I love Hunter in Civilian clothes, it literally brings advent detection range down to 1 block. Probably not unbalanced with the partial success mod, definitely fun.

The first perk pick is really hard. None of them have direct synergy with each other, except maybe phantom and scout. The ones that don't require weapons are really awkward to use correctly. I often feel like one of my two perks is being wasted at any given time. That's okay though, I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Isn't "reaction fire on enemies who are attacking" a really bad perk, since heavy cover gives a staggering +60% defence? I realize it does 2 automatic damage, but that's nothing against armored enemies. Perhaps LW's "fire if only >50% chance to hit" function should be included with the skill?

Does the SMG give you a full move, or just a partial move? What does "raise the alarm" do? Do "titan" robots only appear under special circumstances (I got one on gatecrasher, which was manageable)? How can I tell if my enemy has a grenade? Why did you choose to make passive gene mod upgrades with no downside? Does the "attack from concealment perk" do anything if you don't crit?

First of all, love the classless system!

Deathwatch seems OP, I was wondering where the "overwatch on enemy attack" ability was but now theres guaranteed damage too. Not that Im complaining.

Assassinate that didnt break stealth was really cool for phantom builds. Wish that would come back.

Cool Under Pressure and Guardian are both overwatch abilities and I kind of wish it was possible to get both.

I get the uniformity of the same number of abilities per level but maybe its ok to break that?

Shadowstrike requires stealth? Or does it work from squad sight range when you arent "visible to a target"?

Thanks and keep up the great work!

Re: Civilian clothes, just don't get shot.

Re: Early perks, it's true that they generaly don't synergise that well, they used to synergise too well in only certain areas which is why a few were changed.

Re: Deathwatch, that's a good idea, I'll see about including that.

Re: SMG, they give you 60% of your movement, implacable gives 120% instead of 100% if used with SMG.

Re:Raise Alarm, it gives enemies bonus detection and sight range

Re: Gatecrasher has a BOSS unit that grants bonus tech and resources, TITAN units can spawn after the TITAN Dark Event completes

Re: Grenades, Look at their belt.

Re: Genemods, because aliens are lategame super soldiers and once you have genemods you're about to win the game

Re: Assassinate, Yes you need to critically strike to deal the bonus damage,

Re: Overwatch abilities, that was intentional killzone becomes insanely powerful with ALL overwatch abilities available.

Re: shadowstrike, it can work with squadsight as it always has I simply retyped the text and re-balanced it to how it actually works.

If shadowstrike doesnt require stealth and triggers for a non-stealthed squadsight sniper across the map, that seems pretty powerful?

Eventually would love to see even more abilities borrowed from XCOM1/other mods to choose from!

The mod package itself or the recommended mods doesn't include anything for camera usage, which means unless you grab one of the ones floating about you're stuck with the standard 4 corner camera angles (Which suck). Having a good camera mod in the recommended mod list would definitely be a bonus.

Of course, you can just go ahead and find one, but I love that Spectrum has a depository of recommended and stable mods attached to it. Adding quality mods to that list can only be a good thing.

I just got shot by an Advent Scout with a shotgun, 8 tiles away, in half cover. They had a 45% hit rate, is that kind of aim intended for shotguns?

Just remember that the enemies get the same bonuses as you like, bonus aim when close with a shotgun, aiming angles and such so expect some scouts to be very dangerous up close.

Some feedback, Would like to see some quality of life improvement, like seeing stats on armory. Tactical layer its awesome but strategic layer its as boring as I remember it to be, only good thing about it its how awesome you made the research tree. Hoping you can improve into that sometime. My least favorite part are the classes, at least early on some perk i find extremely useless but that may be in part with my approach rather than the mod itself, it usually either phantom or deathwish for me all the time. some are utility that go to specific classes but like if someone gonna use a sniper, steady hand is the way to go and look far superior to alternatives

Originally posted by Yzaxtol:

Just remember that the enemies get the same bonuses as you like, bonus aim when close with a shotgun, aiming angles and such so expect some scouts to be very dangerous up close.

