For me the line will be ability to kill such monster as queen with one soldier. 
Using Mech, then yes, but without it, I think that queen should not be such easy target. Maybe some immature, not mutated queen. But if we speak about late game then it should cause fear in every soldier, not matter how much experienced.
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I kinda hope that they don’t - I think you’d lose the horror element of the game if you started having super soldiers late on in the game.
I’ve always felt that one weakness of a lot of the Xcom / UFO style games is that the difficulty curve can spike early on, but then fall away significantly once you had your tech and leveled up squad. I’d rather have a situation where the difficulty slowly steadily rises and your own side doesn’t really become all that strong.
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That depends on the strength of the opposition. Super soldiers versus endless hordes of monsters or equally scary and powerful “super monsters” are viable tropes.
That said, I don’t want the avengers cast to be deployed on missions, but battle hardened veterans who’ve survived during the entire campaign should be forces to be reckoned with.
We also agree about reverse difficulty curve, and FiraXcoms are really bad at this. I’d like to get back the “arms race” feeling of a properly paced long war campaign, where both sides have power spikes, Sometimes, the player may get the edge for a few weeks because he reached an important milestone on the tech tree, and sometimes, the aliens will really put pressure on XCOM making you fight for your life.
I think the game benefits from changes of pace, with a mix of quiet and intense periods, and the occasional very easy or very hard mission to keep things fresh.
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OG XCOM managed to do a lot with very little in this area, and that’s impressive in its own right, but aliens still acted individually, they would go on alert or on patrol, enter sniper mode or do things based on the map routes created when it was generated and behave according to their intelligence and bravery, and an fair amount and randomness that gave a decent illusion of artificial intelligence, but aliens mostly behaved as individuals. Having them stick together as groups (pods) creates more complex engagements, as long as you can’t game silly activation mechanics.
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the difficulty curve is something the original xcom got right. You’re not trying to gain an edge on the aliens, you’re just trying to catch up! As I recall, all late game gear is alien gear, Heavy Plasmas and Blaster Launchers and whatnot. I guess the aliens didn’t get armor, but they had mutons and sectopods tho, sounds like fair game 
Since in PP you can’t exactly graft mutant parts on you (or can you? 
) I guess it would have to be handled differently but basically I support the statement that super soldiers shouldn’t be a thing regardless of training/experience. it might compare better to FXcom titles given we’re not currently looking at 14 men squads by default in PP; late game FXcom 1 was OK, but late game FXcom 2 it’s like "you, go scout, next guy, kill literally 9 aliens, the rest of you just move up and save your abilities for the next 5 pods I activate in 1 go 
"
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I think Anu research will let you do that, kinda 
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Ok, I just thought of something that might just be one of the most important things I don’t ant PP to have.
What I hate in games is when you know something as a player but your avatar can’t do it because “Duh idiot ! There is no way you can do this it doesn’t make sense”
Let’s take an exemple :
You’re playing an RPG. You have an habit of searching every place you happen to end up in and you find a hidden lever. You want to pull it but this message appears :
“I don’t think I should touch that”
10 minutes of playthrough later you find a message that says “Pull the lever to open the secret access” and then you can just pull the damn thing.
In PP, here is how I’m afraid it could go. Let’s say that you suppose that some monster’s weakness is in its left leg because you see something moving on this particular spot. You hit it but you get a normal amount of damages done. However, you later realize and autopsy of this monster and discover his heart is in its left leg.
In conclusion, I don’t want research to unlock obvious stuff. Another exemple would be the uncapacity of using a NJ revolver before being able to produce some. I don’t need to know how to build a car to ride one, got it ?
IDK if my point is clear enough and I understand replayability relies on some barriers to prevent stupid fast speedruns but let us be a thinker too, please. Let us experiment and discover thing : I never needed a guy to work in a lab for me to realize I was able to open a door or drink water…
Good day folks
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I see what you are saying Haxone. Being able to pick up dropped gear would be fundamentally different from entering every engagement with one.
