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PaperclipPerfector  21hr ago (text post)   875 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Gaming subthread.

I think I got about 20 hours out of MENACE before burning out. It's a good game, but I'm going to wait till more substantial updates or large mods come out before trying a new run.

Right now:

  • The AI collapses when you get effective scouting units with high damage weapons: the AI always knows your sightlines, even for units in stealth, and are desperate to not get shot even when the sensible thing to do would be to bumrush the most likely origin of suppressed fire

  • The actual Menace enemies are remarkably unfun. Super-tanky and hit super hard. I had to cheese a mission by deploying smoke (which is OP) on all my units to survive till the countdown ended, otherwise we'd have been slaughtered with no recourse.

  • I discovered that the medium mech with two linked autocannons trivializes engagements with anything smaller than a heavy tank (except for the Menace)

  • Many weapons, particularly deployable weapons, are poorly tuned or not as effective as they should be.

  • The map gen needs work. If you've seen 5 maps, you've seen them all. The world needs more terrain diversity, choke point battles, rivers, cliffs, any kind of elevation really.

  • The ship upgrade/OCI system is half-baked. We need a lot more slots to play with and we also need more of the options we have to be buffed, alongside the addition of new ones.

Still a good game and I enjoyed a good helping of it both in demo and EA, but I'm going to need those mods or a lot more content to keep me going.

Applying modern tabletop wargaming to an xcomlike is such a good concept that it outruns its supply lines. There’s just not enough content to explore the whole idea. I want air support and field engineers and Foxhole levels of bespoke armor variants. I want faction cooperation that goes beyond the stuff you bolt on your ship. I want the Menace not to show their whole hand in their first mission, and I want their campaign presence to add the kind of decision-making you get from leaving countries to burn in XCOM. It’s not there yet, and that’s a shame, but I still had a lot of fun with my one campaign.

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