I went to look at the Long War 2 range aim bonuses and it seems they don't start dropping shotgun aim until 9 tiles, it seems I was underestimating the shotgun too much.

First off, I want to say this looks fantastic! There are a lot of very enjoyable things going on here, so please don't take my few criticisms to mean I think the mod is bad or un-fun.

I really only have three major things I'm finding pretty frusturating.

The first is Gatecrasher. I think it's just not very representitive of the difficulty of the rest of the mod. It's punishingly difficult because the enemy deployment is the same as always, but I haven't had the oppurtunity to outfit my squad in any way. It also doesn't help that my sniper starts out with 0 armor.

We've been taught to deploy snipers to high ground by most of media, but XCom has always made that a mixed bag because high ground offers only low cover (with a few exceptions.) Combine this with the enemy Mag Rifles and your sniper in Gatecrasher will probably be the easiest to hit *and* a guarenteed one-shot for almost any enemy unit.

I think it would help a good deal if the sniper the player was given had "Kevlar armor" instead of whatever they're given.

The other minor thing I'd suggest about Gatecrasher is maybe just have a 2 pod and a 3 pod out there. The double 2 pods seem to team up on the player far too often due to placement, and even just the Seargent/Trooper combo is enough to challenge your team.



The second is Good Angles. I really wish it was an option and not baked in.

The problem with Good Angles is it makes it often impossible for me to really understand what sort of cover my soldiers are in. I have been suprised many times with how high the enemy shot chance was even though I was in "High Cover".

The AI is, of course, unaffected by Good Angles in this way. It understands how exposed it's troops are, but there is no UI (that I'm aware of) to tell me what chot chance an enemy would have against me if I moved to any given location. This has led to more tears then anything else, as I'm just constantly shocked by 50-60% shot chances against high cover. I had honestly thought initially the enemies aim stat had been trumped up to obscene levels.



The third is how willing the enemy is to take low probability shots. I've seen the enemy take 0% shots against my squad without them being paniced or in an otherwise "bad mental state". Eg:

https://pasteboard.co/hoCxuMo0o.png

This just makes the AI look dumb, but is oterwise no big deal. The problem is the 5% shots they're willing to take. Those do land, and combined with how powerful the AI weapons are vs. how los the soliders health can easily lead to one-shots.

Even as someone who embraces "That's XCom baby!" it feels unfair. Generally when I lose a guy in XCom I can point to it actually being my mistake. ie - I got too greedy on that Run and Gun and popped a second pod, or I moved to bad cover to take a 95% "sure thing" and missed, leaving a soldier exposed.

Instead, due to the huge volume of fire your soldiers take over the course of a game, you just occasionally have your people taken away from you. While that might be more representitve of the fiction, and certainily gives more to the "this is hard" feeling it also just feels unfair. It's hard to explain.



Also wanted to say I really love your take on SMGs. In LW2 I just used them as speed buffs on a soldier who had no intention of ever shooting anything, but in Spectrum they're a very powerful choice, which is really fantastic. Popping into the open and hosing down a wounded badguy only to retreat into heavy cover is really satisfying!


Anyhow, thanks a ton fo rmaking this! I'm still trying to learn it. I think if I could onyl make one change I'd make Good Angles an option. I can survive the other things, but I'm constantly frusturated by thinking my soldiers were safe when I had actually made a bad move because I can't get the information I need to make a good one.

Chris Woods

(EDIT: I can't spell embraces.)

Hey!

I'm talking to myself because I went and did some research.

It appears that Good Angles is in vanilla by default, but I never felt as shocked. Maybe some of the values are changed by the mod and that's what's throwing me off?

Anyhow, I do see the GA is an XCom 2 vanilla thing, but I've got more then a few hours in XCom 2 and I'm really sure it's operating differently in Spectrum.

Thanks again!

Chris Woods

I really like a lot of things about this mod from my first playthrough. I figured it's probably helpful to have some first time play comments, so here you go. These are clearly not educated comments, as I've only played one short Ironman campaign. Consider it a first impression.

