A brand new year: The year of the handle

[legionof1]

Welp now late october year 3 and i think i lose. Siberia base decimated my gals and equipment stocks. Armor replacement will take 3.5 months and i have to make do with mostly raw gal replacements. Meanwhile there are sway government missions ongoing on 4 continents and the shutoff tech is 5 techs away. And i lost my manufacturing base to pure grey robe stargod base attack. Net loses this month total about 23.7 million and 8 months of base building.


So fair warning Siberia base is MUCH more difficult then it used to be. Stormtoopers and Supersoldiers have 20 Nightvision and 60% thermal. Flat and minimal exterior terrain means your essentially pinned inside your landing craft for the duration, Unless the stairs down are close.  And at least in my case i had 60ish foes in a 4 map tile layout(same size as runabout maps) on difficulty 2. Including 7 tanks. It was an epic battle that i greatly enjoyed playing to the end. But i do feel it is overtuned for where lies in the tech progress

[Dioxine]

Siberia is that hard since it isn't mandatory to finish the game.

[Arthanor]

Unless I'm mistaken, you also don't have to go as soon as it spawns, so you can prepare more if needed. And it'll keep spawning so you can go, decide the layout isn't good, take off again and try again next time, assuming it's not a static map.

The enemies with thermal vision are a pain but it's nice to play without over smoking some times.

[KateMicucci]

After a few organ grinder missions I gotta agree with what others have said: too much smoke, too much acid rain damage.

If the acid rain damage only discouraged gals from going on the mission with exposed skin, that's one thing, but when even green and blue armor gets eaten through in a few turns then that's getting silly.

Also, the manacles requiring both 100% of TU's AND two hands free makes these really hard to use.

[legionof1]

Side content position is valid. But i still feel its a bit over the top. I only won because i abused door and LOS mechanics. More then 3 times the density of strong enemies(power armor, terror units, etc) then pogroms in less space....

Nothing wrong with the enemy have excellent vision but that plus density on tiny flat map leaves no options but mechanics abuse, or a straight standup brawl which runs counter to the entire game to this point. Now i grant that i may have had an outlier in the spawns types but the density won't change much. Keep in mind the density increase for higher difficulties. So what 80-90 dudes on 4 and like 100 dudes on 5? On smallest map size? Seems absurd to me.

After a few organ grinder missions I gotta agree with what others have said: too much smoke, too much acid rain damage.

If the acid rain damage only discouraged gals from going on the mission with exposed skin, that's one thing, but when even green and blue armor gets eaten through in a few turns then that's getting silly.

Also, the manacles requiring both 100% of TU's AND two hands free makes these really hard to use.

Acid and smoke resistance is the key here not armor thickness. Smokey armor or dont go. I would bet money that was the design.

[KateMicucci]

Heavy tac armor has smoke resistance already, and 80% chem vs 70% chem damage for smokey. My tac armor gals still started taking damage after five turns- at the same time as the gals who didn't have helmets. I don't see how smokey helps.

[legionof1]

It gives you longer duration once the armor has worn out. Resistance still functions with 0 armor. You will absolutely run out of armor completing an organ grinder run irregardless of what you wear because of chem armor stripping mechanic. Stripping is a percentage of damage caused after resistance. Not final damage to hp. More resistance serves better for longer. Smokey is also relatively sooner and cheaper then H tac or defender tier. Organ grinders dont offer particularly high rewards after you managed the ghoul captures for tech. Doing a few early and then ignoring them seems the best use to me.

[Dioxine]

Siberia is perfectly doable with 12-strong+ squad, equipped with mid-late game tech. The solution to the number of enemies (which can reach 68 on the Jack Sparrow, but will be around 40 on John Silver - a third of them very weak, too) is the right amount of firepower to destroy/disable closest enemies instantly, and armor to withstand every weapon that isn't Tank, Baby Nuke or Supersoldier. If you can't do it, you're too weak yet to get endless lasers which are headache-savers.

As for the Organ Grinder, the lure is not monetary, there are Ghoul captures, slaves and most importantly, Life Support Systems to be won (if you need them). If the reward was too much, the player would feel missing out by not doing it. The key to this mission is speed and cold blood. If you finish it in 12-ish turns, you won't take much damage even with completely wrong armor (like Chainmail). Naturally the hospital downtime is high after such a mission, but not if you already managed to get Sickbay and Surgery. If you use Smokeys and well-trained squad, it's merely challenging IMO. It is supposed to be on the high end of the scale as well.

