Thoughts after finishing a soldier difficulty campaign

[BCool]

Great game, thanks for all the hard work!

I finished a soldier ironman campaign and started a veteran ironman campaign. I really enjoyed the game. The tension in the early game on ironman really made every decision feel important. Money is so tight that you really have to make compromises (like delaying the hospital and training center for example). I liked the air combat. I really liked the ability to rapidly refit the planes to fit the situation. I liked the mars platform and the different loadouts which can be customized for the mission (like using the smoke launcher for the Cleaner leader capture mission or the raid of their base) or customize the loadout for the aliens you expect to meet or for the environment (rockets or cannon). I think the grenade launcher also is really fun and frustrating early on. The ability to launch 2 grenades each turn and to carry a lot of ammo compared to grenades is worth a bit of frustration (I found the accuracy enhancing equipment helpful for my grenader). 

On my first play through I understood the limitation on only clearing 2 ufos of each type without paying OP points, but I wouldn’t have chosen it if I had known of the option at the beginning of the campaign. 

Interrogating the cleaner agents for more OP was great. I wish something like this continued with the aliens. Maybe at some point you learn a way to communicate with one or more of the alien types and you get OP the first time you capture each different alien of that type. If that would be implemented it would be nice to have a text popup when you select an alien on the map indicating the alien type. 

Perhaps introduce other opportunities to get OP points during the middle or late game. 

An option to get a some amount of OP instead of money for letting foreign governments to clear a downed UFO? (only once per UFO type perhaps)

I only played on soldier so I can’t say that the panic system was too lenient. I’ve played a lot of xenonauts 1 so I knew how important it was to control the skies. However there was no panic for most of the middle and late game. 

As other people have suggested, more mission variety in the middle and late game would be great. Like saving a supporter from an alien attempt to kill, or to flip them. 

Base attacks, seems like you should get some rewards for shooting the ufo down with base defenses. Perhaps a unique ufo mission where the ufo is more damaged than normal.

Random combat observations

I found that forcing your machine gunner to fire into a ufo filled with smoke with 0% chance to hit the aliens, ends up hitting the aliens anyways more often than not. I like it a lot, but perhaps not intended? You have to use control to fire at a space behind the alien that you want to hit

I was surprised that the jetpacks wouldn’t let you stop at a point in the air and scout the map as you could in Xenonauts 1. Is that something that will eventually be implemented? 

Also I was surprised the ARES (upgraded MARS) wasn’t able to move around like a soldier with a jetpack at least. {edit: I guess I never realized it could, sigh)

Random thoughts

Perhaps sometimes, especially when a fighter engages your interceptors, the aliens get the initiative and can place their ufos rather than the player. Might spice up some of those fights.

Probably never going to happen, but I thought it would be cool if there was an option to send 2 helicopters on a mission for twice the soldiers.

I was surprised there wasn’t an option to patrol over a landed ufo so the interceptors could wait to shoot it down when it left or an option to shoot at the landed ufo with interceptors to trigger an air combat perhaps. 

And since there is value to alien corpses with the ballistic testing, there really should be an option to just kill a captive alien (or just use them as resource for the project to start)

 

Edited May 11 by BCool
correcting a mistake