Hello. After-Shocked...

[BadgerBadger]

Well, I've been lurking about your forums for a good moment, biding my time to post some of my thoughts or opinions - frankly I was a little surprised at the amount of interest an older game still maintains. Asit may, I was biding my time and opinions until i finished the game - and LOL, it just keeps not ending.

 

I actually discovered the forums a bit late, in fact I had given up on the game for a .. break - after getting hooked on it while playing an obscure game no one i knew had even heard of, and which i found accidentally while looking up X-Com. Sounds familiar, i bet.

 

It was only thanks to the forums that I learned of the "don't grab the last cultist base" issue, which chasing them around eternally re-taking my bases had made the game simply frustrating (esp. w/ building Secret Service and Defense to no avail)- and in fact, repetiitive. I wish now i had checked earlier - the constant base disruption meant that my research and ship production was crippled, so the game was going nowhere, and the constant fighting - even with 3 FULL SQUADS in rotation( for owunds and training), meant that when i finally went on the wargot mission, my commando unit was simply TOO good, and the wargots (seperate opinion topic: they are too weak, even as mooks) simply were no challenge at all ( on veteran difficulty) - by the time i finally got onto their ship. (I had taken the temple WAYY before i knew i was supposed to).

Perhaps i should have started a new game armed with this knowledge - and I will, when it's mod time.

 

Anyway, that's my introduction, and i wanted to very briefly outline some of my takes on AS, before perhaps going into more detail in the specifics, that have their own threads ( 60- What? pages of them, i see?).

 

First, as a fan of Gamma world onto Fallout, and X-Com, i just can't say how impressed i am with the game overall. I tried AL; it's certainly a good game in it's own right, but the atmosphere and.. hmmn.. cartoony 'look' of it, are less to my taste. Heck, after AM, As looked cartoony to me at first, but i quickly came to love it so much i never finished my AM game.

 

For relatively familiar ground, I found the story fairly refreshing. I actually found myself surprised by some of the twists and revelations - not often that happens, I'm afraid, and although of course there are details I could nit-pick, over-all, I'm just floored by the story. I actually found myself eagerly anticipating the next research/plot point.

 

I'm also impressed by the number and QUALITY of the mods, especially for a (no offense - ) relatively obscure game. Very dedicated fanbase. And like all the competent mod communtiies I've found myself, very helpful (despite some quibbles, hey, all families have that, eh?).

 

So: If you're still reading tghis, some of my thoughts, and even , dare I?, critcisms...

 

First off, Having played and loved AM, I even more loved the post-apocalypse feel of AS - at first - but, in the strategic game, this feel is quickly swallowed IMO by how one can take territory and hold mines, etc - whole nation-sized provinces - without a base. It's implied that the resource points rae min-bases or communtities, but as i see it, the resources should bE bases, so to speak - and civilization should be islands in mostly-uncontrollable mass. This was more true in AL, when my resource mines were fully automated with no crews - but we couldn't automate better defenses? Just a quibble, but the mood suffered, and i felt it too quickly and easily progressed into running a total-war style "empire" of good boundaries, rather than the , as I said, islands or bastions of new "civilization".

i notice most of the mods address the tactical level, and i looked inmto modding originally on this forum ( and StratCore) to see what was moddable and what was hard-coded, because i wanted to mod the strategic level. Relatedly, i thought the 3 great factions over-simplified, and despite the current length of the game, I found myself wishing for a richer diplomatic situation in the strategic game, perhaps even to the point where the arrival of the ship is in effect a sequel game or chapter.

 

Next, but relatedly, having played AM, i found Reticulan technology disappointing in AS. Remember in AM when you snag your first laser and yur riflemen are like "OMG BFG FTW"?

We do it for the LULZ, boys. But seriously, game balance issues aside, it strained my suspension of disbelief and consistency that the R. weapons are no longer awesome (well... ), but that really , who didn't trade up fro human slug-throwers as soon as they could?

Lasers.. with RECOIL? Very... interesting ( btw: i modded their recoil out - until i was reminded that recoil is also time between shots..LOL).

The story says - the first mission - that your high-tecdh will gve you an edge, and i expected that to get us through until we could make our own weapons, and i was pleased someone bucked the mandatory "progression" of RPG'S (oh let's be honest, most RPG's never WERE anything but squad-based missions strung together with a skeleton "story")-

and the Ret. weapons would be merely a burp as they broke down and you ran outta unreplaceable batteries... but the actuality becomes, you find Ret cells endlessly, and you quit using them mostly because they're JUNK.

Not to mention, those guns sure are BIG for tiny little pot-heads.

