To be fair, Peltz is the only person I know who actually dislikes the game.
Not that he's not entitled to his opinion, but I and at least 4 people I know who played it liked it a lot.
Thanks for the tips Satsi - I actually finished the game a day or two ago!
By that time Cyberdiscs were a piece of cake. Like you said, as long as you immediately engage them with everything you got they become pretty easy to deal with. Or if necessary just one heavy with HEAT ammo will take it out almost instantly with one rocket.
I didn't continue with the diary since the first two attempts with all the named soldiers might have confused everyone, and I also didn't want to risk failing the 3rd try on ironman too.
But I was succesful! Once I figured out how the metagame worked (base building, research, engineering, sattelite management) I started to fire on all cylinders. I focused on sattelites early on, then once I had a steady income and safeguarded the countries covered by sattelites already I turned on engineering.
I neglected my hangar almost completely early on, and tried to work immediately to plasma weapons. Laser weapons seemed like a dead end. So I struggled a little bit in terms of firepower early on, but with the good armor I managed to develop instead I didn't really lose any people. I also learned from the first 2 attempts that I should never use more than 1 move (and then use the other for overwatch/to run back/to shoot) when moving into unknown territory. Too often I moved into fog of war with my last move only to startle a group of enemies instaflanking me.
With that tactic and a few vets I quickly started to establish a very good base team. Also very different from the first two attempts was that I would use a LOT more explosives (nades, heavy rockets) against strong enemies or groups of enemies than before. I was always trying to get as many weapon fragments and alloys from every mission and explosives destroy those, but I found that it's still preferable over risking a drawn-out fight with a lot of opponents with a high chance of one of your soldiers getting critted.
Once I got plasma weapons and good armor for all my vets the game became rather easy tbh. Muton Elites and Sectopods are still a bitch, but everything else is a joke. Even Ethereals are not a bother as you usually know very well when to expect one so you can prepare just fine to kill them in one turn before they can even do much.
The final mission
was also kind of easy compared to what you had to deal with before, especially with the new psi powers. I had no few than 3 psionics in my final attack squad, which made enemies low on will (mutons, sectoids, thin men) hilariously harmless. Only the two sectopods in the open at the end were a pita, and the final boss I took down in one turn with focus fire (which made everyone else insta-disappear). In some ways it's good though - a redonk boss fight with something that is a 100 times more powerful than anything you'd seen before would have been a little silly. This made more sense.
Some minor niggles:
- why can't I shoot/capture mind-controlled units? Or why don't they count as 'captured' when under control at the end of a mission for that matter? Was kinda silly having to wait until the mind control wore off and then dping a fusillade on it every time.
- switching around armor and weapons could have been a little more straightforward. Not that it was a huge bother, but still more than it could have been!
- had some (mostly harmless) CTD's in my first two tries, always when using laser weapons it seems.
- I know it's kind of against the spirit of the game but some sort of undo button would have been nice. Not for when you fuck up, but when you accidentally tell a soldier to sprint THROUGH a door instead of NEXT to it - would be nice to cancel the order as it he is still running, before he runs in and potentially gets hmself killed due to an accidental misstep.
Other than that I was really happy with the game and really enjoyed it.
I may do an ironman game on 'classic' difficulty now, and use the CK peeps for that one. Has anyone played on classic yet? How was the difficulty? I don't mind if I try it ad actually 'fail' it, now that I already beat the game once.
P.S. I also immediately figured that I had to don the psi armor on my psionics specialist. I agree that it wasn't very obvious and a little silly, but since the gollop room says "you need high enough will" and the armor increases will I thought "let's try this".