[legionof1]

Well after much consideration on my response I'm gonna to leave it at i respect, but disagree with the design choice. It is optional content and unless something changes, ill will mostly ignore it for future playthroughs. Nothing it provides is worth the cost/risk until late game, which by then tech negates much of the reward value. Maybe if space missions(energy gun limitation) had a higher difficulty or lasers where better in a broader range of land combat. The craft weapons are good but most of the lifting in the air goes to missiles due to shielding and lower risk from higher alpha. Laser and plasma base defenses.... meh

[Arthanor]

Some of the laser weapons (the laser HMG type thing especially) are pretty useful. And the laser-HMG thing is awesome against mercs too as a way to reliably drop all but the bersekers in one salvo at relatively long ranges. They're also the perfect weapons to give to teams tasked with facing "easy" enemies as you progress.

As for craft weapons, lasers suck indeed. They're pretty much only good for dropping civilian/faction non-military crafts since they are low damage, high RoF and high ammo count weapons. They used to be really good and worth the investment in parts, but not anymore.. Hopefully there are tweaks coming up for shields as a recharging HP buffer instead of flat damage reduction that will make lasers relevant again.

[karadoc]

Whether it's 'worth it' or not, I'm looking forward to facing some tough missions where really big guns are helpful (such as the update Siberia). It's good to have a brutal bloodbath every so often to spice things up. Actually, I like what Dioxine said about organ grinders (and I think the same applies to any very hard mission):

If the reward was too much, the player would feel missing out by not doing it.

I think it's really good for the game to have challenging and varied missions (for many reasons), but it's also important that players aren't pressured into doing tedious / gimmicky tactics to progress in the game. So in that sense, it's probably good if the really difficult missions are not "worth it" from a risk & reward point of view. Because if they were low-risk enough to be worth it, then they wouldn't be performing their role as 'really difficult missions', and if they were worth it by being high-reward, then it would push players into doing things that they might not enjoy.

On my previous playthrough, I cleared Siberia with long-range, super-powerful seduction skills through the smoke. The super soldiers were completely helpless vs my seductress suited gals...   But this time around, the seductress outfit and the smoke are both far weaker; so I'm looking forward to a big weapon shoot-out challenge.


[edit]
One more thing. For missions that are designed as optional challenging extras, I think it's a good idea if the 'pedia text signalled to the player that they should expect high-risk.

[CaptainCorkscrew]

Whether Siberia is hard or not depends. I was lucky the first time around and had no chance the second time it popped up. For Meridian, Siberia was easy, but he was much better equipped, had an arsenal of baby nukes, heavy plasmas to destroy tanks in one salvo and used cheesy bow tactics to kill everything in the vicinity without stepping out of the craft.
I knew that this mission was somewhat special, but I had no idea it was so hard and optional.
My guess would have been that it is essential to the main story.

[Dioxine]

For Meridian, Siberia was easy, but he was much better equipped, had an arsenal of baby nukes, heavy plasmas to destroy tanks in one salvo and used cheesy bow tactics to kill everything in the vicinity without stepping out of the craft.

That's what I mean by enough firepower.

[legionof1]

That's what I mean by enough firepower.

And the same reason i think its not worth the effort. If your fielding hvy plasma and baby nukes to "earn" laser tech your going backwards. The singular advantage of the nuclear lasers(at the moment) is weight/inventory space. But the moment you have training facilities weight is a non issue. And its a very small margin of primary weapons that need more then one reload in a battle. Shotguns mostly but even then the higher tech ones have generous clips for the damage potential.

The base defenses tech you get are only of middle quality, being neither the most accurate nor particularly efficient in terms of tile to firepower ratio.

Missiles are doing the lifting in air combat because hey damage reduction makes alot of the guns really poor against targets gunship or above.

Can anyone make a case for this being worth the trip at plasma tech besides Dioxine?

 

[Dioxine]

They're meant to deal with weaker enemies without the hassle/cost associated with all guns that use ammo; with the Battle Laser and laser gatling, they're not that highly inferior to plasma, either. You do Siberia once, you save a lot of maintenance later. If that's silly, well, my bad. But ammo manufacturing gets tiring at some point.

Also, neither the laser defense nor laser craft weapons are dependant on Russian Files.