How the game went: I got an early(ish) base assault due to proper mission management and snowballed with EXO suits(which i rushed, rendering corpses to buying alloys to be able to complete the research) and purchased scientists. I did roughly zero autopsies (besides trooper and officer and a brief foray into psionics because i knew i was ahead and wanted to try them out) until coil guns had been completed. This was because i knew that the costs and values associated with their research was not worthwhile. The core cost for researching the items made any PG project a necessary planed portion of the run.
I ran two 0% supply raids, 1 0% troop column, and 2 100% troop columns. I ran zero 100% supply raids. I liberated three regions(so far, i suppose i could go and try to liberate more). I found one landed UFO's(but killed the mission by liberating the region before i could attempt). I purchased alloys and elerium from the black market and well as (roughly) every elerium core i could find.
Advanced Coils were completed on August 30th. I was able to remove a significant amount of Dark Events until i just stopped bothering to prevent the mission. HQ assaults were done with 8 men at 100%. I deliberately let a number of supply raids and troop columns finish.
It is currently the end of September and i am simply waiting for the shadow chamber to finish so that i can do the research (which will take a few days only) and then run through the end of the golden path line. I've got a full squad of MSGT shitkickers all kitted out in EXO/predator. The shadow chamber was delayed over a month due to lack of elerium cores. Similarly i almost certainly will not achieve plasma weapons nor second tier armor for similar lack of cores. I have not yet encountered the majority of the endgame enemies and don't expect to given how fast i have progressed.
I ran no significant gameplay effecting mods nor any second wave options
Proving Grounds Projects Completed:
- *Alloy Plating
*Basic Suppressors
*Battlescanners
*Hazmat Vests
*Incendiary Grenades
*Mechanized Warfare
*Skulljack
*Skullmining
*Tactical Vest
*Talon Rounds
*Venom Rounds
- *Tactical Infiltration: actually sat and simply trained an officer instead of going on missions to achieve this
*Vulture: I was supply rich and also really needed some elerium core drops(i did not get any except set cores from mission rewards)
*Vengeance: I was supply rich
*Integrated Warfare: I was supply rich
Squad Composition: One Heavy Squad, Multiple stealth squads. Heavy squad split sometimes for 5 man missions
Core Heavy Squad:
- *Grenader(Support): Officer [officer training forced him to go on many fewer missions than i would have wanted]
*Specialist(Medic): Kept wound times down plus spot healing.
*Specialist(Hacker): Dealt with robots + perma-aid protocol for pointman
*Spark: Came lateish. Pointman. Focused on armor. Got him at same point as mag weapons
*Gunner: AoE lockdown (Hail of Bullets+demolition)
*Gunner: AoE lockdown (Hail of Bullets+ [should have been demolition])
*Sharpshooter(Death From above, precision shot, double tap): Primary kill
*Technical(tank focused)
*Technical(Tank Focused)
*Assault(For when things really needed to die)
Core Stealth Squad:
- *Shinobi
*Whatever else was necessary/wanted to get leveled up
Guerilla Tactics School: Overall i felt that the GTS has several effects on the game. Some of which i thought were negative and some of which were positive. In general I thought the goal was to increase strategic diversity and it failed in that goal.
- *Soldier Promotion encourages planning and specialization: This reduces replay value because once you find the squad you like you're encouraged to replicate it next time: not sure how exactly to fix this but random promotion and then maybe a different primary purpose of the GTS might work
*Prices of immediate upgrades were too high: Most of them are simply not worth it when you would want them, besides the larger unit infiltration. Early on, when you really might use some of them the prices are comparable to important upgrades(like a scientist or AWC) or more. Later on those upgrades are not valuable compared to equipment
*Officers took too long to train: In long war 1 this seems OK. But in Long War 2, between infiltration and wounds, i really want to borrow the training mechanics from the psi lab for officers and for the AWC. My officer consistently lagged behind the team and simply didn't go on a number of missions because they were training. The officer should always be able to go with their squad(if they're not wounded)
I feel like the GTS was attempting to add strategic depth and instead simply made it easier to collapse to a dominant strategy. What might be a better option would be nixing promotions entirely and just having the GTS be officer training.
Advanced Warfare Center: this seemed to me much better than the GTS in terms of enjoyment because it allowed every soldier to be unique even when I trained the same(normal) skills. It felt to me like the goal was make soldiers more unique and so generate more attachment and strategic diversity and it succeeded.
- *Similar to officers I really want the ability to continue training in the AWC. The inability to train and fight at the same time makes it a lot harder to attain skills on important soldiers. This makes it harder to enjoy the soldiers that get cool skills.
