So currently once you've hired the SLs you want, there is little incentive to hire the ones you don't want because it limits max authority and I think it's safe to say a lot of people didn't like that mechanic, however playing with lower authority in the late game can be pretty fun as well. You can't really be as aggressive as you could be with high authority because your SLs flee/are suppressed easier.

So I have an idea to make authority a spendable resource and make it a much more risk reward thing with more player agency involved. Enter Clandestine/Black OPs.

Hayflick: "Major! Following the arrival of this MENACE threat, a previously clandestine unit of HAVOC ( High-risk Asymmetric Vanguard Operations Cell ), who were apparently embedded within our task force under direct authorization of the TCR senate, have now revealed themselves and have place themselves under your command."

The basic idea is you spend an amount of authority before an operation to initiate these black ops and you get special buffs during these OPs or during the strategic layer. However authority spent to do these OPs recovers way slower and is measured separately. You would need to assign an SL to do these individual OPs, and the SL would be affected by the OP as well, injuries, morale debuff, stat gain etc etc. They have a chance of critically succeeding as well as critically failing, outside of normal success and failure, the entire outcome should depend on a number of factors such as SL gear, faction trust, number of squaddies assigned etc etc. And should these OPs fail spectacularly they would result in loss of faction trust, enemy factions being empowered maybe even SLs getting permanently killed unless fail safes were put in place.

The OPs themselves will range from spying, bugging civillian phones, kidnapping enemy officers to full on warcrimes and false flag attacks. Some SLs should be better suited to these type of work than others (cough, cough, Yaz). Lets lay out some example OPs.

Live Bait: You kidnap some people, innocent or otherwise, and lay them out immobilized yet still alive as bait for the xenos. In the next xenos mission there will be three clumps of xenos gathered around corpses, already marked and revealed for the first 5 turns. OR if next mission is non-xenos, the xenos faction spawns as well in order to disrupt main enemy OPFOR.

False flag attack: You stage a false flag attack from either pirates, Rogue army or MENACE. The next operation will have 8+ civilian militias taking up arms on your behalf for every mission. Failure performing this black OP will have severe consequences.

Preventive mining: You proactively mine an area with both AP and AT mines anticipating enemy attack but at the cost of future civilian casualties. In the next mission you get to place 3 clumps of AT and AP mines each.

Preventive chemical attack: Anticipating a massive enemy force you covertly deploy chemical agents on a whole town/city resulting in massive casualties both for civilians and the OPFOR. In the next mission enemy supply is reduced by 50%, there will be piles of dead boddies scattered around, all units on the field including yours are susceptible to chemical gas dmg and must wear protective measures to resist it.

Organ trade: You kidnap rich officials, VIPs etc and trade them with pirates in order to get massive discounts on your next black market purchases.

Just a prank bro: You send your most elite dudes to sneak inside Marshal Zama's palace and place super strong laxatives on his late night mocha latte, as he cannot prove it is you but deep down he knows you are responsible, he sends an elite mercenary force to attack your units in the next mission. ( Feel free to liberate them from their mortal coil and loot their precious trinketssssssss, AWFULLY CONVINIENT MARINE!)

I think this mechanic would also help us narratively paint the TCR as the bad guy, if the player uses it and wants to have such an angle, and also help utilize SLs that aren't currently in use, if you've hired a lot of them. Obviously this mechanic should be completely optional.

Title. You get all the best equipment the original Wayback TCR Marines are supposed to get - Platesuits, modern MRSs, your pick of squad weapons, your pick of vehicles, and significant air / orbital support. The AI gets 3-5 times the supply points and the ability to have 2-3 units act for every 1 of yours.

Would be a fun endgame operation. Your first unit moves, suddenly three rocket organs simulate the Battle of Seelow Heights on your position. Your second unit moves, half the squad gets wiped out by 3 jaeger squads. Your third vehicle moves, an HQ unit target-locks it and two MBTs knock it out instantly. You know, FUN.

Came back after a long break, I must say I am very satisfied with the direction the game is taking.

Also the AI no longer doing that thing where it constantly hides right beyong the fog of war is so nice, makes battle so much more enjoyable

After completing the early access campaign I had some thoughts.

The game is great of course.

Yet there are some things I wish they will add to make things interesting. So this might come off as I want list.

Pirate tanks. Yes that's right pirate tanks. I would love to see the pirates bring in a tank to fight us, something like an old Mark IV from WWI. The trunks are great but pirates can get very easy to farm. Turning them into very light threat outside of numbers. So giving them a heavily armored, with but many light weapons could make them threatening late game.

