So I’ve just played Fort Freiheit for the first time completely and I really liked it – however aside from the bugs I found and reported, there is one issue I am not quite happy with and unsure wether or not this is a bug:
As it stands now, I defeated the queen, I found a cache with one extra ammo for the Heavy’s rocket launcher, but both my Assaults are now completely out of ammo without apparently any means of regaining some.
Not only does this make them completely useless offensively, even defensively they become useless as due to a bug, already reported via the ingame reporter, they cannot even use their medkit when their main weapon has no ammo.
I’ve not been spamming bullets like a madman, I’ve not been wasteful, but still I now have two regular shooter aliens left and both my Assaults are completely empty, my Heavy has three rounds left for his Gatling, my Sniper has two shots left in the Sniper Rifle… hopefully that’s enough, but still… given the setting of the mission, those four going on a ride to hell, the least their former comrades could have done is give them enough ammo to at least take all the aliens with them, no?
This may be something that just needs further adjustment in future builds. As of now, the number of crates and their contents is random, as is the number of enemies. It is possible to be unlucky and have a large number of enemies and a low number of crates/ammo.
I imagine you’ll be able to bring ammo on missions in the final game. I think the reason for making ammo scarce in this build, is to give players an incentive to explore the map and test balancing as well as item-interaction. I kinda like it Conjures good memories from UFO: Enemy Unknown and why I always used Laser Rifles
I finished the map in the end too, although my Sniper ended up dying, having to go into pistol distance with the last shooter alien… but oh well, they were infected anyways, so who cares. //callous commander
That’s very true, I actually Gunslinger’ed the queen to death in the end… she took two grenades, three rockets and she still was standing, even though all five explosives were direct hits – all her legs were destroyed, both her pincers and her thorax, just the abdomen was left.
Sniper guy took out the pistol and went full Roland Deschain of Gilead on the Queen, firing three times in one turn and finally taking her down for good!
Then Sniper guy died from return fire by a measly grunt.
Color me impressed - I have yet to defeat the queen, much less get close to completing the mission. A combination of lack of explosives and some lucky (disabling) hits to various hands, etc. The ammo restrictions I hate - already looked for a user file in hopes of “adjusting” things before playthru six or seven on random maps, the limb disabling I love.
Silly me, I thought blowing the queen’s head off (great graphic, btw, the hole where a brain would normally be) would be effective. Not so much…
Thus far, seems very stable, in spite of me running a number of background programs, some of which are memory hogs. Only one crash thus far, and I think it was IE caused, rather than Phoenix Point. For a pre-Alpha backer, its in good shape. I’ve tested much worse, right now, I’m simply enjoying.
One thing I realized in Fort Freiheit was that there were (at least) three caches, and possibly more. Each had what I am assuming is random loot drops in it for ammo. I did run out as well, with all three soldier classes, and at the end both my assault troopers were ammo- and grenade-less.
Keep in mind, though, this is also the pre-Alpha, so is just meant to showcase the game, and isn’t balanced or anything.
I’m not sure how I feel about this crate business in general; I think it would work better and make more sense as periodic/limited but customizable supply drops you can call in rather than troopers just salvaging random crates they coincidentally manage to find on the battlefield, or better yet, a combination of both salvage and supply drops.
The crates are randomly spawned, I only had one in my first FF run, and that contained one rocket, an empty Assault Rifle and an empty Handgun – not quite what I would call useful, given that both my Assaults were running on empty in the end.
But this RNG will get tuned, and eventually proper combat looting will work just fine, taking ammo and even weapons from killed enemies, etc.
Too much or too little. If scrounging ammo is going to be a central gameplay concern, there should always be at least two to three per encounter/region. Even just one may make it too difficult for many as it’s easily missed or behind a difficult enemy position.
Though I’d also hope bringing in extra ammo and how much with your force is going to be part of the tactical considerations during loadout. More ammo = less movement perhaps. Or less willpower perhaps due to the stress, discomfort and noise of carrying the extra weight. And part of the rpg elements in building individual soldiers and in building preferred team rosters.
The crates are placed because you don’t have a base were you can fill your inventory with ammo, explosives,…
Don’t forget it’s a pre-alpha build, not even an alpha.
In the final game, I think there will be less crates and you will have to think how to fill your backpacks.
The backer build was explained by unstablevoltage to not be very balanced so this will probably be changed in the future to increase the amount of clips given for each mission and in the main game you will probably be able to give your soldiers the amount of ammo you deem necessary before the mission
Update to my earlier comment - I’ve now “won” four missions in a row, several with only a single crate. I just needed to adjust my strategy some, and make better use of terrain and movement. I don’t feel the “need” for adjustable user files any more.
That said, as we proceed thru Alpha, I really hope the Devs giv us user adjustable files for ammo load outs, weapon ranges, damage capacities and the like - not because I want to cheat, but because when a horribly unbalanced pre-beta release does come out, some quick edits and we can keep testing…
I did not find any ways to do it, but shouldn’t the assault rifles have single shot modes? Or they can only fire bursts? I would imagine the gatling can only fire burst.
About the crates, dont know id it is a bug, one of the was empty. Should be good to take from dead comrades stuffs, so you could use that. At leas with last wounded crabmen left i took a dead crabmen gatling and died by shooting At my feet lol. I know that this last thing should not done but i tried.
I managed to defeat the queen and complete the mission on my second attempt. I had two soldiers with automatic weapons run out of ammo on this attempt and lost one of them to an alien shot when adjacent to the second ammo crate. I then proceeded to win the match. I think that these gunners probably need 1-2 more ammo per clip or to hold an extra clip in the backpack by default, or to come with a sidearm. Actually I think the sidearm option is the better one.
Conjures good memories from UFO: Enemy Unknown and why I always used Laser Rifles 
