Hey, I punched each of those imps fair and square to get my superpowered wands! Psi strength improvement went totally unused during the crafting of my strategic wand stockpile. Part of the reason I suggested strengthening Imp fireballs or adding a str-based melee to the imps was that once I had good armor, I could take however long I needed to punch them down and the real challenge was making sure they didn't wake up and wander off as I swept the map. And making sure that there wasn't a pinky demon hanging around, those things can chew right through top drawer armor.
Shame about the explosives impotency issues. Would reducing blast radius, or introducing a 200-piercing guided sabot round for the blaster launcher make it easier for the AI to handle? Additionally, shame about the AI not being able to handle widespread flamers.
The shipping bootypedia entry on the Imperial Probe was crystal clear, it was just odd that I never saw any missions officially run by the Star God faction using that ship. Just seemed to be a gameplay/story disjoint.
Spear piercing was largely a verisimilitude suggestion. If this would devalue the spear as a melee weapon due to increased availability of piercing resistant armor, I guess I'd suggest upping a pierce-spear's damage to compensate. If the spear's in an ideal place right now in terms of balance, by all means leave it be. A strength-adding alloy lance might be fun, but in general I'm a sucker for polearms because I think they look cool.
I can appreciate that with all the factions there currently are (and the need to capture specific units to progress technologically) giving the Humanists more missions would increase the RNG effects. Humanist Bombing/Pacification missions simply seemed to fit their MO.
I've been playing a lot of the Long War mod for XCom 2012, and I'm not entirely sure there'd be a riot over lose-lose terror missions. Broadly speaking, Long War reworked terror missions to always lower your score-analogue, your forces are there only to mitigate damage. As long as Gov't pogroms were explicitly disallowed in the starting two or three months I don't think it could do significant campaign damage. As with the proposed Humanist Bombing missions, though, Gov't pogroms would reduce the number of chances to snag tech-tree critical captures like the engineers, academy medic and esper, etc. Siiiiigh. But it'd be fun and a nice change of pace! Even now I'm wondering if stunning all the gov't terrorists, grabbing all their stuff, and aborting would be the way to maximally profit for minimum score hit...
On that same subject, the LW mod introduces "Trap" missions. Can't take credit for that suggestion, and again just like with the terror missions - the playerbase has adjusted to their existence. I have faith that Piratez players would be able to handle it, but I'm optimistic by nature. The explanation for hypothetical Piratez traps would be simple: "They figured out you're using a hyperwave decoder and laid a trap for you, handle it". It's no different than a first month base assault in terms of "unfair to the player" IMO. Both the landed trap and the aerial Q-ship suggestions were aimed at reducing a sense of complacency and safety that developed once I got advanced armor up, and the noninteractible swarms of Heavy Gunships flying around on Crackdown missions.
I was mentioning satellites mostly out of lore curiosity. There's tons of information in the Bootypedia about what's going on on the surface of Imperial Earth, and much less about whether or not there's anything in orbit. I can imagine orbital factories, or even housing for the elites of the various factions. The Solar Governor bootypedia entry describes Faction facilities on the surface of Mars, but I have no idea if there's a thick layer of surveillance and military satellites, or if Earth's orbit is a relative wasteland.
I don't doubt that hammers are amazing, just as with the spear suggestions this was coming more from a logic/progression point of view. I can imagine a hammer being improved by being made out of sturdier materials, for example, and there's many many improvements to the one-hand melee weapons (longsword, techblade, electro sword, wolverine claws, force blades, the demon weapons, etc) and there's no improvements to the hammers. It seemed like an area with no progression, which feels weird in a game with head-crushing depth to its tech tree. Plus, Discs-o-Death on my synthsuited pirates was basically a range-11 hammer anyways...
Hm. I can see how using ammo to rotate which slughtrowers are in vogue works. My suggestions for more MAG and other ammos was generally from a consistency POV - in-universe, I can't think of any reason why PS blackmarch SMG magazines can't be manufactured, or why MAG or improved HE rounds can't be made for the CAWS. ...Actually, one thing that might be interesting is Contacts: Blackmarch being required to manufacture advanced Blackmarch SMG ammunition, representing developing improved contacts with the manufacturers and getting their insight on improved ammos. Hah! I'll bet they'd be interested in buying those blueprints from the Pirates for a pretty penny too...
I look forward to Piratez Extended! What, uh, what is Piratez Extended?
I personally found melee an expedient solution to most problems. In the earlygame I did a lot of handcannon + cutlass/axe, then in the midgame I had a smokey-armored lasrifle sniper and RPG launcher that did tons of useful work, as well as a soldier with a Confederate Eagle. I added on a Custom Snipin' Gun sniper too, so by no means was I completely gun-free. By then my rank and file hand was dualwielding a stunrod and a techblade. There were a couple of reasons for this: I needed to be in melee range to stun people, and I needed to stun people to advance my technology and economy. Adding a techblade gave me a lethal option. A ton of my early and midgame missions were pogroms, and most pogroms have urban terrain that makes melee combat way more practical. Power armored Trader Bodyguards make melee almost necessary! There were several months that were literally pogrom -> one UFO -> pogrom and that was it, so I think it's unfair to blame my evolution towards melee solely on my scummy behavior. Terrain, tech-tree paths, bad judgment, and a high number of strong starting rookies all led me towards that composition.
I was also afraid of running out of nuclear laser clips so I was super shy about adopting laser weapons. This turned out to be pretty foolish in the long run, but that fear also pushed me towards the techblade as my source of a reliable kill. By the lategame, the stunrod got replaced with knucks, and the techblade got replaced with the Disc o' Death, and right before the end I replaced the knucks with Imp Wands which on high strength troopers is basically a plasma rifle/super knucks combo.
