125 day early feedback (1.22)

[mjc4wilton]

Decided to start put up my early thoughts as I begin to end my first play through as a X1 veteran player. Save is unmodified "Soldier" difficulty as I wanted to see what the stock experience is like before I try changing anything.

 

Performance
First, loading times for about everything are LONG. The same applies when switching between bases, though not nearly to the same extreme. The memory leaks are still around (I got up to 12 gigs after 6 hours). Also there seems to be a lot more hitching during combat than back in the steam demo in February. I trust that this stuff will be looked into however I think some caching on the geoscape would be a relatively quick fix for some of the performance between bases and the like. The loading times right now I'd say are my biggest technical gripe of the game and are probably close to the worst I've seen off solid state storage (Game is installed on my boot drive (Win 10 Pro). 808Gb free of 930Gb after formatting. Drive is a ~2 week old Crucial MX500 1TB (29 power on, 223 hours, 546GB total writes)).

Geoscape Gameplay
Geoscape gameplay itself feels very similar to X1 and I don't have a whole lot of gripes. I messed up by waiting too long to get started on my second base and the long build times for everything caused me to have to fast forward quite a lot of the way through the early campaign to get stuff up and running enough to be workable. Research seems to simultaneously accelerate too fast and too slow. I find myself unlocking the research topics pretty quickly to get lasers, plot progress, etc. however that causes a backlog of random stuff to still research due to some of the timers (I still haven't researched mag weapons for example and I am already at about 50% of my troops using lasers). I think shortening some of the research timers for early game stuff would be useful along with maybe adding more required research topics between major researches (I would like to see something about learning to understand alien electronics, programming, material design, etc. as an early game prerequisite for some more advanced tasks for example). I generally like longer campaigns though so this point may just be a playstyle conflict. 

Another balancing change I'd like to see is a better way to acquire alenium and alien alloy. Either increasing the reward amount in some situations (such as base captures and maybe larger UFO recoveries), or reducing the cost for some of the major upgrades would be nice. This could also be related to how I found myself not deploying to as many UFO crashes as I would have liked early game as some of my soldiers would take a long time to heal after some more difficult missions and with the more limited barracks / training space I didn't feel like I should recruit more soldiers to rotate through. Perhaps just upgrading the amounts of soldiers in the barracks and training center would be enough of a balance there.

Ground Combat
Overall solid. I would like a bit more verticality in some situations (especially urban cities during terror attacks for example). Beyond that, everything felt great apart from the performance issues. I think the gameplay here is pretty well balanced as is. Grenade range is good, visibility and night combat are enjoyable, etc. Perhaps if anything, an upgraded shield would be nice made from alien alloys or something harder with maybe 160-200 HP rather than the base 80 to make shield carriers more useful. The 10 round burst on MGs could also use maybe a 1-3% accuracy buff as currently my AR has 0 kills despite having over 12 missions and plenty of opportunities to actually kill something.

Aerial Combat
This one is interesting. I primarily used auto resolve as I don't particularly care for the mechanic back in X1 and the one here seems the same with just some minor AI tweaks. In terms of the general threat level, things seemed to escalate from 0 to 100 within a few days where my basic fighters were not fast enough, hardened enough, or have enough fuel to interdict, fight, and even remotely win combat scenarios with anything larger than light craft when previously they did absolutely fine. 

In terms of the mechanic itself, I think the entire mechanic (which currently is an X1 clone it seems) needs to be gutted and replaced. The ground combat is amazing, I think something similar should take its place. I think introducing pilots as characters would be a good start so that pilot skill can become a factor. Furthermore, the way the ground combat is played is an action -> reaction loop thanks to the turn-based element. If aerial combat took a similar approach and made the combat more turn based rather than real-time with pausing it would be a lot more enjoyable. Seeing something like getting a radar lock and having to choose between deploying chaff, flares, or evasion maneuvering on the next turn would be nice as an example. Regardless, something more turn based should be the end goal for aerial combat as its always seemed out of place given the rest of the nature of the game and how many people get into it due to the xcom-like combat.

Steam Achievements
I did not expect this feature for early access. It seems well done and fun and I just want to give props for having it in this early and I hope that more achievements get added in the future. I would like some more referenced names like "Welcome to Earth," "All your base," etc. as having those pop-culture references after completing one makes it more immersive in my opinion since I can hear the line from one of my soldiers quite easily and has earned a few laughs.