[BB5] Allied base raided way too frequently

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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Hi !

First of, i love what i saw in BB5, i can feel what the game will be like in few month for his release, and a lot of things are cool atm. Still, few things bug me out, and the top one is probably an allied base that is raided DAILY.

I mean, i succesfully defended the base, 7 times, in a row, with at most 48h between the two first attack, then came the raids, every day…

Problem is i’m at a relative begining of camain, and therefore only have 7 dudes to send to duty.

When / if one of my dude is injured, i have to send it back to defend allies with few lasting injuries. Maybe it’s intended? I mean, planet is big, we probably can’t save everyone? But that sound strange to me to actually have to defend, put a lot of (material) effort in this, spaming 2 - 3 grenades in the way for giving up some days after cause “damn, i have no time for you anymore guys, i have 2 other pending missions”.

Note that the allied base is not in mist (while not really far of a crab base, but still…) and all defenses are succesfull atm, so i wonder if / when it will stop?

Anyone experiencing the same? Am i just a grumpy dude? :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think it’s sort of intended that the alien attacks will become more and more relentless the longer a haven stays in the mist. That’s the thing, you won’t be able to save all havens forever, you’re eventually going to have to surrender them to the ayys. It’s another sort of pressure in addition to…well, I assume you’ve gotten that research already, the Oneiric countdown.

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Yep i have the Oneiric ^^

I was a little upset about it to be honest haha, i’ll somehow hoped that the game will be a little more subtle about how you can have a game over but heh, i guess it’s an xcom-like things xD

Yep if the base was in mist or in really close area i’ll won’t be worried but their is still few hunderd miles away. So i wonder if it is supposed to be like this regardless of alien mist? oO

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Hmmmm, if they’re not in the mist it should be a little less tough, but I notice there’s a large alien base nearby. Try destroying that and see if the pressure lets up.

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Yep i’ll love to clean this base, but my soldiers aren’t in good shape, i planed to do it asap but as the ally seem to don’t know how to lock their base door, i don’t find ingame time to raid the base with soldiers in fighting conditon x)

maybe you’re right and i should just let them defend by themself for a day and try my luck attacking the base :confused:

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You should. You can even go and help defend for a moment, then evacuate if things will get hot, and they will defend themselves. Destroying alien base is priority.

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What he said. The attacks are annoying to say the least, and new base will pop up, but if you try hard enough, you will get a breather. I’m getting seriously burned-out, I might get over this game before it’s even out.

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If you look at the alien base, it tells you it’s attack range. And according to tool tips “bases are in the mist, but can attack areas outside the mist”

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Yep, i did eliminated the base and that have drasticaly lowered the base attack frequency. Thanks peoples :slight_smile:

Still, as it’s a suggestion thread, i think it may be a little too frequent. On early game with only 1 or 2 ennemy bases to deal with it’s okey. But imagine if we have 4 - 5 bases around the map, that can’t obviously all be revealed in time (cause of long scanning time). It can became just horrible verry quick :stuck_out_tongue:

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And that is the point. :slight_smile: Enemy just began his final invasion to wipe out (or contain) all living creatures from the Earth. They won’t wait for you to gather soldiers and do the research. :wink:

Imagine that there will be several mist spread areas around continents and in each of those areas will be many alien bases… That is reality of this post-apocalyptic game. :wink:

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Yeah, and even if you destroy the base, a new one pops up before too long. It’s a real chore having to keep an allied base from being wiped out in the early game. In my first game I hadn’t even unlocked the ability to recruit anyone before there was a storm of sniper-wielding Tritons out for the head of my spongiest recruit.
Even when I had some recruiting tech, my one jet was too busy putting out fires all over the mist zone to even pick anyone up.

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While i agree it’s somehow realistic considering the context. I’m concerned about the pleasure of play when 80% of game time is basicaly used by either defend a base or destroy a nest. At some point i can’t even explore anymore cause my only jet is busy doing go & back travels, and my few soldiers are just about to shoot a bullet to themself in order to have some sleeptime x)

I won’t say it’s about difficulty, as it’s definetly doeable, i play other genre games in highest difficulty so it may help with difficulty itself. My issue is mostly about how the feeling of the harassement is.

Risking to loose the war? sure, it’s the point of this type of game. But the restless impression seem a little too hard. Or at least, if it have to be a restless situation, i’ll expect a little more diversity than just ~ 2 mission types so we feel a little less the repetitivity in the situation. (i definetly know it’s a baker build, not the final stage huh :p, so it may, or not, have more latter on ^^)

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I’m not sure if I can comment such things, but I suppose that it should be like that. This is alien invation, and we need to struggle with that. Maybe sometimes sacrificing some haven just to take a rest. It was even like that in BB4 with frequency of attacks, but there we had better equipment available from the start and we could advance much quicker to have super soldiers and eradicate any alien threat. :wink: Now thing get worse. :smiley:

EDIT: But maybe you guys are right. I didn’t progress too far because of problem with saved games so I didn’t get frustrating impression. Maybe I will comment more, when my inventory will stop loosing equipment and soldiers will keep their progression between saves.

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I view this like the frequency of missions in XCOM 2: Long War 2. Unlike the base game, there are usually far too many missions in the modded game for you to be able to take every single one that pops up, so you need to prioritize. And because that game took several days apiece for a squad to “infiltrate” a site before they could safely attack it (otherwise they’d be facing forces 4 to 5 times their number) you also had to have at least a B and C team in addition to an A team.

Put simply, in Phoenix Point, you likely won’t be expected to tackle each and every mission that pops up. Your soldiers have Stamina, now, which means they need to rest in between runs. Alien attacks will just get so frequent that you have little choice but to leave a haven to get devoured by the mist. And even if you do manage to keep fending them off, that haven’s population count will just keep dropping, whether through starvation or attack, until it withers away.

