A comprehensive guide for playing Phoenix Point (or an attempt at one)

[VOLAND]

last edited 2020/06/10

Part 3

Known exploits

First Turn Striking, what is it and how to do it

I define a First Turn Strike (FTS) as an overwhelming attack delivered on the first turn (before the opposing force can make any preparations) that prevents the opponent from mounting a response, usually by disabling (killing, or crippling in a way that negates any retaliatory capacity) many, if not most enemies.

First Turn Striking is the single most effective, reliable and quickest way of dealing with any situation that Phoenix Point throws at you.

To FTS you need to have the right team. By mid-late game you will have at least one FTS capable team, simply because some of your soldiers will have gained so many SPs that they will be close to maxing out their stats and skills.

There are many different builds that enable FTS, but the common theme is that you want squaddies that can deal a lot of damage per AP, and you want a way of recouping spent APs.

The last part is the most constraining, as there are only two ways of gaining back APs, and that’s Rally the Troops (LVL 6 assault skill, cost 4 WP and 2 AP, gives back 1 AP to each squaddie, limited to one use per turn) and Rapid Clearance (LVL 7 assault skill, cost 5 WP, gain back 2 AP for each kill until the end of the turn). So you will want soldiers with Rapid Clearance doing the killing, and also some support soldiers with Rally the Troops.

The mathematics of Rally the Troops are such that the more troops you bring to a mission and the more of them have the skill, the more APs you can recover. It is quite easy to double the amount of starting APs in this manner. However, as your killers will have Rapid Clearance, Rally the Troops is more of a safety net in case you have trouble closing the Rapid Clearance loops.

As to how to achieve the highest damage per AP, your imagination is the limit. What’s important is to remember that you don’t want just high damage potential, you also have to deliver it to the enemy. That means you want high accuracy and/or extreme mobility.

The best candidates for FTS killers are recruits with third-row proficiency damage buffs, and if they also come with Reckless (+30% damage, - 10% accuracy) and Cautious (+20% accuracy, - 10% damage) it’s a nice bonus (note that for FTS killers Cautious should only be picked up if you also have Reckless, as you don’t want a net reduction in damage). Something like a recruit with Strongman (+30% damage heavy weapons, -10 perception [who cares about this penalty to perception, really?]), Reckless and Cautious is ideal. They have to be assault, or dual classed to assault, to get the Rapid Clearance skill.

Here are four basic examples of FTS killers:

1. Assault/sniper with strongman skill. Give him a Deceptor (NJ Heavy Machine Gun) and plenty of ammo, NJ pistol, synedrion sniper helmet, Anu torso and leg armor (or the speed legs mutation). As to stats, you want high speed (ideally 25) and high willpower (15+). For skills you want Dash, Quick Aim, Ready for Action and Rapid Clearance. He can one-shot kill crabs, tritons and basic sirens at 5 tiles distance. The way to use him is to use Dash to get close to a bunch of enemies, cast Rapid Clearance and Quick Aim, kill one enemy, cast Quick Aim again, kill another, etc. Once the group is dealt with, move to the next one, with Dash if necessary. With Ready for Action and plenty of ammo you will never lose a beat.

2. Heavy/assault with Reckless. Give him a grenade launcher and a rocket mount (Fury, Thor…). Give him the Biggest Booms, Inspire, Rapid Clearance and Ready for Action. Synedrion sniper helmet, NJ heavy torso, Synedrion sniper leggings. Plenty of willpower. Not only can he close Rapid Clearance loops, but also soften up targets to help other FTS killers close theirs.

3. Infiltrator/assault. The LVL7 infiltrator’s Sneak Attack damage x2 buff is a great way of increasing damage per AP to the levels necessary for First Turn Striking. For the x2 buff to apply, however, you need to be hidden and using a silent weapon (currently melee, echo head bionic, or crossbows). The only way of staying hidden while doing a melee attack is by using the vanish skill (4WP, that both completely hides the soldier for the remainder of the turn making him undetectable, and allows him/her to move 5 tiles in any direction). If you have the DLC, there is no reason for not putting the echo head on all your infiltrators. Unless you have ethical, or aesthetical qualms about chopping somebody’s head off and replacing it with something that looks conspicuously like Princess Leia’s helmet in Return of the Jedi.

A good setup is an infiltrator with assault rifles proficiency, that adds 20% damage and accuracy. As always, Reckless and Cautious are a nice bonus. Give him/her Sneak Attack (LVL7, passive), Dash, Ready for Action, Rapid Clearance, top speed and a lot of willpower, and the Synedrion assault rifle. He/she can reliably one shoot kill most regular crabs and tritons at more than 10 tiles distance, and is a great finisher - killer of targets that have been softened up by other squaddies.

