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2.5-dev Feedback (Early Game, Hard difficulty)

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Ragwortshire:
I've now downed my first Supply UFO and found a Plasma Blade, so I guess that means the early game is over! I've enjoyed the campaign so far, and seem to be keeping up reasonably well with the aliens. I have 5 working Labs (all at my original base) and 3 workshops, and have been able to research all of the topics that seem important as well as producing two Dragon Interceptors. However money has been pretty tight all the way through.

Here are some issues which I encountered:

Geoscape:

 - Aerial Laser Cannons never appeared on the market for me, even though they were the second tech I researched. In the campaign_asymptotic_market script, they don't have an entry despite being a human-manufactured weapon. Is this intentional?
 
 - At some point I received the message, "United America is content and below the minimum happiness allowed for the campaign." Am I supposed to have lost now? Their funding dropped a lot, but it's recovered since then. I didn't have radar coverage at the time, but I assume the drop was due to a successful Harvester attack.
 
 - There's a long period from 110 alien interest to 200 alien interest, during which the aliens receive no new weapons, species, armor or UFOs. I think this is actually a design flaw. The Hard campaign starts at 50 alien interest, so this period of 90 interest is longer than the entire game up to that point! There was still lots for me to do on the Geoscape, but the Battlescape missions became steadily easier and more tedious.
 
 I really think this needs to be changed, since a new player might well get bored by such a long, early period of not much happening. I think the simplest way to do it would be to move some alien tech forward from 80 Interest to 110 and from 110 to 140, and some back from 200 to 170. That would smooth the difficulty curve out somewhat, rather than having this annoying dip.
 
 I do admit, though, that the current pacing is much better than it was before!

Battlescape:

 - In general it seems that during this period, the aliens are decent at short range combat but quite useless at long ranges. So my tactics were always focused around engaging the aliens at long range. When I researched Heavy Lasers, the disparity only became more apparent. This got tedious after a while, so I think my ideal weapon to encounter earlier would be the Needler.

 - Having researched all of the early Plasma weapons, I really haven't found a proper use for either the Pistol or the Blaster yet. This is mainly a result of the previous point: If the aliens are close enough for my Plasma Blasters to be effective, then *their* weapons will also be effective, which is bad. Also Plasma Rifles seem very powerful; a typical team for me early game was 5x Plasma Rifles, 2x Grenade Launchers, 1x Sniper Rifles.
 
 - Also a result of the previous point: Close-combat skills were not very useful for me. Assault specialists, on the other hand, get to play with the Plasma Rifle, the Laser Rifle (I assume, I didn't research it yet) *and* the Heavy Laser, which seem to be three of the best weapons. The Heavy Laser in particular surprised me; doesn't it have much more in common with the Sniper Rifle (long range, high accuracy, single shot) than with the Assault Rifle?
 
 - Certain maps were a bit weird. The Sewage Construction map is basically a huge, linear crawl across the map... and then the same again, but underground! The Bungalow map suffers from the opposite problem: There's no room to deploy your troops and the fight is over very quickly; moreover, smoke grenade abuse is needed as there is not enough cover for the whole team. Finally, the start position on Village is just evil and requires horrific smoke abuse to escape from.

AI:
 
I think that rather than trying to diagnose specific problems, I'll just give a general overview of how my battles tended to go:
 - Turn 1: Phalanx shoots any visible aliens, and deploys smoke grenades if needed. Team members take cover (or hide in the smoke, if cover does not exist).
 - Early on: Phalanx has all team members who can engage Reaction Fire and try to maximise vision and cover. Aliens emerge and either try to take some shots from long range (with not enough accuracy to kill) or move in closer and die to reaction fire. Aliens who took long range shots are taken out by snipers, Lasers or just aimed shots from Plasma Rifles.
 - Later on: Phalanx advances slowly across the map with Reaction Fire on. Alien stragglers either emerge one by one and die to reaction fire, or are spotted and taken out by Grenade Launchers.
 
 I guess that the AI has a rather hard task here; it somehow has to make its short- and medium-range weapons effective against an opponent which has long-range weapons as well. That would indicate things like hiding around corners, or maybe swarm tactics to overwhelm Reaction Fire. But the AI only has a routine for closing in along the most obvious path and shooting, and it doesn't do teamwork.

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