I’m working up to a squad of six MEC’s. They’re utterly awesome for the alien terror missions where you have to rescue civilians before they’re murdered, and they’re badass for getting Meld before it self destructs. I fucking love my MEC’s.
Sorry for the double post, but, on Normal, I don’t really see any real benefit to using the flamethrower on anything more than one MEC for crowd control. The power fist is an instakill for most enemies, and does damage to the mechanized critters that aren’t damaged by fire. It’s also got limitless uses and ruins enemy cover.
I’m finishing up an Impossible game and I don’t see a lot of use for the Flamethrower, either. The guaranteed-hit AOE panic would be useful for the painful early game but the fist so massively outclasses it after that in all categories that it’s not worth investing in, since you have to replace the entire suit to change the weapon. Punching holes in walls and murderfying big targets is grand, but mid-game and later, I’d take the fist over the flamer just for the movement bonus alone. The flamer could have infinite ammo and I’d still be a little leery over it in the long run.
I’ll give them credit, they at least -tried- to improve the balancing of weapon and skill options in Enemy Within, by buffing the awful stuff and nerfing some of the bigger things, but there’s still a lot of no-brainers around. On the plus side, the new tech, gear and resource branches makes the mid-game is a lot more interesting now in deciding which expensive tactical options to invest in and then how to get the most out of them. The new maps are also pretty interesting, with a lot more verticality involved, although that does start to make the TU/LOS situation grate more.
End-game is even more of a yawn though, since your soldiers get EVEN MORE powerful than before, while the enemies have nothing new on the high end except armor on the sectopods. At least the proliferation of robotic enemies does pull back the extreme power of psionics a little.
Also, the bugs. My god, the bugs. The teleporting alien pack bug is STILL there. Rifle and LMG suppression are completely broken in so very many ways, with the most bizarre having the soldier turning into an eyeless, invisible phantom for the rest of the mission. I’ve seen so many that I’m starting to compile a bugs video thanks to Shadowplay…should be amusing.
There’s the “do the tutorial, the game freezes up” bug. The new Meld tutorial works, but the old one doesn’t for a lot of people.
I’ve heard a lot about the teleporting alien bug, but having sunk quite a few hours into the game, I can’t say I’ve quite run into it. The game seems to run patrols with one pack of aliens, and those come across your soldiers often, often at inconvenient times and places, but I don’t know that I would call it a bug. There are other actual bugs of course. I’ve run into the permanently wounded soldier and the immune to damage suppressing thin man. Not fun. The bugs really grate on ironman, which is a pity since it’s the best way to play the game IMO.
I at least haven’t seen any aliens teleporting directly into combat into the middle of my squad, like I did in EU, so maybe they actually have genuinely fixed that one, but they are definitely still teleporting around during patrol mode.
I have, on video, a UFO commander group of Ethereal + 2 Elites ending my turn inside the near left corner of their UFO, under surveillance of a cloaked soldier, then suddenly vanishing when the enemy turn starts and “patrolling” in from the fog of war from the forest outside of the opposite side of the UFO, a full screen away. Not even Chrysallids dashing have that much move, much less those beef slabs.
The “bug” is basically just an oversight in how enemies are handled. Aliens don’t really need to do anything when they haven’t been activated, so the game teleports them around rather than wasting time computing their pathing and such. A noble optimization, and probably a sensible one. Yes, they do teleport farther than their movement allows, but I’d call that “the AI cheating” more than “obviously buggy behavior”.
The problem is that they only flag as “active” in the scenario where they wander into the party’s view (whose turn this happens on is irrelevant). The issue seems to stem in the fact that Firaxis clearly didn’t know what to do with battle scanners and cloaked troops. You can’t give them the standard “activation” scene because they haven’t noticed your cloaked party member/battle scanner.
So Firaxis’ (strange) decision was to treat them as “inactive” when discovered by undetectable means. This sort of makes sense… except for the fact that it does this for their movement as well, so they can teleport around as if they haven’t been discovered. What should have happened is an intermediate state between “inactive” and “active” where they wander around with actual pathing, but don’t take cover or do other things they normally do when activated.
Basically the “teleporting” isn’t a bug, it’s an optimization/rule of the game. Something the AI is allowed to do under certain conditions. The bug/problem is that they teleport under circumstances where they shouldn’t be allowed to. (I’d say it’s a problem more than a bug, because Firaxis clearly made a deliberate decision not to wake the aliens up when battle scanners or cloaked dudes see them. A baffling decision, to be sure, but to me “bug” implies something a bit less intentional).
Except teleporting into the middle of your party, which I haven’t actually seen happen, but is definitely a huge bug.
I’ve had Exalt troops drop down from the sky into the middle of my troops, and same with thin men, but never on-grid teleportation.
Holy shit holy shit holy shit…
They brought back invasions of your base!!!
TPing not in the middle of your party can still fuck you big time. I remember one particularly disastrous assault on the alien base - you know how there’s a little nook up and left from the X-com spawn that doesn’t connect to anything but the big wide room you’re dumped into ? I always, always make a point to check there first because sometimes aliens do spawn there. So this time I check too, there’s nothing, fine, we move on. Next turn a cluster of chrysalids and some sectoids rush through the doors up ahead, so naturally my reaction is to back the fuck off. Last guy, my most badassest of snipers, took cover behind a chest-high wall overlooking that little nook… and now there’s 3 chrysalids there, who get to discovery move right up to him.
So that was awkward, and the end of that Ironman save.