One of the haven missions involves a rescue attempt for someone held in a “Disciples of Anu prison”.
This mission involves - your team loading on the edge of the map requiring basically a full run to get into sight of an enemy, and on unarmed civilian in the middle of a disciples of Anu temple. Worth noting is you start with control of this civilian, he isn’t someone to walk up to and take control over or whatever else. The temple is crawling this disciples of anu in every direction from him.
The mission always seems to play out this way: turn one, move your guys, move the civilian anywhere.
Anu turn: civilian will always be in line of sight (as he starts in the middle surrounded by them) so they shoot him immediately. Mission failed.
This is a really mind boggling mission, I’m not sure what developer thought (or didn’t think) this through. If he’s a prisoner, why’s he just in the middle of the temple? This clearly isn’t a prison of any sort. If he’s not a prisoner, why do they shoot him as soon as my troops arrive?
It seems obvious he should be in some sort of cell and only seen as hostile once troops have gotten somewhere near him. Surely Anu’s first move when encountering phoenix point troops isn’t to start shooting their own prisoners or civilians? The effect of having such a ridiculously stupid mission is just frustration rather than any sort of fun.
Some missions are like that, and they don’t look great.
Basically you are forced to bring a vehicle and your assault operatives to use chained Onslaught protecting the VIP, those are 2-3 turns missions, design is a bit silly
There are some places that the prisoner won’t get shot, but otherwise stand the prisoner behind a couple of soldiers in the first turn. After that, run him around the building on the right or though it. Then brutally destroy the enemy. A few incendiary grenades will speed the process up.
While I appreciate the response - your basically saying “this is how I got round their bad design”. The core point though is - This is incredibly bad design, which makes no sense practically or by lore.
Aight cool. Sorry I’m just getting a little frustrated with this stuff, especially when I get the sense people are letting the people making design decisions here off the hook because we’ve found a work around.
This game had so much potential to be great, to be more than so many others in it’s genre but it feels like it slips out of grip with every update leaning towards nerfing cheese play styles rather than fixing game mechanisms which force players to use cheese.
I’d really like to be talking about cool features, like we did when the game was in beta and the community generally saw the potential. Instead it’s this.
I understand you, perfectly, I think the same, but a lot of stuff need to be nerfed unless you enjoy a clickfest, if you want just to win it is fine, as @MichaelIgnotus says, a clear differentiation Rookie/Veteran from Hero/Legend or just Legend is what we need.
Because right now cheese is part of the game, by design, one example: perception 60 for your operatives, you can see the Spawnery in a Lair from turn 1, without moving a tile, and every move of Pandorans, very far way.
Feel like this is getting into another thread. But take this example of perception. You could deal with that kind of cheese in a couple of ways:
Set limits of Lair visibility (can only be seen within 40 squares or after x turns at longer distant). Bad option, but technically easy to implement.
use the old sunken burrows lairs were originally in. Not good option either, as having played both options the way it is now is more fun in general. The old option was still open to using the unit pathing to determine where the lair was anyway. Pro again is technically easy to implement.
Include a new variable in the perception system, like percentage of unit seen from the ‘head position’ of the observer unit. This would have wide reaching benefits in in sneaking from cover to cover, but also mean lairs aren’t so visible across the map as they’re behind walls which largely obscure them. Yes they’re big but to an extent they’d camo with other pandoran structures. Technically this is a more difficult option, but would enhance gameplay across the board. This would also open the door to directional perception and other bits to really make sneaking more of an ‘on field tactic’, and not just a stat line.
My issue with how they’re handling cheese is it tends to be solutions like option 1, rather than option 3.
Oh beieve me, we’re not letting them off the hook. I’ve spent more than 2 years consistently telling the devs what is both good - and much more what is bad - about this game. I specifically joined the CC so that I could tell them to their faces just how piss poor some of their design decisions are (though I tend to do it more politely than that).
We in the CC are as baffled as you are as to why some clearly broken mechanics are still in this game years after they have been identified and proven to be broken.
My own personal theory is that there is someone extremely high up in the SG hierarchy who is either so in love with their design - or so terrified of alienating the casual player-base that makes up half their custom - that they resist any attempt to improve it into a proper tactics-based TBS. To me, that’s the only way I can see the devs justifying some of the most patently absurd stupidities that still exist in this design.
All I can say is, it’s taken 2 years, but the devs are starting to listen to us, and you might start seeing the fruits of our incessantly patient labours coming round the bend.
But don’t expect miracles. Even the changes we’re pushing hardest right now don’t go nearly far enough to turn this into the gem it could be if only they had the courage to clean it up.
That’s a big concern in itself though. At some point the money is going to dry up. The closer we get to that, design decisions will increasingly become about ROI. A ‘cut and run’ point will likely be set to ensure any larger non-kickstarter investors make their cut.
I’m a realist on that point as without investor return, there will be no Phoenix Point 2. But without a legacy, there will equally be no Phoenix Point 2 either.
Couldn’t agree more, but other than plugging away patiently and repeating myself ad infinitum until they get bored of hearing it and do something about it, there’s not much I or anyone else can do.
All I’m saying is your impression that people are letting the devs off the hook is very far off the mark. Just because we play with workarounds doesn’t stop us telling them how stupid the stuff we have to work around is.
Though I have also said before that if something else came along with the potential to do what PP could and should have done, I would probably abandon PP in favour of that.
The devs have clearly made their bed, and while I’m currently lying in it because it’s the best fit for me right now, I am under no illusions that it’s never going to be as (un)comfortable as I would like it to be.
To be more precise, 70 for your operatives with Farsighted (+10), Perception Head mutation (+14) and Priest body and leg armour (+7 and +4) and the Spawnery is a so called “big” target that can be spotted on even longer ranges (afaik double range, so 140 tiles, funny, isn’t it?).