Gameplay is getting Frustrating

[Croissant]

I have HAD it with this game. It was AWESOME just AWESOME when I started. But I soon realised what a chore it is to play. And the glitches... oh the gliches. This game is nowhere near finished. Why is it 1.02 already. I feel like I'm playing a really really early alpha release. The AI is terrible. The original Syndicate had better AI than this.

I play this game on a laptop which isn't all that powerfull. But the game runs really well. But for some reason after about an hour of play it just starts slowing down. Eventually the game just grinds to a halt and is pausing every 2 seconds for about 2 seconds and it just becomes frustrating and virtually impossible to play. I restart the game and it works perfectly again until another hour or so and once again it starts slowing down. Combat seems to be the culprit that gradually starts this. For some reason when using the slow down time ability the game runs smoothly though. I need some help with this. Any ideas?

But about the game itself... I am so frustrated I really need to let it out and have a little rant. I have completed the game but oh boy did I have some frustrating moments (and lots of fun as well).

1. The AI. Your agents are USELESS. Why oh WHY god oh WHY?? is there no HOLD POSITION option. It is increddibly hard to keep your agents in a cover position. It's just STUPID when you've built the entire game around this.

2. Your agents don't want to fire at anything. The only way to do this is manually tell an agent to attack each target or to use attack move and that again gets them out of cover. Using the slowdown skill is just SO slow (and why the hell is the screen scroll slow as well. FFS that's just DUMB). The game is SO buggy that when the game is slowed down so much it's virtually impossible to have any confidence in a command actually being given correctly. Half the time the agent just doesn't even do what you tell him to anyway and when he has a minigun that charges up a while and you're in the slowdown mode there''s just no way of knowing whether he will actually attack. Chances are he probably wont. UGHHH.

3. All your guns are useless anyway. The game is clearly meant to be played by being stealthy and not in combat. So why the hell would you bother upgrading anything. Combat is SO bad because of just those 2 points above that it's just pointless. When your agents are actually shooting, 70% of the time it seems they're shooting at walls or some type of barrier. Oh and the infiltrator and his stupid sniper gun. What the hell? Is it just me or is the sniper gun just pointless? Whenever I've been in combat I just got blasted by waves of ENDLESS enemies (stupid). What's a sniper rifle gonna do? Well you're doing it wrong you say, it's supposed to be for long dist... SHUT UP!!! Not ONCE in this game have I found an opportunity to use this stupid thing. And the SET UP ability is also useless. You just end up shooting at walls with it. Even with maxed stats that sniper gun didn't kill anything in 1 shot. More like 5 if you're lucky. That's like shooting a water gun at a stampede coming right at you. There aren't any rooftops that you can take advantage of.

4. The infiltrator can do all the missions. This is probably the best/most efficient way to play the game. There is just NO need for a Soldier, Support or Hacker (once you get proxy hacking). There just isn't any point in bringing those guys along, since combat is not really a good option in Red Zones (or any zone for that matter). You just get overrun eventually. You can be stealthy with them too but what's the point? I mean who REALLY wants to waste time and effort and energy looking after all 4 agents, making sure they're stealthy when a) One false move will get you in a 15 min minimum fight for your life or b) Everything can be done with just one agent. And if you use the Infiltrator only then the other guys won't level up. UGHHH.

5. Generally poor AI. Tell agent to move here agent stumbles on invisible rocks or something like he's drunk and eventually gets there. Or not. He might decide to go somwehre else. You know what. I'm done talking about the bad AI... The AI is just BAD ok. The game looks beautifull and I LOVE it but seriously guys. The gameplay is just terrible. Can you please put more resources in the Game experience itself rather than the awesome effects and making it look cool.


