Re: The X-Com Files - 3.7.2: Best and Brightest

[Akamashi]

I kind of wrote about this earlier. There's a terribly frustrating mission that you don't want to go on, even if all the agents are equipped with the latest technology. This is the lotus tower (golden academy). It's boring, uninteresting, and very long. Aaaaaaaand... It's simple. It's impossible to invent a worse combination. You either need to do something about it, or just cancel it. It's boring to destroy it even with blaster missiles. Either the beginning of the mission should be done on the roof, or the building itself should be made fragile. I do not know, but now it makes the game worse.

[bananas]

I kind of wrote about this earlier. There's a terribly frustrating mission that you don't want to go on, even if all the agents are equipped with the latest technology. This is the lotus tower (golden academy). It's boring, uninteresting, and very long. Aaaaaaaand... It's simple. It's impossible to invent a worse combination. You either need to do something about it, or just cancel it. It's boring to destroy it even with blaster missiles. Either the beginning of the mission should be done on the roof, or the building itself should be made fragile. I do not know, but now it makes the game worse.

What if there were more pathways up to the top and the mission didn't end until the psi emitter at the top was disabled/blown up? In the meantime there would be periodic waves of Black Lotus (or Osirion) reinforcements every 5 rounds, and every 10 rounds, Elite Soldier reinforcements, that way the player would be encouraged to get up to the top.

[psavola]

I dunno what's the point of that mission anyway. I have never obtained it IIRC. You can prevent Black Lotus from establishing the tower by terminating them, but there is no way to prevent Osiron from establishing the tower, so that part is just RNG. And the mission does not give you anything (except kill the 6 point/day "base penalty"). So it seems to be like a sidequest. If it is in, maybe it could be improved somehow also from this perspective.

[Akamashi]

My main complaint is about architecture. You have to wait on the ground floor for 30 turns until some of the enemies come down, and then run to the stairs for a long time and climb for a long time. 95% of the tower itself is not explored, as enemies are hanging around the stairs. This mission is long and tedious. It's light and very frustrating. Something needs to be changed in it.

[bananas]

So in a previous version, sometimes a Hybrid Keep would manifest as a Landing Site and that would be like an active large-scale operation that would wreck that countries opinion of xcom and slaughter ratings for unwary players.
In this version, the Hybrid Keep is a base(or mansion-like or what have you), but I'm not 100% sure if it has the same dynamic, does it? I've only encountered one so far.

In that game Xenonauts, there is a new type of air-only alien encounter attack, and it seems like this game does include air-only UFO flybys, but they don't seem to have the same effect as the Alien Terror missions, that I can tell.

Would it be feasible to have a large ship landing site with a detection radius, that would sit and wreck ratings, but 1) spawn interceptors when Xcom craft approached, and also/or 2)took off to aerially fight XCom? The drawbacks might be if players couldn't know it was an alien aerial bombardment or not, so they'd have to send xcom fighters along with transport, but personally I do that anyway b/c battleships are already pretty dangerous with one.
Edit: Or, for this "Air Terror" variant, it would keep landing but only for a split second, about +50 times in a row