4. Heavy/assault with bionic melee torso. Only available with the DLC, this is currently the easiest and most reliable FTS killer. Take a heavy or assault recruit with third-row melee proficiency (+20% damage), and Reckless if available. Dual-class him/her into heavy, or assault as applicable. Give him/her Dash, Rapid Clearance and Brawler. Give him/her top speed and plenty of willpower. For armor, prioritize speed; accuracy is not important. Just give him/her the bionic torso that allows to do a melee attack for 1 AP. And Marduk’s Fist. Now just run to an enemy (Dash if necessary), cast Rapid Clearance and hit it. Next!

These are just some of the possibilities but, really, your imagination is the limit. And we didn’t even get into berserker meta builds, or priests aka walking psychic nuclear bombs…

You also have to think about your support team. Here you want as many Rally the Troops as possible and a priest with the frenzy head mutation, to give all your troops the teleportation ability… Eh, speed buff. Let’s call it a speed buff. Also bring along someone with Mark for Death (LVL7 sniper skill, until the rest of the turn the target will receive +50% damage, costs 4WP).

There are some more tricks to make First Turn Striking even more efficient. For example, sometimes you can safely kill enemies at no AP cost, using pistols and PWDs with Quick Aim, and gain 2 APs through Rapid Clearance.

Eventually, you will get so good at this that you will be First Turn Striking even without wanting to (and you will be trying to avoid FTS killer builds because it turns the game into a cleaning simulator, where all you do is sweep maps of enemies in the first turn and mop up on the second).

If you are a person of little faith, bring along an LVL7 Technician to cast electric reinforcement twice every turn and then recover. It’s basically a perpetual motion device that grants invulnerability to the whole squad as long as it’s switched on. If there is any reason to not have it switched on always, I don’t know it.* See Double electric reinforcement below.

*Unless there are other games that you play without using godmode because you operate under the misguided and outdated notion that repeatedly clicking on things until they die is not the pinnacle of video game entertainment.

Double electric reinforcement

Electric reinforcement is a LVL7 Technician skill that adds 20 armor to every body part of every squaddie at the cost of 6WP. It can be cast twice by the same Technician on the same turn, adding 40 armor to every body part of every squaddie, making them all but invulnerable for one turn. If the Technician does not spend any APs during the turn (and there is no reason why he/she should), he/she can cast Recover (for 4AP recover half of the starting WPs; so with 20WP, get back 10WPs).

With 20 Willpower it would take the Technician 5 turns to run out of enough WPs to cast electric reinforcement twice per turn, but with the mcguffins spread around most maps that give WPs and the WPs granted to every squaddie with Inspire (LVL6 Heavy passive skill, grants 1WP to every squaddie for each kill by the soldier) that is very unlikely to happen. Not to mention that few missions in PP last that long.

AI’s obsession with healthcare

The AI is anxious to heal its critters. No matter how small the damage, if there is a medkit available nearby, the AI will forget everything and use it to cure that 1HP scratch. This behavior is easily exploitable. For example, if a Siren is controlling one of your soldiers and that soldier has a medkit in the quick slot inventory, any scratch to the siren will prompt your mind controlled soldier to rush to her to administer first aid.

Human opponents also often carry medkits, and will heal themselves, or their mates if they get a splinter. This can essentially be used to buy yourself a whole turn, as applying the medkit consumes 2 APs, and often they will want to/have to move before using it.

Detecting hidden unit using the mouse cursor or Warcry (LVL3 Heavy Skill) or Mindcrash (LVL7 Priest Skill)

You can’t move on to a tile occupied by an enemy. Even when you can’t see the enemy, the game will prevent you from moving there. So if you know there is a hidden Triton in the vicinity (because you shot at it and it activated the Pain Chameleon skill to hide), just try to move and see what tile you can’t move to. The easiest way is by using dash, as you will see dots on every tile around except one conspicuous tile where you can’t move.

A similar technique can be used in Lairs to find the Spawnery. Look in the top right and left corners of the map for a walled hole. If the mouse cursor indicates you can’t move there, that’s where the Spawnery is.

Finally, you can also spot enemies within 10 tiles of a Heavy or of a Priest by using Warcry or Mindcrash. When you are going to activate this skill, the target icons above the actions bar will show all the enemies that will be affected. By clicking on the icons it will even center on them.

[IF YOU KNOW OF ANY OTHERS, DO TELL!]

Appendix 1: Hints and tips on dealing with specific enemy types

The trouble with Chirons.

Most players have problems dealing with Chirons that lob explosive or acid projectiles over long distances.

As all Pandorans, Chirons come with different mutations/HPs/armor, but the common features of all of them are:

• the range of their projectiles is 40 tiles and it costs 3AP to launch them.