I do see some potential flaws with this though. Some things may just be that alien. I imagine NJ gear would be easier to use since they are fundamentally a militaristic faction. But Anu may have graft weapons… I wouldnt try to pick up and use someone’s arm as a gun O.o (Crabman guns fit in here). Synedrion may end up with heavily futuristic weapons as well. So I think this may need to be done on a case by case basis.
As for some of the obvious stuff… we may actually be able to do things in a bit of the reverse. I would love to start off with only extremely limited knowledge of enemies… maybe we dont know how much armor a Crab Queen leg has? Maybe we dont know what a grenade arm is? We can visually see them but the readout doesnt tell us until we complete the autopsy. This feels like a middle ground where we make assumptions based on what we see but specific information is reserved for later.
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There was a quite long thread about “just this”, if you are interested how others see it.
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Of course some things should be researched before being put into application but I would find frustrating to be refused eventual bonus damages from a direct hit to a vital point (which my soldiers disovered shooting the monster) because science didn’t agree first. Non sense.
Some of the greatest discoveries are not coming from a lab… Just remember that.
That said, obviously one shouldn’t be able to manipulate things he doesn’t understand. That makes sense.
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I mostly agree about this point, but there are counter examples too.
If the lever is sitting in the middle of the main room, you should be able to pull it. If the lever is sitting on the third branch of the eleventh tree, behind a nest and only showing under direct moonlight and you just beeline towards it on your second playthrough after skipping all the preliminary quests to get the map to the lever, it gets more debatable (of course smarter game design could avoid these issues altogether, but that’s not always as clear cut as this basic example).
Foreknowledge has to be accounted for in a game with replay value, and lore can justify a lot (let’s say NJ most valuable weapons are locked with biometric safety to prevent unauthorized use by the enemy. Maybe this weak point becomes even weaker once you can coat your ammo with whatever toxic element hurts the aliens most, which requires research and dissection to discover)
All in all, I think we all look for consistency. Snapshot is dealing with a new franchise and they can come up with a wide variety of lore justification to back up game concepts and I’ll be fine as long as the end result is consistent enough to make sense.
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It goes without saying that anything is acceptable as long as it is lore-justified. Thanks for clarifying this part of my point of view with words I couldn’t come up with right away !
This is hard to balance replay value and the possibility to exploit the “game related skill” you have acquired. Of course every playthrough makes you better and you should be able to progress from one to another as a player. I just don’t want a shitload of artifical barriers to prevent that.
But as we agreed, lore justification is my weak point : I’d accept anything if there is a story behind it !
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Be careful, that’s how old school TFTD players got given the “Elerium doesn’t work in saltwater” excuse! It’s the shame we bothered to equip our avengers and firestorms with Fusion bombs when water canons and water balloons would have done the trick 
(I’ll let myself out)
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Lying about % SO much… like @Avenger93 said, I can see players missing a “High hit chance” shot but when FXcom told me I have a >90% hit chance and I miss 5 times in a row (after 3 I even reloaded the save to reproduce because I couldn’t believe it) I would sooner have NO indication about how likely I am going to hit something then an indicator that lies to me. (Scatter lazer against a large enemy who was RIGHT NEXT TO MY ASSAULT, hitting a barn door sprung to mind.)
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And ironically made it worse because if you miss a 80% chance, meh, s**t happens, if you miss 3 >90% hits 5 times in a row that puts a bunch of soldiers in danger, you reload and go in differently to make sure your troops who can’t hit a bus if they were in it are not put in so much risk.
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Would you care to explain in which way it lies to you?
Five consecutive 90% misses is undeniably an unlucky streak (one in 100 000 scenario) but what is displayed is mathematically accurate. At no point did the game tell you that you had to hit the target at least once in these five shots. You could be extremely unlucky and miss 20 consecutive 90% shots and it would still be a legitimate scenario.
As long as you don’t get a 100% shot missing (those have happened btw, but for very different reasons, linked to the engine and not the RNG), the game isn’t lying to you, but your brain gets carried away by the god awful way untrained humans handle probabilities (the gambler’s fallacy is a good example, but isn’t the only one).
