Good patch so far here. Not running into any problems.
There is one other thing I wanted to bring up though, which is the manufacturing levels on Expert. They might need toning down; not so much because of difficulty, but because the combined ammo of every Exo all at once with very beefed up attack power cannot take down a group of the size I'm seeing. It's not doable, not even close. Heck, I just did a mission that was mostly Hunters, Avalanch, and SilenceBots, just a normal office mission, and I blew through half the ammo on my team JUST killing those. And I didn't kill ALL of them, either; I had a ShieldBot virused and tagging along for part of it, so I stopped about 13 or 15 of the enemy bots by simply by letting them run out of ammo and shut down.
Now granted, I've only found two out of four Bahamut stations, but the weapons added by those typically are very low-ammo types, so that isnt really going to help.
The current army looks like this:
The HideBots alone have 4000 HP each. Blunderbots are about 12,000, DumbBots are about 2000. The CommandBots have 4000 on their own, and of course are capable of boosting other things; I've found that commandbots can potentially upgrade 30-40 other bots in crowded areas, and those guys are going to be scattered among that final mission.
Now, things are a LITTLE skewed by the fact that I'd gone through most of this run with low-damage weapons, since the parts hadnt been balanced until I'd already hit the late game, so I couldnt do all that much damage in Tiger Den missions. But this number would still be pretty darn high, particularly considering the nature of those missions.
In all honesty I should have brought this one up alot sooner, after the number of bots per mission, for normal missions, was dropped to balance with the shield and power increase as difficulty rises, as it makes sense that THESE numbers need to drop as well to account for this.
In other news, overall the whole game is going pretty well now. I'll still advocate the idea of a difficulty higher than Expert, but I think Expert itself is just about where it needs to be. Most players are going to find plenty of challenge here, and lots of good tactical stuffs to be done in it. I've not lost Exos much myself, except in the Tiger's Den missions, did two of those, did some decent damage before going down considering my weaponry at the time, and had the occaisional death of the Science Exo by him essentially walking into chainsaws, or my Brawler when he dissolves himself, really must stop doing that.
EDIT: The number of bosses there isnt actually part of the problem. They dont have particularly insane health, generally around 12,000 or so, just very dangerous abilities instead, and there's assassinations yet to be done. So that bit actually seems about right.
