Difficulty rating? Seems punishing

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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I may be missing a simple concept of combat but…

With absolutely everything being destructible, there’s no possible way to take up strategic positioning.

Reaction fire from everyone and their dog for every single action? I keep getting turned into swiss cheese just trying to take a shot.

The random crates are an entertaining touch.

I’ve still yet to clear a map. Made a dozen attempts so far…

Edit: So when I was making my initial play throughs, I didn’t realize that the old skool Xcom mechanics of Ready/Fire are no longer in play. If you don’t take the time to free aim, you’ll almost never hit.

Even doing something dumb like using a guy who has no chance of hitting the actual target, just the cover, to knock down said cover can have you making crabby patties in no time.

The free aim calculator seems a bit wonky to me at times. Taking aim at a target, like the crab queen, and the zoom tells me I have a solid chance of doing 3 damage per shot, but the actual damage after the shot from the Heavy is almost half her life?

I still feel the strategical high ground is mostly non existent, After multiple wins, I find running and gunning the best option. Fire, fall back, fire, fall back. Just a continuous rat run. Leaves me clearing maps, grabbing all chests, and 75% all my units at full health.

Which is kinda like the same thing as the high ground position I was aiming for to begin with, where you are almost tactically impervious to incoming attacks while funneling mobs into kill zones. Which I can almost replicate with the run/gun method.

Anywhoo’zers… Latest Patch seems much smoother, still some graphical issue, RAM leaks, need better tool tips, camera getting stuck and the only way to unstick is by cycling through units hitting escape till it comes back.

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Thanks for providing feedback, I have moved your thread in the appropriate Feedback area of the forums – this makes it easier for the devs to find it all in one place. :tophat:

In addition: Try to find full cover, depicted as a fully filled shield/solid shield icon, that should provide you with a much better cover protection and won’t be toppled so easily by gun fire either.
Furthermore, strategic positioning does work indeed, it just works differently from what you might be used to from other games – the main counter for the reaction fire is taking up a position with as few direct sightlines on the enemy as possible; if you cannot shoot directly at them, so can’t they.

Combine this with full cover and the careful yet appropriate use of Overwatch, and you should see better results hopefully.

Also please bear in mind that this is the very first pre alpha build, so nothing about it should even remotely be considered final, and everything is still very much subject to chance – which is why feedback is so important and valuable at this stage. =)

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I’ve played both the PC Gamer Weekender and the EGX Rezzed, and this build is most certainly a lot more challenging. I now struggle to beat the Fort Freiheit Fixed Map Scenario (I haven’t done it yet lol), but I’ve beaten the Random Map Scenario a couple of times now, so it is possible. You’ll nail it soon I’m sure!

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I just tried this game for the first time. I played the Fort Freiheit level and got soundly whooped.
I didn’t realize that the medkit wasn’t a pistol and two of my troops bled to death. Following that I tried to use a medkit on a bleeding character and somehow used the kit on nothing and wasted my turn.
Then I discovered I had run out of ammo. Swapping to a different gun I shot the queen bug only for my gun to break.
When the queen bug reached my last guy I shot the missile at her for giggles. I made sure that I was not in the splash bubble and somehow I died anyway.
This game is brutal. Gimmie more.

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Good point about the medkits, they do look a bit too much like a pistol/side-arm in your inventory.

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I do like the basic mechanics of the game and see great potential in it. I like being able to go between characters throughout the phase. It is nice to be able to go back to a character, even if they moved and shot, provided they have enough movement left. It adds a layer of strategy I am not used to (have not played turn based / RTS games in a while). The crates are a good addition provided I can make it to them and they have something useful for the chars that are still alive. I like the free aim mechanic (the RNG gods are not usually on my side and like to follow the 50/50/90 rule).

But, currently I am finding it less and less fun to play especially in the random missions. Here are some of the reasons:

Random: More often than not I barely make it passed the first entrance because of being overran their first turn with melee and sniped by ranged (or blown up) that too often disable my weapon/arm and cause bleeding. I have played a couple dozen random missions and only beat it once and that was with 1 guy with 1 HP left and no ammo. I was lucky enough to get a bleed on the last crab melee with my last shot and kite it until it died.

Fort Freheit mission: I have not played many times and am about 40/60 success with not more than 1/2 of the squad not making it. The balance of OpFor at one time is better.

Both: My attacks seem to miss more often than hit in what I would consider acceptable range (usually have better results with reaction fire) while their attacks hit most of the time and do more damage/disable/break/bleed. The possible damage markers usually mean not going to happen. Some times I get a surprise and do decent damage.

I do know this is in pre alpha and so far I do like what I am seeing. For the next backer build I would like to see more balance on accuracy at range and more even placement of the opponents on the map in random.

Thank you for adding in volume settings and the ability to restart the mission when after their first round my sniper’s weapon is destroyed and heavy’s arm is disabled from a grenade and one of the assaults is killed from melee and the other assault is bleeding from a sniper.

I am looking forward to seeing what else is planned. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to play this early and provide feedback.

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I don’t have problem with hitting/missing chance. I.e.,if I see that I could hit only for 2-3 damage (likely) then I’m not shooting and choose another target or trying to get closer to this one. Likely/possible damage system works fine for me, it’s clear and not as tight as percentage system.

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This might be because I played the newer version, but I found it pretty easy, I rarely missed due to me making sure to have the aliens writhing the circle as much as I could and had my squad spread out for the crab queen , I only lost one due to me suiciding them to try and get to a crate because they ran out of bullets and they had their head disabled.

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I’m pretty sure it’s intentional, since they want to test the boundaries of how much difficulty they can push.

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I just tried Fort FreiHeit for the first time and managed to beat it, I did lose two soldiers, but the last two were not in big trouble. Probably helped that I have played the original X-Com and the first Firaxis X-Com quite a lot, and several of the UFO / X-Com games in between.

The cover system makes sense to me… but I guess it does seem a bit strange that everyone returns fire. Even without having been positioned to return fire. Also several of my soldiers ran out of ammo, and I guess returning fire costs ammo for each soldier? Not sure I want to return fire at every possible time to do so.

Not sure if its already in the game, but maybe it should not be possible to return fire more than twice each turn… which means, each soldier can only return fire twice during the aliens turn, and the same for the aliens. That they somehow can do more while its the others team turn, seems a bit strange.

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