*i didn't get any use out of the full retraining: for similar reasons to above there just isn't a point where you can reasonably drop an important soldier (even if retraining would be valuable). Playing roulette with AWC abilities could be valuable (if you could see them all) but ultimately you suffer the same training problems.
*i really liked how you couldn't gain the scientists research bonus when they were employed at the AWC... I did not like having to micromanage that but understand that there may be limitations involved.
Proving Grounds: OK so here are some big issues. The GTS was disappointing but the proving grounds hurt. Everything about it was disappointing. I felt like the goal was to allow players to pick unique items that a few soldiers could use but I felt instead that it enforced a strategy on the entire playthrough.
- *prices are too similar: more or less the "cost" of a project is "one corpse and one core". And there are only so many cores floating around unless you're 0%ing a bunch of supply raids.
*the high initial cost and then low reproduction cost meant that specialization was mandatory. The fact that many of the items were only minor upgrades does not help this.
*many of the items produced are just not valuable. Neither unique nor important enough to warrant being projects. This gets is separate section though
*weapon mod upgrade projects are just terrible: suppressors are minorly useful but you need the project most for items that you do not acquire enough of... Which means you can't run the project.
This would encourage diversification with only minor forays into the things you wanted to ensure everyone had access to. That is, you can kit your primary squad with unique items and then kit your secondary squad with a standard set. Alternately you could move back to the "each project produces one and only one item" and not allow any instant building. Alternately (if simply given to you) you would have lots of one off items to play around with, and would use them because they were free.
Similar projects could be added for weapons (one tier removed... So once you had laser and mag you could upgrade everyone to laser with a highish cost pg project and a core) and armor.
Weapon mod projects should make that level basic upgrades and allow you to buy the next level at an inflated cost. You can gate behind higher quality corpses if you're concerned about too many weapon mods but I don't believe that will be an issue since there is still an elerium core cost and elerium cores are super important. But realistically these are just here at the moment to bait you into wasting cores. It's difficult to get enough loot drops to achieve the top end upgrades of the more broadly applicable items let alone have 3 cores necessary per upgrade to do so. If these are intended to be "general stat up" items available for resources then they failed miserably at achieving it.
Expressed in each individual item type (exception of vests) is potentially a product of the way that PG projects are designed in general. I do not feel like i got to play with any of the cool toys that i saw in the PG. There simply were not enough elerium cores in order to run the PG's let alone buy the items (the better of which now cost cores)
Ammo: I always thought that the point of ammo was to let individual soldiers specialize in killing certain types of enemies or applying certain effects, giving each soldier an ideal target. A small constraint which can produce tactical options. And/or provide a unique options for aim based classes.
- *AP rounds are too strong or all the others are too weak. The vast majority of high value targets have some amount of armor and so minor +damage to specific enemies is very weak in comparison. It also comes far too early for its value.
*Ammo should not cost weight. It already has the cost of taking up the slot of a generally more useful item. More importantly ammo without weight opens up taking it on soldiers who value their mobility. This in and of itself makes some of the weaker ammo more likely to be used(given prices are fixed)
*ammo is focused too much on doing damage, because of this there are clearly superior options
*redscreen rounds are a great idea (as would be fear rounds for -will) but only high weapon damage units can really afford to use ammo(due to the value of other items from their specialization) and so the classes which might like this are constrained
Thinks like reducing enemy will or dodge or mobility seem high on the list of "cool options". Stun rounds (stun 1) could be fun. Shredder and redscreen are good examples of ammo types that make sense under this rubric. However, having weaker ammo like this might require a dedicated ammo slot, as otherwise there will be very little incentive to take it over something more powerful like a flashbang.
Otherwise the answer seems to be "Shooters get ammo and only get the best general ammo" which seems counter to the design ideal. And once that happens ammo has to be incredibly powerful to compete with other "1 core" projects or even basic constructed items like smoke grenades.
Almost more importantly i felt like i didn't get to "play" with any of the unique ammo. While this is no big deal for ammo since so much of it was boring its more important for other things like
Grenades: Grenade items are very disappointing. Not only is there little reason to produce many of the grenade types but there wasn't much of a point to put them on anyone but a grenadier. And then, on top of this. The cost and value associated with the varying grenades made them not worthwhile to produce.
Vests and Plating: I really liked vests and plating. They felt unique and valuable. I put different ones on different soldiers and felt like they did interesting things for each soldier. I also felt like they were individually strong enough that i might drop other free items (grenades/etc) in order to put some of the stronger vests on what otherwise might have been utility soldiers. They effectively replaced free items (medkits on gunners to make them immune to poison) and let me take tactical actions i would not have otherwise.