6. As I said before any combat encounter has waves and waves of enemies coming at you and you just can't stand there and shoot at them because you'll be missing half the time if you're lucky enough to be shooting in the first place. You can't stay behind cover because the game just doesn't let you due to the AI doing it's own thing so the best thing I found to do was to find some cover if you can, then place an Ammo pack and just spam grennades killing waves and waves of enemies. And this was awesome... I finally found a way that I could WIN. Until... For some reason some Red Zone areas decided to not let me place ammo packs. I'd tell an agent to do it, and he'd just wonder off somewhere else. WHAT??? Then when he finally placed the ammo pack it was just a white outline of the ammo box (as if it was placed on a level below the platform he's standing on??) and when I click on the ammo pack all I get is this description box with a big question mark on it. Needless to say it does NOT replenish my ammo. Can't remember where else this happened, but it was definately happening on the last mission on top of the Tower. So I save the game and restart the game and reload the game but it still does it at those spots. Man!!! Yet another BUG that just makes me think this game was made to troll me.

7. Can't deselect agents. I want everyone to fire at something, while number 3 goes and hacks something. Haha keep dreaming.

8. I feel like I ranted too much. There are so many other things. Why the hell would I get an augmentation that would give a 7% accuracy boost. Seriously? 7%? Just ♥♥♥♥ off. Give me some upgrades that I can use. And the guns are just either really weak (guns that I got at the begining of the game) or they're really powerfull. There's nothing in between. Powerfull / heavy guns slow your movement down so you can't really take advantage of other augmentations because you have to use augs to negate the heavy guns. So the other option is to stick with the other guns that you coulda had almost at the begining. I dunno. Just needs some serious balancing.

9. Some missions are bugged and I can not complete them. On two seperate missions some person I was supposed to escort somewhere died. In the mission log it says that he is in hospital and that we have to wait for him to be better or something. Only it never happens. So the mission is just sort of stuck there. Sigh...

10. Why can't I click on a minimap and center my view on something? RTS games have been around for ages. Why are we reinventing the wheel?

I could go on and on.

I am clearly not happy about this game and it's only because I LOVED the originals. I am somewhat passionate about this game and this is why I am ranting. This game has so much potential, but it feels like it was rushed and we have an incomplete product. I want to play more of this game because in all honesty I had lots of fun with it but in the end the bad AI and just struggling to get my agents to do what I want them to do against endles waves of enemies got the better of me and frustrated me to the point of just hating on it so bad. And there are so so so many bugs.

Please fix it so that at the very least putting your agents in a cover position will allow them to stay covered and will allow them to fire at enemies without you directly telling them to do so. Until this happens I am not loading this game again. I've had it.

HOLD POSITION for the love of god. Attack things that are hostile.

[Lyle]

Sounds like your system might have temperature problems.

2. Yes, the game needs an autofire option. The sheer amount of clicking in combat often means you send your agents out of cover by mistake.

3. Im mainly focusing on going in guns blazing, and its quite effective most of the time. So not sure what you are talking about there.

7. I agree, it ought to be a toggle selection system. Example: you select everyone, send Hacker to go hack, then press 3 to deselect him, move the rest into cover, press Support healing skill and then deselecting with 2 to keep the skill from deactivating, and then click attack with the remaining agents.

Other than that I think its a very solid release. Certainly not alpha material.

[TwistedMinds]

Originally posted by Dino swe:

7. I agree, it ought to be a toggle selection system<snip>

Not exactly the same thing, but you can group with CTRL-F1/.../F4 and select with F1/.../F4. Create the F1 group with 1-2-4 (when hacking) and F2 with 1-3-4 (when nanohealing).

[Lyle]

Originally posted by TwistedMinds:

Originally posted by Dino swe:

7. I agree, it ought to be a toggle selection system<snip>

Not exactly the same thing, but you can group with CTRL-F1/.../F4 and select with F1/.../F4. Create the F1 group with 1-2-4 (when hacking) and F2 with 1-3-4 (when nanohealing).

Too complicated to remember all those custom constellations when in the middle of a firefight.
With a toggle system I could simply select the ones I want on the fly and improvise as I go, or deselect everone by simply left clicking the ground. At the very least this should be an option in the gameplay settings. It would be both user friendly and intuitive imo.

[VulpusAlbus]

I don't fin it difficult to quickly shift+select agents. Not sure, May be just used to do it in RTS.