• they launch 3 projectiles per shot unless they have the “stability” mutation that, if activated (costing 1 AP), allows them to shoot 5 projectiles with greater accuracy.

• they are the only Pandorans that can fire at enemies without seeing them, that is, at enemies that have been detected in any way.

• their heads have 0 armor.

Here you can see the blast radius of a Chiron’s attack (this was a much less dangerous Goo Chiron, but as their blast radius is the same and the goo stays on the ground it makes for a good visualization tool). As you can see, the AoE is somewhere between 9 x 9 and 12 x 12 tiles

The first problem with Chirons is that they often spawn at the edges of the map, outside of LOS, making it harder to spot them.

The second problem is that they can fire at faraway targets without LOS.

The third is that their attacks can be devastating against lightly armored targets, not least because of a bug that sometimes increases the damage done by explosives by 100%.

So, not surprisingly, there is ample consensus that the only good (explosive or acid) Chiron is dead-on-the-first-turn-before-it-can-shoot-Chiron. There is no doubt that this is the single most reliable way of dealing with these creatures, or with anything else that the game throws at you, for that matter. (See First Turn Striking in the Exploits section for more).

Just as reliable though apparently less popular for dealing with Chirons is the double casting of electric reinforcement, which can also be used to deal with everything else that the game throws at you. (See Electric Reinforcement (aka godmode), also in the Exploits section).

There are, however, ways of dealing with Chirons that don’t involve relying on exploits. They are riskier, but also more satisfying… When they work, that is. When they don’t, it’s fountains of blood, and pools of tears (of rage) (quits).

1. Scout ahead while avoiding being detected. You want a soldier with high perception, high stealth, and high mobility to spot the enemies. Ideally an infiltrator, but other classes can also do. Just don’t use a heavy with a jetpack, because that’s not scouting but baiting.

If the soldier is detected by any enemy (see detection) (either because he enters the enemy’s perception range adjusted by the soldier’s stealth or because he fires a non-silenced weapon, i.e. all weapons except crossbows and any weapon fired by a soldier with the echo bionic head or a Triton with that mutation), he can be targeted by a Chiron. Keep him some distance away from the others… just in case.

The point of this method is to use the first turn to get into a good position without provoking the Chiron into action, so that on your next turn you can easily disable it.

The big risk is that even if you manage to stay undetected during your turn, you might be detected by the Pandorans on their turn, as they start to move. It’s always best to end your turn inside some building - it won’t always offer 100% protection, but it will help. And don’t bunch up at the entrance if possible…

2. Once you are in position, you can disable the Chiron in a variety of ways, besides killing it or disabling its abdomen. The Chiron needs 3 APs to shoot, so applying warcry (Heavy class LVL 3 skill, cost 3WP: reduces APs of all enemies within 10 tiles to 2AP) is enough to put it out of action for one turn. Applying >25% paralysis also works. So does panic - for this it helps to disable the head first, which is very easy as it never has any armor and a maximum of 100HPs. And if you can panic it, perhaps you can also mind control it, which is awesome for just so many different reasons…

3. If you can’t avoid detection, can’t disable the Chiron and can’t stay out of its range, you can still do a few things to minimize the damage. Heavy armor is quite effective at stopping most of the damage from explosives, so if you have someone clad in heavy armor you can use them as bait.

Note that you want them to be covered in heavy armor from head to toes; e.g. the Anu skirt + Synedrion headwear + NJ jetpacking fashion enthusiasts will get seriously hurt, because highest damage done by the explosion to a limb will be subtracted from the total HPs, in addition to the penalties to total HPs from disabled limbs.

Of course, if you have an infiltrator that can cast a dummy in a convenient spot that’s an even better bait.

You can also find safety inside some buildings, especially on the ground floor of a multistory building.

Finally, a neat, though dangerous trick, is to place a soldier on an elevated tile, ideally a column, or a bridge, or a construction crane. It is very likely that the projectiles will harmlessly fly-by.

What to do if despite everything you still get hit and some of your soldiers are put out of action, crippled or dead? Evacuate ASAP the wounded, especially those hit by acid, and consider aborting the mission if you don’t feel confident about your chances. Ain’t no shame in it - some battles you win, and some you lose. There are plenty of havens and apple crates in the world, and you can always return to lairs when they become a turkey shot, aka Citadel, the most dangerous and terrible of all Pandoran bases… not.

Sirens

Sirens are cool and scary, but they are not that hard to deal with. As all Pandorans they come with different heads and arms that give them different abilities, and different amounts of armor and HPs, but the main danger with Sirens is that they will attempt to Mind Control (MC) your squaddies.

