Honestly I don't think it's worth even using rocket launchers. They're heavy, the ammo is heavy, they're slow to fire and it's really risky to try and shoot one over obstacles since that 10% block chance could result in a gibbed xenonaut. Not only that but the same job can be accomplished pretty effectively with grenades anyway. They seem to have a very specific niche of taking out targets behind hard cover at long ranges but in pretty much every case of that you can flank them with other soldiers.
Anyway I got this ages ago when it was still being developed then put it away for a while, I've come back to it and I'm currently in early January with things going pretty smoothly. I made a couple of mistakes that I now know about but nothing that's tanked my run.
I really wasn't sure whether I was going to like the new way nation funding is handled (namely, it's based on air interception rather than ground combats) and I still think ground victories should contribute more to relations but overall I don't mind it. I do like that cash is usually pretty tight so you can't manufacture 10 of everything right away.
The ground combat feels a bit easy to be honest, barring the inevitable cross map critical hit on a soldier surrounded by cover I haven't lost all that many people. Cover is abundant and usually very effective and your weapons tend to quickly kill the aliens (except ballistics vs androns in which case you tend to just scratch the paintwork). UFO breaches are fairly deadly but once you figure out the layouts and where the guards are stationed it's easy to drop a stun gas or alienium grenade around the corners and clean whatever is left afterwards. Also I've had precisely one alien base so far and it was a cakewalk. I blasted through it easily partly because the enemy never attacked in groups of more than two and partly because it doesn't look like it was balanced for taking along a hunter scout car (yes, vehicles fit inside the alien base). My car was toting a pulse laser and just obliterated most of the resistance it faced.
Actually speaking of the scout car I read a lot of people saying how useless they were but so far mine have been amazing, they get a longer sight range than soldiers which isn't reduced at night, they have damage resistance a little less than wolf armor which comes much later in the game at a much higher cost, they're buildable from very early on and they're fairly cheap. All of this comes at the cost of taking up two soldier spots in the dropship. Also, the default machinegun isn't amazing but the pulse laser is fantastic if you don't mind occasional overdamage. I can't help but feel the hit detection on them bugged or something though because I regularly see enemy shots hit directly on the car but deal no damage and don't pop up with 'resisted' or 'missed' so in a large majority of the missions they end up absorbing repeated blasts from multiple enemies with only a small amount of damage.
Air combat balance feels alright, the autoresolve seems to be pretty accurate as well although I noticed one time that it left one of my foxtrots on about 4% health against an alien scout which was baffling since fighting manually leads to the scout getting destroyed before reaching attack range 100% of the time.
Overall it's still fun although the sheer number of ufos can lead to tedium over longer play sessions.
Edit: Fuck alien grenades though, holy shit.
Author
Topic: Xenonauts - Post cold war XCOM re-imagining - KICKSTARTER FUNDED!! (Read 26883 times)