Hey
Before I'm off to, as it turns out, visit Odie in Singapore, I wanted to drop a few more lines about my experience with the dev version. It's still R25186 from Jul 16, and some of the things I will say or have said may have been resolved already (I hear the intro sequence is now better, for example... haha).
But I assume that not too many people play the latest dev versions from start, through the entire campaign, and as a first time player, so I'll share a few impressions from that point of view.
All in all, it's a great game - which is most important, before pointing out only what needs improvement. It succeeds well at stealing time which was intended for other important things, like sleeping.
The only real (and known, but big) problems are within the battlescape. One is the pathfinding, aliens shooting walls, and the "action camera" not showing things (as in: knowing someone has been injured / reaction fired only from the sounds while watching the edge of the map). The other, most grave one, are crashes back to geoscape during the AI's turn, which were rather frequent especially in farm maps - and made me ignore some missions which kept doing this.
As for the rest of the game, the campaign scripts could be improved. For one, there are lots and lots of weaker ufos as opposed to, say, some stronger/grouped ones that one
has to leave alone at times. This gets a little tedious, especially if the missions are all the same. I now finally started seeing some Ortnoks (in August 84)... a point where I have, in the rest of the game, researched everything (except particle rifles, which haven't shown up yet) and covered the globe with bases. Too late, I think.
Alternatively, even if the aliens were all the same - what makes it repetitive is that they all
act the same. I.e., shoot direct fire-weapons and hide in predictable places. They never use grenades (unless they carry one when you spawn next to them), or any other variety of weapons. I know that improving that is somewhere at the bottom of the AI todo list. But I wanted to stress how important this is. There are more than enough weapons for the Phalanx - give some to the aliens, and make them use them in less predictable ways!
I would love it if they had, say, a grenade launcher. Or some kind of flamer, and someone who charges your flank with it. Where is the scary Chryssalid? That alone, some more variety there, would keep those missions interesting ENDLESSLY.
At least, again, let those aliens who
use differnet combat styles (Bloodspiders) see some action earlier.
The repetitive missions made me use the "auto mission" feature a lot. In combination with save-cheat, of course, since for now it's an all-or-nothing blackjack gamble that invites this kind of tactic. Obviously, a better design soultion here would be an intermediate result based on numbers, equipment and maybe the players' average performance, plus laziness penalty.
Finally, there were some minor difficulties like finding out how to destroy base installations (that one took me a while... and it's possible to cut off your entrance), aircraft particle beams having no ammo, abovesaid ufo recovery/yard issues and, naturally, a few gaps regarding the airplanes in development (Starchaser has Stiletto stats and flies backwards, and creates incomplete log messages, the others don't start at all yet, even with antimatter in store).
Apart from that, or even with that, I had much fun. And I'm looking forward to getting back to it at the end of the month.
See you around
Vio
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