A ‘basic’ Siren

Siren Mind Control works similarly to the LVL2 Priest class Mind Control skill (immediately take control of an enemy within 10 tiles and within LOS for 1AP and WPs=WPs of the targeted enemy character; maintaining control on subsequent turns has WP cost depending on victim, 2 for humans; multiple enemies can be controlled at the same time), with 2 major exceptions:

1. the Siren doesn’t require LOS to her victim; and

2. the Siren cannot activate the MC victim until the next Pandoran turn.

Some things to consider when dealing with the scaly centipede mermaid:

• Disabling a Siren’s head sets her WPs to 0 and prevents her from recovering them.

• Killing a Siren releases her victim(s) from MC, but they will not be able to act until the next player’s turn.

• While a soldier is under MC, it’s on the Pandoran team for all intents and purposes, meaning that it will lose WPs when a Pandoran dies and if it is on fire, poisoned, or covered in acid it will receive the corresponding damage at the start of the Pandoran turn (and if released from MC during the Pandoran turn, then again at the start of the player’s turn, which I understand to be a bug).

• The Siren is a support unit, she is the Priest in the Pandoran party. She looks scary with the scales and the claws, but that’s mostly just for show. She will cast Frenzy (ability, buffs speed of friendlies within 20 tiles by 50% and makes them invulnerable to panic, for 4WP) or Psychic Scream (ability, reduces WPs of enemies within *10 tiles by x), depending on her head mutation, and MC if she can.

• The Siren is a control on the players who drain their WPs and rush ahead. All Sirens have 30 WPs to start with. Though that is more than any of your soldiers can have (the maximum, with a third row skill and a head mutation is 25 WPs), the more WPs a Siren has to spend to initiate MC, the easier it is to break it. Remember, she loses WPs as the Pandas in her team perish. It’s not the same situation to have 2 soldiers separed from the rest of the team with close to 0 WPs (because, of course, they carelessly dashed there) under MC, as having to deal with a Siren that has under 10 WPs left after casting MC.

The key to dealing with Sirens is, of course, disabling the head. Once her head is gone, a Siren will still have some short range attack capabilities, but with her WP set at 0 any death in the Panda team will panic her. Though disabling the head will not immediately release her victim(s) from MC, it doesn’t usually matter, as even if you kill her and the MC ends, you will not be able to use your formerly MC soldier(s) until your next turn. It does matter when your soldier(s) is/are under the effects of some damage over time effect (fire, poison, acid, virus), as then it will tick twice. The only difficulty of disabling a Siren’s head is that it has not less than 20 armor. Use sniper rifles (it will need 2 shots, usually), or shred the armor with a grenade first. Close range shotguns blasts can also work. Pistols too, because they have relatively high damage per projectile. However, if you have a heavy weapon (Hellcannon, or Deceptor) just go for the kill - shred the amor off the torso, or the tail and finish her off with an AR. Melee weapons and bash with high strength/buffs are another option.

Now, when dealing with Sirens in a difficult situation (multiple Sirens, many enemies, whatever… ) my advice is to consider the situation as a whole, and not focus too much on the Siren(s). Nobody likes their soldiers to be under MC, but 1) sometimes attacking the Siren is not the best way to prevent it, and 2) other times, it’s OK to let the Siren take control of your troops; remember, it will be a whole turn before she can use them.

Though the variations of a ‘difficult’ situations are infinite, some things to consider are:

• Are the other enemies frenzied? (A likely scenario when there is a Siren with the Frenzy head mutation). If so, remember that you can’t make them panic. Maybe it’s a good idea to focus on killing them, and thus indirectly dealing with the Siren by depleting her WPs. Killing an Arthron reduces enemies WPs by 2, a Triton by 3, a Siren, or a Chiron by 5, a Scylla by 10.

• How are the enemies on WPs, is there more than one Siren and what are your chances of killing them (not just disabling their heads, but putting them down for good)? Killing a Siren makes each critter on her team lose 5WPs, and sometimes they are easy to bring down (depending on their HPs and your capabilities). Don’t forget that if you can shred her armor she will be very vulnerable to a shotgun, or an AR.

• If some of your soldiers are already under MC and you are worried about what they will be doing on the next turn if you don’t disable the Siren(s) now, consider whether you can make them panic: remember, they are on team Panda now, so any Pandoran deaths will lower their morale (also, there is this exploit that has to do with AI’s obsession with healthcare…)

• An almost universal solution to large crowds is Warcry (LVL3 Heavy skill). And for small crowds and energetic individuals as well, because enemies with only 2APs will often waste them.

Variations:

Head:

• Frenzy

• Psychic scream

Arms:

• Slasher

• Injector

Torso: