Developer Proposed Game Mechanic Updates

I’ll surely share my thoughts on Canny! Thanks for the feedback loop.

Haven’t had time to look at these in detail yet, but a very good step in the right direction.

Thanks UV - and thank you Snapshot.

Here’s hoping that together we can turn this into the great game it promises to be.

Such news, confirms the feeling that the game is on its way to be really really good.

But please do not forget the BALANCING, which is heavily discussed here in the forum.

Really good news. Hope you will be able to archive this goal.
I think it would be a good idea to enhance politics. I think the next ideas are quit easy to implement and they are able to greatly enhance the non-linear game development, which really differs your game from xcom, and makes it better.

  1. Add the ‘gift’ possibility. You will able to make a gift (resources) to some faction to impove their relation.
  2. Add the possibility to share technology you have with some faction. For example share ‘counter-mist’ technology from Synedrion with NJ. This should imply a big relation penalty from Sybedrion.
    3.Make unique characteristic for bases according to their location. For example, some bases have a boost at production facilities and penalty to exploring and vice versa.
  3. Make a possibility to sell/buy mutagen in the Anu disciples havens.
  4. Make a possibility to help to the certain havens. For example make a gift for a certain haven to boost their development or improve their defence.
4 Likes

Phoenix Project base personnel poll

Support — Phoenix Point

add:
Against Solution 1, don’t understand Solution 2.
I am for Solution 3 and 4.

add2:
The design for placing containers in a mission Scavenging Site (according to Yokes) - wry.
(Monsters cannot / should not attack the “abstract zone with resources” - directly)

But this can be justified if these are OUR containers, after we looting “abstract areas with resources”. For this we exclude containers on the roofs, and rewind / but take into account in the game process - packing time.

And

  • You can set an Ambush as an accident for all missions, including before the defense of the Haven (a quick stripping battle for 3 turns or a long battle involving the third participant).

Give Anu an own Sniper. NJ and Syn have one. Since Anu doesn`t, you are forced to raid the other factions, when longing to be aligned to them.

I like the idea of recruitment at the base, but please add in a soldier screen that only displays soldiers at the base.

The personal screen at the moment really works against having lot of troops, which is ok if that is the way the game is designed, but then we can have up to 9 bases, what’s the point of that if they can be taken by a surprise attack… I always thought the addition of multiple basses fitted better with having enough troops to defend them…

Btw, I think the XCOM before-battle squad screen (this) looks really greater, than a table in pp. This improvement doesnt need changing mechanics or rebalancing and needs only game disigner hours.

Please fix whatever bug is causing the Geoscape to eventually forget mouse clicks to enter areas, commit area scans, or interact with the locations on the Geoscape. I’ve only had one successful game that this bug did not activated on, and that was with the new DLC.

Mutog mutation in miniChiron/Mortar

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+1

That… orange… matrix thing where we customize and train our soldiers is really strange. It doesn’t seem like we’re sendind our boys to a desperate fight for survival, it seems like, well, anything else.

Glad to see this, but let me make a meta-observation. Often, when changes such as these are proposed, they are criticized by long-term devoted players of the game who (1) already understand key aspects won by long, hard experience and/or (2) feel that you are making things too easy for new players. A lot of comments I’ve seen in responses to the topics listed above appear fall into one or both of those categories. From my own game design/development experience decades ago, I eventually learned that skills and approaches that seemed natural and easy to me presented major barriers to actual paying customers, and I made changes to make the game more fun and more accessible.

It is useful to remember that the paid user base of the game only grows when new players continue to adopt it and do not find it unduly difficult or hard to understand. Without that financial growth, the game lacks income sufficient to continue development, expansion, and support. Therefore, it is a wise choice to provide sufficient ease of mastery and opportunity for success, even if it’s on a ‘newbie’ difficulty level, to let new users get sufficiently skilled and engrossed in the game to try it at harder difficulty levels.

8 Likes

You make very valid points @Fritzworth, but the game as it is currently designed has several confliciting issues:

  1. The Dynamic Difficulty Algorithm did not take into account the way that players (especially newbies) tend to play these games, so very quickly ramped any level of Difficulty chosen up to insane levels if you Saved & Restarted (S&R) all the time.

  2. The open skills sandbox approach, whilst really interesting, means that players can very quickly get extremely OP characters, who then feed off one another in a series of ever more intricate combos, that literally enbles some players to take down the Biggest Nasty in the Room - or even a whole mapful of Nasties - in just 1 turn.

  3. To counter this, the Nasties get bigger, stronger and more numerous as the DDA reacts to the alpha-strike nature of the game.

  4. To counter this, the players have to resort to ever-more-powerful alpha-strike skill combos.

It’s a vicious circle that can only be solved by rebalancing everything and reducing BOTH the power of Squad Skills AND the number and power-output of the Nasties on each mission.

The BIGGEST problem with this game, is that a lot of cool stuff was thrown into it without any consideration of how they would feed off one another - and this makes for some wildly unbalanced scenarios on both sides.

