Garriath said:
KingsGambit said:
Thanks for writing back!
In response to your concern that the sequential missions take away strategic choice, I forgot to mention a key feature: troops now become "fatigued" after a mission and are undeployable for a number of days. This means that your resources are very limited in choosing which threats you respond to- actually being able to confront every attack as it happens would only be possible with an extremely efficient, well-designed team.
Just to give a broader sense of things, every soldier that comes back from a mission completely unscathed is fatigued for 5 days. If they get wounded, they're out for a week or two, and if they're gravely wounded, they're out for a month or so. Combine this with the fact that once the game gets going (I'm at the point where we're about to go after the base with the psion, oh joy), you're going to be getting an alien attack every couple of days, and it means you really have to maintain a large, large stable of functional troops.
They also balance the fact that you have 6-8 troopers on your team by having more enemies, which in a turn-based area where you're facing down a bunch of chrysallids, means that every now and then you'll have these pitched 10 on 8 battles that are really crazy.
The damage reduction can make things difficult at times; some enemies have damage reduction that shaves damage off every hit, and when you bump into a cyberdisc with basic weapons, it means almost nothing short of a rocket, grenade or shotgun is going to leave a scratch. But then again, those guys are supposed to be hard, and if I bump into an enemy who I probably can't kill the turn I encounter them, maybe that's an interesting level of difficulty.
This is the first I've heard of 62 health chrysallids. Given the way that the mod throws waves of enemies at you (I once did a terror mission that had 20 zombies on it, there was just no way to kill them all before they turned some hostages and spawned into chrysallids themselves), I'm hoping I keep well ahead of that curve.
KingsGambit said:
The missions coming sequentially instead of as a choice of three however I'm not quite sold on. As well as tripling the amount of play, I would imagine that it removes the panic management element. The point of having to choose between the three is that the two we *don't* do increases the panic on those continents. It adds the strategic choice of picking between panic level and different rewards. eg. go for the 4 engineers or keep panic in Asia low. Wouldn't being able to do every mission mean panic levels all stay low (and additionally, the troops get more missions to level up on)? When do the mid-range enemies start appearing, out of curiosity?
They change the way panic works in the mod - it goes up incrementally rather than by whole bars, and the primary way by which it grows isn't by forcing that '3 simultaneous attacks' question, but by having all alien incursions that go unresponded to, which, in the early game where you only have sattelite coverage of a couple of countries, is a lot, increase panic gradually. So panic won't grow in massive bursts with those weird choices, but during the early game it will grow everywhere you're not defending, and all you can do is burn along and try to get sattelite coverage, which is much harder to get, and with changes to air balance, harder to keep.