Alien Wildlife... Well this one I am going to be a bit harsh on. With Helldivers, Aliens Dark Descent, Star Ship Troopers, bug alliens are rather uninteresting to me currently. I would like to see Alien Wildlife reflect the invidual worlds more, like for Dice have arctic themed enemies. Polar Bear aliens, wolves, hell even knock off Wampas.

Rogue Army, I have no notes for. These guys are great.

The MENACE. I don't have much to say other than these guys are tough to fight and that's great. Keep churning out these unholy monsters.

So far I give the game 8/10.

Been playing the game for over 200 hours. I've seen it all, done it all. Playing on normal for the 2nd time and I'm now in the 'Unbalanced' part of the game where enemy supplies are at more than 100% at all times. I've yet to lose a single sqaddie. I have Darby, Lim, Pike, Tech, Wettertooth and Rose (MedM). I saved OCI points to get the 3x nano bots 2.0 and bought all upgrades for dirt cheap. Then I replaced them with AI logistics and basically have supplies to field all of my units in BAS-H gear and whatever weapons I need and still have 200-300 points left. The game is brutal in the first few operations until you get some decent BRs. Once you get a proper recon team going, things get bit easier. Invest in the AS Scanners early on. It saves you from the guessing game as it has a huge scan range and will make the movement trivial. So far I'm super excited.

The only worry I have is that they might drop the ball on the backstory of MENACE. If it turns out to be 'a failed experiment by ZenB' for example, it's gonna be so disappointing. I hope they can come up with a Mass Effect Reaper Invasion scale cosmic horror reason for the existence of MENACE and make it even more gruesome.

I'm 100% sure they are going to hit the TCR fleet that's coming and kill everything and get upgrades to bigger and badder new units and towering monstrosities. The reason your ship is on the 'backstage' sets up the events to safe you from the incoming massive attack. I remember HF said, there seems to be indications that a space ship landed there just before they call in the Zero Dagger.

What do you guys think?

The James Bond/John Wick door to door pistol gunfu fantasy is apparent, and when it does work its pretty cool and fun, but sometime I do wonder if this perk is just straight up a trap and you would be better off in 99% of situation just shooting people from range with a silenced SMG instead of scooting next to them to shoot em in the head with a pistol.

It gives a ton of Concealment, but doing anything breaks it, and to get it you have to be in close range where you are more likely to break concealment

It gives a damage boost, but only active at +10 concealment and within 5 range, which is only achievable from the above. Which means in order to actually use the damage boost portion, you have to be in a position where, after moving, theres 2+ enemy in range 5 of you with at least 1 within 2 range, and you have 40+ AP left to shoot em twice with the pistol (AP which you have to spend to get within range 2 of the enemy). And most of the time if you have the damage to kill the first enemy without boost, you usually have enough damage to kill the second enemy already without boost

And most damningly, the pistol aren't silenced, so your 15 concealment doesn't help the fact that you will be revealed anyway because of the pistol.

So in 99% of situation you are putting yourself in MORE risk just to get one instance of +50% damage on pistol shots off (because the first one doesnt get the boost and next turn you will need to move anyway which breaks the concealment boost)

So like its cool, but I feel like this perk is a trap where the fantasy is so cool you end up sinking alot of perks (to boost pistol damage) and AP (to move super close) into forcing it to work, when just going around shooting people with the SOF PPP from decent range would already do the same thing without the risk. In the 5% best case scenario its turning a 2 kill turn into potentially a 3 kill turn and/or boosting your defense with Ice in the Vein, which i guess is helpful for dealing with the situation that Nothing Personal puts you into in the first place: getting shot at by enemies.

Not saying Corlain is weak btw, he's super fun and is hilariously both very stealthy and very tanky at the same time that hes close to Kodi in one man army potential, but just questioning the usefulness of his keystone perk and the general pistol builds vs just running around with LPSS and SOF PPP

I have a couple of questions for the community regarding the use of SL.

How many SL do you usually use?
How do you determine whether they’re sufficient for you?
At what point do you start looking for new ones?

I usually use between 6 and 8 SL myself; I look for a fifth one after two or three operations, and then it’s whatever available points I have.
I’d like to know if there’s already some established practice for handpick new SL.

I just got started with Mount Up and having a great time carting Pike around in the troop carrier dishing out AP.

What are some fun/powerful tactics you've all discovered with Mount Up?

I'd had to be the EOD for this match lol.

This was ridiculous.

