Perhaps it is just my playstyle where I prefer to be fighting on the front lines, but I think Ive only ever used this mode MAYBE 3 times in the entirety of the near 20 hours of me playing - and one of them was forced for the story mission. The only time I ever go into this mode is to remotely convert resources to power. It wasnt until about 3/4ths of the way into the story did I even get ACCESS to the ability to create troops, but I never have enough resources to make a small army of Guardians to even warrant this mode, as most of it is spent on turret ammo or converting to power so I can keep playing.

This is probablly *THE* most underwhelming and half-baked feature in the game

• There are no pros.

• The UI is a NIGHTMARE to navigate. There is no QOL features like hotkeys to select troops, facilities, etc. The only hotkeys you get are *after* you have already selected something. This wants to mimic RTS-style games, but lacks about every single basic feature in one. The only exception is command groups with Control + a number to assign them to that group.
  
• Reiterating the lack of hotkeys, In order to convert materials, I have to scroll to my tower and click it, or click the Tower button at the bottom right, then click the convert. Why cant we just have a hotkey to select the tower, or power converters, or ammo converters...
  
• Mode has a minimap, but does not allow you to click on it to move in traditional RTS manners. The only quick-look feature is snapping to your tower, but as I am on the frontlines, and there is not a button to snap to ME - THE PLAYER - I have to move the camera to find me each and every time I want to look at the towers / artillery near my current frontline.
  
• AI / Pathfinding is a joke - I barely even try. They get stuck on EVERYTHING. I made the mistake of putting the Guardian fabricator inside my base to protect it, and they cant even navigate out the door without me meticulously pointing them through it.
  
• On recovery day, I find the amount of troops so insane that I cannot even take time away to UTILIZE the command mode to call in artillery, mines, etc. I just set them to Auto-fire and forget about them. Even with Bullet Time enabled, I feel its not enough to manage the handfull of guardians in traditional RTS-style gameplay where Im telling them to attack specific targets. My damage output as the player is substantially greater than the output of a handfull of guardians, so I dont bother.

Big Machine go BRRRRRR. Scary AI kills mankind and forces them to hide from some sort of super huge stompy thing.

I tried to stay engaged with the story but its so bland and cliche I genuinely barely remember anything about it other than a bunch of people called the Envoy worship this new machine god-thing as a means of survival. You fight them to survive.

The AI-Generated voice acting is atrocious, and not only do the subtitles not match what they are saying, but nor does their lipsynching. The emotions / tones of voice often dont match the context of whats going on, and some of the characters are downright hate-able due to the poor voices that were chosen for them. MGT for example seems like a pretty chill dude, but the voices come out as stand-offish and the condecending tones in their voice just make them sounds like a total ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. At one point you save someone they care about and someone makes the remark that they are trying to say "Thank you". MGT responds with the most agressive and offensive "SHUT UP!". Its obviousl from the context of the conversation that this was likely meant to be more of a playful / teasing response, but no... The AI generated voice just makes him sound like a complete and ungreateful ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

The constant back-and-forth between NPCs for a few one-liners as a means of progressing the story got tiring quick, making me run to the other side of the base to click a button, or research a free instant research just as a means of getting me to interact with that character. Do better.

Recruitment of your characters is a neccesary part of the experiance, since when they die, theyre gone. However this was probably the MOST under-explained part of the game, and if it wasnt for small snippets in the menus I would have never figured it out. The whole Operator vs Local Operator thing was confusing, and it never explained to me in the tutorial segment that I had to go on tour with them atleast once in some hidden menu in the character select screen to *actually* become a part of my squad. Only THEN can you assign them to parts of your base, send them on missions, etc.

Skills for these RNG chracters were.... lackluster. I would have liked to see more combinations of these skills, but for now they appear to be entirely static. In short I've only seen 3 types of characters:

• Infinite Ammo/ Skill Cooldown
  
• Rocket Launcher / Decoy
  
• Shield / Sword (Think Genji from Overwatch wher you deflect bullets)

Eventually you progress into the story enough to unlock modification of your XEN guns and the ability to transmute your XEN boots into other XEN boosts if you dont like them. A Neat idea, but I would like this to extend directly to manufacture / modification of the weapons and its parts too. Maybe I like that its got 4 Skill slots, but I hate the fact that its a +450 Attack... What if I wanted to convert it to a +50 Mag Size instead, or vice versa?

There are not really any Pros / Cons worth mentioning here. Most of it is just a means of associating a location with some sort of utility.