I realize this has been addressed:- laser rebalance - at least for human weapons, and i agree that reverse engineering in no way guarantees the quality of the originalat least IRL.

At any rate, this was jarring to me, in both respects, and without -so far - deeper knowledge of what can be modded - i haven't (sofar, there's ALOT of posts) found how, or if, modding the "loot" could be done so that IF i modded REt. weapons, it wouldn't crush game balance.

 

Quick quibbles on game balance?

TEChNICIAN class? ( or field medic or contorl train whatsit? LOL)..

Are you Kidding me? Look, just becuas eyou fix something doesn't mean you USe it well - or all jet crew/techs would be jockeys.

The requirements are so overlapped with Medic that I - and i bet many others - just ended up with our medics becoming, in fact, field medics - wielding power armor and the heavist of wepaons - with a BONUS. Eat your heart out; troopers and gunners.

 

The Nightmare (Vivid Image) Circlet...

Seriously, this has to be th emsot unbalanced.... If it was a Projector, it would be vicious enough - but as acriclet,a dn that area, on every effect...

For so long , that was more threatening to me about the cultist than ANY thing they had - and i do like that it's rough, but - when i finally made one, i immediately took it off, ass it made it TOO crazy. That's when you know it's too powerful.

 

Cyborgs our steam-dwarf-ish friends, tho' i love them ; seem a little unbalanced to me.

Wouldn't you think that each cybernetic addition, making them less biological, would reduce their psi power a step? ( For example)

Afterall, they are giving up SOmething - aren't they?

 

I was REALLY disappointed by the mooks.. err, Wargots. (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Mooks

Okay, okay they're mooks - but mooks needn't be a complete paper tiger. I was so looking forward to them as a challenge.. and usually so disappointed.

For curiosity's sake, i went back to my old save game where they attacked the laputa - BEFORE my squads had spent ? however long endlessly respawning cultists ( i STILL feel dumb!) and level-ing , and no. it wasn't just the Waergot ship; even on the laputa , with my "baby" squad that AREN'T super-heroic, I found the fight pretty easy - yes, therew as a critical hit that got one fo my squaddies, but overall, my men were more than a match for wargots, even ona 1-to-1 basis. If cyborgs are analogous to dwarves, and the psy's are elves, the Ogres should be a little more formidable, is all. Yes, in vague, they are ogre-ish - big giants that hit hard if you let them hit you - but , until i check their stat blocks I admit this is just specualtion - I don't think they are NEAR s tough as they look.

And their technology? Really? These are the gusy the laputa guns couldn't scratch? Yes, they have plasma... But otherwise, pretty un-impressive. My hired scouts had better scanners, before i met these jerks. ANd : thanks for the drone technology, doofuses.

Guess what i want to mod most?

 

Relatedly:

AM had this issue as well - the commando special forces helicopter - in a scenario where i simply cannot BUY we'd have air superiority. The wargots can't shoot down the laputa shuttle? REALLY????

Frankly, i thought - even perhaps expected - that upon the failed boarding attempt, the Wargots were going to destroy the Laputa, and deny you the landing craft, after which the game would change to having squads fight almsot guerilla-style against an alien race that has advantages including air superiority. You saw the Power Armors lined up like tanks in their ship? You can't stop territory grabs from large forces with commando untis, but thats a flavor-scale opinion i have had a while. ( i liked that in AM, your squads influenced control, but you had a sense they were not doing the bulk of the fighting).

I would have like dto see, as i said , the wargot arrival change the game so much it was , in fact, perhaps a whole next game...Oh well.

 

And, lastly, not a complaint, simply a reflection: turns out the "acanti" were the villains, not the starghosts? WOW.

THAT's a twist Shyamalan would've appreciated. I expected, did everyone else, that the "ghosts" were the ancient evil, perhaps even the same beings earth had seen as the ancient "gods", and expected we'd find they and the Ret's had been at intergallatic war sinceangels and the devils and atlantis, and what-not; trite, cool the first 40 times, revelation.

In my game, becuase of the mistake i mentioned earlier, i still had wargots while the SG's attacked, and i kept wondering why Ghosts weren't leading the wargot squads - i thought THEY were the "gods", and expected such a revelation on the wargot ship.

It's funny now, and tho' i think that would have been cool in it's way, and think the current story has some.. issues ( the SG's make pillars to spread the biomass? uh, ...huh)-

i nonethless have to hand it to them, I like how it turned out (i thought the 'female' would be underwater, didn't you? so much biomass we can't see...)-

partiuclarly the almost "star trek" sense of truly ALIEN beings, of truly alien scale, and motivation, as opposed to the all-too-anthromorphized "aliens" of most sci-fi.

 

What a great game.