Do missions scale to the level of your team?

Phoenix Point
#5

I think that main flaw here is design. Experienced soldiers are too powerful:

  • skills give too much power instead of versatility (different options) on the battlefield
  • attributes are pumped too much, so inexperienced soldiers can’t match experienced in willpower usage (skill output), speed and durability from strength

Basic weapon stats are meaningless on their own if we expect to multiply those values by skills. And this should be the other way around where you take any given weapon and you expect it to behave almost the same in all situations, no matter how advanced is timeline during campaign and what skills soldier has.

I would prefer overhaul of all skills and re-balancing around that. But it is too late for development to do that. So we are left with changes like:

  • re-introduction of SP limit per soldier (so they won’t have all skills and/or max attributes)
  • balancing aliens to not overcome power of soldiers limited in such way.
3 Likes
#6

I disagree. Your rewarded for putting the time into training units up. The Firaxis XCOM’s are exactly the same in this regard.

If you feel that it makes your troops too powerful, then don’t level them up.

2 Likes
#7

Yes and then you need to do magic tricks so your new soldiers could handle next battles to come. :slight_smile: And practially you can’t loose your experienced soldiers because you will get punished heavily by the game without those soldiers. I think this is not good way to develop game. :smiley:

By magic tricks I mean training center in base which can spew out 7lvl soldier just with lower SP count. :slight_smile: That is silly. In the end game you can’t take level 1 or level 2 soldiers because they are almost useless in hard combat situations. That is the price of “reward for training”.

And lets not talk about that poor game of FiraXCOM. :wink:

Argument about not leveling them up is fantastic. Maybe I should not play the game to not feel that something is wrong? :slight_smile:

#8

As long as there are super soldiers, the following problems will never go away:

Balance Difficulty: The game assumes that you will eventually have super soldiers. Possibility 1: From this point on, things have to be VERY difficult since your team now consists of Flash, Iroman and so on. This is frustrating for the beginner. Possibility 2: It is ignored that you have supersoldiers. Now who is frustrated? … players who actually expected PP to be a tactical game.

Damage over time will NEVER be properly adjustable with supersoldiers. The well-known ACID problem only resulted from that. (Damage over time <multiple alpha strike)

Cover: Positioning becomes obsolete if you have “Flash” or extremely high accuracy

Defensive Overwatch: what for? You can kill significantly more enemies on the offensive by regenerating AP.

Free Aim: is at least LESS relevant, because you can run directly in front of your opponent’s face and then pull the trigger several times.

And the worst: no DRAMA and no TENSION! Everything is cleaned (FTS) from the map. You are not afraid, but solve a cleaning puzzle. For me this is also the main argument why PP does not generate views on Youtube “Lets Play”. The audience wants to see an exchange of blows, where something happens unexpectedly and the tide can turn again.

7 Likes
#9

All of that would be best addressed in a Phoenix Point 2 if there ever is one.

#10

So I haven’t completed PP on hero level yet (recently started), only on rookie lvl. But certainly on rookie level with my playing skills I completely agree with the overpowered superheroes. But I wonder if the equipment storage and access system is also at fault in assisting with the problem.

Having easy access to all equipment available, especially ammunition is assisting the super soldiers. I’ve stripped equipment from units on one side of the world to access and equip soldiers on the other side.

So a team can go from one mission and on to the next continuously until they need a rest. But if surplies of ammo and weapons are rationed, perhaps the balance would come back into the game.

So I recognise that this will not limit many skills, but may shift playing styles. I wonder what other players think? I recognise that many other players have played more than I have. Perhaps this might be a feature for the higher difficulty levels?

Afterthought: would dash and melee weapons become more relevant?

1 Like
#11

Yes, shared inventory is also a problem, but in my opinion it wouldn’t change much since power comes more from skills than equipment. So it is not so important if you will equip the most weak or the most powerful sniper rifle… or even assault rifle.

#12

I’m pretty sure it will be addressed in this Phoenix Point, the question is how exactly and when.

It’s important to raise these issues as @walan (and many of us) do, but it’s also important to be aware that it’s not so easy to fix them as it seems.

#13

The catch 22 to it, is that by pleasing X audience you then anger Y audience.

So whose voice is more important?

For example, if you addressed all the points raised in walan’s post above, then you’d have a harder game. So what do you then say to those that say that the game is already too hard? Suck it up?

If you stripped back all the abilities and essentially turned the game into the Micropose’s XCOM’s, then you likely would end up with a game akin to Terror From the Deep. Is that what people want? I think not.

