i am not sure about this, but i think volatile mix grants you far more damage because it also amplifies the dot of experimental grenades, e.g. my acid grenades have a dot of 5+ i.e. an acid bomb does 10+ damage (7-8 from the explosion + 5 from the dot at the beginning of the enemies turn). that means that 1 acid bomb can kill an entire squad in one action (salvo does not end your turn). the biggest problem i have with chain shot is the aim penalty.
There are lots of ways to mitigate aim penalties, and the way Chain Shot works is that the second shot benefits from the fact that the first one marks the target if (as is probable) you have holo-targeting.
the regular (i.e. non avatar) version of vortex is rather bad damage wise. keep in mind that on higher difficulties enemies also have more hit points.
At least on Normal, it seems that the associated free insanity effect almost always triggers, and this deals extra damage plus rupture. I routinely kill one or more enemies with the vortex.
i thought that map generation works like lego blocks, each block is hand crafted but the assembly of the blocks is done via an algorithm. in that sense the gateway is just another larger lego block, but the map on the whole is procedural generated. in that sense i have no disagreement with you.
That's how I understand it as well, but I didn't find the gateway block very interesting - just another open area. I happened to have a map with cliffs surrounding it, so I got to hit everything from higher elevation. And I understand that it's typical of procedurally generated maps that - as happens in X-COM 2 - the generation algorithms are biased in favour more open blocks because this assists pathing, and also leads to more naturalistic arrangements than buildings spawning everywhere without gaps.
imho currently the missions just pop up without any coherence with the strategic layer. suddenly a train can be raided, suddenly a vip needs rescue, suddenly a ufo lands and so on.
Surely that's very much in keeping with the setting's nature casting you as a resistance hub - you aren't in charge of organising, you're just the strike team others call on when they have an opportunity for you.
outside the story line there is no narrative on the campaign map and tying missions together could provide this. it could also force difficult decisions on the player, e.g. one team sneaks a transmitter on a train, while another team executes the ambush. or one team get's one the train, the train moves to a black site and the same team has to destroy the black site, i.e. any items spend or soldiers lost will not be available in the second mission.
A linked mission like the latter would be an interesting twist, certainly, but feels more like a story mission than the typical course of events (also, if you have a team blowing up aliens around a train, it's a bit far-fetched to think that the aliens would just set the train on its way without checking for stowaways. Though that does raise the alternative possibility of missions where you have to go in dark - and so can't use explosives or have other kit restrictions).
One thing that does limit the need to make hard choices is the long times between missions - in XCOM it was quite common that wounds would force you to use a secondary squad, and it was very important to keep everyone healthy. With Guerrilla Tactics and a long time between missions, it's rare for me to have more than one or occasionally two soldiers out of action by the time a mission comes around.
i don't mind unique tilesets or larger unique areas in an overall procedural generated map. but i would dislike the static maps from xcom1. another reason xcom1 maps sucked was that enemy placement was fixed as well as xcom starting position. long war fixed that.
The fact that the mod could fix the starting position issue shows that it's not a fundamental problem for fully-crafted maps. But there are plenty of good XCOM maps that would be welcome as one-off maps and that I prefer to anything I've seen in the sequel - the train and battleship maps from Slingshot, the observatory, the paper factory, the terror maps, the fiendishly hard construction site map, the Chryssalid fishing port map, the base defence map, and others.
well the problem is rather that the retaliation missions are mechanically not the best design. it does not help that bradford constantly yells at you either.
My point is that the 'civilian counter' is a large part of what makes them a fairly bad design. The fact that they're just terror missions transferred to a new setting where they aren't all that appropriate doesn't really help. The sort of map restrictions a resistance camp demands (at least as portrayed here) don't really suit the needs of a terror mission tactically, never mind the excessive numbers of civilians randomly standing around - while I can accept that most resistance groups are involved in clandestine activities like hacking, sabotage and laying mines - and so wouldn't be armed or able to defend themselves against direct attack - these would be people primed to hide from aliens, so standing around doing nothing makes less sense than for civilians subjected to an unexpected attack (and it's never been that plausible there). Also, as a very minor point, it's a nice touch that civilians now have names, but they should be drawn from region-specific pools rather than having the same mix of nationalities wherever in the world the mission takes place.
if i remember correctly the base assaults in UFO depended on your base layout.
You had a lift and corridors leading from it in exactly the same way, facilities leading off it in exactly the same way, and every facility was the same shape or size except for hangers. To all intents and purposes the map was the same every time.
my main problem with the strategic layer (not speaking of avenger base management, research etc., but the map interactions) is that it is very simplistic, has no real connection to the missions which just pop out of nowhere and has little strategy involved. i agree with the rest of your sentiments though.
The map has never had any real connection to missions in X-COM games beyond providing mission targets - in the original two they didn't even allow you to adjust your income through such things as resistance contacts/satellites, nor did the original games have anything equivalent to an intel resource. There was no connection between missions more complex than "you shot down a UFO, now you can send troops to that UFO".
The only way the tactical layer was linked to the strategic layer was through equipment/bodies used for research and alloys/elerium used in construction - exactly as now. Where the current game falls is in these two areas - alloys etc. are too abundant to be a limiting factor, to the extent that I can just pass up alloy resistance leads, and tech isn't linked to battlefield artefacts. With the possible exception of Apocalypse, XCOM2 has the most sophisticated strategy map layer in the series.
I'd still like a way to get UFO missions back if one can be found that's in keeping with the game's theme, but given that the resistance can't plausibly have aircraft and the aliens don't need to use UFOs when they have terrestrial and airborne transports, it's not clear how to do this. A facility that gives the Avenger weapons and lets it attack transports, maybe? Not very fulfilling when transports contain only one mob each, though.