I usually use just 3 control grous to all situations:
F1 - all four agents,
F2 - all but hacker,
F3 - all hacked personnel.

This works really well and makes it quite easy to select whomever I need and leaves more binds open just in case.

As for the combat approach - it works well. For me it's as viable as stealth, I use both. Just don't let the enemies raise alarms and call for reinforcements. Snipe thos that have exclamaintion signs over their heads.

[Tennmuerti]

1. agree
2. agree

3. get some better laser/plasma guns, apropriate upgrades, augs and combine certain agressive combat skills and you can have a team that will just reap through shielded/armored enemies in seconds, actually i am at a point where the stealthy aproach is just much more time consuming, when I can just walk in and keep walking towards the objective and killing everyone, the straight up combat can be very effecive with the right gear/abilities
3.1. enemies aren't endless if you don't let them keep getting off alarms, there are in fact usually a very small limited number of guards around unless they are popping off the reinforcements call
3.2. sniper rifle is your early way to get enemies out of cover via impact rounds, it disables dangerous enemies for a time, it will also interupt alarm calls, and an enemy out of cover will just get shredded by a good team, finally when set up with the upgraded skill it really does some serious damage, but you do have to micromanage the shooting a bit

4. and when you make a wrong move and infiltrator gets caught solo? or are you waiting on cloak recharge all the time, also there are extraction missions; finally there is nothing really wrong with it if you want to use the just infiltrator for most missions, the game is designed so that you can split your agents; finally just like you can get a hacking item on an infiltrator, so too can you get stealth generators and high vent ability on your other agents

5. haven't really experienced those problems

6. erm this seems just a continuation of your third point, so yea, can can definately just slug it out effficiently, there are plenty of tools to let you do that, also i've honestly never once needed an ammo pack in a firefight, i don't think i've even ever had my team drop below half ammo, unless its a heavy assault with a minigun type weapon just going ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on a whole platoon

8. what's wrong with an accuracy boost? it's a direct dps increase unless you are already at max accuracy, you can use other upgrades for those slots if you want to, but it's by no means useless if you are shooting it out; standard plasma/laser weapons do a very good job and are definately much more effective then your starting gear, you don't need heavy weapons on every agent, just one assault who doesn't recieve penalties with a heavy weapon is enough, and you can use all those slots for other augs

there are less major bugs in this then in most AAA releases, and a lot of things you described aren't bugs, just the way the game is designed

but i do agree, the hold cover / return fire / agressive team settings would be very very welcome

[Eukatae]

I can't say I disagree with anything you wrote but I don't think any of it is as dire as you think.

[Koranis]

OP, the original Syndicate had the worst AI ever, you could beat almost the entire game by just parking your men behind a corner with a flamethrower ready and the enemy agents would come to you from all over the map just to turn into a human torch. Nostalgia can play tricks, you know.

[Zourin]

If you're having trouble fighting, you're not levelling your team with that option in mind.

- MInd your soldier. It's easy to think it's a pure infil/hack game, but the soldier is a brute force solution if you take the time. He needs armor, unsilenced weapons, frag grenades unlocked, and levels in weapons specialist. He pairs strongly with the Support who can carry ammo packs for him and medical supplies.

- Avoid taking out cameras, as this puts more enemies into play. Only destroy the most troublesome ones. Disabling them or destroying/disabling power generators works better.

- Flank. Flank. Flank. Take that infiltrator and get it behind the enemy where he will do more good, plus unlock and use that katana to assassinate enemies calling for reinforcements. It will make your life easier. If you have one pesky enemy behind you, Hijack him.

- Agents getting low on health should find cover and stop attacking for a while, and give the support some time to do some healing. Agents take a LOT less damage unless flanked.

- Focus on killing enemies calling for reinforcements (!). It's better to take on a small patrol than to let that camera finish setting off its alarm, and in a firefight, that one guy with the (!) will only add to your pile of trouble.

[MadAsgardian]

It's definitely pretty buggy, but my biggest frustration is lack of funds -- sitting around waiting for cash to tick upwards is not entertaining.

