A question and some more feedback.
It's a pleasure!
What do I need to produce Alien Laser Rifle ammo? I had the rifles themselves and the clips researched for months, I'm able to build laser cannons for my aircraft as well as laser HWPs - both tanks and hover and would soon be done researching the laser defense. I just got cyberarmor built for most of my people and decided to build some laser rifles to help with logistics so I could remove some of the various mid to long range weapons I have cluttering my deployable craft and bases, I got some rifles built and got the unpleasant surprise of not being able to make ammo for them - all I have is two clips I captured during an UFO mission a few months back.
What you need is a miniaturized power source which can be used for powering hand-held weapons. For craft weapons and HWPs it's not an issue, since you just use a big battery, but for energy beam handguns you need something much smaller. (Which is one of the reasons we currently don't have laser weapons in real life.)
The Cyberarmour makes a huge difference and allows a lot bolder gameplay, especially when capturing enemies are concerned and as importantly, in underground missions, which up to that point were suicide without saving and loading as if there was no tomorrow.
The opinions on this armour are vey divided and every player sees it as something else. I think the most prevalent opinion is that it's not worth its price. I admit I deliberately made it somewhat controversial, so I am rather happy with this result.
Mission wise, range continues to be an issue, especially in the Americas. All Exalt missions that spawn lately have only people I've already captured enough of for them to no longer show in the research tab for interrogation and no joy with finding anyone who can unlock their HQ.
I don't think EXALT is inherently harder to complete than the other starting cults, but a lot depends on RNG.
Some bugs are harder to squash than others.
A note about the T'leth Embassy - I had my first underwater mission earlier tonight and it almost turned into a complete disaster because it put a bunch of rookies I had in the Skymarshal for training into the submarine and ignored most of the ten experienced agents I had inside to babysit them during missions. Perhaps a note that not only you shouldn't bring dogs on such a mission because they will drown but only the soldiers who will fit in the submarine and no extras? Having five of the nine divers as newbies was very, very painful.
I think it's clear enough from the "Underwater Operations" article:
"Remember that the Calypso can only accommodate up to 7 agents; if you bring more, they will have to sit this assignment out."
Sure, I can add more reminders everywhere, but after the player get it it will be just more clutter.
I did have two head-hunter missions tonight and the experience was very different. First, it was Master Lo - the Ninja trainer. I did get him alive with only one casualty - he used his super special, ten thousand times folded Katana to turn Amenyst, the base's Robo-Tank mascot into scrap. It was hard persuading my squaddies to bring him in one piece after that. I had to promise he'll be subjected to all the fun and games my Intelligence officer could think of to make them see reason.
I'm sure he will... appreciate it.
Next, it was that alien assassin fella and he accounted for the first casualties I suffered, if you don't count poor Amenyst, since equipping most people with Cyberarmor - throwing grenades across the whole map after I had all his drones shot down was an unpleasant surprise.
Good, good! I've been worried he was too passive.
What kind of weapon did he use?
On a related note - perhaps interrogating those special people if someone gets to all the trouble to bring them back mostly intact should give some info about them? In the Ninja trainer's case I got a short blurb that it might be a good idea to keep my people far away from each other if I'm facing psionic enemies and in the assassin's case, a dossier about a MiB affiliated agent, that gal who is supposed to be able to mind-control multiple people at the same time and has influence over multiple governments. Nice touch, however wouldn't it have been better if we actually learned something about the people we just interrogated too, after potentially going to some significant trouble to bring them in intact in the first place?
I'm all for this, but these articles won't write itself... If you feel inspired to give it a try, I will definitely appreciate it.
All things considered, those head-hunter missions were a nice touch, however, especially in the assassin's case, it was a very good thing it spawned after I had Cyberarmour otherwise he could have wiped out most of my people with his grenades without seeing a trace of him.
Well, he's basically a Boba Fett expy...
Now for an issue, one that the assassin mission highlighted. That was the fourth time since I began deploying tanks that said HWP got stuck into the transport unable to exit because there was something spawned right at the ramp. I had to either use its cannon, which would have blown up a lot of weapons I had in the transport, or let it sit the mission out. I tried to clear the trashcants with a trooper armed with a CAWS with AP ammo, it didn't get the job done.
