Maybe they do exist and I’ve just not come across them but it seems that every variant of weapons and armour is a side-grade rather than an up-grade. They’re different but not better. Honestly, Most of them are just worse than your stock gear anyway.
It would be nice if we could get guns that actually do more damage as the aliens end up with more and more armour. Rather than terrible things like the acid guns.
Upgraded armour is really needed if they take away the ability to clear a map within the first turn. There would simply be no way to survive an ambush later in the game without it. Why do all the enemy weapons strip armour too?
I feel like there’s a real lack of progression in the game. You don’t get better equipment by researching it but the enemies continue to get more difficult parts to deal with, and come in ridiculous numbers like 30+ for your 6 soldiers to deal with. There are no upgrades for your bases. Your soldiers hit max level really quickly.
Even things like mutations aren’t worth it. They might as well have been alternate armours. Would far have preferred the mutations to provide utilities while still allowing you to use normal armour. Like the tentacle torso sounds useful, but it only has 10 armour so it’s not worth it.
I don’t want it to end up like the modern X-com games where your soldier can end up way more powerful than the enemies and essentially untouchable. However, I would like to see some progression like X-com had and a kind of mission difficulty progression that was fair and drawn out over multiple turns. Perhaps this is mostly down to the lack of enemy types. So far I’ve only seen 4. Arthropod, Triton, Charon and Siren. The later two rarely appear. It’s actually annoying because I need to capture a Charon but haven’t seen one in ages. (there are also worms, eggs and the mindfraggers but those seem more like traps than enemies considering their extremely low health pools, movement ranges and that they don’t give any willpower when killed. Same for the towers, which now that I think about it I only saw the mist tower right at the beginning of the game in my first or second mission, then never again.)
It might by design. If I understood it well, the research tree and tech progression was to be not-linear and various tech were to deal with certain mutations better. Enemy mutation were to create spikes in difficulty when we are not exactly equipped to deal with current threat.
On paper I like this idea better - I found FiraXCOM’s middle tier to work well while tier 1 and tier 3 were stacked against/in favour of the player. However, I loved the variety of guns in LongWar. That free-form design has also some pitfalls. It doesn’t seem to be fully realised in BB5.
Who knows, maybe there will be some form of linear progression in 1.0.
From my understanding this game should be about adapting to the enemy. So at the beginning you can deal with enemy (let call him “A”) with what you have (let call it “Z”). Then enemy evolves (mutates) into “B” and you need to counter it with something else (name it “Y”) which you need to research. Then enemy mutates in “C”, and you need to develop “X”.
This means that “Y” will be to deal with “B” but not with “A” or “C”. “Z” won’t be good vs “B” or “C”, and “X” won’t be enough to deal with “A” or “B”. So all your updates and research won’t be really upgrades. They will only change your tactic. And I like idea that enemy could again go back to “A” so you will need to use your “Z” (starting weapons) so they won’t become obsolete even late in th game…
But we will see how Snapshot Games will deal with that. They have many different types of damage, and they can have quite many different enemies (with this mutating body parts mechanic). It requires proper balancing but idea can work well.
Also keep in mind that they’re trying to keep most of the exciting parts of the game close to the chest. So we only have a vague idea of what the progression system is. Like the mutation system and how research unlocks new ways to fight the alien threat.
I think there are too many things which can go wrong for PP that probably something will. If I was developers of PP I would not release it until modding support is ready for at least this elements which are debatable to work well and may require experimenting and changes. This way modders would probably fix the game faster than the developers could reducing any negative consequences.
you might sing a different song if you were to find money to sustain a studio of what… 50 employees?