Gotta say, I really like this system, and I’m glad they added it in. It makes the game that much more harrowing and nail-biting, when you know that, for all your military expertise and advanced hardware, you can’t save everyone. Though you can certainly try.

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In the early stages of the game, every resource you have is more or less irreplacable. If you lose a squad member so early on, and there aren’t enough havens to get more, you’re pretty much unable to win battles anymore.
Havens cannot be both utterly crucial to victory and impossible to defend, in such an early stage of the game: We need one or the other.

That said, if havens are meant to be so expendable, there should definitely be a point in the tutorial where the game beats players over the head with it. Players are natural perfectionists, and just as shooter players will avoid using their good ammo and 4x strategy players will avoid using automanage features, the average Phoenix Point player will probably play the game in ways that aren’t fun if they think losing a haven is a ‘fail state’.

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It seems that in BB5 there is a lot of combat to go through. Most exploration will lead to combat, then there are the defend missions, then there are the attack nest missions, etc.

This high frequency of combat, coupled with the triton mist and the high alien HPs (looking at you egg with 160hp) is making me burn out really quick. I have actually stopped playing today, despite being at home chillin.

In XCOM I spent about 50-60% of my time in combat, while in PP BB5 it’s like 90+%. Most of my research is still to be done, still waiting for my extra base rooms to complete, but already did LOADS of fighting and my 5 initial guys are level 5.

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Most of my initial guys are max level, and I am so busy dealing with respawning Pandoran colonies now that I don’t even have time to look for a second base, which sucks because the first base caps out at 8 people.
Again, this is on Easy.
The sheer amount of bullets alone I’ve used up on armies of sniper Tritons, to say nothing of medkits, has kept me in a constant state of poverty.

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The fact is that in Long War you start with (much) more soldiers. Also, you don’t have to move troops between base and manticore.Travel is (much) quicker.
Anyway, in Long War (either 1 or 2), I would never end a campaign, I would get bored before after doing so much combat and advancing so little in other domains. Great game mod, love it, but … long and tedious.

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Aliens can go fuck themselves. Alien nest clearing takes too long. They get full turn after hatching, but my soldier does not get a single action point after the headcrab is removed. STARTING enemies release the mist, and they can also turn invisible, shoot with high accuracy, overwatch (what is the point of enemies defending and ambushing I have no clue, they are stronger), and also, they get better guns than you. All of this is balanced by them also being more numerous. Nests/Hives /whatever take a shitload of time to finish, and I am 100% sure I seen some having exactly the same layout, so no procedural generation there. And you will be wasting most of your time fighting in haven defense or attacking the Hive. This game is not hard, it’s TEDIOUS. You can win anything with no or minimal damage received, but say goodbye to hours to finish the battles, while you can’t even rest up your soldiers fully between the attacks. Unless there is at least an option to auto-resolve most of the battles, I ain’t playing this again. I spent like 20 hours and only thing I unlocked was neutralizer? I need to purposefully let enemy release the mist so I could research it? I need to make new guns and armor every mission, like it’s the garbage X-Com:Apoc? I only played this game for story and research. I don’t care about the tactical part, yet you shove it down my throat. Only battles you can choose to skip are scavenging ones, but realistically, they are easiest and most rewarding. Whose idea was the damned ambush? You think it’s fun to waste God knows how much time fighting ~3 times more enemies than you have the soldiers, for NO REWARD? There was “We don’t want players camping and spamming overwatch”, then you add the exploding worms who poison and set your guys on fire, and only overwatch can save you from them. And this is not all. “Oh, the start is tough, it gets easier.”, no, the madlads actually did it, they removed the inverted difficulty curve. So, the game gets harder and more frustrating. Instead of feeling ever closer to victory, rewarded for your hard work, you actually feel more and more desperate, ever closer to defeat. Even fabled Dark Souls, the epitome of difficulty, rewards you as you progress. Granted, here you don’t progress. You regress into madness and despair. I mentioned despair already? Good. You can get some elite class soldiers, BUT they cost a premium (havens ask for more resources than they have), you can’t replenish their ammo, let alone their weapons and armor. You see, weapons and armor, are also fall to despair, aka. disrepair. One (1 (I)) grenade (lovely unpreventable damage) will evaporate your gun out of existence. No it’s not broken nor damaged, it ERASED FROM EXISTENCE. You have to build new one. It takes to build more than you have time between missions, so you will run a few missions with no guns. You can, allegedly get allies and their tech, but you need to do the quest, and I started in Arizona, and quest were in: middle of Africa (Sn), Manchuria (NJ) and MADAGASKAR (DA). Now, since I barely explored most of the north America at the point and could not even explore from how often base attacks happened, it seemed impossible, however after destroying FORTH! base, I got enough time to explore most of south America and Greenland, but, game got to buggy and Hotfix released, so I started over. Needles to say, I already spent all my strength and will, and have already fallen to despair. When the Hatchet sentinel activate without me shooting or coming close, I just Alt+F4 out of the explosions and headcrabs I can’t even stop. I could stop them if I was camping and spamming overwatch, though, but you said this is not what you want in your game. I was one of the most active members on forum, next to Spite&Malice, Yokes, and that one guy who has what I’m assuming is ninja mask as avatar and always talks about Xsolla, but I’m spent. Wish you the best, but you are moving on without me.

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You should try to make paragraphs that are broken up by topic. I really am having trouble reading what you wrote besides assuming you are roleplaying the ramblings of a mind touched by the Pandoran.

I’m not sure what difficulty you were playing on, but I’ve experienced bad RNG when it comes to some of BB5 and it can be brutal. But it is still a work in progress so there is tuning that is yet to be completed.

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