Thoughts on XCOM 2

Just wanted to offer my own unsolicited opinion on turn timers.

I really like the idea of kicking the player in the pants and getting them moving. I don't really think that a hard and unchangeable timer is the best choice to motivate though. I liked the final mission in xenonauts, in which we were given a window to act, and after which, the game starts pushing back with ever-increasing enemy reinforcements.

This is something that XCOM 2 sort of does, but the enemy reinforcements are usually so trivial that it feels half baked. I think that if the drop ships had just kept coming, and delivered fiercer troops, it would have been a more effective, less 'gamey' timer.

Though rare are the games I played in my entire life that have a balanced difficulty curve, I'm still wondering why is there no one out there that implements scaling difficulty settings. Instead of putting fixed difficulty settings and just wishing the player will be neither too strong nor too weak when getting to a specific point where otherwise it's going to be either boring easy or impossible for the player, why not simply use a percentage of current's player overall strenght? Is there a reason why no one ever tried this?

Scaling is a lazy, horrible mechanic. In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, if you rush through the game, there's no enemies in later areas cause you're too low lvl.

In Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, enemies also scale so you'll face rats lvl 30 with 150 HP with more skillpoints invested into their skills but they have the same (weak) skills and no items!

Scaling doesn't reward you for playing well and doesn't punish you if you play bad.

4) Combat Mechanic Changes: A few changes to the combat mechanics worth touching on, I think. The first is the much heralded concealment mechanic, which is initially fun but I actually don't find has much impact on the gameplay. I started ignoring it entirely in the later stages of the game (it only affects the first fight) and I still did fine.

I don't think that they could make this very impactful, because the fact that aliens can always see you in Nu-Com is the reason that the Nu-Com battlescape so much more balanced and difficult than XCOM and Xenonauts were, imo.

The null lance, which allows you to hit everything in a straight line

I've only played XCOM 1, but I like the idea of this. Weapons that allow the player to abuse the geometry of the map like this are fun, even if they're farfetched.

I am currently playing XCOM 2 on Commander Ironman, so I wanted to share my thoughts as well. I like the game very much and I would give it 9/10 right away as I am not experiencing any issues. Maybe I am lucky though.

I like the fast paced combat and timers as well and I haven't found it less tactical. Maybe it would make more sense with the mod True Concealment where the timer starts after concealment wears off because sometimes I was missing 1-2 turns. Once it happened to me that I didn't make it to the computer with a hacker in time, because it was on the second floor and it was not possible to get there by climbing, only by stairs. On another mission some of my troops haven't reached the evauation area in time and were captured, which is btw very good feature as well. You have to free them later on. Despite these failures, I continue just fine.

What I would like to see in Xenonauts 2 is the possibility to get soldier/engineer/scientist from an event. There were events in Xenonauts 1 like sunken ship or bombardments, it would make sense to have a rescue mission event after to get random outcome.