1) Blacksite mission. Holy christ. To go from one advent captain a mission to like 10 pandora veterans attacking at once is a bit of a difficulty jump. I get that it's my choice as to when to start the mission. Next playthough, I'm definitely going to wait longer, but it's such a jump I almost feel like some sort of major warning is in order. How you do that, I'm not sure.

2) There sure is a whole lot of armor on everybody from the very start of the game. That seems a bit weird. Especially since I'm not seeing a whole lot of good ways to shred at low levels.

3) In my plathrough, I had supplies coming out of my ears, but virtually no alloys. Not even sure where I'm supposed to be getting alloys from other than digging out rooms. But they seem to be necessary for a whole lot of things. The power jump between gun techs is enormous. So much so that somehow finding a mag pistol at the start of the game gave me a HUGE advantage. I suspect there's a tech I need?

4) All of the weapon tiers seems to unlock at once after Modular Weapons? That's really confusing.

5) It was unclear to me what the advent disguise actually did?

6) The classes themselves seem almost superfluous. That seems like your intention. Given the big colorful symbol that the class provides for the soldier, I'm not sure I like that. Seems like many of the class perks, you can just pick later if you want that. And then it's all equipment. Class should be more important, I think. Perhaps a fixed perk, or maybe their perk improves for each level of that class? The wide open perk choices is interesting, but I think you have to ALSO not make classes unimportant.

7) In the short campaign I played, enemy variety seemed much better than LW2. Things seemed much better explained than LW2. I find that LW2 gets very boring at the beginning of the campaigns. Same enemies over and over, for many missions. I didn't feel that here, and it was refreshing.

I rarely ever comment on anything but I'll give feedback for this because of how strongly I feel about it.

First off... I like the mod more than I like most mods for this game. I avoided Yellow when I saw it because I assumed it conflicted with LW2 and I wanted to finish that off before doing anything else. After having tried this mod for a few hours I can say I like it, if not more than LW2 then about the same.

With that out of the way...

Do you have any plans to make a more modular version of this? Most of my complaints would really mean nothing if I could use 'some' features of the mod and not others. If not then I might have to look into how to do it personally but if you are going to do that yourself I won't have to sink the time into it.

Pros/Cons

Enemies:
Pro - I like all the enemy changes across the board. I don't have any complaints about what is added to the game.
Con - Conflicts with other mods that add enemies I also like. Not a fault of the mod and a weak downside but it is there.

Weapons:
All good. Very minor cons. Move on.

Classes:
Pros: All access to all weapons. This is something that seems like a no brainer but I am glad it was included.

Cons: I don't like the all classes have the same perks thing. I understand the methodology and it makes balancing the classes themselves (such as they are) much easier but it makes them all really bland as a result. It's simply not to my taste. The perks themselves range from alright to good and the only real problem with them is that some clearly synergize better than others which is what I assume is what you wanted to avoid altogether. Now this isn't a problem for me since after testing them out I just elected to use a bunch of the Class Mods I'd already used before downloading this instead of those added by this mod. This may just be a taste thing AND it doesn't really matter to me since there is an easy workaround but I thought I'd be honest and mention that of all the changes made in this mod this is definitely the weakest in my opinion. I'd go into more depth on the issue but that would be a long rant and, as I said, it is easy to play around.

Armor:
All good. Very minor cons. Move on.

Crafting Overhaul:
Pro: Good addition to the game.
Con(?): Not sure if it interferes with other items I've added through mods. I assume there's been some conflict but I can't tell whether it is an 'actual' problem and have no dedicated a lot of time into testing it out.

Gene-Mod:
All good. Very minor cons. Move on.

DLC: Integration/Story Mission Changes:
Pro: Mostly good. I especially like that the first mission has been spiced up a bit.
Con(~): I would like it that Shen's Last Gift wasn't such a pain in the ass. I'd really like to get SPARK earlier in the game (as early as possible really) and as a matter of personal taste I really don't like having to wait to get the chance to get the Unit as is. This isn't a particular problem with the mod just an odd personal gripe.

