Cik

I think half cover could stand to be a little better. The cleaners especially seem to have absolutely no problems hitting people in it. Ultimately you can only use the cover the game gives you (shields work to some extent but shielding your way out of a surrounded position on some of the cleaners missions is borderline impossible) it is a little odd that taking cover is more or less totally suboptimal, because the optimal strategy is to move out of total cover - fire - move back into total cover. breaking LOS is really the way to play as much as you can, because only very long range (ex against sebillians) and LOS blocks really save you from return fire.

I'd like to see altitude / energy management with countermeasures and deeper missile play. doesn't need to be flight sim level but it'd be cool if the upgraded planes gave you more than more HP + more DPS. Also, we could use sidegrades to the different planes, with missile carriers vs. gunfighters (or mixture of both), plus a loadout system that gives the aircraft greater range and speed in exchange for a lighter loadout (less missiles / guns / countermeasures) If I remember X1 had some aircraft sidegrades, F16/Mig-25, I think that would be relatively easy and desirable to put back in. If anybody cares about my ideas I could sketch it out more thoroughly but that's what I want most of all. Oh, and I'd like the ability to escort transports, if that doesn't already exist (maybe it does..)

Just wanted to pop by and second the cleaner "issue". they seem on the whole much more threatening than alien enemy forces which are generally sebillians. On the second cleaner mission I have been demolished twice by the starting cleaner group(s) (out in front of the building among the container stacks.) They have you surrounded to start out with and they seem really, really accurate. Maybe aliens do slightly more damage but I step one foot out of heavy cover and these guys have me totally zeroed, just taking overwatch fire out of the fog all over the place. I had lasers and defender/warden and it barely seemed to make much of a difference. Maybe if defender/warden made more of a difference vs. standard weapons it'd be easier, but it doesn't seem to help that much. Just for scale I lost 6 reasonably skilled defender/warden armor with laser weapons to that mission for a failure, and a raid on a destroyer (landed, I think) I got through with like 1 loss (died as I entered the upper floor where there were 3 aliens at point blank range) I think the cleaners are cool but they seem very good at what the player is also good at, which makes them difficult to stand toe to toe with (at least for me idk) Could be they just have a really well prepared position in that one mission or bad luck but just throwing in 2 cents.