Stephen Sossna said:
The Problem with current XCom is that it is hard until about mid-campaign, and then gets easier. Barring stupid decisions, a plasma-equipped Psi-Soldier can easily deal with anything even on impossible. The difficulties change how hard the game starts out, and at which point the difficulty begins to ease up, but it always gets easier as you go.
To be honest, I don't think that's so bad.
I kind of like that "lurch" when you start out and everything is going to shit and there's simply too much to do, and then you slowly start to feel like you have more and more control. Yeah, it's the complete opposite of how a game is meant to work, but it does make you feel like you're actually turning the tide rather than just slowing down the unstoppable alien juggernaut. Both have their merits I guess, the first two X-Com games were very much an escalation and it worked, but it did sometimes feel like you weren't having much of an impact.
GabeZhul said:
The MECs and genetic enhancements and whatnot sound great, but my biggest gripe with Enemy Unknown was the two weapon tiers where lasers were downright skippable with just a little forethought. I want to see more tiers, like say; traditional -> railguns -> lasers -> plasma -> quantum (or gluon, or unicorn fart or whatever)
The thing is, the campaign isn't really that long, and you shouldn't really be out-teching the aliens because you're reverse engineering and building on their technology.
That said, Firaxis did acknowledge that they kind of dropped the ball in making lasers straight-up inferior to plasma, particularly relative to the effort and materials needed to produce them.
Personally, I think the Tier 0 (projectile) weapons should just be terrible (as they are), the Tier 1 (laser) weapons should do mediocre but reliable damage with high accuracy, while Tier 2 weapons (plasma, alloy) should have the potential for massive damage but a much higher possible range.
That way, you'd want to give your recruits and less skilled squad members lasers so they could actually hit stuff and finish off weak or badly wounded enemies to gain experience, while your more experienced squad members use plasma/alloy to inflict high damage on big enemies.
The other thing that's really missing is a tier 1 missile launcher upgrade. The blaster launcher is pretty much the ultimate weapon, but it arrives so late in the game as to probably not have much effect.
