My son and I both LOVED all the X-com games and were really excited to buy Phoenix Point as soon as it came out even though the reviews online for it were pretty bad. Now I see why all the reviews said it wasn’t ready for release, and kind of wish I didn’t spend money on this game. My son already quit entirely in frustration, I’m trying to stick with it but the game seems so badly balanced and documented so poorly that I am considering just quitting for a few months until enough patches go thru to fix the game. Maybe I am just not understanding things though, please help me with:
Is it intended to save/reload multiple times per mission even on the easiest mode? Everything (on both sides) dies so easily - if you ever leave something alive and in range of your soldiers, you’re basically guaranteed to die. I wouldn’t say the difficulty is too hard - with 1-2 reloads per mission I can get near-perfect results every time (again, easiest setting). The difficulty is just so random and frustrating.
Is it just me or is Return Fire ridiculously overpowered? For both sides. Attacking from close up is a death sentence unless you know you can 1-shot.
Berserkers and Heavies seem pretty useless compared to Sniper/Assault or Sniper/Heavy. Berserkers die way too easily. Heavy armor makes it impossible to get close enough to ever hit anyone, and doesn’t keep you alive if you do get close.
I got a Technician and he seemed awesome at first, but now he ran out of “ammo” on his Mech Arms thing, and I can’t figure out to get more. How do I get more ammo?
I tried using a Scarab vehicle, supposedly vehicles are really powerful but I don’t get it. If I take a vehicle then I can only bring 3 soldiers. The Scarab does some massive damage up front but then runs out of ammo and I have to fight short handed with 3 soldiers. Doesn’t seem worth it
Capturing pandorans with the neurazer - am I doing this wrong or is it really cumbersome and difficult to pull off? It’s SO hard to get close to something without dying, and then most of the time when I finally pull it off, the neurazer just kills the guy. Skulljacking in X-com wasn’t easy, but the Neurazer is 10 times harder
Anyone know if Epic Games offers refunds on games you purchased and don’t like? I’m not holding my breath on that, but if it’s an option to just get my money back and buy the game later if it improves, I’d love to do that
Hi Homer,
Rather than repeating what’s been said in other threads, let me direct you here, which answers some (but not all) of your questions: PP-Beginner begging for help
To answer some of your questions specifically:
We don’t know. I and a few others play an ‘HonestMan’ version of Ironman, without Restarting failed missions, and we seem to find the Difficulty Spike less severe. But that may be just blind luck. The game scales itself based on your performance, so if you’re registering near-perfect scores every mission, it thinks you’re a god and reacts accordingly. See this thread for more details: [QUESTION TO JG & THE DEVS] Am I playing a totally different game to everyone else?
RF was nerfed recently, but it still takes a while to figure out how to handle it. See first thread for some tips.
I rarely use Berserkers. Heavies are great once you’ve figured them out.
The Mech Arms have a reload like most other weapons. You either need to get lucky and scavenge some, or Reverse Engineer your Mech Arms and then you can manufacture them.
I thought that at first, but see my post on the first thread I linked you to for their awesome uses.
No idea, I haven’t got there yet (I play very slowly)
You’ll have to ask them.
Hope that helps. It’s a good game, but it was released way too early and it’ll take months to iron out all the wrinkles.
general: balance is still off and bugs are everywhere, it is basically a beta at this moment in time.
no its not intended that you save/load multiple times per mission…I definitely don’t get that vibe from this game. but there is no requirement for perfection either, you can rest or simply use medkits to recover lost HP and keep trucking, and the game has a forgiving economy that allows for easy replacement of troops or buying large volumes of medical gear.
for the AI its extremely powerful, for the player not so much as it requires the player gets shot at. and not a lot of enemies shoot at the player without devastating result. now you can bait an enemy and have it get plastered by the return fire “for free” but you generally pay 1/3-1/2 your soldiers HP total for the free shot.
There are multiple ways of dealing with it though, in the tutorial it is explained that return fire has a limited range…meaning that you can still take them down at range. return fire is tied to the gun…so destroying that will remove the crabs ability to do so, and you can apply the dazed status condition that completely negates return fire as well.
every class has its niche, but there will always be “optimal” combinations.
take the arms off his back and place them in your inventory…you will get a “reverse engineer” research option. complete the requirements to start this research…this may mean getting your hands on more “mech arms”, then complete this research…if you have completed it you can build both the mech arms and the munitions for it. you can do the above with most (but not all) pieces of armor and weapons, this can be very helpful if you want to use a certain piece of gear a lot.
vehicles (but not aircraft) are in my opinion in need of a serious balance pass, at the moment the opportunity cost is way too high. and the scarab is actually one of the best trades (with regards to vehicles) in the game.
neurazer captures are a matter of numbers, you need more then 1 dude wailing on the target…dash helps with the close but isn’t needed. rally the troops (to give all the dudes close with a neurazer an additional poke), daze applying tools (keep in mind that daze is placed by shock damage…in order to do so target HP+armor has to be less then the shock valeu) or panic inducing strategies (viral damage, priest)
unlikely, but the fact that you are asking for advice gives me the feeling you can at least see the diamond in the rough here.
No, but you should complain its buggy and non working or how Epic launcher can be buggy and non working Then be amazed by template answers trying everything but fixing the launcher and in the end you get refund.