This is obviously the strongest part of the game, as its the main focus. Building my base was a blast, but throughout my game, I was continously hit with features/mechanics that were poorly explained, or not at all. Some of it was likely due to poor translations and some of it seemd just completely forgotten about. A good example of this would be the power converter which can turn items into energy. The Option text is "Dismantle" which I thought meant it would dismantle the actual power converter, so I never clicked it. It wasnt until multiple hours in that I did it by accident and saw the UI and the big lightbulb went off.

• Fun and *mostly* intuitive mechanics around base building. Stability gives me problems at times for no apparent reason. I could have a floor tile supported by 4 walls under it on each side, yet the game tells me I have no support.
  
• Ability to save templates for different building styles... HUGE plus when I want to experiment and dont want to have to remember how my base was beforehand.

• Some of the "upgraded" variants seem to be missing - like better batteries. I see the upgraded material storage, but nothing for power.
  
• Lack of "storage" between tours. Would be great if I could pre-fill my autoloaders with ammo, or if they saved their contents between tours. This would greatly alleviate material costs for setting up base / prepare for Recovery Day
  
• Auto-harvesting of resources does not scale based on capacity, meaning it might takes 10-20 minutes to harvest resources when your X-Field size is larger. Ive seen many other people complain about this too.
  
• Auto-harvesting does not seem to STOP harvesting when storage is full, wasting the materials.

At the end of the day, I find the game fun, but it is slowly starting to get to the point where Im going to have to stop playing. The early game was a blast, and I loved every second of it. The Tower Defense / RTS modes I felt got underutilized in my gameplay and I almost never used it unless I was forced to. The story is not very memorable and generic, the AI on all accounts are dumb as a rock, the combat was fun but the numbers in later game seem to encourage high ROF / multi-hit weapon configurations which severely hinder survivability in terms of strategy. The material and power system seems too punishing to use your base which you worked hard to upgrade and actively penalizes you with less loot. Auto-looting seems to only give you a fraction of what you could find manually and costs extra power, but saves you time which is a nice tradeoff.

I think the game has a solid foundation to build on, but from what Ive seen in the responses so far its been due to budget constraints that these mechanics werent further fleshed out / fully implemented. Variety is the spice of life and this game has almost NO variety in terms of anything. I would have liked to see more variety in terms of weapon parts and abilities - Having every gun have 180 Ammo is pretty bland, and often means I am reloading every few seconds trying to shoot the enemies. I would have liked to see more options to build upon the gun stats other than just Attack, Crit Bonus, and Crit Chance. I would also loved to see better utility options for the base instead of just turrets and ammo. Perhaps harvester drones that can get resources outside the X-Field, or portable miners like you see in Recovery Day? Just give me SOMETHING else to do in Exploration days other than just rush the POIs and extract.

I can look past the poor character design, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ AI-generated voices, horrible story, and dated graphics, but I am sure most of the "newer generation" people here cannot.

That’s a lot to read and I’ll probably read the rest when I’m not at work.

But your entire segment on the guns just falls apart when… there’s a drum mag core gun.

Also your test with the rapid core gun was to take a fast firing xen and see how much faster it gets? Generally speed up fire rates is percentile in any game. So it’s completely trash and does nothing on rapid fire options. And seeing as some xen have 60 second timers… there’s more apparent uses for it. It’s not supposed to be used for fast firing. Also different higher rarity core guns just innately have more ammo. My purple rapid core gun with no ammo mods has 280. So at 10 cost that’s 28 rounds. Which to be fair I mostly use a 15 round firing option and a 173 round firing option. (Yeah those exist) it really sounds like you just haven’t found much yet. Also you mention how there’s 2 shotgun options then complain how there’s no ranged stuff. What about beam, piercing shot, heavy shot, missile, smite, etc there’s like 80 something xens for firing type alone.

You also complain that a thermal sight doesn’t do much… well it adds a thermal site that’s fairly effective in heavy weather which is nice. While also not giving much less stats than things without additional effects like smart sight or shield sight.

Underbarrels have bayonets, grenade launchers, functional bipods, laser pointers (the laser range for aiming is kinda anemic though) and at least 4 types of stocks. Then you 3 different barrels that all change how your gun fires.

Now we get down to the core guns, standard which later on keeps a damage buff, rapid which fires faster, marksmen which I don’t remember the effect, engineer which uses mend and loader xens better, support which uses support xens better, drum mag for extra ammo, Cavalry which reload faster while sprinting. And that’s just off memory.