I just think that there is no true perfect balance. No matter what you do you are not going to please everyone, because we are all at different levels with these sorts of games. I for example, have played every XCOM game on lowest difficulty, because I like a moderate challenge but not too hard. Where as others love the high difficulty factor. If you look at all the people playing on legendary vs rookie here, you can see the variance. Who do you cater for? You can’t do both. So who is the more important one?

#14

Mod support is the important one. Get the game in good shape with the upcoming changes and then get to work on providing us with solid mod support.

4 Likes
#15

Now that I 110% agree on.

#16

Which is why I constantly argue for Second Wave Options and linking Skills limitations to Difficulty Settings.

XCOM has a pretty broad fan base, of which I was one until PP came along and knocked it out of the park imho. Some have no problem with save scumming, others abhor it - so XCOM gave them a Second Wave Option to cater for those tastes. Some like random rookie stats, others hate them, so the Second Wave gave them both. Etc, etc.

And to answer the inevitable ‘but who do you balance for?’ question, in this case I’d say you balance the Pandas against those playing with Skills limitations, because playing PP with Skills limitations is much, much harder than playing PP with super-soldiers - and people who have no problem with using super-soldiers clearly have no problem with wiping out an easier enemy in a handful of turns.

2 Likes
#17

My take on that, is that if you factor in how long 1 play through of PP will take generally. Then do you want a long play through, or a quicker one? It factors in there.

Some people want a REALLY long play through, which is perfectly valid. I’m just not one of those people. But if you look at those who LOVE the Long War mod for the first Firaxis XCOM for example. We all just want different things from all of this.

#18

Absolutely agree. It’s why I don’t play this on Legendary - not because of the difficulty, but because I like to take my time and savour the world in these games, and Legendary gives me absolutely no time to do that.

So yes, another SWO should be Speed of Timer; another should be Recruits come Naked/Armoured/Fully Armed etc.

1 Like
#19

I’m one of those people - though tbh I never finished LW2 because PP came along.

But that’s my point in a nutshell. Fans of this genre of game (or any game for that matter) want & like different things, and games are now sophisticated enough to let them have their cake and eat it to a pretty large extent.

I mean, I think my point on Terminators/non-Terminators is actually being proven right now in the way that people report they play on these forums. I play HonestMan with 1 Skill/turn limits and Rally restricted but not limited to 1/turn; Voland plays HM with 1SPT including Rally; mcarver2000 self-limits on Terminator skills, but allows himself to use them when he needs them; but Spagetman seems to like his Terminators as far as I can tell. We all obsessively play the same game, just in different ways - it would just be nice if the game itself could act as our referee, rather than us having to exercise sel-restraint (or not) is all.

#20

For me, I feel that there needs to be more differences in gameplay based on difficulty level selected. At rookie it should be a substantially easier game, with less limitations. Where as on the higher ones, more restrictions (or options for restrictions) should be there.

Make the game far harder. Limit skills. Have certain abilities not in the game at all. Go for it. I’m all for it. I’ll just never support a harder game, when it comes to the easier difficulty modes.

#21

Not necessarily, because you can (have to) balance difficulty for each difficulty level primarily by looking at the enemies’ side.

The problem right now is that you can’t balance difficulty because with First Turn Strike what you do with the enemies is irrelevant, they aren’t gonna have a chance to do anything on their turn anyway. It’s the same thing on Rookie through Legend.

#22

True, though the same can happen to you as well. When I attempted the Antarctica mission on Veteran I got my ass handed to me in 1 turn, every time and gave up. So it goes both ways. It’s not just an issue of first strike from the Phoenix side, it’s also one from the Pandoran, where your up against such high level Pandoran enemies that your screwed over in 1 turn with no counter possible.

#23

But that’s precisely the thing -

  • as a player with +200 hours I can do Antarctica on Legend with self imposed restrictions, without using FTS, without any problems

  • any player can do Antarctica using FTS (provided they know how to do it) on any difficulty level

  • casual or new players (I don’t dare say what % of all players, because I have no idea) probably can’t do Antarctica without FTS on any difficulty level.

The problem with super-soldiers is not that they make the game too easy for some players - they make the game unbalanced in general for every kind of player.

#24

…because the game balances itself to cope with super-squads, so mere mortal squads don’t really get a look-in.

But yea, @icemann, to your point about Easy needing to be Easy etc, we completely agree. Problem is, atmo the game is so wildly unbalanced, even in the early pre-Lvl7 stages, that some people have problems coping with it.

But I think the devs know that, and they’re slowly working towards fixing it, so fingers crossed.

1 Like