No seriously, why did you think giving an ability for pandorans to respawn the next turn and immediately have 4 action points an engaging way to play the game? There’s also the issue that this interaction is bugged and alot of the times it does not render that the Arthron is resurrecting itself properly.
From a gameplay perspective, this completely kills melee and shotgun builds. A hatching Arthron where you can’t disable essentially is death for anyone who is within 1 AP move of the creature. It’s stupid.
From a lore perspective, how did the Pandorans even get ancient technology? The whole LotA expansion was supposed to be about phoenix pursuing an area of research nobody else was aware about. If the Pandorans take over one of my gas fields or ore mines, fine, but currently why even bother attacking my ancient sites if they can just evolve out of thin air plentiful supplies of Protean gas and Orichalcum?
From a mechanics perspective, if mind control disables you for a turn, why is reassembling your body from a bunch of ancient gas completely instantaneous?
Agree. Maybe with exception of a build which has melee tentacle retaliation.
Not really. If you will kill Arthron with overwatch then you will have whole turn to set another overwatch or run away from Umbra that will wait for a spawn.
Yep, there could be some more prerequisites for Pandorans to mutate such variants.
To force players to use more overwatch rather than powerful attacks? And to use different abilities other than direct shots. Explosives, fire, mind control, war cry all have effect on not yet spawned Umbra.
Not really. If you will kill Arthron with overwatch then you will have whole turn to set another overwatch or run away from Umbra that will wair for a spawn.
I would agree with you, except the way PP does overwatch is incredibly janky. I’ve just ragequit my game where I set 4 overwatches on a respawning Umbra but only 2 fired off because by the time the second finished firing, the umbra had left the overwatch cone for the remaining 2. It’s incredibly stupid. Normally it’s not bad but it led to the death of a soldier and also my general opinion of how bullshit the umbras are was just too much.
If overwatches worked like Xcom this would be much better. Maybe have a way to set overwatch order so to avoid friendly fire? Or better yet, have the soldier pause taking a shot if a friendly is in the way during overwatch?
Well technically it’s not instantaneous because it happens on the next turn.
It’s really fine if there exists enemies to counter specific units of your own. Unless you’re building entire teams of only melee units, there really shouldn’t ever be a problem. The exploding Myrmidons also counter melee units in a similar fashion, except they explode instead of a delayed respawn.
You counter Umbras by killing the host with fire, or by setting up adequate overwatch cones facing its respawn point. The hosts are identified by their names and a small purple drooling/gas animation. Disable their head (if it’s a spitter? can’t remember) and weapon and leave them be until you have a better opportunity to deal with the Umbra. - alternatively, paralyze the host
Here’s an example of a terribly equipped team dealing with an Umbra in a sticky situation.
(Everyone remaining in the screenshot lived, Mission Success. Legend. The one soldier dead was sacrificed to save lives.)
Well there are ways. You do so by positioning the units in such a manner that the overwatch cones won’t overlap your soldiers and no “accidents” can happen. It’s a bit of a skill to develop and understand the overwatch cone system but it works really well, just isn’t taught (to the point of mastery). It has a few quirks (like width causing a delay in reaction), and the AI knows how to abuse your errors that you make with it (like knowing it can run from point A to B and trigger you to shoot at cover intentionally - truthfully I’ve done this to the AI sometimes too), so it’s easy to get the impression that “It doesn’t work and it’s broken.”
I don’t think the AI is that smart, considering how it behaves 99% of the time it’s avoiding overwatch ‘smartly’. In fact, there is an open upvoted ticket right now on overwatch: Better Overwatch | Voters | Phoenix Point
The dumbest thing about overwatch is the time it takes for your soldiers to get their weapons “drawn” - they’re supposed to be watching the area with the weapon already drawn ffs.