So your complaints for the core gun largely seems like what you’ve seen in maybe a couple hours? Which is fair if that’s what it is. But yeah the system is extremely large. And this is ignoring how you can take turret guns and fire those by hand if you want. Or you can pilot mechs for fps content.

There are more than 3 barrel types. Standard, Heavy, Double Tap, Scattershot (3 shots instead of 2, doesn't actually become a shotgun), and a railgun type that charges up to do more damage once charged. Haven't used the railgun type so I don't know the full mechanics on it.

There is just a lot to this game. For the Risk vs Reward, the answer is simple. Farm up the previous levels where you can clear no issue to get more materials to build up your base to handle the harder levels.

Edit: Got a better understanding of the mechanics. Will hop in later. :)

Originally posted by FearParable:

There are more than 3 barrel types. Standard, Heavy, Double Tap, Scattershot (3 shots instead of 2, doesn't actually become a shotgun), and a railgun type that charges up to do more damage once charged. Haven't used the railgun type so I don't know the full mechanics on it.

There is just a lot to this game. For the Risk vs Reward, the answer is simple. Farm up the previous levels where you can clear no issue to get more materials to build up your base to handle the harder levels.

Oh sorry I meant there’s 3 that completely changed how you fire, double tap, scatter, and railgun.

But yeah there are more.

Originally posted by ThatGuyKhi:

As someone on the fence, this was very helpful. I'd enjoy the TD aspects but get severely annoyed from the other gameplay choices, especially Tour Mode.

Tour mode If wanted outside of trying to get blue prints can be completed using “instant explore” which costs more power to do but instantly gives you a (small) pool of loot from that area. So you can only run recovery days if you want or only explore the big nodes and recovery day etc.

It is a lot harder to use instant loot and get rarer resources but you can also do a lot more runs a lot faster to make up for that. Which will also cycle the store more often so you can find what you need and buy it more often to replace what you aren’t getting.

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

TSo your complaints for the core gun largely seems like what you’ve seen in maybe a couple hours?

"Complaints" is too harsh of a word here. Its just simple criticism. And I wouldn't call 20 hours a "handfull" That's more hours than most would spend on a game.

Also different higher rarity core guns just innately have more ammo. My purple rapid core gun with no ammo mods has 280. So at 10 cost that’s 28 rounds.

Ive got 3 Oranges with extended mag size and none of them go over 45. Either Im just getting bad rolls, or you got a god roll. And by "mods" I am assuming you mean Xen Boosts, and not the primary/secondary rolls on the weapon stats

As for the attachments - The focus was not on the utility feature - its about the buffs / bonuses. Either they dont exist, or I simply havent found them yet, but I have not found a single attachment in the 40+ or so that I have still sitting in my inventory that does not give you bonuses to anything other than Attack, Crit Chance, or Crit Damage. Im aware the Thermal actually works, the grenade launcher actually works, the bipod and long range scope works, etc. Thats not the issue.

Also your test with the rapid core gun was to take a fast firing xen and see how much faster it gets? Generally speed up fire rates is percentile in any game. So it’s completely trash and does nothing on rapid fire options.

Which I guess comes down to poor description / flavor text. Yes, I would expect the ROF to increase on faster firing Xen just as much. 0.3 rounds a second is still extremely slow in terms of SMG / Machine gun standards, and so far Spray is THE fastest Xen Morph I have.

Originally posted by FearParable:

There are more than 3 barrel types. Standard, Heavy, Double Tap, Scattershot (3 shots instead of 2, doesn't actually become a shotgun), and a railgun type that charges up to do more damage once charged. Haven't used the railgun type so I don't know the full mechanics on it.

There is just a lot to this game. For the Risk vs Reward, the answer is simple. Farm up the previous levels where you can clear no issue to get more materials to build up your base to handle the harder levels.

Where did I say in any portion of my post that there were only 3 barrel types? I literally listed 4 of them as examples in my post.

Originally posted by SeveredSkullz:

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

TSo your complaints for the core gun largely seems like what you’ve seen in maybe a couple hours?

"Complaints" is too harsh of a word here. Its just simple criticism. And I wouldn't call 20 hours a "handfull" That's more hours than most would spend on a game.

Also different higher rarity core guns just innately have more ammo. My purple rapid core gun with no ammo mods has 280. So at 10 cost that’s 28 rounds.

