Jick Magger
Arcane
I'm pleasantly surprised by the game so far. Only major complaint is with performance. I've only played for around three hours so far and the game has crashed on me at least four times.
I have no idea what's up with the stun lancer guys, are they meant to have some form of down syndrome or something? They run into your entire squad, poke one of your guys for 3 damage and then get gunned down by everyone.
Medical Specialists are the best things ever.
Their drone heals and revive have no range limt and the ranged hack is always nice to have.
On the other side, sniper based sharpshooters are garbage. Probably because due to the uneven procedural terrain. Pistol sharpshooters are great though. Rapes every idiot who shoot at him, shoot at everything with high accuracy and provide secondary cover destruction via grenades in case the grenadiers are too far to help.
I find it hard to justify bringing a medic, because unless I get lucky with stocks in loot, I rely on combat protocol (and grenades) for early game guaranteed damage, and haywire protocol for shutting down mechs, which are very common in reinforcements even if the shadowchamber says beforehand there are no mech units in the zone. While the conservative choice is to bring a medic in case a lancer dashes past your overwatch and knocks your guy unconscious, that extra spot for a medic could be the second grenadier or sharpshooter.
Gunslinger vs sniper, why not bring both? Gunslinger has higher damage output overall, but sniper is better against armored targets. Either build should have long watch to pull off the phantom spotting play properly, I find return fire not all that useful, though it certainly looks cool.
I have no idea what's up with the stun lancer guys, are they meant to have some form of down syndrome or something? They run into your entire squad, poke one of your guys for 3 damage and then get gunned down by everyone.
They are actually really dangerous, as they have a chance of stunning, disorientating or knocking out your soldiers.
They'll probably die anyway, but it'll really throw a spanner in the tactical planning.
Also, 3 damage? On Commander they tend to hit for something like 5 or 7.
I don't think it's the graphics settings at all. You can turn off AA and it suffers the same problem.
I suspect they may have made the fatal mistake of using too much UEScript instead of shipping a finished product with most things done through functions. This was probably necessary to allow the game to be moddable, but really doesn't play well with performance. Why do I suspect this? Because the stutters always occur simultaneous with game logic being processed. Witness how the UI takes entire SECONDS to process you making a selection (backing out of building selection, cancelling a hack, etc). Notice how you can tell a movement you just selected is going to trigger a pod because the game suddenly stutters as your guy moves. Witness the game chugging hard at the end or beginning of a turn when destruction is being processed on the environment.
None of these things have anything to do with raw GPU power. The bottleneck is the scripting and how the engine handles that.
In any case, it is absolutely CERTAIN it is not GPU limited, since for the stuttering issues you can set every setting to the lowest setting and notice little difference in performance.
Had a Viper grab one of my troops through the ceiling+a wall, they should've baked this cake for a bit longer.
It's sitting at 74% on steam and that's dropping fairly quickly.
Damn! It happened!
Why so low ratings? Anyone played it here?
But most of that stuff is not about performance, but difficulty. Seriously, go read those user "reviews".Had a Viper grab one of my troops through the ceiling+a wall, they should've baked this cake for a bit longer.
It's sitting at 74% on steam and that's dropping fairly quickly.
Damn! It happened!
Why so low ratings? Anyone played it here?
User reviews always relate to technical performance first of all. It's pretty rare to see a game dinged for actual gameplay or decline, it's usually over bad optimization or something like that.
Wut? There's way, way less panic than in the first game. (Playing on Impossible/Legendary.)Panic is a broken mechanic. Maybe even worse this time around, because one mistake will probably cost you the game on commander. Anyway. I can take that a few men die, even officers, but when soldiers constantly panic it just gets tedious as hell. Firefights never really escalate. Start of battle. You take down one or two. An alien manage to flank and take out a man. Cool and all, but usually this means that you are down two men or more. One man dies, and then another panic. So when it's time for you to retaliate you are two man short... and yeah, if you are facing a sectoid one of your men will probably be mind-controlled as well. Happy times. You know what this reminds me off? Trying to PvP in WoW, in the good old days. You enter an arena but spend 75% stunned and unable to attack back.
Panic is a cool gameplay thing otherwise, but I don't think with this small-scale skirmishes it works out well at all.