Campaign End: Commander 1.4 Feedback

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WanWhiteWolf
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Joined: Tue May 16, 2017 10:09 pm

Campaign End: Commander 1.4 Feedback

Post by WanWhiteWolf »

Finished first campaign 1.4. (and first LW2 campaign for that matter)

It was my third attempt. I played a very recruit aggressive strategy (had 10 full squads + some leftovers on January). I ended up having 115 soldiers in barracks and 11 casualties. I liberated 7 regions and ended up in May (well over a year). Still had like 7 bars left on avatar progress.

Classes
I think soldier classes are generally balanced - way more than I expected. There isn't a class that is specifically overpowered or useless and I really enjoyed going through different playstyles and combos.

Some Notes:
Gunners
I think they need a buff. The Suppression spec needs some % aim debuff instead of a fixed amount to stay - somewhat - relevant end game. Shooter spec seems a weaker version of ranger shooter.
Specialists
Both OW and Hacker spec seem ok to me. Medic is however pretty weak. Even on long missions it does not pay off. It needs some sort of offensive ability (e.g. consume medikit to do damage). This way it would be a tradeoff in keeping them for heal or use them against enemies.
Grenadier
Both sapper and support paths are competitive. Middle path seems stronger early in the campaign but it fades later. Some perks don't really fit here (e.g. who is going to use chainshot on a 72 aim MSGT soldier).
Shinoby
Apart from tower mission, stealth path does not seem to work very well. The drones are going to pop your conceal regardless from 10 tiles away. I found Reaper path very interesting to play and despite my expectations, the Coup De Grace works pretty nice.
Snipers
Halo spec seems a bit weaker than the other DFA or Snapshot. Kubikiri is really strong end-game. Serial seem way to situational. Math wise, considering their huge cooldown, you need to kill 5 enemies to make worth of the skill itself. That's not a very common situation; whereas double/tap or AMF are both useful in pretty much all scenarios. I saw that serial is getting even more nerfs; doubt I will use it in the next campaign.
Assaults
My favorite class. My only "rant' is that the MSGT perks do not offer much. They don't really feel as MSGT perks. +3 damage Cone attack blocked by cover is not worth it when you can get +2 attack all the time and you can also use the cone attack from CPL level. So you lose 1 damage on very very rare cases. I think I used it 2 times in my campaign. Also +2 damage for a MSG perk seems underwhelming.
Rangers
I think they are the most balanced class. I used all 3 paths and mixtures. My only rant is about the cone OW perk as MSGT. I doesn't work properly. Half of the time it doesn't proc; and it's range is not displayed correctly in the UI. It's at least 1-2 tiles smaller in reality. You are better off simply Sentinel OW unless you have a like a rainbow squad sitting in the middle of a street.
Technicals
Flamers are the strongest path in the game - at least for early/mid campaign. Late they seem to fall off a bit. Rocketers need more damage or more usefull rocket types. Concussion is a mess. I think even nuking your squad is better than using it against the enemy. They only come online really late game when they are paired with Serial Snipers. Overall I don't think they are worth it. Simply going mid path gives you more benefits.
Officers
I cannot count the number of times I had to cancel an officer training. I think they need either paused training (e.g. make it so it works as the PSI does) or shorter times. If you don't pull them, squads get split and all squad cohesion thing gets messy.
PSI
PSIs are in a good spot.For me they are the most powerful class at max level but they reach there later. Balance wise I think statis should be turn-ending. It's probably the best skill in the game.
MECs
They are to weak and pain to level up. If they would level up faster, it they might pull their weight as some of the high level perks are at least interesting. At MSGT they have 80 aim as a shooter class. That's less than a grenadier who never shoots.

Strategical layer
My biggest complain is the lack usable gear. Until late game, you cannot really use anything. All your research is basically focused on weapons and 1 tier of armor. You might do a sidestep for basic ablative plating + incendiary grenade; researching everything else is basically a mistake. You have a lot of shiny toys (secondary weapon / grenade types / amo types, vests ...etc).You have plenty options but you cannot use any of them until late game. That said, I enjoyed late game more than the early stages since the variety you have at your disposal leans toward a strategy game, rather than an RNG fest.

There is a lot of RNG involved for the Avatar timer until you manage to reach the Blacksite. The issue is that you need luck - simply put - to slow down the timer before you unlock the golden path missions. By luck I mean finding 1-2 Facilities. Without that ... you have a high risk losing the campaign. I think there should be 1 revealed Advent Facility. They are not exactly easy early game. This way you can buy some time. Once you reach the blacksite and start the golden path, the Avatar timer is no longer an issue.

The most important stat from a strategical point of view - Vigilance - is hidden to the player. This simply forces you to datamine / install some info mods ..etc. If one doesn't know what is happening, how is a player supposed to react? For example ... nobody will know if hiding rebels in Heaven has any effect; except those who datamine. There is no info on how effective it is and nor can the player determine in game. Thus you cannot make any decisions such as "how many supplies will it cost to reduce vigilance here?".

I loved the mission diversity and the new timers. I think there is still a bit room for stealthy missions and challenge wise, I think each mission type is interesting - with one exception: The Hack mission with 8 turns is sometimes broken. As in...I had to abort this mission type 2 times in my campaign from turn 0 since I needed 6-7 full dashes to get to objective. Even those with good spawns you have to almost always use the the +2 turns skill for the intel costs / or take big risks. I think having +1/+2 turns as default would be more balanced but maybe that's just me.

Retaliations are not particularly difficult but the outcome of the missions (e.g. how many rebels you save) is pretty irrelevant on your tactics. It's just RNG. I wish there would be some upgrades for your rebels. What I would envision as ideal is the rebels being grouped in 3 separate camps with weapons, hold position directive and outside player control. This way the player may decide to save one camp or split his forces to save more.

Corpses seem pretty scarce but it doesn't matter much since you can't really afford anything early anyway. However, I took me almost a year into the game (20 Feb) to get the first Fusion blade. I simply didn't get Archon corpses. Also, sectoids corpses are scarce in comparison with other early types - and badly needed if you go PSI path. I would like to see corpses available - at least on late game - on the black market. Make them expensive. I would have paid 150-200 supplies for an Archon corpse.

Base management
I think there is a lot of variety in building order. Engineers become useless late game since you don't have any jobs to assign them. I would love if corpse disassemble would be part of an engineering task and not a research task. I think scientists are pretty busy whereas engineers aren't doing anything.

Miscellaneous
I am not sure why but there seems to be a tendency to stop the player from experimenting. For example:
- Unless you artificially expand your campaign, you will never use most of the items in the game.
- Retraining a soldier can take up to a month. Why? Let us retrain in a reasonable time frame and experiment different builds. It's not like people are going from DFA to Snapshots between supply raids.
- AWG perks train rather slow. For example ...pistol perks take forever; Very unlikely that you make more than 1 full pistol training for more than 1 soldier / campaign. And it's not like they are OP in any way.

In comparison with LW1, LW2 seems more RNG based than tactical. Yes, there should be a balance between them but I feel RNG is predominant and, from what I see, the tendency goes in this direction.
A weapon has 6-11 damage. This means double the damage between min and max. Add the standard 20% graze and you reach to 3 - 11 damage every hit. That's basically playing with "Damage Roulete" option enabled in LW1. Most damage spreads are horrendous (e.g. between 3 - 9 ). As a result I had ballistic rifles hitting harder than a plasma rifle on the same enemy. I understand there needs to be some variance ...but ...this seems to much.
I also had a squadwipe as enemy reaction (1 soldier hit / panic and 2 mind controlled) on the turn I encountered the enemy. There is not much strategy you can employ here.
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