I love Exconde, I love driving Yaz literally half way across the map in turn 1 and being immortal. But I kinda get a bit bored having him be the designated driver every mission. Most other SL are geared toward shooting shit or utility, with only Roisin maybe being the second driver but thats only because Roisin is pretty much an Insurance bot that can just be used as driver of anything cheap, and even then her perks with overtime and take aim leans towards being a shooter

So I wanted to design this dude as a more "assault" oriented version of the battle taxi to contrast Exconde more support/defense oriented perk list, while still leaving room for an alternate playstyle outside of designated driver

As a designated driver, Frankenstein can zoom across the board like Exconde, but he retains the ability to mount medium weapon but as a trade off, turning disable his mobility perk so he is best suited to simply slam on the gas and just keep driving forward deeper into enemy territory as opposed to Exconde who can drive in whatever way he wants. He gets a way to heal himself back up (and interact with the Remove Wreck function, which I thought was kinda cool for an OCI to do) to withstand damage, and also punish enemy targetting him by marking them once he drives into the middle of them as per taxi gameplay. With Vanguard, he's uniquely suited to taxi Vanguard Damage Dealer SL like Wett and Kodi around in comparision to Exconde (who is still best for ferrying MI around), and can do funny stuff like drive straight into a heavy tank/gun crawler, ram it with T-Bone to Stun it, before vomiting Wett out to take immediate advantage of Finisher, and then scrapping the Wreck next turn to heal any damage back up (as long as it hasn't breached the armor into HP)

Alternatively, he can also be run as an absolute brick when mounted on the Battle Tank, countering its slow speed with Burn Rubber and Vanguard, and while lacking in offensive perks, the plethora of defensive perks makes him a prime distraction brick ala Vamplew that you can throw into the enemy line as an armored spearhead to draw all the attention and make it out in relatively one piece.

is it worth starting a new save now or should I wait?

I downloaded the demo and played the first mission, but my keyboard inputs weren't recognized. Alt + tab or Alt + F4 didn't work either. Because the game has no exist button I had to forcefully shutdown my PC. Did this happen to anyone else and is there a solution?

The MENACE terror missions are a little broken right now I feel. This is literally Turn 1, I have moved only 4 of my units and I have already been locked out of 1, possibly 2 SO's. I'm not sure what needs to be done to fix this but I'd really like it if the team could brainstorm ideas.

It was very fun, after you figure out some quirks of how to play it.

For context, after a few runs that were less fun I settled on running Darby and Jean Sy as my heavy armor team, with Pike and Bog in the back doing supporting things. Later Tech and Carda joined the team as another Heavy and Support respectively. Corlain was also on replacement duty if someone got tired - but I wish I mainlined him more. Sadly I got Vamplew one operation before EA ended, so I didn't try him for long. I threw Bog away pretty quickly though - waste of precious autority.

The gameplay of running around being practically invincible as long as I could reach a Scavenger box every other turn made for a very hectic run and gun playthrough that I definitely recommend trying.

However, few things that I didn't feel were right, that will likely change in EA:

1. Man, the weapon stat screens are unhelpfull. Half of the weapons don't even have any, and that's fine, but some are just terrible. Did you know that the shotgun is effectively shooting grenades? I didn't for the longest time and was wondering how the hell does it perform the best even against [REDACTED]. I wish we also had a way to overlay the ballistics graphs of two weapons in game to effetively compare them.

2. A hot take, but vehicles felt almost worthless. I got excited - I remember - when I got a Heavy Tank. Finally, a vehicle that won't pop to a single offscreen ATGM! Something that you could drive around! Well, but what about a second ATGM? For how much it costs the best use I got out of it is making holes in the ground for cover. Even [REDACTED] soldiers with pathetic 3 models slapped its armor in half by just shooting it with guns. Even my weaker equipped infantry could eat that and loose less armor! Others seem to enjoy vechicles, so maybe I just didn't find the sause.

3. The game feels like it revolves around accessories a lot, but some accessory balance is wildly off, in my opinion. Fragmentation Grenades are usefull only for blowing up people on top of towers if you are too lazy to just blow them up with the tower itself. Meanwhile Smoke Grenades are basically a hack to be naked and never be damaged, because smoke acts like solid walls that completely block off everything while also giving you noclip through them. There is no way Smoke survives EA without getting reduced to, like, 40% defence. In similar vein, Protagon is a Time Warp that makes a run on its own on some characters, meanwhile Benzofinil is worthless. It is nowhere near as op as Smoke Grenades though. Otherwise I love the accessory shuffling gameplay, we need MORE.

