The hell of it is, the timer missions would be fine if they weren't like two-thirds of all missions.

The way the design process seems to have worked is "we want to discourage the style of gameplay that was super optimal in the first game, namely 'get some snipers and slowly creep forward, clearing the entire map from as far away from the enemy as humanly possible. Maybe mix it up with some flying snipers or flying tanks.'"

Making the missions time-sensitive, or having endless reinforcement waves, does indeed force people to take an aggressive stance on them, moving forward briskly, taking calculated risks, that sort of thing. But it probably seemed a little brutal... so they added the conceal mechanic, meaning you always got one free hit off firing from stealth. Which is fine, except they also added in a bunch of stealth powers and upgrades that become, as you say, a bit redundant.

>The whole concealment mechanism becomes redundant when you've gotta rush the
>objective without any guarantee that there's not a Sectopod around the corner
>to pounce on your entire squad.

This, I think, is the crux of the dilemma between people who really love XCOM in its new form and people who want to love it but are frustrated by it.

Firaxis wants you to have to be aggressive and take risks in order to win, to play in ways that would be decidedly non-optimal if the timers weren't there, and to have to act like a beleaguered resistance force that needs to strike fast and then clear out because you're actually fighting a huge army backed up by an even huger militia and a semi-hostile populace, which means they'll fucking kill you in a fair fight. You're supposed to rush around the corner without knowing if a Sectopod is there, and maybe you deal with it, or maybe everybody dies, and you're supposed to be okay with your dudes dying, because there are more dudes, so as long as the dudes aren't dying every single mission, or you haven't managed your personnel so poorly that one single squad is the linchpin around which XCOM survives or fails, you'll be fine.

There is 100% nothing wrong with that as a matter of game design.

But some people very much aren't going to like it, at all. Some people are going to quit a game and never come back to it if they experience a TPK, and the stress they feel from trying to avoid that TPK, which is real fuckin' difficult if you aren't a true XCOM master, sucks the fun out of the game for them.

And there's nothing wrong with feeling that way either.

-Merc
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