Meiam said:
Early game mission diversity is pretty awful, all mission are a variant of sneak to the objective and race to the vac point, on hard you pretty much don't even have time to fight on the way there, you might as well just give up if you get discovered. Would be really nice if there was at least some optional way of not evacing the mission so you could grab the corpse (or hell, just let us carry the corpse when we evac)
You're actually hamstringing yourself if you do nothing but run stealth missions. There is a place in LW2 for stealth missions, but early on it is absolutely critical to try and alien sweep on the way to the objective. For the kill XP, and most particularly for the loot. The loot helps kickstart your early-game economy and also helps bring some soldier types online. There is no reason you cannot fight through an extremely or very light mission.
Meiam said:
Class are a lot of fun, but I find them unbalanced. Shinobi and assault are god tier since they can ignore cover, but ranger and sharpshooter are pretty useless without a reliable way to destroy cover. I'm guessing they'll become better as enemy who don't use cover become more common, but leveling them there is a giant pain as there role is pretty much just to use flashback grenade now.
Shinobi are a bit OP, yes, particularly if you cheese shadowstep/faceoff. They probably need some toning down. Assault are arguably one of the worst classes in the game, largely due to their reliance on aggressive flanks, which 50% of the time will trigger a second or third pod, due to pod density as missions get more difficult.
Rangers are early game workhorses and probably the most reliable source of early game damage outside of grenades or hail of bullets gunners. Walk Fire is an essential ability. Once you get them up around Rapid Reaction level they become gods of the battlefield. My best Ranger is currently sitting at 70 kills in 19 missions.
Sharpshooters take a little while to come online, assuming you're building the classic squadsight/nest sniper. They're also hamstrung a bit on tight timer missions that require a lot of mobility. On liberation missions or troop ambushes or supply raids or ANY mission with high volume killing, however, they are essential. A properly kitted out sniper with DFA, Scope and Stock can reliably kill almost any enemy on the map with zero risk.
Don't get too caught up in cover destruction early. Sapper is too unreliable and grenades are too scarce (and loud). Skills like Hail of Bullets, Walk Fire, Combat Protocol, and simple volume of fire is usually more than sufficient to kill disoriented early game mooks. As missions get more dangerous and aliens get more difficult, you should be expanding your repertoire of skills and tools.
Meiam said:
The mechanic really need clearer explanation, even reading the in game help file I still have almost no idea how to liberate region, I know I need to do some missions but I don't really know which. Plus it's really annoying when one of those mission shows up but you don't have the time to infiltrate so you have to wait for it to re appear. On that note you really have no choice but to rush liberating an early region because otherwise the supply flow is just too low, this means almost completely ignoring supply in the first 3 month to focus on intel hard.
You should COMPLETELY ignore supply in a region you want to liberate. Two on recruit, everyone else on intel, scan almost exclusively in that region. First you want anything labelled "Find a Lead". Once you've successfully run that, subsequent missions in the chain will have "Liberation" in their description...there's usually a couple of "rescue a defector" style missions involved. Then the radio tower, then the full on base assault. If you set a haven advisor early (always a soldier) and kill the Faceless in the Haven, it'll double your intel output and make it MUCH easier to find missions with long infiltration timers. On my most recent campaign I had my first region liberated by the 7th of April. Once liberated, switch your soldier advisor to an engineer (assuming you took out the faceless) and set all to supply except for one on recruit (for the 3% chance at a scientist/engineer, or if you still need staff) and one on intel. Move to your next region. That will finally bring your supply flow online. Before that you are ENTIRELY reliant on "war time economy", which means running all those stealth missions and ignoring loot and kills is cutting your own throat.
Meiam said:
The dark event also don't work all that well, if they pop up in a region you don,t have access to yet or they appear but with just a few hour left there's just nothing you can do, feel like your getting punished for something you couldn't do anything about. On top of that some are really no problem at all while others are crippling if triggered early.
Tactical DE's is a tough one. Having them pop in a region where you couldn't do anything about it isn't great "game feel", but the DE's are simply replacing the natural alien tech evolution, so you're SUPPOSED to miss a few of them. Otherwise the game would have the same sloppy inverted difficulty curve of Vanilla.
You're only sending out one squad at a time?
