The thing with abilities that I want to emphasize is that they’re not doing anything different other than giving you the attack power of additional soldiers, but not the HP. You have 14+ soldiers of attack power on your turn, but only 6 soldiers of overwatch and HP on the enemies turn. The player is always going to hate the enemy having a turn because of this huge difference. 6 soldiers at the mercy of 15 pandas is totally unfair. This makes the game hard to balance, but when you consider that stuff that varies with player skill and map conditions such as rapid clearance you’ve made the game impossible to balance. If a player can, on their turn, dash and then kill 4 enemies they’ve used an additonal 3 characters worth of movement points and something like 4 characters worth of attack points. If the conditions are right though a player might be able to get 10 characters worth of attack and movement. A rookie soldier would have had only their base attack and movement points. How do you balance enemies around soldiers that can vary between 1 to 10 characters worth of AP? There’s no way.
How can you expect the player to lose a soldier worth 10 characters of AP and call it a fun learning experience? There’s no way they’d put up with that.
If I were to have designed the game I would have never implemented character skills or classes beyond stuff like strength improving if you carried a heavy load during the mission. Any special abilities would have been tied directly to gear. Want dash? Research a Siren corpse for some special muscle fiber and now you can build a mount to dash once per turn at the cost of some special fiber you collect from killing pandas. As it stands you have half of a RPG system, and half of a RTS system for you soldiers and the best of neither. Soldiers aren’t unique enough to be an RPG character that you can have a dialogue with them over the nature of war, but they’re too unique to send off as expendable fodder since you’ve spent quite some time in their skill menu improving stats and stuff. The class system isn’t fun either. You’re not upgrading their armor or weapons really. You change their basic loadout what… 1 or two times over the course of an entire campaign? One of those times is after you dual class them to equip weapons that you wanted on them since you bought them but couldn’t equip them yet? It’s just a gatekeeping system since there isn’t anything really unique to do with the individual class. Just tie any equipment restrictions to strength, and just keep the maluses like -2 speed on the heavy kit, and +accuracy on the sniper equipment and then let the player make their own class organically instead of having to click through menus 20 times upgrading stats just so you can give your sniper a shotgun.
If we’re forced to do an ability system then consolidate the abilities to either a global commander system that you upgrade over the course of the game, or implement a leader system where you have fire team leaders managing and buffing 1-3 basic soldiers, and a one per mission commander that can issue stuff like rally the troops. Increase the number of soldiers you can deploy to at least 10 for the basic vehicles, and something like 20 by the time you’re at the final mission. That way instead of having to click through 6 different stat menus at the end of the mission you’re only upgrading 2-3 squad leaders who can have much more unique and specialized skill trees. Now you can lose rookies without losing hours of menu clicking.
Now I don’t write any of the above expecting the team to implement my vision or even listen to any of it. Maybe they will take some of the ideas they like, but browsing around I don’t think I’m even suggesting anything incredibly unique. I just think the team really missed the mark on this game, and maybe they’ll reconsider some things. I definitely think they succeeded in making a decent game that can compete with big studios, but so far I think they missed greatness. I doubt I’ll be coming back to PP 10 years from now, much less 5 years from now. Maybe that will change, but they’d really have to dig at the roots of the foundation, which would be the right thing to do, but painful. Mythos games X-com is a foundation of stone. You can remake that game line of code by line of code and as long as you slap a new coat of paint on it you’ll get buyers. That is what the original build should have been, remake ufo defense and then innovate from there. Instead it seems they copied firaxcom as their starting point and innovated from there, and so they started from a foundation of sand. You’re not attracting a massive audience with that. You’re only appealing to people that cant get enough of firaxcom. Go after the audience that calls classic Xcom the greatest game of all time because I guarantee you it’s the larger one.
In Firaxis XCOM such abilities I can use only once in every battle, so I should carefully choose. It’s add more strategy. Moreover I had situation when enemy take control of my best unit and use this ability on me, so I would say it’s balanced in this way.
Unknown threat means random which only force people to save-scum instead of honest play because there no comeback mechanic. I personally don’t have time to start game from scratch or grind another 20 hours training new squad. It’s basically waste of time and I don’t understand what some people find in it.
And here you use them multiple times per turn. Have fun?!
Playing games can be considered as waste of time. If you start to split that some functions of a game are waste of time and some don’t, then there is something wrong with your approach. Maybe some games are not for you. Hard to say.
And people find in it some excitement, need to adapt and prepare for that unknown. If some want to save scum, that is their wish and right to do that. If there is no comeback mechanic then it is not reason to not implement fog of war or even proper stealth system, but a reason to implement that comeback mechanic.
After you shoot the face hugger off you’re soldier is paralysed for 11 turns? That I think sounds like a bug. Your guy should be back functional the next turn after shooting the faehugger off.
Probably unit was shot with some paralyzing weapon before mindfragger has attached. Or he used Hera to shoot off Mindragger and he paralyzed his own soldier.
I didn’t want to comment on that because it is hard to guess what happened. My soldiers were never paralyzed after detaching mindfragger.
Bahahahah I have a feeling i may have done this. Have you noticed though that fraggers heads are more pronounced now. It may be just me. But I’m sure they were smaller so you definately did some damage to your guy shooting the thing off. Maybe I’ve just got better at it.
At some point they changed mechanic that killing mindfragger don’t hurt your soldier even with more powerful weapons like sniper rifle. I’m not sure how it works now, because I always use melee attacks to remove fragger.
I used to use handguns but as I don’t even bother with handguns anymore i use everythingh except MG or cannon. Have even managed to do it with a grenade. Lol
If cooldown can be considered as 1/turn use then that is what many have proposed. Sometimes it would be good just as soldier status (so next “use” would be even possible, but not beneficial). But except cooldowns there should be also nerfs and other limitations like one ability disabling use of other ability.
Most “popular” cheats? Yes, for some players they are popular. While there are many other videos available where the players don’t use the “popular” cheats. For some players the cheats float their boat. While for others, the whole idea of using the cheats, sink their boat. And then we have others, who just can’t stomach the fact that Snapshot allows such cheats (even if they don’t use them themselves).
For myself, I won’t even consider playing the game as illustrated by the video. And guess what? I am having a whale of a time doing so, without the “cheats” (and I don’t care if others want to play with cheats). Technically, they are not cheats, as they are core part of the game’s mechanics. Now, turning on God Mode, etc. via the Console Command would be closer to “cheats”.
I think I understand where Snapshot is coming from. As they have created a system where almost any player can play the game the way they want to play it. In other words, they haven’t locked out a variety of different gaming styles just to please a core group of hardcore gamers.
When is it playing the game as it is intended and when is it “cheating”? It’s not a black and white difference.
Part of winning in a game like this should be optimising your strategy as much as possible. It isn’t surprising a lot of players do this.
They aren’t really pleasing the hardcore at all. There has been no ironman mode since release. The only way to win is by spamming abilities - whether you do this to the extent it becomes “cheating”, or you simply do it multiple times per mission, you have to use the abilities to win.
That says it all Who wants that?
I have 100 h in PP. Am I hardcore now? Please don’t get into this question now, I don’t have time for such pointless discussions.
I didn’t say that Snapshot hit the nail on the head, just that I think I now understand where they are coming from. They are still listening to those that feel that they got it totally sideways. And they show they are looking to balance some of the things some believe must be fixed. But it is their game, we only bought it, lumps and all.
If you start to split that some functions of a game are waste of time and some don’t, then there is something wrong with your approach. Maybe some games are not for you. Hard to say.
Who wants that?