This is a really interesting discussion, and I’d be very interested to know how many people on this thread are actually saving and restarting when they get into difficulty.
The reason I ask is that I am currently c.40+ hours into my first playthrough of 1.0, on Heroic because I’ve played all the BBs, so I know how the game works. I have only restarted once, and I’ve so far lost 3 men during the campaign. Yet, I have only ever seen at most 2 Sirens on a mission & 1 Chiron. I’m wondering if this is because I am lucky or because I’m playing the way the devs intended, and instead of overcompensating for my god-like prowess, the game is adjusting dynamically to my level of play.
Funny thing about taking losses and how it effects gameplay in PP, in Firaxis XCom WotC - the game sets the player up to withstand losses to a reasonable degree - whereas PP does not. If you get a squad wipe in PP it’s pretty much game over (unless you’re using exploits).
Reading how the game works is quite an interesting read, it’s a good system - but the player needs the ability to recover from it or it’s no ‘game’ just a torture device. Recruitment prices come to mind first, and the difficulty you choose at the start second.
Personally I like games that lets you roll with the punches, I honestly think PP could be one of those eventually.
And that’s the thing as recruitment is NOT cheap. It requires quite hefty investments of resources that are not at all easy to come by. You often need to do several of the missions that give resource rewards, in order to be able to recruit a single squad member.
So having a system that requires losses, in order to stay at a moderate difficulty level, just doesn’t work. Now if recruitment was, like in the other XCOM-like games, where recruitment could be done at your bases for a lower cost, while still having the elite recruitments (eg snipers, infiltrators, technicians etc etc) at the Havens, then that would be far better.
In addition, in the late game, Havens are not at all plentiful (unless you’ve been super defensive). So even if you do have the resources to get new recruits, by then even finding Havens within reach to get new recruits from is hard. Plus you need to level them up, before they are useful.
So this whole performance score I read is just another shortcut to the promise of ‘Enemies respond to your tactics and evolve’. So much easier to do a simple equation instead of strategies and counterabilities. PP is taking too many shortcuts.
I am actually in favor of keeping a part of the mechanics a mistery to the user. Playing should not be excel sheet and minmaxing.
What pp completely messes up is putting up “price tags” or feedback of losses. Am I intended to bail out of battles if there is a slight chance of losing a team member?
How would I ever be able to make such a decision if the effects on the whole campaign aren’t clear and even worse, will affect the campaign in rather unusual ways.
If you clean out enemies well you would expect this to lower their numbers for example.
There is a overarching design for strategy missing, and missteps are rather costly.
Rather just scaling numbers alone, it should indicate that you for example mobilized their reserves. Can be some ingame messages from other leaders, or at the high end opening up extra missions you otherwise don’t get
Players arguing on soldiers death and that played only higher difficulties have no idea of the nightmare it is at Normal and Easy. The price of the forced buy of equipment, push do much more missions that skyrocket the difficulty. That’s ridiculous.
What you consider acceptable losses and what others do is a personal decision. I’ve gone into Haven Defences with a Lvl3/4 Squad, spotted a Scylla, and turned around and bugged straight out before now.
On the other hand, I deemed it ‘acceptable’ to lose 2 men taking down a Lair, because I knew that would buy time for that region to recover.
If you clean out a Nest or a Lair, it reduces the spawn time of the next Haven Defence in that region.
However, it isn’t going to reduce the overall numbers of the Panda threat. We know right from the get-go that we’re in an existential struggle against an infinitely spawning, mutating enemy who is never going to run out of soldiers! And your own personal strategy should reflect that.
At higher difficulties recruit is few food, knowing you can produce a lot, and you can exploit training facilities, replace a death is a lot easier than at Normal or Easy where you are forced to buy a ton of equipment.
It’s not what I consider acceptable it’s what it is acceptable… at Normal and Easy.
That said now I probably deciphered most of the equation, I will probably achieve make the game trivial at least at Easy/Normal,
I’d suggest the players needs a way to plan to ABSORB it more than a way to recover (not that there should be no recovery capability at all). I said before that a TBT game lives on its ability to reward good tactical decisions, which PP doesn’t really do. By the same token, a strategy game (which this is seemingly also meant to be in the genre), lives on its ability to offer and reward strategic decisions. Building bases and squads with the foresight to withstand a brutal squad wipe is strategy. More so than being able to quickly rebuild from it. Given the cost of recruits, this isn’t a very feasible option. At least on easier difficulties. It’s easier to do this on harder difficulties, which seems kind of… Backwards.
I agree, the original pitch made it sound much more like evolution would involve much more specific and tactical responses. Use all lasers, Pandorans evolve retracting skins, use hesdshots and you see heavily armored heads, etc, etc. All we actually got was Do Well - - - > Enemies now have quadruple health and blanket armor that makes PX rifles and handguns useless.
On easy I think it’s fine to make the game trivial. On normal it should be how the devs intend it, normal should be the base point difficulty from which others then deviate.
Agree Normal can be a bit rough but most turn based players should be able manage at least a second campaign.
Trivial, mmm, perhaps sort of first month, not that trivial for me past day 20, but a huge change anyway as I finally reach characters level 7, and factions wars, but I wonder if I didn’t triggered it too fast through my difficulty auto scaling manipulation.
First big factor of difficulty auto scaling is number of combats done, but it’s possible that some combats types are out of this equation.
There’s certainly more and more ways to exploit the system to make the game more playable. But I have only vague guesses.
At the point I am, doubting I’ll be able finish my current “Easy” campaign, for me, despite the deliberate difficulty manipulation, it’s harder than XCOM1&2 Veteran.
- The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that the game ‘needs’ to be made more playable.