Feedback after Commander campaign

[Antifringe]

I just retired my campaign. I'll be honest, I didn't play it through to the bitter end. After finishing the Golden Path, I was so far ahead of ADVENT that I didn't bother. I was getting Coil Guns in June and had AVATAR progress slowed by 50%. Understanding how to optimize the strategy layer makes a huge difference. Which is probably a good thing.

Some thoughts on assorted topics:

Psionics: (I used the fan patch to fix the Solace bug). Way, way better, possibly too much. Lots of powers that were awful as yellow moves are now fantastic as blue moves. Insanity is well named, because it's insane Mass psions can cast Insanity every turn, and then still do something else. If you are stacking psi bonuses, it usually hits, and if you have Schism, it can also be used as either a finisher or as a lead in. Strong stuff.

Mind Merge is so much better as a blue move. I even took the Soul Merge upgrade.

Soul Steal is better but still feels lackluster. The health bonus is so incidental to Soul Fires's primary function that it's hard to justify the skill point. It'd be an easier sell if it also slightly increased the damage.



The Avenger: Something feels off here. You end up getting a ton of contacts and power points from missions, and as a result, you need less and less Avenger facilities and less and less engineers. I only built one Communications Relay and one Power Relay, and didn't need to upgrade either. The stacking bonuses from Lib3 and UFO missions eventually bleached everything out. I had two blank rooms at the end, and after a few PoI events, I could have decomissioned the Comm Relay if I wanted to.

I think putting a hard cap on how many power points you can get from UFOs and how many contacts you can get from Lib3 would be a good idea.

Related to this problem is that I quickly ran out of things for my Engineers to do. Engineer VIP missions became junk tier starting around June, even worse than the awful soldier VIP missions. I got so tired of Shen nagging me about idle engineers that I actually deleted the corresponding sound files to get her to shut up.



Annoying VOs: Touching back on the nagging issue, the VOs assume a vanilla game environment, and become infuriating in the LW environment. Bradford won't shut up about me not having a supply income, and Shen keeps getting on my case because I have 15 Engineers but only four actual job slots for them. Could we please have an option to turn these things off? Maybe flag them so that the Reduce Beginner's VO works on them?

[justdont]

Psionics: (I used the fan patch to fix the Solace bug). Way, way better, possibly too much. Lots of powers that were awful as yellow moves are now fantastic as blue moves. Insanity is well named, because it's insane Mass psions can cast Insanity every turn, and then still do something else. If you are stacking psi bonuses, it usually hits, and if you have Schism, it can also be used as either a finisher or as a lead in. Strong stuff.

PsiOps are quite amazing to rush now (as they should be, in my opinion), but they drop heavily in efficiency in the long run. Early PsiOp is huge, mid-game PsiOp is strong, but he won't outshine others, late PsiOp is a strong support, but that's about it.

On Legendary though, unlucky early +hp dark events will instantly drive PsiOps down a couple of notches. When a buffed PsiOp can kill (or do an easy combo for a kill with, say, grenade or Walk Fire) someone with soul fire - it's huge, when he can't - it's much less nice. If one can get an early Superior Psi PCS - it's huge as well, but it's a big "if". PsiOps now come with a great amount of front-loaded power, but it doesn't scale well with advent's arms race.

[Antifringe]

I found Soulfire to be the least useful of their mainline abilities. I mean, it's fine, it's basically Hail of Bullets with a shorter cooldown, but like you say, it quickly becomes nothing more than a finisher. Insanity, on the other hand, gives you powerful control abilities, and can be used every turn.

Bastion requires you to burn a point on the mediocre Fortress, but if you game the AI, you can make the enemy waste turns pretty reliably.

Fuse ended up being one of my favorite soft control abilities. The damage is so so, but it shreds, and it also removes the damn grenade from the alien. The big ah ha moment for me was when I realized it works on MECs, and strips them of their micromissile attack.

[justdont]

Yeah, Insanity is better for the long run, but it has the same issues - it works well only if you push it past certain breakpoints and do so early enough. It stays there as a reliable snake-leash, but for other enemies (even advent) you have to stack psi offense a lot or you're going to live with lots of insanity misses. Red Fog plays a huge role as well - if you play with Red Fog on, it adds a lot of power to Insanity, as now wounded targets are easier to affect.

[stefan3iii]

Psi carries a heavy cost to unlock and maintain, but gives you soldiers that aren't much stronger, and fall off as tech goes up.

I'd like to see the psi lab get some sort of strategic function. Like if it could generate Intel, or extra missions, or auto find faceless, reveal or counter dark events, etc. Sure there could be lots of ideas. But give me a reason to build psi other than slightly stronger early game soldiers.