I’ve captured a Scylla with Neurazers. The way I did it is:
Waited for it to come closer (killing as many bystanders as possiblein the meantime)
Once close enough used 2 assaults
use dash to get close
use Neurazer 4 times (it applies 32 paralysis -> 64 by using 2 assaults)
at this point the queen basically lost almost 2 AP
dash back (don’t want to get squashed when it will move - not sure it would happen but didn’t take any risks)
Use heavy’s “war cry” ability to remove 2 AP
A priest can perhaps panic the queen (that would be even better than “war cry”)
rest of the squad continues to kill other toons or shoots the queen’s legs so it can’t move as much and diminishes its “max hit points” which counts for paralyzed status.
Do it again and again, but without dash this time (you probably don’t have enough will power). The other Pandorans should be pretty dead at that time (I had 8 soldiers, so 6 to get rid of the others).
To paralyze someone, you have to apply an amount of paralysis equal to: “maxHitPoints / 10”. So with a Queen having 1450 max hit points, you need to apply 145.
Applying 73 Paralysis on it will remove 2 AP from her turn, so depending on her abilities, she might not be able to do anything.
You have to be carefull that Neurazer still makes a bit of damage, so when trying to capture a fireworm (1 Neurazer is enough) or mindfragger (2) you have to be carefull to not over-apply and avoid making them bleed.
If you side with Synedrion (or steal their tech), you can use the Athena sniper rifle to apply 15 paralysis per shot. Or 5 per shot with the Hera pistol. This is a great way to capture everyone on a map.
Applying 15 to a crabman or a triton prevents them from moving AND shooting.
On a Siren, you need a bit more but it becomes difficult for her to do anything.
Two shots on Chiron and he can’t shoot (I think it uses 3 AP).
There, hope you have ideas on how to better paralyze now.
The problem with “the difficulty” in my view (personally I haven’t see one) based on others issues is that Recruits may be too expensive. PP seems like it tries to give that old school Xcom feel of “anyone can die” but then on the flipside makes it plain painful to replace them when they do. I feel that if it wasn’t such an expensive chore to replace fallen troopers there’d be a lot fewer complaints about “difficulty”.
I use berserker/assault to break armor. I usually give them first synedrion assault rifle I get because it has very high range and sprays ammo so it is harder to miss and can hit multiple body parts in one shot. Then with armor break I aim to hit few body parts, usually between arm, torso and head. This removes lot of armor from all parts it hit so others can more easily finish the job. Imo this is very useful for big enemies.
As others have mentioned, the game is still in beta form, despite it being officially released. It’s still much improved from the backer builds, which were in a rough alpha state, but the current version still needs a lot of work in all departments; balance, polish, UI, and a lot of features are very bare bones and could do with a lot more rounding out.
Personally, I’d suggest waiting – it’s just none of us know how long that wait will be. There’s been no official statement in terms of what’s next. Is the release build their feature complete build and now they’ll focus on small hotfixes and dlc? Or will they continue to build upon the release version and expand on its features?
The NJ heavy armour is actually heavy enough you can ignore Arthon and Tritons with basically anything but a sniper weapon with a machinegun and a shield arm as they can’t actually meaningfully impact you.
Which can be handy to take the grenade launcher and the fury mounted rockets use the heavy reduce action cost of all explosives and fire two very long range grenades and a rocket to shred a lot of limbs and basically stand as a wall against a lot of the return fire.
Just fyi, he’s playing on easy, which means he doesn’t have the “forgiving” economy. Soldiers cost far more on easy and normal than the do on legendary or even heroic.
Yeah I think this post sums it up pretty well. The prevailing consensus on the forums seems to be that the game is terribly unbalanced and not ready to be released yet, but that’s ok because we’re still in a Beta and the game is still being developed…
Except that the game IS released, it is NOT in beta anymore. They already took a beating in the online gaming reviews, and took money from the fanboys like me who didn’t want to believe it and bought the game anyways. They already have our money, what makes anyone think they will be motivated to work on polishing up game balance now? They’re on the hook for delivering new content on a schedule - there’s no chance they’re going to put work into fixing the base game now.
Maybe the expansion content will be better balanced, maybe it won’t. All I know is I’m not going to throw more money into a game that bombed this badly on release. I’ve deleted it from my computer, and I’m hoping Epic Games will refund me but I’m expecting that to happen.
I have seen people talking about waiting for dlc to fix the game. Personally i buy dlc for games i enjoy,I’m not going to throw more money down this well. The game balance is so bad releasing before christmas was clearly a cash grab. All of us have bought games we regretted, for me this is certainly one of them.
Nah, this should be done for as-is game (as e.g. Fireaxis XCom with no expansion)
while I believe expansion should bring TFD “under the sea” (with more bugs of its own?)
That’s incorrect. Epic have the same refund policy as Steam. If you’ve played for less than 2 hours and the purchase was less than 14 days ago, you can get a refund.
The teams working on the DLC aren’t the same teams working on the base game. We’re committed to getting the base game to where it needs to be with bug fixes, balance changes and extra polish.
Will there be any announcement this month in terms of what is in the pipeline? A tentative road map would go a long way and I believe be much appreciated by the community .
Then be amazed by template answers trying everything but fixing the launcher and in the end you get refund.