, atrocious slog of a game that made me consider uninstalling it. I was about to launch up the game and I paused, decided to come here and post this as my time is better spent lobbying against the “kill 1, get 1 next turn!” approach of lair reinforcements.
So I hear they were added recently because people were staying in place to kill everything and win, gasp like I mean, we’re not supposed to like, you know, win and progress in these right? What is being missed in this however is that these lairs aren’t special. They are dime a dozen. They pop up every time you defend a haven. They aren’t THE endgame mission where you attack the mothership, alien world capital or whatever. They don’t give out any reward of note, +10 rep to factions that can be easily lost 5 mins later in a random event. Items received? None. Bonus for killing 50+ aliens? Nothing. No bodies to sell, no loot to salvage. It’s an exercise in futility that takes place in the most dreary levels.
So I say: Either remove reinforcements altogether or bring them down to a quarter or something. Make a hard cap of aliens in a level. The game wasn’t even displaying all of their heads on the bottom was something like 20 spotted at once. The red noise indicators aren’t even included in that. The lairs are too frequent to be this constricting and they are literally asking the player to speedily cheese them however possible. Make them playable, not endurable.