[Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

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tesb
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2017 1:02 am

[Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by tesb »

Preface: I am really impressed what Pavonis Interactive did with LW2, especially the new strategic layer, the coil weapons, the many small additions the classes and so on. My main issue with LW2 is that it amplifies mechanics and design decisions that i did not like in vanilla nor in the predecessor; although in XCOM1/LW1 it was a lot more bearable.
Just so you know where i am coming from, i primarily play RPGS, ARPGS and strategy games (mostly paradox titles these days), i played since the dune2 and the original ufo defence days.


My issues:
1) Merging of genres: strategy and rpgs
I think all my time playing these games in these genres left me with two lessons:
1a) Strategy: Your troops/units/spaceships etc. are fodder!
They are mass produced and used to grind the enemy into dust, no tear is shed when i loose them (even experienced ones). I had no problems with loosing soldiers in the original ufo defence from the 90ties. Higher ranks were just some stat bonuses and soldiers were plentiful, loosing the equipment hurt a bit though.
1b) RPG/ARPG: You loose a character or wipe your party, you loose!
If i die with my character in an ARPG i loose him/her (hardcore) or take severe repercussions (normal). If i wipe my party in an RPG i loose the game and have to reload.

You can see that merging these genres leads to very contradictory playstyle/approach. On one hand LW2 gives me a lot more customization than vanilla XCOM2 and even character trees on character trees (awc perks, officer training). I level up my soldiers throughout the playthrough and nurture them from mission to mission. As soon as i loose a soldier or even a whole squad im basically trained by decades of playing rpgs to reload.
On the other hand on the strategic layer, it is one soldier/squad out of many. rookies cost very little, equipment is not destroyed i can even buy high level soldiers on the black market or get them in mission rewards, they are replaceable.
LW2 intensifies this dichotomy even further: On the one hand you have a lot more soldiers and squads and the game is balanced around loosing a few missions/soldiers, on the other hand we not only have the class skill trees but soldiers level slower (at least it feels that way) and we have additional perk trees (officers and awc) to even further customize and invest in our soldiers.


2) The necessity of alpha striking the enemy
Personally I don't like strategy games where the outcome is dictated in the first turn/few seconds of an engagement. I like to react to my enemies or being able to react to them. I would love to see drawn out fire fights, pinning the enemy with some soldiers while slowly flanking with the rest, etc.
Vanilla XCOM2 was quite bad in that regard, your first pod was always a non issue due to the concealment mechanic and the rest of the enemies i usually just blasted to dust with my 5 grenadier 1 specialist squad. cover? suppression? flanking? planning? strategy? all meaningless. It also pushed you in that sort of gameplay because you did not have any armour hit points like in XCOM1, i.e. any type of damage means the soldier gets injured.
In LW2 this was made better and worse at the same time. It was made better by introducing more abilities and swarms of enemies. especially on swarming missions, you can't get away with grenade spam (although it helps). i usually found myself in situations where i had multiple turns of combat and needed to lock down enemies by other means, i.e. suppression, overwatch, sacrifice, poison and smoke grenades and so on. It was also made worse because the high density of enemies in combination with the absence of items like the scanner in LW1 means that you can not really flank or move up, because the risk of triggering a new pod was far too high, which means combat over multiple turns was mostly static long ranged fights.

3) pod activation:
This is something very specific to XCOM1/2. the way pod activation works leads to very strange gameplay, i.e. use one concealed soldier with phantom to scout, move your soldiers up close to the vision range of the enemy and put them into overwatch. this will basically waste the enemy turn because he moves to cover and kills a lot of enemies. On the other hand acitvating a pod during your turn, especially i you already moved with some soldiers means problems, especially the famous -i just move up my last soldier and he somehow triggers a new pod- experience that most players made. I don't have a good solution, but i think this play around gameplay mechanics is really tiresome.
It does not help that point 2) reinforces this issue. If fights in general would last a few turns, you would be much less bothered if either the player or the enemy gets a bonus turn.

4) the deadliness of combat/lucky shots:
I guess from a lore/immersion perspective it is appropriate that any shot can be deadly. especially in the beginning you play with soldiers that wear cavlar are inexperienced and go up against plasma and coil weaponry. In that context it is understandable that shots that connect are deadly. From a gameplay perspective it can be frustrating, all the planning, all the training, all the strategy, in the end you are at the mercy of random numbers. When i look back at strategy games there was often rng involved, e.g. in warcraft3 all units had damage ranges, yet it never felt that your rolls on the damage numbers decided the battle. in XCOM1/2 it is the other way around.



Some ideas:
What if missions were mostly attrition based with longer firefights, e.g.:
-Aliens and XCOM personal would start with a lot of armour and similar hit points as of now and but all weapons would shred (the amount depending on the weapon). The first hit would rarely be important, the combats would last longer and you would have to plan combat over multiple turns. The more a soldier/alien gets hit the more dangerous the next hit becomes. You don't loose soldiers out of the blue due to some lucky hits of the enemy, on the contrary you would know when a soldier is bound to die (was hit a few times and got his armour shredded) and can actively plan to protect him instead of praying to rngesus.
-Reduce weapon and sight ranges and movement speed, this would effectively enlargen the map and give you more room to manoeuvre your soldiers.
Together both these changes would make alpha striking less important and extend the combat duration. Basically instead of having combats of 1-2 turns you subdivide them into 3-6 turns. In an rts this would be equivalent of running the game in a slower speed.

