I downloaded 2.3 on release and have gotten to the Stingray production stage by now. Before that I played a few missions in an earlier version a year or two ago. I have probably played through X-Com 1 10 times, TFTD 2-3 and Apocalypse 10 or so as well, so I am pretty familiar with the tone of the games.
First I must say a big bravo and thank you for getting it all together. It really is shaping up to be an impressive game and something to spend quite a lot of hours playing.
I do have some feedback on things that could be tweaked to provide IMO a better experience though.
Regarding missions: By a combination of slightly choppy graphics, the lack of a save feature, few time units and quite unpredictable aiming, these are at best really good, but at worst either very predictable and repetitious or really frustrating.
Predictable and repetitious tends to be the case with scout/fighter UFO crash missions, where the aliens always start in the same spots, and you simply retry until your craft lands right next to them, so you wipe out all of them in round 1. Frustrating tends to be the case on the larger maps, especially where aiming is a problem. And because of the high UFO numbers, it is unviable to take on ALL missions, unless you have a LOT of time on your hand.
Aiming is sometimes an issue. The fact that soldiers can be damaged even when you "see" a miss (I would think this may be intentional going from the ufopedia text, or just an in-character fix) means that whenever an alien fires at a group of your soldiers, and perhaps misses all of them, which is really often, you have to go through them all to check exactly who got damaged. It would be far better if "near hit" damage is either disabled, indicated on the person with some blue lighting effect, or the engine tweaked to be accurate in what is displayed.
The accuracy model isn't always great - occasionally I have missed cleanly with all 3 Heavy Laser Pulse Wave shots at 98% accuracy. At the City map I believe it was called (one big tower block) I spent a frustrating two hours because the aliens would fire through several Z-levels of stairs. I also found that I could shoot through the wall in places even though the aiming line went red, and at the top of the stairs, move through the wall.
The frequency of UFOs is probably the largest issue. Comparing with X-Com 1, research progress, # of UFOs appearing etc, I would estimate that on Normal difficulty I get about 2.5-3x the occurence of UFOs. Usually there are 2-3 in the air at the same time, plus two terror missions, plus 2-3 crash sites. In UFO 1 you had occasional periods of high activity making you go "Oh Shit", which was when you knew a base was being built, and you could spend the time with less activity to think through your strategy. In UFO:AI, I have just gotten the Stingray craft, and just had my first Sheevan sighting, with no bloodspider yet, just saw the first Supply ship, and the UFO number has passed _300_. Yes, THREE HUNDRED UFOs and no endgame in sight.
This is a BIG difference in the feel of the game. In X-Com 1 you were pretty certain whether or not you would be able to take down any UFO 90% of the time at any point in the game, and you didn't encounter that many, so you had a pretty good control of the flow of the game. You had a clear choice, to crashland it or attack when it landed. Terror missions were quite rare and a "Big Deal".
In AI, taking down UFOs is a roll of the dice until late in the game, every mission is a terror mission, and UFO landings seem a lot more rare. _Because_ the missions are somewhat frustrating, the _number_ of them is simply too high, which forces you to rely on autocomplete or to just ignore them. At the present I speed through a week at a time, sometimes two weeks, ignoring 30-40 UFOs and 10-12 terror missions, with no ill effects.
Autocomplete by the way has stopped working altogether. For the first quarter of the game I could autocomplete nicely, for the next quarter it took 3-4 tries, and it now never succeeds. If you wanted to expand Autocomplete and make it more in-game, you could make it "Assign to army" instead, and with levels of military capacity as an additional stat for each nation, tied into nation happiness. E.g. if you sell lots of items on the market and UFOs to a nation, their military capacity goes up - so they will happily do missions for you. Doing missions reduces capacity. If capacity is low, they come up against new technology or large numbers of aliens, they are more likely to fail and more likely to take a big happiness hit.
Not to mention annoying gamebreakers (at least for my type of player who saves often and reloads if I suffer a massive setback). The two particular ones are when a UFO appears and shoots down your transport craft (annoying BECAUSE progress is so very slow) and when a base is assaulted apparently by land, as a network of 3 base radars and 1 radar installation was unable to detect the UFO, so I lost the base.
The SAM and base installations are interesting additions, but I feel they detract somewhat from the UFO feeling. To avoid big attacks on my main base I just plonked a hangar base and a production base right next to it, along with 3 sam sites, and tons of anti-air in all of them, making it an impenetrable area often littered with crashed UFOs.
Advancement seems somewhat broken as well for the Speed stat. My soldiers have the same number of TUs they started with, plus 2-3 for those who started the lowest, after having done 40 missions each. This places all of them at about 30-32, up from in some cases 28-29. The aliens have enough TUs to walk several steps and fire off 4 snap shots, placing them at 40+. This just feels far too slow.
