MagicMagor

No worries. Before i leave for a short vacation (and forget details) here are some more observations from my continued play. I'm nearing the end of month 3. I did the second cleaner cell. Shield and assault soldiers had warden armor, everyone else none. Pistols and shotguns were upgraded to laser, rifles and sniper were still acc. I advanced towards the east, which turned out to be the correct direction. Reinforcements started to arrive shortly after i had found the VIP. No engagement with the reinforcements, and this was the only mission were i had 0 causulties. Which seconds my earlier point - the difference between advancing in the right direction and the wrong direction makes a huge difference in diffuculty in this mission. A few days after that i tried the cleaner HQ, but reloaded a save before that after closing in on the final room. The "attack base" mission was a welcome difference to the usual missions. I can't say if my rather substanial losses were due to my mistakes or the difficulty of the mission (the beginning felt good - once i encountered sentry guns things started to go down). I will attempt the mission later, with better gear and more soldiers. My verdict on the cleaner missions in general is, that they should not be attempted when they pop up but later. Take advantage of the fact, that these missions are permanent. (Due to low starting panic, i had no trouble with panic) After that i had 3 UFOs pop up during a timeframe of one or two days. My angels were in repair (turns out they are no match for UFO fighters), so a small UFO, a medium UFO and a landed UFO turned up. I would have tried going for the landed one, but the medium one attacked my base. Defending my base was an interesseting mission. Especially since the tactical map is based on my base layout. I took quite some losses (1 sentry gun, 4 soldiers - but only 2 soldiers remained dead after the mission), but it felt the aliens started to ramp up. One potential bug: I had started constructing the dragonfly dropship but that stopped due to not enough storeroom. However after building a second storeroom the project was still on hold - i had to scratch it (and all progress on it). Not a bug but a strange UI-thing: After the base defense mission i had recovered one destroyed sentry gun, which enabled the repair sentry gun engineering project. The popup "new engineering project available" only offered me to "assign new research project". I don't know if it is because i'm not that good at the game but expanding feels incredible expensive. I built a second base in asia and outfitted it only with a radar and two hangers. But building new interceptors were expensive (to be fair, i could have built 2 angels, but decided to wait, since i was close on finishing the research and the improved interceptor - which i can't build because i lack enough alenium, oh well). I think i will have to invest at least half of my funding for next month to get the second base up and running. All while i feel ill matched with the aliens if i go by the base defense mission. However maybe that feeling is desired, since it feels like trying to catch up but never being fully on par (there are still so many research project i want to do...) All in all, i have a lot of fun with the game so far, but the pacing feels a little off. In the beginning not much is happening (a lot of waiting), the cleaner missions seems to pop too early and by the end of month 3 things start to pick up maybe a bit too fast.

I have never played any of the old UFO/Xcom games but i have a little experience playing tactic games and played Xenonauts 1 a little bit (12 hours). Initially i wanted to play a "full" campaign in the EA version (or at least as full as it is possible) before giving feedback but the last mission prompted me to give feedback now. I'm playing on soldier difficulty and so far i lost at least one soldier in every mission apart from the first one. While i attribute this to my mistakes in most of these missions, the last mission i played (taking out the VIP in a cleaner cell) i felt the game didn't give me the tools to play this a lot better. I had 8 soldiers (2 shield, 2 assault, 1 sniper, 3 riflemen) and the MARS, all accelerated weapons and warden armour. However because i split my team up and moved south and north of the dropship, while the VIP was in the building east of the dropship it took me a long time to find and kill the VIP. Because of that there were many reinforcements on the map and i lost 3 soldiers + the MARS in that mission. Now i have nothing against difficult missions but in comparison to the last missions (were i only lost 1 soldier, due to my bad positioning) this felt like quite the difficulty spike. And this was my second attempt, in my first attempt the riflemen and sniper had no armour and i reloaded an older save after i saw how many enemies there were. I think the difficulty of that particular mission is a combination of three things: 1. You don't know where your target is, so if you are unlucky and pick the wrong direction to advance, you spend a lot of time searching the whole map 2. The sheer amount of enemies will slow you down significantly 3. The timer and reinforcements make it impossible to play this slowly Now exploring more of the map rewards you with cleaner data (i collected quite a few) but that pales in comparison to the difficulty due to the reinforcements. It is possible that i run into a bug, since the changelog of 1.22 mentions the timer between reinforcements changed to 5 (from 2) turns - it didn't felt that way, but then i don't know how many enemies each wave spawns. One small thing that would have helped greatly would be a hint as to where the VIP is. Just a mention from the operations officer "we suspect the vip to be north of your dropship" or something along these lines would have helped. Than i could still make a calculated decision to go straight towards the VIP or cover more ground for extra cleaner data (and less enemies in my back). Currently it felt like a roll of a dice. Or slow the cleaner progress on the strategic layer down, so this mission spawns later (or make it otherwise a little bit clearer, that waiting to do this mission might be a good idea). However overall i enjoy the current state of the game. The MARS unit is awesome. Some smaller things i wanted to mention: In my first UFO mission two soldiers were downed, however only one was KIA. The other survived, but i don't know which soldier that was. An icon on the mission debriefing screen if a soldier survive despite being downed would have been nice. The pacing feels slow in the beginning. While that gives plenty of time to recover after a mission, most of the time in geoscape is spent waiting. It is hard to gauge my current fighter performance (and therefore whether i should invest in better fighters or instead in better soldier gear) when after nearly 50 days i only had one UFO encounter. A turn counter on tactical missions would be nice. In theory i could count the turns myself, so i don't feel that there is a gain in hiding that information. However during timed missions, it could help immensly in planning your approach.