Gameplay style and "bad" powers

Has anyone tried fighting 8 empaths?

Sometimes it's due to excessively narrow content types, but some of those powers are not even situationally effective.

One thing this game lacks is civilians who are actually at risk. The game Freedom Force, which was released several years ago, was a super hero RPG with an interesting twist. You had to defeat the bad guys in the missions, but while doing so had to avoid doing collateral damage to citizens and buildings. That meant that even though your AoEs were very powerful you eased off on them in certain situations or used them strategically. You didn't actually lose the mission if a civilian got hurt or a building collapsed, but you did take a small penalty. It gave that game a much greater sense of super-heroism, because you really felt that citizens needed saving.

I think something like that could really work in this game. The penalty, IMO, would be that for one minute after defeating a civilian the character responsible cannot receive drops. That would simply allow it to serve as a minor time barrier. Unfortunately collapsing buildings are unlikely addition to this game (although we do have one in Steel Canyon that explodes).

Villains and Rogues, meanwhile, would not necessarily be penalized for injuring civilians.

Since none of this is likely to materialize, citizens who at least screamed when they went running down the street from a villain would add a dimension of realism. And they should probably run from player Villains as well rather than wave hello.

Saving civilians is good from a story point of view, but really hard to make into fun gameplay, because it allows AI to lose the mission or penalise your score for you.

I'm more than familiar with Freedom Force, as my website will show. There, the penalties for collateral damage were so small that it didn't really matter, it was worth watching a building collapse jsut for fun even if you lost 25 prestige or whatever. Except for mission specific cases like the "Save Nick Craft" mission that frustrated the heck out of many players.

Champions Online had a number of escort missions, which also proved really frustrating much of the time. (eg escort the aggro-grabbing lady Bigfoot)

The common problem with these two cases is that its no fun to watch an AI run into the line of fire and be unable to stop them.

It can be improved upon, but its still tricky to get right.
In one of the Freedom Force missions I wrote for a mod, I had groups of civilians to escort to safety. I included commands to move them to spots, get them to wait, and so on, similar to CoX Mastermind commands, and made sure the enemies in that level preferentially targetted player controlled heroes. Even so, it wasn't one of the smoothest missions.
If you want to try this out in CoX, make a Ninja MM and try to keep your Genin alive. Its quite challenging. Fun? Maybe...

Not saying it can't be done, just that its often one of the least popular and most frustrating forms of gameplay in cases where its been tried.

I think a variant of MM controls would be the key. There are already non MM entities in this game that use MM controls. On a connected note, I'm really impressed by the Warburg scientists. While they lack combat function, they have noticeably higher perception and you can tell them to stop and wait for you.

There's other concepts that could be attached to this. Have a multitude of civilians instead of just one and tie survival to a score. As long as you save X number of people you succeed while saving everyone is a bigger bonus. A kills based version of this already exists with the 30 Fir Bolg mission. Circumvent the whole AI issue and protect an object like the power source to your villainous lair or the computer network for the research lab's firewall.

One thing I have always wanted to see more of are patrols. And also, non-combat devices like sensors that can alert nearby critters.

Think about a mission where you need to infiltrate a very difficult base and complete an objective like freeing a prisoner or getting a piece of equipment or information. But to do so requires you to learn patrol pathing and time your movements. Destroy sensors, doors, cameras etc.. You could gain influence on how efficient you were at completing the mission. For instance, minimal causalties gets more reward than total carnage. Figuring out how to bypass a security system instead of destroying it. Getting the Prisoner and successfully leaving before a certain amount of time has passed (presumably to get out before backup arrives). The sensors would be multi-spectral devices, to prevent folks from just "stealthing" the whole thing. Stealth/Invis gets you past the living guards, but not the machines.

And for me, MORE AMBUSHES ! MORE Dialogue from NPCS.

The "Stop 30 Fir Bolg" mission, much as some people hate it, is a good example of interesting mission design. I've run it solo, I've run it with teams, I've only failed it when it was bugged and all the waves came at once.

The "Protect the Henges" mission is another one, although the implementation is a bit too easy I think. As is the Terra Volta reactor...actually make that WAY too easy (although I understand why it is easy, since it's intended for people who screwed up their build). I would like to see more missions like the reactor, only, you know, challenging.

Other missions that try to encourage playstyles besides "smash everything" aren't so good. Keeping hostages and objects alive doesn't work so well when you're on a team or on a high difficulty, since they don't get any tougher, and escortees are stupid and will run right into a pack of Nemesis and get AoEd into oblivion. The final mission of Levantera's second arc also doesn't work so well; every time I've run it with a team they've waited by the door while I grabbed all the blinkies and completed the mission, then they TPd me back so we could kill everything.

Encounter that presents an interesting divergence from the norm: the Hamidon encounter in the LGTF.

Encounter that does not: Reichsman.

Encounter that does: The first mission in the ITF. It is a survivability challenge, as the ambushes can easily overwhelm the tank's aggro cap, and you don't need to kill them, only survive long enough to get what's-her-face to the altar.

Encounter that does not: Romulus himself. Bring enough damage and -res to overcome the healing fluffy, you win through the old formula of buff up > taunt > debuff > kill (apply heals and refresh buffs as needed). I'm not entirely sure what the devs were trying for here, but we beat it through brute force as usual.

Encounter that does: The phalanx. Again, you must only survive the robots long enough to kill the computer.

Encounter that does not: Eight AR/Dark clones. If they debuff your damage enough, will you actually heal them if you manage to hit?