As for missing a target at point blank, remember that your assault most likely had to sprint towards the barn door, in a combat situation, with gunfire, explosion, alien chemicals spilled, adrenaline coursing through his veins and that the “barn door” is armed and will try to dodge, grab the laser’s barrel or do anything it can to stay alive.
Also, and that is unfortunate, XCOM EU/EW handled armored enemies by giving them a defense bonus that would reduce the enemy’s chance to hit them, so what should have looked like shots bouncing off their armor was showing as plain misses, which sucks.
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I used to fix fruit machines for a living so I’m acutely aware of percentages large number sets and the fallacy of expecting only 10 misses in 100 shots…
BUT - Its common knowledge that Firaxis XCOM had it’s hit rolls disconnected from the numbers in the GUI hence why I say I would sooner have no indicator or a very ambiguous one instead of an “accurate” one that is just a placibo becaue the actual number is bullsh*t on chips.
Which is why I said I didn’t want false information on the gui, it just smacks that the devs don’t have a respect for the players time or game experience. (even if htat’s not the intention, it’s the same a D&D DM fudging a roll to help the party intention may be good as long as the players don’t know the DM is doing it)
The only known hidden adjustment is aim assist in all difficulties but impossible, and this is strictly in favor of the player. It increases your chances to hit and decreases the aliens’ when things go wrong for you. Here is the aim assist section from the ini files (Vanilla version, may have been tweaked for WotC but I doubt it)
NormalSquadSize=4
ReasonableShotMinimumToEnableAimAssist=50
MaxAimAssistScore=95
AimAssistDifficulties[0]=( BaseXComHitChanceModifier=1.2, MissStreakChanceAdjustment=10, HitStreakChanceAdjustment=-10, SoldiersLostXComHitChanceAdjustment=15, SoldiersLostAlienHitChanceAdjustment=-10 )
AimAssistDifficulties[1]=( BaseXComHitChanceModifier=1.1, MissStreakChanceAdjustment=10, HitStreakChanceAdjustment=0, SoldiersLostXComHitChanceAdjustment=10, SoldiersLostAlienHitChanceAdjustment=-10 )
AimAssistDifficulties[2]=( BaseXComHitChanceModifier=1.0, MissStreakChanceAdjustment=15, HitStreakChanceAdjustment=0, SoldiersLostXComHitChanceAdjustment=0, SoldiersLostAlienHitChanceAdjustment=0 )
AimAssistDifficulties[3]=( BaseXComHitChanceModifier=1.0, MissStreakChanceAdjustment=0,
I don’t like it and it’s not the most popular feature but it is strictly built to help the player and won’t make you miss a highly probable hit consecutively.
The missed 100% hit is another beast entirely and, while I found Amineri’s explanation from XCOM 1, I coudln’t find the one for XCOM 2 (as Amineri is one of the modders who built Long War for XCOM 1 and had to do a scary amount of work to expose code and variables to create a large scale mod on a non moddable game, I expect she knows what she’s talking about)
Please note that in over 1500 hours playing XCOM 1 and 2, I haven’t experienced this even once. I don’t doubt that it happens, but it’s quite rare.
As for the RNG itself, it’s been proved fair and adequate, if not top notch. I’ve probably linked the studies about this somewhere higher in the post itself.
Now I haven’t played XCOM 2 in a while and maybe some code has been exposed that cheats against the player, but I’m not aware of such “common knowledge” and would be happy to hear about it if you could provide us with a reference.
I’m a big fan of having information displayed as strictly Wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) in tactical games, and while XCOM isn’t perfect (that aim assist IS shit, it should at least display a “difficulty adjustment” line in the hit chance modifiers list), I have yet to find evidence that it cheats against the player or that bugs that may rob you of a hit are anything but exceedingly rare.
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There’s an idea: Protect and build up Independent Havens, to increase your base chances for better rookies with better stats, because now, you’re providing better living standards, along with better food, less injuries, and more time for training.
Things should still remain random, but that would be a nice incentive to watch out for your little Independent buddies!
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