[TwistedMinds]

MadAsgardian, why are you waiting? Go make a quick withdrawal at the bank, pick a fight to level up, go scout your next target.

[Disky]

Is maybe your laptop overheating after an hour and dialing down the clock rate?

Check out the nightly build, lots of fixes to navigation.

Press S to stop agents from doing whatever the last order was.

Therewas a bug placing ammo boxes on some surfaces I beleieve that is fixed in the nightly.

[Croissant]

Thank you all for your great responses. I must say I was really frustrated when I wrote this. I am a bit more relaxed after a good nights sleep.

I am surprised to hear that many of you don't have issues during combat. I must say again that I LOVE the concept of the game and stuck with it until the very end. This means that I have pretty much maxed out my agents and already have all the gear. And with that said I am still having difficulty just running in their guns blazing. Yes I can take them on but sometimes the waves just keep coming and coming and standing there trying to repel all the enemies just becomes a chore. Progress becomes very slow and the buggy AI just added to the frustration. Perhaps I was wrong to give heavy guns to the rest of the team and given them augs to deal with the penalties. The charge up time is just too long to stop some ppl from calling reinforments. But even then when I want to kill someone who is calling reinforments it's hard to always kill them in time because they are behind cover or they just decide to run away.

Anyways. Regarding my laptop slowing down issue. I'll do more testing by getting some sowtware to monitor the clock speed. However I don't think the laptop is overheating or is at fault. Simply because as soon as I restart the game the issue dissapears instantly and the game runs smoothly again for another hour or sometimes even 2 no problem. So I do think the game itself has some cleaning up to do to let go of some resources as the game is progressing. The rest of you out there could simply have better hardware than me to handle this regardless. I could be just on the borderline or something. Also when I use the SLOW ability (stims I think it's called) the problem just instantly goes away until I stop using it. That's a weird one. The annoying thing is the game doesn't allow me to save and come back mid mission. So if I'm stuck in some complex and this starts happening the game just generally keeps slowing down and everything becomes more frustrating exponentially :). If I could just "RESTART THE GAME" everything would be fine but I can't do that because I'll lose an hours progress or something like that. This also makes my combat more frustrating and I try to avoid it. But granted it does sound like it's just me with this fault here.

Thank you for mentioning the nightlies. I will definately check them out. Oh and somebody asked me what was wrong with an accuracy boost. Nothing is wrong with it, I think it's just insignificant. 7% is nothing especially when the goons are behind cover.

[Gillsing]

Originally posted by Croissant:

The charge up time is just too long to stop some ppl from calling reinforments. But even then when I want to kill someone who is calling reinforments it's hard to always kill them in time because they are behind cover or they just decide to run away.

I've never felt that the charge-up time for the cannons was too long to blast anyone trying to make a call. But cover can certainly be an issue, in which case the infiltrator might still be fast enough to sprint to the caller and cut them down. And grenades, both fragmentation and EMP, can usually be used to circumvent cover, especially while Team Stims is in effect, since that should allow for catching the call early enough.

Shooting cameras is a good idea as long as patrols can be killed off one by one, which ought to be easy enough before gaining suspicion levels. Certainly better than being spotted by cameras which then send out patrols regardless, while still being there to send out more patrols. Sometimes hacking them isn't very convenient, such as when the terminal is placed behind poison gas. Or when the hack doesn't last as long as one would like. Prolonged battles can make one forget that the cameras that were hacked before are now active, and whoops, here come reinforcements at a very inopportune moment.

[Croissant]

Originally posted by disky:

Is maybe your laptop overheating after an hour and dialing down the clock rate?

Check out the nightly build, lots of fixes to navigation.

Press S to stop agents from doing whatever the last order was.

Therewas a bug placing ammo boxes on some surfaces I beleieve that is fixed in the nightly.

I've been looking for some time now but have idea where to find the nightly builds. Any links?

[ERock]

You don't 'have' to kill to stop the call for reinforcements, just disrupt the call. You can send in the hacker to start to hijack, then get back in cover once you've interrupted. You can also get close where they'll do a kick attack, or send in the ninja with a sword attack. Grenades also break concentration well. :)