Overall
Still very much enjoying the game! One thing I'm noticing that I don't think was true in the previous games (even LW1) is that LW2 is really much more of a strategy game than a tactical one. Last campaign I played on Veteran and struggled, this time I've been playing on Commander and it's easy. I don't think I've been playing the tactical layer all that differently, the big change is that I've been watching a bunch of streams and now I understand how the strategic layer works. It really does feel as though if you get the strategy layer right the tactical battles just get easier and easier. I'll probably try Legend next and see just how big the step up in difficulty is.
Class Balance
So back in my first thread I ranked Gunners and Grenadiers as sitting on top of the pack out of the base eight classes, and Rangers and Technicals towards the bottom. This campaign, as luck would have it, I got very few Gunners and Grenadiers (and the ones I did have kept getting wounded) while the Black Market gave me a ton of Rangers and Technicals, so I got a lot of opportunity to practice with them.
With Technicals, I've come to see them as the 'early game carry' class. If you're patient enough to pull off flamethrower ambushes they really are very effective, but I still think they fall off pretty hard as the game continues. Still, given that the campaign's usually going to be won or lost by then, I guess that's not the worst thing in the world. I just wish you could give then extra rockets so that a Rocketeer build could be more than a one-shot wonder.
Rangers have the opposite problem – they're godlike once they hit Gunnery Sergeant and can do the Rapid Reaction OW build, but they're kind of meh until then. They're not useless, it just feels that Gunners do everything better. One thing that I think really holds them back is magazine size – one of the reasons Gunners are so good is that they have a base magazine of 5, meaning they can use their special skills and still have plenty of ammo for regular shots. Rangers, on the other hand, have 3 shots and a base ability (Light 'em Up) which conflicts with reloading. So I kept finding that my Rangers would get to shoot twice on turn 1, but then would spend the rest of the battle shooting once a turn at best. If they had a bit more ammo they'd be a lot more useful – as it is they're really dependent on high-cap mags, which is a problem because everyone else ALSO wants the high cap mags.
On the whole, though, the balance of the base eight classes is pretty good, so I don't think this needs to be a priority. (Yeah, I think you can guess why I keep saying 'base eight classes' instead of 'all classes' – we'll get to that later.)
Missions
In the early game I sent teams of 4-6 to do everything. By early-midgame, though, I was dividing missions into two categories:
Troop Column, Supply Raid, Network Tower, Headquarters – Combat missions. Send as large a squad as possible with snipers. Kill everything.
Jailbreak, Hack Chest, Hack Workstation, Rescue VIP, Escort VIP, Kill VIP, Sabotage Facility, Blacksite, Forge – Stealth missions. Send 1-2 soldiers with SMGs. If you have to fire the SMGs, something's gone wrong.
A lot of people have complained about how LW2 seems to force you into stealth, and looking at that list, they might have a point – there were periods in the midgame where I was doing three stealth missions for every one combat mission. The thing is, the way the game's set up at the moment, you kind of don't have a choice. The reason I say that is that there were two mission types I played 'normally', ie sending a 4-6 man squad – Destroy Relay and Neutralise VIP (where I was going for a kidnap). And guess what? Every single time, these missions were the most dangerous and the ones where my soldiers were most likely to be wounded/killed. The reinforcement mechanic and the timers just make it REALLY punishing to fight your way across a map, especially a big map.
I do enjoy the odd Shinobi-Specialist stealth op, but at the moment I agree that there are too many of them. I wouldn't mind if there were a few more missions which could be realistically done with small squads (since small squad combats are a lot of fun).
Research/Proving Ground
I'm starting to think that most of the 'side-path' technologies and projects just aren't very good. Due to a fluke of RNG, I got absolutely no scientists from mission rewards in the first three months of the campaign (seriously, I got 7 engineers and zero scientists. That's ridiculously unlikely). This meant my research was really slow, so I had to skip all the autopsies and non-essential techs, and focused on weapons/armour. And you know what? I didn't miss the side techs at all.
