I am finishing a legendary campaign with all DLCs.
I explored already all the points of interest in game and NEVER had an ambush.
Some months ago i did a Festering Skies campaign until destroy Behemoth… it happened the same. All world was explored and had no ambush. My guess is that with Festering Skies DLC the ambush mission disappeared.
Link to Canny: No ambush missions | Voters | Phoenix Point
Not disappeared, but definitely almost non-existent. I think the higher levels can do with more ambushes.
Just for your interest…
First play through, I never saw an ambush mission. Later play throughs I had a few.
I own only Year One Edition, so no Festering Skies, which was released either the week after or week before I started playing.
I think whole ambush mechanics needs to be remade or removed. It doesn’t fit gameplay flow, and if the goal was to counter global inventory sharing, this should have been tackled directly.
Optimal player solution to ambushes is to reload. This frees up immense amount of resources compared to ensuring that every exploration aircraft has a combat-worthy team at all times. And even if you have said combat-worthy team, the fact that ambush was generated replacing an exploration/salvage node on the map is already a strategic loss.
Or given how rare they are, just to accept losing 1-2 naked scout recruits throughout the campaign.
A solo vehicle can easily escape an ambush. Just run and hide.
Isn’t that an optimal player solution to everything that went wrong?
You can have a perfect turn sequence in combat where reloading is of no benefit (and it’s not even that hard with late game builds).
You can’t out-benefit reloading an ambush - it’s a loss (of exploration/scavenge node rewards) even if you survive it. Second loss is that you’ve already paid resource cost for having combat-viable teams for exploration rather than a naked recruit.
If you explore many sites with no occurance buttle, you will encount an ambush mission.
Ambush missions seem purposefully designed to trouble players who tend to keep away buttle.
Buttles can be unexpected
I finished the game in legendary with all DLC until Corrupted Horizons i got ZERO ambushes. That sucks because i finished the game in legendary also before Behemoth DLC and i had several of it during campaign.
Ambush missions should be removed, since you simply can load the savegame and instead of ambush, you get something usefull.
Ambush could need some rework and should have some kind of limitations. I mean an ambush next to a radar station phoenix base, 10000km away from nearest mist makes no sense. Ambush inside of mists is something, that makes sense.
Also ambush should trigger a rescue mission, so you have 2 options, start the mission with the ambushed soldiers OR let your soldiers hide and start a 3 day timer, where you can send reinforcement to help your MIA soldiers. Also this mission should have some kind of reward.
Well… i don’t reload save games and i believe, that like me, there are many players who don’t do scamloads to play PP. Ambushes are part of the game and force player to have a team that can escape it when exploring POIs.
Actually reality is sadder than that, ambushes are very rare, but you don’t care if you explore using one naked soldier, because they are just food, expendable
None of my units are considered cannon fodder. I don’t play that way. Vehicles are my choice of PoI vs. ambush. They can generally run and hide in order to evac.
Ambushes are irrelevant, no matter if you play one naked soldier, vehicle or Mutog or full squad. You can neutralize enemies and get XP , 5 easy SP in Legendary and other stuff like weapons, I did not find the challenge
They were just a nuisance on top of spending hours only to find nothing. At least an ambush was more involved than finding nothing.