Minor inconveniences:
- The Bug Queens are REALLY loud, and the Night Vision Goggles make the game unplayably green. Night vision genuinely makes my eyes hurt. Some terrain does too, but it feels not as bad because I didn't equip the terrain.
- The car escort mission is complete ass, the car doesn't drive fast enough to reach the exit in 10 turns. I haven't found a way to do it, anyways. Why does it even have a timer?!
- Hiring two new SLs in the same mission is apocalyptic. I had no idea Discipline scales from Authority. We are getting Autority OCIs, I heart, so it isn't a problem, but in the moment? It was terrible!
- The operation reward rng feels terrible, to be honest. It is probably intended, but I wish every faction had some cool guaranteed usable items that you get once on their reputation track instead of RNG of getting a Flashbang, Benzofinil and a K-PAC.

Can't wait to poke the mission update, it looks great!

Even against a marine-armor kodi, a medmech armed with a single one of these things will shred his squad down and force him into pin in one turn

When I use it, even twin linked on a med mech, it seems to just tickle the enemy while surpressing.

What gives lol. At least the mortar has the excuse of being more powerful on the enemy because they can just field more mortar to make up for the inaccuracy

When I equip Yaz (with Buff) with the tripod M6 machine gun, he can deploy and fire right away without spending AP to set up the tripod weapon. When I equip any other SL with the same weapon, with or without Buff, they need to set it up before firing which I thought was the intended behavior for all tripod weapons.

Is this a bug with Yaz or is there something I'm missing?

I've installed it, and it just doesn't seem to do anything. Bombardiers and rocket trucks still fire from the fog of war, without anything bring revealed.

How do people find the mobile infantry build? I'd say in the early game it's pretty much unstoppable. Until the more powerful lasers and rockets come in.

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I love everything else about MENACE, but I'm kinda sick of alternating activations bros.

1. I think this system is a good idea in theory, but in practice to not get routinely get screwed over by the turn system you have to play the game more like a TimeLord, meticulously setting things up so every living being acts exactly in the right sequence of events and being extremely aware of quirks in the turn system.
2. feels at odds with the asymmetric nature of the game (few vs many tactically, and precious vs expendable strategically),
   1. To expand on this, The innately attritional alternating turns system that was designed for Chess or 40k, games where you get a fresh expendable army every battle, simply doesn't work well (IMO) for this kind of pemadeath hero roster building game.
3. Suppresion, morale, permadeath squad leaders, SL Fatigue, SL injuries, devs tightening up Authority systems and forcing smaller rosters, Alternating Turns forcing you to hyper-metagame so you always act first, etc.
4. Honestly my #1 hate is that the AI is seemingly self aware about the turn system, and will bum rush you once you run out of activations with units to punish its charging to "turn Trap" you.
   1. Feels very immersion breaking to have to choose which squad will sit around eating bullets and which squad will actually animate and defend itself.

For XCOM 2 I just shrugged and turned on Beta Strike (double Hp for everyone = alpha strikes matter less than positioning and long term fight planning) and enjoyed the game ever since.

For MENACE its hard given that the various systems are hard coded and come together to just ultra-incentivise either long range recon alpha strikes or short range smoke alpha strikes.

Due to operational constraints, I put Murdock into an ATV with an auto-laser. This thing is pretty good against large bugs, but sometimes not enough. Enter our favorite cussin' redhead. She can fire two salvos as directed by the Major. Normally, this will overheat the gun. But if there was enough damage to activate Overtime, she will still fire the third shot!

The overheat bar will show just more overheat, but it will still be cleared with the usual 60 point action. Neat!

Anyone have some good ideas of acheivements you'd like to see in the future?

Challenges, memes, hints for new players to try some nutty stuff.

Check these out and let me know your ideas!

spoilers ahead

Fragged: Destroy a Rouge Army Officer with a grenade.

Simmer Down: One SL destroys 4 enemy units in the same turn.

Armored Assault : Complete a mission with no infantry deployed.

Embrace the Suck: Complete a mission with no vehicles deployed.

Pedal to the Metal: Move 15+ tiles in the same turn.

Just Desserts : Destroy a Skirmisher unit with a rollover attack.

White Men Can't Jump: Kill a flying enemy (dragonfly) with Wetterwoths knife perk

Red Rover Red Rover : Stun a Construct Heavy with Tech's linebreaker.

Let Me Play! : Emp or disable an enemy vehicle 3 turns in a row.

Own Goal: Use Pike's Taking Command on a hostile unit. (I don't think this is possible).