I am not sure what is the deal with reaction fire. From what I have read here I get the impression there has been a lot of to and fro, but the UFO way worked perfectly fine - if you have TUs at the end of the turn, you can use them for reaction fire. It is mindbogglingly silly that a soldier will only reaction fire IF he has the reaction fire button ticked, AND that this limits the number of TUs. People will understand and remember TU costs after only a few missions, so the ideal solution is that reaction fire is ALWAYS done based on current turn remaining TUs. If you want reaction fire, don't use all your TUs, is an extremely simple rule that minimises unnecessary mouse clicks.
To add to that, it feels somewhat silly that your experience when you land at a crash site depends 100% if the aliens are facing you or not. If they are facing you they will pepper you with reaction fire - even on the units not moving. Yes, if you move 4 different units, the aliens may "reaction fire" 5-6 times on a 5th unit you haven't moved at all. This is silly. A good compromise might be that aliens always face you but have a higher hurdle / less TUs available on the 1st round.
Game progress isn't excessively slow, but if I had actually played through all 300 missions I would have killed myself by now. I still haven't seen the Needler, Particle weapons or the Bloodspider.
What I feel are the biggest problems with the game therefore aren't really down to any single cause, rather just a lot of things acting together. Big map terror missions are frustrating _because_ of the aiming issues, choppy graphics, low TUs and the extraordinary frequency of them. Small map crashes are OK, but end up repetitious because of fixed placement, but changing this would cause even more annoyance.
I also feel that UFO1 and Apocalypse were enjoyable to some extent because you could choose how hardcore you wanted the experience. If you used save and load extensively, they actually were very casual games. If you didn't, they were pretty hardcore. AI hasn't really decided what it wants to be.
So my suggestions are:
Geoscape:
* Reduce the frequency of UFOs. Quality, not quantity. I can't think of clear reasons why you can't pick almost any UFO frequency you want with compensating tweaks of funding, costs, item income etc.
* Have UFOs land more often and do terror missions less often, tweaked to give respectively smaller and greater impacts on nation scores.
* Reduce dismantling times. Doing a big UFO mission in itself should best be somewhat frustrating and take quite a bit of effort, but with a very clear gain at the end. The extraordinary dismantling times takes away the "gain at the end" part.
* Make the relation between UFO yard distance and time more fixed and the smaller of "on the same continent" or "moderately close", and reflect this in the game. Optimising players will always seek to minimise production times, so they will stick the yards almost on top of the bases, and SAM sites and radar sites on top of that again, leading to a rather un-UFOy experience. OR, when you place them, indicate the "distance category" for each existing base so you can see how far away you can go before it raises the research time.
* Consider not having SAMs. It's a nice idea but execution is difficult to do well (you end up with a "megastack"). This should be less of a problem with lower UFO frequency.
* Some stats on the craft weapons would be nice. At the moment the stats are given for ammunition only, not showing anything for ammoless weapons. This could be put in the Ufopedia if nowhere else.
Advancement:
* Up Speed stat gain quite a lot, at least to until you reach the middle range. The slow gain and low levels makes the loss of a single soldier and later missions quite frustrating.
* It would be great to have automated training facilities, so there is some minor stat gain across the board for all soldiers over time. Otherwise nobody will ever change their soldier's weapon type, making Accuracy redundant.
Missions:
* Reaction fire: Should be automatic based on remaining TUs. If there is a 'type of shot' button it should indicate which shot type is _preferred_ (and if there isn't enough for that, do a less accurate shot). Ideally, reaction fire should only be allowed against the soldier moving.
* Reaction fire on 1st turn: Have most aliens face the transport craft. Lower alien TUs or up their hurdle.
* Aiming: Percentage displayed should always be the right one. The maps would be better if the alien debris wasn't so bizarrely shaped (strange triangles) that you never know for sure whether a shot is blocked or not.
* Base attacks: Losing a base really sucks. The current "always succeed with autocomplete as long as you have a single soldier" is a stopgap solution - alternatively, make base attacks a regular type mission where you can use either soldiers at the base or fly in a transport craft.
BUt other than that it's really great
Final edit: I have searched around and see from an old thread that the target speed stat gain is based on an expected average of 100 missions per soldier, for a gain of 10-15. This seems unrealistic. Firstly, it will presume that no soldier is ever allowed to die, because 100 surviving nonretry missions is exceptional. Secondly, assuming 30 minutes per mission (a low to moderate estimate when including retries) it assumes 50 hours spent in missions alone, excluding geoscape, which the average soldier (some more, some less) should reach over his career. This seems way too hardcore.