Ive got 3 Oranges with extended mag size and none of them go over 45. Either Im just getting bad rolls, or you got a god roll. And by "mods" I am assuming you mean Xen Boosts, and not the primary/secondary rolls on the weapon stats

As for the attachments - The focus was not on the utility feature - its about the buffs / bonuses. Either they dont exist, or I simply havent found them yet, but I have not found a single attachment in the 40+ or so that I have still sitting in my inventory that does not give you bonuses to anything other than Attack, Crit Chance, or Crit Damage. Im aware the Thermal actually works, the grenade launcher actually works, the bipod and long range scope works, etc. Thats not the issue.

Also your test with the rapid core gun was to take a fast firing xen and see how much faster it gets? Generally speed up fire rates is percentile in any game. So it’s completely trash and does nothing on rapid fire options.

Which I guess comes down to poor description / flavor text. Yes, I would expect the ROF to increase on faster firing Xen just as much. 0.3 rounds a second is still extremely slow in terms of SMG / Machine gun standards, and so far Spray is THE fastest Xen Morph I have.

Yeah I think you might be taking me calling them complaints, harder than I mean it.

But yeah by mods. I meant. No rolls no xens no nothing. It’s 280 stock. The modifiers are for damage largely and some crit.

There are only like 4 stats that matter for the gun specifically. Damage, crit chance, crit damage, magazine size. Would be weird if your gun barrel gave you more armor. Not sure what else could fit here unless you want like sights to make bullets travel farther. But that’s what xen system is for. Adding stats like that would overlap with the xen injections.

Yeah pretty much every game does fire rate modifiers by percentile. So 5% faster firing on .3 seconds isn’t even going to be shown on the number.

But 5% on 20 seconds or even 60 seconds will be very notable.

Games do exist that have flat speed ups. But they are rare.

Faster fire rate xen I can think of is light coupled with double barrel. Before xens to speed up.

Also the 3 barrel comment from the next poster was to me because I phrased something weird.

I am kinda amazed you have orange rarity gear and 20 hours playing but haven’t seen much variety yet. Would be interesting to look into. If you’ve gotten a lot of it from infinity seige it might have higher rates for items you’ve seen before. So it doesn’t drop new types often or something.

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

Yeah I think you might be taking me calling them complaints, harder than I mean it.

But yeah by mods. I meant. No rolls no xens no nothing. It’s 280 stock. The modifiers are for damage largely and some crit.

There are only like 4 stats that matter for the gun specifically. Damage, crit chance, crit damage, magazine size. Would be weird if your gun barrel gave you more armor. Not sure what else could fit here unless you want like sights to make bullets travel farther. But that’s what xen system is for. Adding stats like that would overlap with the xen injections.

Yeah pretty much every game does fire rate modifiers by percentile. So 5% faster firing on .3 seconds isn’t even going to be shown on the number.

But 5% on 20 seconds or even 60 seconds will be very notable.

Games do exist that have flat speed ups. But they are rare.

Faster fire rate xen I can think of is light coupled with double barrel. Before xens to speed up.

Also the 3 barrel comment from the next poster was to me because I phrased something weird.

Gotcha. He didnt Reply to you so I thought it was directed at me for some reason.

And yeah, that would be a good addition - extending the bullet drop range. Accuracy, Recoil, Rate of Fire / cooldown reduction, and spread are a few stats off the top of my head. Could even have some that reduce the cost of the ammo like the Xen's do.

Barrels giving you armor wouldnt be that much of a stretch considering ive got a sight that projects a forward facing shield when I am aiming down my sight - on that note I think its pretty much already covered with this shield.

I am super happy there is a Drum Mag Core though - Im looking forward to finding one. I still dont think it will come close to giving me a full "Belt Fed MG" style gun with 100+ rounds in the mag, but its atleast better than 20 shots I have so far.

Originally posted by SeveredSkullz:

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

Yeah I think you might be taking me calling them complaints, harder than I mean it.

But yeah by mods. I meant. No rolls no xens no nothing. It’s 280 stock. The modifiers are for damage largely and some crit.

There are only like 4 stats that matter for the gun specifically. Damage, crit chance, crit damage, magazine size. Would be weird if your gun barrel gave you more armor. Not sure what else could fit here unless you want like sights to make bullets travel farther. But that’s what xen system is for. Adding stats like that would overlap with the xen injections.

Yeah pretty much every game does fire rate modifiers by percentile. So 5% faster firing on .3 seconds isn’t even going to be shown on the number.

But 5% on 20 seconds or even 60 seconds will be very notable.

