Hello Steelpoint,
thank you soo much for your valueable feedback.
I've been giving this mod a short play through, and I'm very much enjoying it thus far. Actually losing an XCOM playthrough early on was quite exciting, and I'm quite fond of the new weapons, I find they all mesh in well.
I found that most mod have too many weapons, which do not have a unique purpose or does not play well with other weapons in regard of what kind of a battlefield role the soldier equipt with it should have. Its great that you like the additional weapons. They do mesh well indeed.
Loosing it early game can happen easily, especially when ignoring terrorsites early on.
Despite the need to mount an Alien Base Assault to progress the tech tree, my initial foray showed that despite it being a Floater base, I'm quite outgunned. I think I'll try again on my new playthrough when I get some Alloy items and take some shotguns.
Jeah, the Base Assault is kinda critical to progress in the tech tree, there is some Alien Alloy Tech avaible for research before going into the base. If you spend some research on it, you can even go into this mission with Personal Armor and Alloy Weapons and the bigger team from Sykstriker. Proxygrenades also do help a lot and fire.
My only complaint thus far is with Terror missions. The actual missions are good (outside of a Floater tossing a grenade into your ship turn 1) but I've found, at least on the Port attacks, that the end game turns into a elongated game of hide and seek. Exacerbated when in one mission I had two floaters stuck behind some train yard railing, which I only found after much exhaustive search.
I look forward to future updates, as they come. Good work.
I think i am gonna add some armed civilians on some missions to spice things up a little bit.
Jeah that can happen on those maps sometimes, but not let yourself be discouraged from such minor things.
I am working on a update as we speak, let yourself be surprised.
Played some more so I can give some more feedback. My current run is late in June. I'll pick some notable comments.
Late in June, consider yourself lucky to be alive, if you do not have Laser Weapons up to that point.
There are some green huge dudes coming soonish.
- All of my Terror missions to date have all been from TFTD, almost all of them but two were port/factory attacks, with only one being a resort attack and one being a Military base attack. In terms of difficulty, I found them challenging but manageable with good tactics, firepower and luck, only one Terror mission forced me to early abort when my landing zone was swarmed with Zombies and Chrysalids before I got off the craft.
Hm... too much TFTD terrains? Maybe i have to recheck the terrain assignments.
The Snakeman Terror Sites are actually really important for getting a Chryssalid Corpse, or the good medikits will never see the light of day.
I depends sometimes its necessary just to respond to the site and dustoff immediatly, to avoid the big score penalty.
I already have done a overwork of the scoring but still putting it to the test, will be in the next update thou.
- One terror mission started with a alien throwing a grenade into my craft and killing half my squad, decided to redo that one.
The good old classic grenade to the face, always a good one
- Speaking of terror missions, I had some kind of special alien mission which involved aliens hijacking a cargo ship. Interesting idea, except I had to instant abort that mission when, again, my landing zone was utterly overrun with a dozen zombies and chrysalids alongside plenty of snakemen, while I only had alloy ballistics. The near -2000 score penalty from that sent me into the negatives at the end of the month. Very rough, may have just been bad RNG with snakemen + tons of chrysalids all around my landing zone.
I call that really bad luck. But you can kill Chryssalids with Shotguns and Alloy Ammo but you have to get into 1-2 tile range to do this effectively.
High Risk - High Reward.
- The alien base attack was a good challenge, albeit a long slog towards the end. At minimum I only felt confident doing that mission with alloy ammo ballistics (especially shotguns) and alloy armour. I still lost half my squad.
- Drones are a god send, and I wish you could buy them from the start of the game. I keep a healthy reserve of Motion/Drones as I usually lose one a mission, I find them invaluable in breaching UFOs (I can put them at the door, best case they can open it next turn for entry, worst case they tank the shotgun wielding alien).
- Motion Scanners are a god send in general, far more so than in vanilla I find.
Jeah the early base mission is rough, there were a couple of people who actually had serious issues with this mission. You really have to think how you setup your team and how you use what equipment with whom. Just running in noobstyle will end in certain death in most cases.
So finally someone who actually uses the Drones! I was waiting for feedback regarding those.
Did you had a opportunity to try out the Drone/Medikit? You can use it to stim up your Shotgun soldiers so they can run longer (if you use Advanced Movement Methods Option).
Remember you can repair the Drones and Tanks, if you recover their corpses intact.
Motion Scanners in general are damn useful, everyone who does not use them will most likely end up getting loads of deaths. *evilgrin*
- The early game techs are a nice fit into the game (alloy ammo, alloy armour, upgraded ships, etc) and help make up for the delayed tech progression, which I enjoy. The upgraded Interceptor provides a very noticeable increase in combat efficiency.
I am glad to hear that you appreciate this
My current squad roster consists of half the squad as generic infantry men, with rifles and backup shotguns (weight pending), two grenadiers using the very effective grenade launcher, two snipers and two rocketeers, as well as two motion/drones. So far its proven very effective. I only shake it up for Alien Base Assaults where I ditch the Grenadiers and just give em a Rifle and Shotgun.
Seems like a familar setup, but i do have more then one combat team, usually 2 minimum, up until 6.
Grenade Launcher gets replaced with the Small Launcher later, there is even a Hovertank for shooting Elerium bombs.
Edit: I find these Alien special missions to be very brutal. Bordering on unfair. I just had a mission on another out of control ship, this time I had no super-skyranger and was just thrown on a empty deck, on the low ground, surrounded by snakemen, green bugs and chrysalids.
At the end of that long mission I somehow only lost two soldiers out of sixteen, and my two drones, however literally everyone else was critically wounded, and a rogue alien grenade destroyed my entire stockpile of equipment that was also dumped off of the skyranger.
I chose to just reload a older save and abort the mission, I'd rather tank the -1.5k score.
Jeah that is the Linership from TFTD, i did not had the time to rework the map so the UFO Defense craft can properly spawn on this map. Its works for TFTD since these craft are smalle 10x10 instead of 20x10. So for the time being you are literally out in the open. Its your one time chance to get a good ass whooping. ;P
I usually also just tank the score until finished reworking the Linership map.
Thanks you so much for your great valued feedback, please let me know more
Kind regards hellrazor
