squid830: Have to agree with you there on how repetitive it gets. It's also relatively easy, and turning the difficulty options to max and then some (currently playing with max difficulty, +1 Cog point per extra move, -50% blackstone) just makes the missions take longer, which exacerbates the repetitive nature.
It also really bugs me that there's this disconnect between the map phases and the battle phases. It would be so much better if our actions in the map phase would determine where/when we fight, and'/or if enemy squads would move about (e.g. chase us, cut us off, etc.) instead of there being set battles in set locations.
Additionally, the battles should ideally reflect what we're trying to achieve, instead of just "kill all enemies", "escape", "last 4 turns" and "scan or destroy". There's so much scope for variety here, but it just seems so random and generic - and having the exact same battle map appear multiple times - sometimes within the same mission - really doesn't help matters.
This game has so many cool points to it, I hope they either make it more interesting or barring that, at least open it up to modders or something. This seems like the best W40K game out there at the moment, yet it still seems like so much potential has been wasted to create a game that's much more generic and repetitive than it needs to be.
It also really bugs me that they wasted the potential of the troops in this. Since one gets additional tech priests faster than one gets additional deployment points, it quickly gets to the point where it makes more sense to send more priests than troops - and it's often more efficient to just use the priests directly and ignore the troops altogether. I've been making some effort to use the troops (because I like the idea of disposable troops commanded by tech priests), but it's definitely a sub-optimal play style compared to just using the priests directly.
I heard the game is easy and/or repetitive and was hoping the custom difficulty woula address it. You are saying this is not the case? What if you doulbe the number of enemies and double their hp?
I set it at the hardest level (which increases both number and health of enemies by a fair bit), but didn't go beyond that, plus I also reduced the blackstone rewards by 50%. It definitely made the game more difficult - especially at the start; however overall it just makes the game more tedious.
It's possible to crank up the health and numbers even more on top of that, and add even more fights per level, and even start with zero blackstone (I left the initial amount at the default). While I'm sure this will make it more difficult, and also means it will take longer for the difficulty to reduce, it will make it even more tedious - and ultimately, you'll hit a point where it becomes easy again (but the tedium remains, or possibly even increases later as you slog through the fights, since the maps repeat even at the default settings, and the "goals" for the combat are limited to "kill everything", "hold out N turns", or "escape" - or sometimes, one followed by the other. Those goals in theory sound good, but they're too nonsensical when they could have quite easily more aligned then with your actual goal for the mission - yet the two are very rarely related (generally only when the "goal" is to wipe everything out or kill a boss - then they align reasonably well).
What makes all this worse is that the enemies still do the same amount of damage, and while tougher enemies appear later, they don't scale nearly as fast as your techpriests do (or more importantly, their armour and OP skills). There are too many OP things - armour that can't be breached because the enemies are too weak, the ability to avoid enemies easily due to being able to run across the map in one turn (this can be negated with an option, thankfully), or the bizarrely OP abilities to heal everyone instantly for one cognition point - which is on a three turn cooldown!
What makes the game interesting - and why I still enjoy it somewhat - is it's possible to edit the save file to increase the troop slots, and bring more troops with you. While this is cheating and sounds counter-intuitive to making the game more difficult, it's more challenging playing with more troops and less priests - but you really need a decent number of them if you crank the difficulty up really high, since they can get killed rather quickly. Without the extra troop slots, on higher levels you're pretty much forced to use more tech priests, because otherwise the levels take too long (which increases awakening faster, which means you can do less missions before the finale).
There ARE other options to increase difficulty, but IMO they're not interesting because they restrict you too much: like disabling all AOE weapons (ie you won't find any - which means a decent chunk of weapons will never appear - which is bad because finding new and increasingly deadly weapons is the highlight of this game IMO). Even crazier is making your TP's use melee only weapons - definitely challenging, but again makes the game a bit lame.
If this game had mod support I'd recommend it 100% - as it is, if you're good at xcom style games then you will almost certainly figure out a way to win easily quite quickly. If you can force yourself to only use a maximum of three tech priests (so you rely on troops more), at the highest level with +1CP movement (so movement becomes increasingly costly the more you do it per turn per TP), and possibly also limit yourself to upgrading the TPs in strict class order (e.g. don't give everyone one level in tech auxilium, but upgrade one class fully before starting another class tree), then it will hopefully be challenging enough for most of the game. I can't guarantee it won't get more tedious later on though, as the samey levels (and goals) tend to wear on one after a while.
I have to say the overall presentation is really cool, and really drives home the WH40K atmosphere and lore - for that alone it might be worth it. I mainly wish they'd made some minor changes, such as requiring proper healing time for TPs after getting wounded, or allowing one to unlock troops and upgrades by spending blackstone (instead of the random way it happens now - sort of - even a basic X-com style way of "researching" stuff between missions would have made some sense given the setting).
So overall I'm not totally unhappy with it, but I am a bit disappointed that they didn't think through some of the systems all that well. The mission structure parts and the actual battles look like they were designed by different people, because the two don't really interact as logically as one would have expected.