All in all I really like the changes made by the mod, especially the changes to Weapons, Armor, and Gene-Modding. My only complaints are really those that have to do with the classes and it conflicting with other content add-ons I also enjoy. Over all I appreciate it and felt it was well worth speaking out in support.

After playing long war campaigns with red fog as part of the gameplay, I find it very difficult to play without it. I always felt it added a ton to the game. Do you have any plans to add that sort of thing in? Or are any mods that add that compatible?

Excellent work so far on the mod.

Also is there any way to remove the combat text that shows up after a unit shoots from the UI? I know there is the issue with text showing up twice, but what about removing it altogether?

So I wrote a simillar comment in the comment section of the mod, but after thinking about it some more I've refined a few of my thoughts. Please note that I realize a lot of time, effort and care went into your designing of this mod.

Classes

Without exception I find the class system to be uninspired. Having every soldier have the same skill set makes no sense to me whatsoever and fundamentally hinders the enjoyability of the game. It feels as if you didn't want to try and step on any toes or, that you felt all the class ideas had been done to death, especially with LW2, and decided to try this approach instead. Except, it really doesn't work. It drains the personality out of the class system. It doesn't require you to consider how you utilize some of your soldiers since no one is inherently special. While this is obviously meant to be rectified given the vast selection of equipment, the skills themselves present a lackluster experience, thus deadening a great amount of appeal to me.

Combat

Combat is very... swingy. I've never really been a fan of flanks being automatic criticals. It feels absurd and very gimmicky. It can also be far too punishing because it encourages a sense of needing to crit, given that crits seem to do a lot more damage than in vanilla (and LW2) and that base damage isn't enough to crack the tougher enemies. While I understand the principle idea behind this (don't get flanked) I find it an uncessary one, since it's hardwired into Xcom already. Making flanking more punishing just feels like a means of artificial difficulty. Sure, if you flank an enemy you get rewarded, but it may also expose you unintentially.

Which leads me to the good angles. Did their values get buffed? Because in one mission a good angle basically nullified the heavy cover that an enemy was behind. Since it works both ways, it seems careless and makes cover feel, well not like cover. There's no sense of security for good position if that positioning is so easily exploited without being flanked.

Also, the enemies feel like bullet spounges if you don't flank. And they'll punish you accordingly given their higher damage values. Having your soldiers 1 shotted in full cover, which is partially nullified by a "good angle" is... disheartening. Which brings me to...

Gatecrasher

For the initial mission I feel like I have no control. And to be honest, I hate that. Vanilla is the same way. The difference between this and vanilla is that you've buffed the enemies without giving the player an equal footing. The boss enemy at the end, while unique really punishes you and since you NEED to kill it, you're screwed if your initial encounters went poorly. Forced restarts are never fun. LW2 really did it the right way since you have more than enough firepower to overcome the initial mission. Giving the Gatecrasher mission weaker enemies or the player a squad of six instead of four, may fix this issue.

Strategy

And here's the kicker. I love the strategic elements this mod introduces. I think it does a great job of capturing Xcom's need to work off of the scraps of ADVENT so they can become a legitimate threat. I think this mod does wonders with the crafting (though I'm not a fan of having to build grenade launchers) and it provides a lot of important strategic choices to the player. The Factions of ADVENT make sense and they're incredibly diverse and also provide strategic thinking. And that's what kills me.

I want to like this mod. I want to say this is going to replace LW2 as my go to mod, because there is just so much here to like. But... the tactical layer and the unispired class system, topped off with what I feel to be swingy combat, just makes the mod flounder. The gameplay feels like it really exposes the RNG elements of Xcom and not that tactical ones.

Conclusion

All in all this mod isn't for me. I don't expect it will ever be and that's fine. You clearly have captured a lot of people's attention with a well crafted experience. Maybe some of my concerns will be addressed and maybe I'll take a look at it again one day. But, as for now I'm going to have to pass. I hope this has come off as constructive and not billigerent. Keep up the good work.