As for the Proving Grounds, you need it for the Skulljack, but the more I look at them, the more I start to think that most of the Proving Grounds projects are 'trap options', which look nice but sucker you into wasting money which could be more profitably spent on weapons, armour, or strategy level stuff such as Resistance Comms and Radio Relays. Grenade, ammo, and weapon mod projects eat up cores (which are a very limited resource) and consume a LOT of supply. When you look at the numbers, it just doesn't make sense to spend 100 supply on Battlefield Medicine, or to collect 3 basic suppressors and 3 advanced suppressors and pay 90 supply just for the privilege of paying another 20 supply to manufacture more advanced suppressors that you'd probably already have if you hadn't used them up in the project. Why are these projects so expensive? It doesn't make sense.
Psi
Okay, so I was just going to skip Psi this campaign, but JL asked if people could give the new 1.2 psions a try and see whether the changes have helped. So here's my feedback.
1.2 Psi Ops are terrible. They are really, really bad. Even with the lowered training times, they actually feel worse to me than they did in 1.1, because with the other eight classes I've been learning how to make good use of their skills to make them more effective. With Psi Ops, though, I can't make them effective because there's nothing to work with. They are worse than every other class in the game by a wide margin.
My experiences with Psi in this campaign: two out of my four starting Psis came out of the tank with Mind Merge, Insanity, and Fortress. I sent them off on missions in the vain hope they might do something useful. Their Insanity attacks had a 50-60% chance to hit – this wasn't against high-level aliens, this was against basic ADVENT. And if they hit, you got a one-round Disorient. The other two starting Psis got Soulfire. This meant that an average of once per mission they could do 5ish damage to finish off an enemy. In other words, my starting Psis were somewhat worse than a rookie with a Flashbang and a Plasma Grenade.
After a lot of work, babying, and powerlevelling, I managed to get a couple of my Psis to mid-high level. My best Psi has Soulfire, Stasis, and Null Lance. By contrast, my best Gunner has Hail of Bullets, Chain Shot, and Saturation Fire. Have a guess which one I'm going to be bringing on tough missions. Oh, and due to pre-reqs, it turns out that my Psi is never going to get Fuse or Domination because he doesn't have Mind Merge. So that's fun.
It's not the randomness of the Psi skills that's the problem. AWC abilities are random, too, but no-one complains about those because they're extras added on to a base chassis that's already strong. Psi Ops have three big problems:
• Their powers are too weak – I already broke down the problems with the Psi class in an earlier thread, but the TLDR is that half of their power list is mediocre to awful. If you're going to have an entire class based around semi-random abilities, they need to be GOOD semi-random abilities.
• They're too slow – With a standard tech path, your Psi Ops are going to start coming online in early summer – May if you rush it, June if you're slower. This is far too slow. The cell time bottleneck means that Psis take forever to level, meaning that it's virtually impossible to get them to high rank before the autumn. By this point your regular soldiers are hitting Master Sergeant and the Psis just can't compete. A Psi who gets critically wounded might as well be dead, because by the time he's recovered and caught up on training time the campaign will be over.
• They're too expensive – Getting Psi Ops costs you the Psionics tech (30 Supply, 2 Cores, 1 Sectoid), a Psi Chamber (150 Supply, 1 Core, 3 Power), and a scientist if you want them trained anytime this year (call it another 150 supply or so). That is a huge resource investment, especially early in the game. There needs to be an appropriate return on it.
To make Psis as good as regular soldiers (not better, just somewhere near competitive) you'll need to fix at least one and probably two of these problems. Possible solutions:
Improve the weaker Psi powers – I already came up with a list of suggestions for this, so here it is again.
- Spoiler: show
Without a really major buff along these lines, Psi is going to remain another of the 'trap options' where it actually makes XCOM weaker than if you'd avoided building it in the first place.
Finishing Up
The complaints about Psi probably sounded kind of negative, so I should say again that I'm really enjoying the mod. 1.2 is definitely better than 1.1, and I'm looking forward to the new mission type you guys are introducing for 1.3. Keep up the good work!