It happens. Not as much as it used to, but in fact I like this effect to a degree, as it highlights why infantry is better in dense terrain. And in general you can get it out with some effort.
Can anything be done about this? The only alternative is to keep just enough equipment in a transport to arm the people I'm bringing at any given mission and that's simply too much of a bother, considering that depending on the type of mission, expected terrain and how experienced the people I'm bringing are, the loadouts could vary quite a bit. It simply takes too much time to load and unload equipment before and after each mission to bother with not practically having most of a base's arsenal loaded in the transport stationed there.
So the issue is specifically with the equipment tile? But the only enclosed craft where the HWP spawns at the ground level is the Skymarshall, and the Skymarshall has side doors which you can use to get your people out and clear the vegetation.
Depending if you know what to research and what missions to push.... and being lucky actually getting them, the position in the campaign late '99 can be radically different. While cyberarmour did help tremendously and is the main reason I didn't scrap the playthrough and likely left the mod for greener pastures due to not being willing to grind through the first two years of light cult activity and alien lifeforms, once I knew what I actually needed, I had to spent months skipping a lot of missions and letting the aliens do basically what they wanted until I actually got the item I needed to unlock precise alloy shaping and thus the research necessary for the cyberarmour. It really didn't help that the mission types necessary were among those that in my experience spawned the least.
I don't think equipment is as crucial as you suggest, though of course it's important. I would say having experienced agents has more impact, they can deal with most aliens using fairly standard Earth technology (sniper rifles, napalm grenades, early M.A.G.M.A. stuff, etc.). And the Alloy Vest isn't much worse from the Cyber Amour. (Honestly this is the first time I've seen anyone this enthusiastic about the Cyber Amour... It's nice.)
Now that leads to another issue, directly related with when I unlocked the cyberarmour and the time necessary to outfit my strike teams with it. By the time that happened, the aliens upped their game and I once again find myself in the unpleasant situation of being outclassed on the ground, which leads to the second issue - troop replacement. Once I had a full strike team, after a few months when in my three bases I my scientists being lazy, underworked and doing God knows what, I finally began tackling the various alien terror mission, shooting the odd UFO, going underwater and underground.
The point? While I did get some nice new loot to research, I lost nearly a third of my veterans in the spawn of a month in two underwater missions, one terror, the first I faced the sankement and those overgrown iguanas of theirs and bloody hell, the underground alien outposts - those in particularly were hell where my two best achievements after save-scumming like a champion were a lost laser tank apiece and no less than three or four veterans. That in theory is good, fighting in close quarters against explosive totting enemies and those overgrown slimes that are bullet sponges should be tough and generate casualties. The issue? It will be at least half an year to an year until I'm able to recover from the losses and that's an optimistic scenario. Ever since I took out the Lotus HQ a few months back, thus leaving only Exalt from the original four cults, the available missions where I can send mostly rookies were scarce. I've got an eight man newbie team in my third base that after an year of deploying all over the world hunting alien lifeforms that they can reach with a Dragonfly and lately a Hawkeye, they're still too fragile and green to even think about sending into anything serious.
Well, I understand, but that's how every X-Com game is... Maybe not as much in vanilla, as it was simply too short for this effect to emerge.
What difficulty are you playing? Perhaps you should just decrease it. There's no shame in it. (As long as you aren't playing on Beginner, which really is for beginners only).
So once again, any chance of hiring better soldiers at worst after Promotion III comes around? The biggest issue I have here is twofold - a long grind to make newbies worthwhile and to add insult to injury, the missions they can handle are the dullest and least fun... when those actually spawn. In the meanwhile, I have to curtail operations against the enemy, which incidentally includes going to some of the more engaging missions when they spawn or risk entering death-spiral as far as my troopers are concerned. That's not a fun way to play.
I have some elaborate and very concrete plans to deal with this, but it relies on code which has not been written yet.