Games do exist that have flat speed ups. But they are rare.

Faster fire rate xen I can think of is light coupled with double barrel. Before xens to speed up.

Also the 3 barrel comment from the next poster was to me because I phrased something weird.

Gotcha. He didnt Reply to you so I thought it was directed at me for some reason.

And yeah, that would be a good addition - extending the bullet drop range. Accuracy, Recoil, Rate of Fire / cooldown reduction, and spread are a few stats off the top of my head. Could even have some that reduce the cost of the ammo like the Xen's do.

Barrels giving you armor wouldnt be that much of a stretch considering ive got a sight that projects a forward facing shield when I am aiming down my sight - on that note I think its pretty much already covered with this shield.

I am super happy there is a Drum Mag Core though - Im looking forward to finding one. I still dont think it will come close to giving me a full "Belt Fed MG" style gun with 100+ rounds in the mag, but its atleast better than 20 shots I have so far.

I mean I was trying to say I don’t think adding the stats xen modify to weapon slots is a good idea. Because then why bother with the xen? Why have 2 systems in game that largely do the same thing? I think the stats on gun parts are more for making the parts not seem bad. But parts are largely for making the gun feel now you want it to feel. Then xen make it actually shoot and what it shoots.

Like sure sights have attack, crit, and crit damage. But I think that’s there largely to just exist and make loot seem better. And to make like purple better than blue. But in reality you use the sight you want because you like that sight. Also the crit stats are likely partly there to show precision over raw damage.

That’s how I see it at least.

I think maybe and possibly not. You want gun parts to work how they kinda work in like any other game or in like survival games. Where as this game is trying to do something different by using 2 different systems interacting with each other.

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

Originally posted by ThatGuyKhi:

As someone on the fence, this was very helpful. I'd enjoy the TD aspects but get severely annoyed from the other gameplay choices, especially Tour Mode.

Tour mode If wanted outside of trying to get blue prints can be completed using “instant explore” which costs more power to do but instantly gives you a (small) pool of loot from that area. So you can only run recovery days if you want or only explore the big nodes and recovery day etc.

It is a lot harder to use instant loot and get rarer resources but you can also do a lot more runs a lot faster to make up for that. Which will also cycle the store more often so you can find what you need and buy it more often to replace what you aren’t getting.

So in a way, one just gets stronger at a slower pace by utilizing Instant Loot? If so, I'm cool with that.
And are the big nodes where the blueprints are?

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

I think maybe and possibly not. You want gun parts to work how they kinda work in like any other game or in like survival games. Where as this game is trying to do something different by using 2 different systems interacting with each other.

I think this is kinda the "nail on the head" I would have expected the parts to more directly modify the "feel" of the weapon in terms of its raw stats and thinking of the Xen stuff as boosts / enhancements on top of the gun's base stats. With traditional weapons, a heavy / longer barrel would typically mean more damage, but here, thats not the case. You'd need to upgrade / switch your Xen Morph to something more powerful to achieve that effect.

Originally posted by ThatGuyKhi:

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

Tour mode If wanted outside of trying to get blue prints can be completed using “instant explore” which costs more power to do but instantly gives you a (small) pool of loot from that area. So you can only run recovery days if you want or only explore the big nodes and recovery day etc.

It is a lot harder to use instant loot and get rarer resources but you can also do a lot more runs a lot faster to make up for that. Which will also cycle the store more often so you can find what you need and buy it more often to replace what you aren’t getting.

So in a way, one just gets stronger at a slower pace by utilizing Instant Loot? If so, I'm cool with that.
And are the big nodes where the blueprints are?

Exactly. Its a trade off of time vs loot. Youll get less loot, but you dont have to spend the 10+ minutes manually searching each node for it.

Originally posted by ThatGuyKhi:

Originally posted by StellarSkys:

Tour mode If wanted outside of trying to get blue prints can be completed using “instant explore” which costs more power to do but instantly gives you a (small) pool of loot from that area. So you can only run recovery days if you want or only explore the big nodes and recovery day etc.

It is a lot harder to use instant loot and get rarer resources but you can also do a lot more runs a lot faster to make up for that. Which will also cycle the store more often so you can find what you need and buy it more often to replace what you aren’t getting.

So in a way, one just gets stronger at a slower pace by utilizing Instant Loot? If so, I'm cool with that.
And are the big nodes where the blueprints are?

Most of the blueprints. But not all of them. Big nodes just hold more everything and drop higher tier stuff.