Psionics: Took too long to get going. Overall not that expensive but the training times still felt high. They did not feel like prestige or premium classes that you had to really work to achieve. But more like something you had to babysit and then you still might not use. The reduction in training time in 1.2 might help but i am still feeling like it won't be enough
- *Psion XP progression makes it possible to cheese promotions by running 0 xp missions (once they have done one mission and gained XP)
*Psion promotions requiring training negate the value in going on missions while training. You lose training time infiltrating and also don't get a bonus promotion. This encourages cheesing promotions
*Psion equipment is super expensive compared to comparable equipment for non-psions with generally lesser effect
*Psion training time requires that any AWC abilities desired are even harder to attain
I don't have any clue how anyone is supposed to afford the psi upgrades when they cost elerium cores. Well besides abuse troop columns and supply raids
Rebel Organization and mission choice: I didn't find this very interesting at all. There are some quirks you can use to know when you can set certain things certain ways. But in general you need so much intel in order to find certain missions that you're going to want hard intel generation everywhere until you switch to "don't bug me mode" and run 4/4/4 while you liberate an other region. I also found it way too risky in order to do anything but have soldier advisors unless you had liberated a region(at which point intel only helped you prevent invasions so you might as well just go full supply with an engineer)
More interesting was choosing which missions to go on, which missions to intentionally scrub, and so on and so forth. This mainly revolved around supply raids and troop columns... but those didn't seem very well implemented in general. Additionally the mechanics of when to go on a mission and when to scrub a mission aren't that well understood.
- *Intelligence generation is way too important: Ironically making it more potent may fix this
*Soldiers way too good as advisors: Maybe scientists/engineers should not go on retals if they're in the haven?
*Troop columns and supply raids are heavily incentivized to run at 0%
An alternate structure i had worked as follows
- Troop columns and supply raids work backwards on infiltration. Because advent has some idea that xcom is around they bring in fewer supplies and troops. If you attempt to go right there and bust in, advent will figure it out and disperse before you can hit them, negating the ability to do the mission if not infiltrated to 50%. Generally these missions are easy to detect and so will have reasonable timers on them. At 50% infiltration these missions would be very light, and have minimal supplies. At 200% they would be swarming.
This has an advantageous effect of letting the player determine their risk level and also making harder supply raids more viable later in the game once players unlock the "big squad size infiltration" upgrades. If players want to run 4 men on a 200% they probably can. But they won't be able to run 10 men on a 200% (the equivalent of a 0% today) because they simply don't have enough time to infiltrate. I suspect that most players will run around 100% infiltration.
This however breaks the strategic purpose of raids. So it might make sense that missions done under some set % cause the aliens to repeat the mission. This would work thematically because at low% they didn't lose many resources they can just try again. The repeat mission would be hard to prevent/detect (I.E. extremely hard to prevent).
This gives players three options: "Smash and Grab but don't prevent the strategic objective" and "infiltrate for a moderate risk/time and negate the strategic objective" and "infiltrate for a long time for high risk and negate the strategic objective"
I think that these three options really enhance the ability of players to play the game, smooths out the resource generation, lets resource generation from these missions scale with the game time, and also fits within the rubric of the game.
The big downside is that you would have to explain the mechanic to players (and they already don't read the documentation; so uhhh good luck with that )
- *Assaults: Scale amazingly, valuable all the time for all trees
*Grenadier: Scale well, valuable all the time. Both trees are quite nice
*Gunner: OP - Not only is it some of the best area lockdown but its also a great high damage unit
*Ranger: UP - Its a gunner without area suppression and less damage
*Sharpshooter: The ability to set up position that will not be respected with respect to flanks(and also DFA) is amazing
*Shinobi: Runs all the stealth missions
*Specialist: Great utility, kills drones dead, prevents ally deaths
*Technical: Early game carry. Still valuable lategame with strong tanking options
They're actually not bad as haven advisors. Because you have so few options available and because the missions aren't so difficulty that sitting and trading isn't a fine thing to have happen. But in the end rangers end up feeling neither unique or valuable. Ideally i would like to see them built around "Run and Gun" which is yes, quite amazingly powerful. But either rangers need to get chain shot and cyclic fire and deadeye or they need to do something unique.
Aliens: This is going to be short. I generally like the alien design but would like to to be a bit more unique. The fact that viper snipers can move and then shoot annoys me. Units which have specific advantage should have specific exploitable penalties(yes i know viper snipers have lower aim as you get close... but they can just run away and shoot you)
Features: i really want to ability to pick up alien corpses and evac with them. I only need one corpse for an autopsoy i want to be able to go and kill one and evac with it.