-Reduce the number of pods and space them out more, so you don't run into the almost certainty of activating a new pod. To compensate either buff the enemy individuals or increase the pod size. i.e. on a swarming mission there might be just one or two large pods (although the individual pod members should not be all next to each other but spaced out over a screen or two), or just activate all pods on the map at once, if you trigger the first one by breaking concealment (the enemy has communication devices). This way you would rarely worry not trigger additional pods, being much more free to actually move soldiers to flanks or melee.
mr_j936
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 12:01 pm

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by mr_j936 »

To each their opinion I suppose. I do not find it easy at all to recover from losing good soldiers. and I often find I do not have enough skilled soldiers to load squads for missions...
tesb
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2017 1:02 am

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by tesb »

oh don't get me wrong i did not want to say the game is too hard. i do not talk about the balance, but i was trying to focus on the psychology.
e.g. even if it was a non issue to loose a high ranking soldier from a gameplay perspective, from a psychological perspective it will still hurt because you customized the soldier, you played him through many missions, he has has own story, background, stats, equipment, perks ect.
you even gave him a haircut and a hat and choose the colour of his socks :)
if soldiers were just generic faceless weapon platforms that get some stat bonuses on level up i would care much less, even if balance wise this would be far harder hitting in my campaign.
aedn
Posts: 71
Joined: Wed Jan 25, 2017 2:12 am

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by aedn »

2) battlescanners are available via proving grounds, and an easy research item to get.
tesb
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2017 1:02 am

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by tesb »

they don't fix the problem, if i want to move an assault into a forward position or flank with a soldier i can't use the item to see if an enemy pod is behind the current one.

in LW1 there was an item that would generate a little map were enemies would be displayed as dots, you did not know what enemies or where precisely, but it served the purpose quite well: no need to activate it and you could actually use you close range soldiers without wasting action points and it had the necessary scanning range to be useful.
Ketchup4684
Posts: 44
Joined: Fri Feb 03, 2017 3:29 am

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by Ketchup4684 »

The motion tracker is what you're talking about. In my LW1 campaign I have 2 of them each mission, it makes the encounters much more bearable.
Solomani
Posts: 27
Joined: Sat Feb 04, 2017 2:52 pm

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by Solomani »

I always wondered how this game would be like under initiative mechanics rather than my turn your turn. Initiative would mean those with highest initiatives act first and most often. A ranger would get his two actions but not one after another... He would just appear in the order of actions more often. In this style you might activate a pod but if you have higher initiative soldiers, you might still act first.

In some ways the change would be drastic and worrisome. You wouldn't be able to do neatly plan soldier A does this and B follows with that. Your actions would be mingled in with alien counter actions. However I think it would make things like long for fights and tactical movements more likely.
rlkr83
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu Mar 02, 2017 5:38 pm

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by rlkr83 »

tesb wrote:(Stuff)
1) I don't understand why you think LW2 merges strategy and RPG genres. It doesn't do anything to this effect that is not inherent in all XCOM games. And even granting that it does for the sake of argument, I don't understand your point. You're upset that there are too many ways to customize soldiers? Did you try not using them? Or you're upset that you can't break out of an OCD cycle of playing strategy games as though you're playing Baldur's Gate?

2) Do you understand the inherent contradiction of a turn-based strategy game where you don't get a decisive advantage by striking first, on your terms? There is no such thing. Oh wait, tic-tac-toe.

It sounds like you're just saying you wish combat was harder. Did you try raising the difficulty to L/I? Full damage roulette? Full hidden potential? Not created equally? Red fog on XCOM only?

3) You admitted immediately that this has nothing to do with LW, so how is it a reason you're "leaving LW2"?

4) This gripe directly contradicts (2) above. Now you want combat to be easier. Or, I suppose understood together they mean you want the opposing forces to fight each other with nerf darts and whiffle balls. Voila. Combat that lasts longer plus you die less.

You're trying to lay a lot of crap at the feet of LW2 that has nothing to do with LW2.
Steve-O
Posts: 124
Joined: Fri Feb 24, 2017 8:00 pm

Re: [Feeback] Leaving LW2: my reasons

Post by Steve-O »

rlkr83 wrote: You're trying to lay a lot of crap at the feet of LW2 that has nothing to do with LW2.
Dude, seriously, what's your problem?

You joined this community two days ago and so far, every post I've seen you make is insulting and hostile. Do you think this is how you make friends online? By showing up out of nowhere, contradicting everything that everyone says and picking apart their posts with snide remarks?

Tesb is free to discontinue using LW2 if he wants to, his reasons are his own. Silence does not infer agreement, so if you disagree with his assessment (and can't think of anything nice to say about it) then just move on to the next thread. Find a topic you can provide positive feedback for.
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