So a handful of us have been arguing from the very beginning that if you choose Easy as your Difficulty setting, it should remain EASY throughout your whole playthrough. Similarly, by that same caveat, if you choose Heroic or Legendary, then the DDA etc should limit the way you can stack your skills and force you to play like a Hero or a Legend to survive.

And if you just want an XCOM-like experience, which tracks your level of ability and keeps just one step ahead of you, then you choose Veteran and the DDA should take into account the fact that you are likely to S&R when you make mistakes.

So those of us who are arguing for nerfing Skills or adding a note of caution about making X OP, are doing so because the track record of this game so far demonstrates that not enough consideration is given to how things balance with one another. We aren’t JUST calling for players to be restricted - we always caveat this with the need to nerf the Nasties as well.

9 Likes

A very fair point but - and this is a particular bugbear of mine - I was flabbergasted when this game launched at the amount of posts that said something like: “I’m brand new to this game, and I’m playing my first runthrough on Heroic Difficulty and it’s too hard! Fix it!”

As I say, I’m all for Easy being EASY, and Veteran being manageable. But if you choose to play on Heroic or Legendary, then you should expect to have to act like a Hero or a Legend to survive.

11 Likes

I haven’t played for a month or so, so may be out of date - but I did play a solid couple of weeks after the launch.
My main observation doesn’t seem to be covered here; There was just never any sense of suspense.

XCom (right back to the first one), always felt like you were exploring, and around any corner could be death. Phoenix point just never managed to create that atmosphere and sense of the unknown. (with the exception of some of the cave-system lair missions)

I’m not sure what the answer is beyond ‘be more XCom…’, but I suspect the main problem is that you just know too much about the map and enemy disposition from the outset in Phoenix Point.

Pretty much my only ‘holy crap’ moment was the first time a Chiron appeared.

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The way it works makes “easy” in fact harder than hero/legendary. You have to provide steady blood sacrifices to DDA God to keep rains of frogs and locusts at bay. And recruits are expensive on “easy”/vet.

Of course the said new players will get brutalised by DDA because they’re not aware of the bloodthirsty deity watching them play and every restart/reload is a further stone on the road to DDA hell.

Yes, I do understand its been neutered a bit but thumbing your nose at heroic players at launch is disingenuous when “easy” or vet could be in fact harder.

2 Likes

Yea, I’ve already covered that in a Canny request that got merged to this: https://phoenixpoint.canny.io/feedback/p/fog-of-war

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I hear that - though I’ve never tried it on ‘Easy’, and from what I’m reading on these forums the last patch went some (but not all) the way towards fixing it.

I have no objection to ‘Easy’ players complaining that the game’s too hard - in fact I have argued from Day 1 that Easy should be EASY - and more recently I’ve come to the conclusion that the DDA should simply be switched off on Easy Mode. That’s what this post is partly about: Customisation of game - Menu options | Voters | Phoenix Point

That doesn’t alter my point though. In the first week that this game was released, I remember engaging with a poster who was having a real problem with the old-style RF, cover not acting like XCOM and a handful of other unexpected mechanics that the game had thrown at him. He was very vociferously (and rudely) demanding that the whole game be nerfed so that it didn’t punish him for doing stupid things like running into the middle of a room containing AR-toting Assaults and shooting at the first one he saw.

As the conversation continued, I discovered that he was playing on Heroic. When I asked him why on earth he was playing a brand new game he had never tried before on Heroic, he said because he always did 'cos Easy was too easy.

I’m sorry, but Easy might be too easy on XCOM or Xenonauts, or many other games you might mention, but with brand a new game, you do a playthrough on Easy to get the hang of the mechanics, and then you upgrade to Heroic, or Legendary, or whatever level best suits you. Personally, I start on Veteran until I’ve got the hang of the game, and then I either change the Difficulty in the Options Menu (which I have asked PP to enable on many occasions), or stop and start a new campaign. Frankly, I’m so bad at many of these games that I often dial it down a bit.

In my book, Heroic Difficulty should mean that if you play the game optimally, you won’t get slaughtered. Legendary requires you to play the game perfectly to survive. So if you choose to play as a Hero, you should expect to have to act like a Hero, not a tactical rookie - and if you make a mistake, you should expect to be punished for it.

It’s hardly ‘disingenuous’ when absolutely no-one knew that this was the case after Launch. If I knew that they’d F!*&£d up Easy so spectacularly, you could accuse me of being a liar, but I think it’s a bit much to do so when no-one at the time knew what the problem was.

And it still doesn’t invalidate the point that if you start a game on Heroic, you should expect to be treated like a Hero! - and that doesn’t mean throwing laurel wreaths at your feet and telling you how wonderful you are, it means expecting you to be a stone-cold gaming badass who eats Crabbies for breakfast, and knows that the best way to deal with 4 Assaults in a room is to lob a grenade through the door, rather than rushing into the middle of it with all guns blazing.

3 Likes

I didn’t understand why you were quote me. :upside_down_face: