Feedback Suggestion: Reduce Accuracy, Add Fire Modes

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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Summary of Accuracy and HP

Compared to UFOD, everyone seems to be an elite marksman of the highest order. We even have soldiers who can fire a six shot burst and hit distant targets with most of the bullets, even under combat stress.

And… it’s making cover pretty useless.

What’s the point of ducking behind cover, when the enemy’s aiming circle is about the size of your head? Rather than address the ease of obtaining headshots, apparently, the Dev solution was to make headshots completely non-fatal and marginal injuries, which seems a pretty weird fix.

It seems that the reason HP values are so high is because the weapons are so accurate, too? In UFO Defence, one plasma bolt could wreck your rookies, killing them or making them panic or giving them horrible bleeding you need to treat. In this game, you can’t avoid enemies shooting you six time in the head, even with effective tactics… which feels very weird.

Thus, I suggest reducing overall accuracy, but adding in something I loved in UFO Defence: Firing Modes

So Many Choices, So Many Strategies

As it stands, your weapon has exactly one effective firing range and DPS. This gives you pretty limited options as to how you engage enemies, and what kind of damage you inflict. Now, in reality, there is some cool nuance as to what options you have:

Three round burst, single shot, full auto, snap shot, aimed shot, blind fire… you have a lot of potential options, if you wanted to use them. Of course, for simplicity and potent variety, about three would be right.

The Candidates

Snap Shot would reduce the weapon’s AP cost by 1, but reduce accuracy. For an AR (Assault Rifle), it might be a burst of fire, still, rather than a single shot.

Shoot would be the standard attack, and would be less accurate than in the current release.

Aimed Shot would increase accuracy, but increase the weapon AP cost by 1.

Full Auto would be for automatic weapons only. It costs all of your remaining AP to use. It greatly reduces your accuracy. But, the more AP you have, the more lead you sling. If any kind of suppression was added to the game, it should also have an increased suppression effect.

Hold Breath would be a Sniper ability, which allows you to dramatically increase your accuracy on your next attack. If you move, Hold Breath would be cancelled.

Artillery Spotting, as described here: Suggestion: Overwatch Ability for Heavy: Artillery Spotting

8 Likes
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Totally agree with your suggestions!

What a strange world do we live when a company named Snapshot Games forget to add snapshots to their game :wink:

5 Likes
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I know! That should be illegal.

I have some hope the Devs are going to pull a No Man’s Sky, and just add in a ton of content, including the above. I think this could greatly improve the experience, and differentiate it from FiraXCOM positively.

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I don’t see much issue with enemy accuracy as long as you use and abuse the full cover and some overwatch, but i’ll love to have the multiple shot choice like in xenonauts for exemple ! good idea.

I’ll keep it to snapshot, normal and aimed though, without touching the number of shot fired, as it’s a perk on the heavy gun lvl 7, and it’s actualy freaking op. The issue with this is that if your soldier can do it, ennemy may do it again, and i reaaaaaaaaly don’t want to see mortar shoter empting their magazine on my soldiers :’)

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Yeah, abuse cover is about right. Anything below total concealment has seemed pretty ineffective. I’ve attempted to line myself up with door frames for minimal exposure, but the aliens still seem to be able to get full machine gun bursts on my characters, at range.

I hate that the developers decided to add in game-ruining, gimmicky, stupid magic powers which take away from the game. UFO Defence had no special abilities, and people still play it to this day.

This isn’t an issue of difficulty, I find the game too easy even on Legend, so far. It’s an issue that it feels wrong.

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I can understand your point of view, while i personaly find perks pretty cool to use, or to fight against. Having to disable ennemy part to prevent some perks or mechanics to trigger add a new (to the genre) gameplay mechanic that i really enjoy, and the fact than soldiers unlock some perks give some sort of “individual progression” that a soldier won’t have if he was just looting his predecessor weapon on the ground and go fight with a super new but not so new laser, making him just soldier N°46434213.

As of difficulty, i dunno, i think it’s really uneheaven and the difficlulty curve tend to skyrocket sometimes.

On my last run on hard, i was just fighting classic crabs and cameleons, never encountered anything else on the run, and on a single mission, bam, 4 sirens, full team wipe o_x i’ll be glad to encounter a single one in the mission so i can at least now what i’ll have to fight. But it’s just a design choice i guess x)

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It works fine with the alien monsters. It can even be logical, that disabling the giant claw means they can’t grab you. I don’t mind perks that are well thought out, and fit the game. But there are just so many abilities that work like super powers or magic, making no sense. Quick Aim, which somehow is more accurate, and makes you go crazy.

UFOD did have progression, your soldiers levelled up a lot of stats as they survived missions, and gains military ranks which increased morale of friendly troops. While giving soldiers 30 abilities to remember makes them more unique, it also makes them more of a headache to remember and manage, and it means you have to go through the process again from scratch if one of your vets die.
And let’s put it into perspective. FiraXCOM had the brilliant idea of taking away basic abilities, like being able to shoot and move, use suppressive or full auto fire, and etc, from all the troops, making them all more bland. They did this… so that the ones who learned how to walk and talk at the same time would seem interesting by comparison to the featureless blobs that were Rookies. That kind of design, making everything boring so that being able to do anything at all becomes interesting, I don’t like that. It also tends to cheapen mechanics lkike suppressive fire, not being so much as a mechanic as it is a simplified debuff, like a Poison spell in a JRPG.

Difficulty is in a weird place because of the weird abilities that give you super powers, if you exploit them, and because of low lethality. If lethality is high, it is possible for one man to kill ten, with some tactics and luck. If lethality is low, the ten WILL pile on the one, even if he takes one or two of them out.

The aliens get a lot of health and armour, and a lot of troops, and damage. High accuracy makes cover ineffective. So you are bound to lose without magic powers, just due to low lethality and poor design.

2 Likes
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This. I really like perks, it makes the soldiers different, along with attributes.

It’s one of the things I most enjoy in the Firaxis XCOM, especially with WOTC or Long War. Sure they have perks that feel like magic, but somehow this vast amount of perks create more unique soldiers that I am more attached.

If I have to choose between perks and little increases to attributes, I always will choose perks. When I played the original X-COM it felt all good because all the game mechanics for me were new, but now… I need more, especially after Firaxis XCOM.

I’d change a lot of things from Firaxis XCOM in favour of Phoenix Point, but perks are not one of them.

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Well designed perks can be OK. Badly designed ones feel like magic, and the game shovels a load of boring and broken perks at you, that require you to memorize a spreadsheet to work out what to pick. Worst of all, they’re unintuitive, making them hard to learn and remember. These are often placeholders for actual mechanics and dynamic systems, like suppression.

Obviously, +1% to some stats is not equal to a skill that lets you attack twice per turn. But I’d be much more interested in a character who is cowardly but very strong, than I would in someone who just learned what Suppressive Fire is. Especially since six other guys are going to learn what suppressive fire is, at level 4, while stat allotment can have a lot more combinations with far more diverse outcomes.

You have a guy whose only good stat is morale? Make him a suicide bomber.

3 Likes
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I have to agree with you that some perks in PP are a bit underwhelming.

For me, the best would be:

  • A rethinking of the perks
  • The ability to choose between more perks (apart of the randomized ones), ala XCOM
  • More attributes, at least morale and aim

And let the player decide between perks or attributes, how is done now, that I think is a very good thing.

But please, never delete the perks. In my experience, playing Xenonauts I could never feel attached to my soldiers, they were only numbers. In fact, after 5 hours I was bored. On the contrary, I think Phoenix Point only needs a bit more love and work because as it is now is pretty fun.

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Complained about this back in backers build, seeing as not much changed, I don’t think devs really care or have resources to do any of that. Adding magical abilities is much easier than implementing things like smoke grenades or firing modes.

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The problem with being attached to soldiers is that it leads to all or nothing tactics where even heavy injuries are good reason enough to reload. If you lose your soldiers and continue playing, then its your own peril as you can hardly recover from loosing soldiers. It becomes a game of going around with an A Team to solve all missions. No deep management of training or injuries, no heroes who sacrifice their life to save others. Moreover it creates an non-congruent experience of the world where loss of human life is suppose to be a common occurrence, where hundreds or thousands of survivors are fighting against hordes of pandorians, but in reality it’s about 6 dudes with guns kicking everyone’s ass.

3 Likes
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You won’t stand this really long i think ^^

6 dude around the world will explode in your face really soon if you can’t expand your active strike force ;p.

I have 3 full 8 slot team atm that move constantly around the glob fighting and progressing, and it’s barely enough to maintain the deathcounter at reasonable levels :stuck_out_tongue:

Loosing a lvl 7 character is definetly an issue, for sure but honestly, it’s not 1 / 6 dude for long, it’s like one from the 24 member of the main roaster, that are already replacable with guys that wait patiently in a base that stack training facilities.

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On top of that, it becomes very similar to some other game we all know and that game did way more features related to team management and has some mods that can push it even further. But regardless.

A good game can become great game by removing features and polishing those which are left. But those core features have to lead to an interesting varied gameplay where your decisions actually matter. I’m not sure if anything changed but flourish of perks starting from backer build 4 turned this game from something tactical into “race to level 6” as fast as possible and then all problems will be solved.

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To be clear, I figure we should keep the perks in PP, the game is designed around them. But we probably should reduce their prevalence and OPed nature. Perks can be good, but these ones need a lot of work.

I’ve talked here and there about how perks can be rebalanced, I don’t consider it hard. I figure make Willpower work like Morale, as it kind of sort of does already, just that it randomly works as a Mana Bar too, often unnecessarily (it already costs 3 AP to use Jump Jets, no need for it to cost 2 WP as well).

Xenonauts had some issues, mods made it a lot better. Once the combat felt like a hot LZ in Vietnam, then every fight was engaging.

I worry the same. Going to wait around for modding tools and patches before I sink any serious time into the game. Hopefully the Devs pull a No Man Sky and overhaul this, as it does have potential.

Strangely, though, my suggestions of firing modes and your smoke grenades would not be any harder than silly abilities, it might be easier even. A lot of Devs get stuck in their own heads, and get busy with other things, so don’t fix obvious bugs.

Just wanted to say I agree with your whole post. No need to quote it all.

Though, honestly, with upgrading stats and just getting attached to a set of characters you have, I sometimes loaded the game even though it didn’t matter. It’s fun to name the characters after ones you actually care about.

It’s good that the cost of losing guys isn’t too high. But… the cost of having to learn a new set of 30 perks would be a huge turn off for me. Easier to reload the game at that rate.

I’m kind of shocked that developers behind the original Enemy Unknown would resort to such lazy rubbish. Maybe they should just scrap this willpower perks system, and return to earlier versions?

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Why? Could you elaborate on this?

You’ve mentioned in another thread that your playtime is about 25 hours, we’ve spent hundreads and thousands of hours in backers builds providing feedback to improve this game. I don’t need to put another 100 in to see that previous issues are still there as they are coming from the core design and not some small tweaks here and there.

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I speaked about 25 hours in release build only, i can’t tell about the earlies backer builds as regardless i had crowfunded the game i wasn’t caring about epic launcher and just played backer builds “another way” humpf. But probably have at least a undred hour with bb 4 & 5, far less with earlier builds.

What i mean is that ennemy will start to stack HP and armor, far more than in bb5. If you don’t complete enough mission, raise higher diplomacy, and defend enough havens in time, you’ll end up having to deal with 80% ennemy having 30 and more armor AT minimum on every part, therefore making almost impossible to deal with them with most repeating riffles. And you’ll definetly have enough explosives for lowering all of them :stuck_out_tongue: Meaning you’ll need corroding stuff, or new jericho weapons etc, but also anu prist and stuff etc, the sooner the better. Ity’s possible with a single ship i guess, but at the cost of ignoring a lot of other events.

Then the mist expand, and the ally bases raided are more and more frequent, even if you clean bases. If you let them expand, sometime they attack the other side of the planet, even the fastest deployment vehicle can’t reach the haven in time. So you have to have teams scatered around the globe to defend and destroy ennemy base, on top of the main team that try to push through the “story”. ^^

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Your weapons are not as relevant as this game is about abusing combination of perks:

Having multiple teams to cover other parts of the world have nothing to do with battle casualties and attrition.
How is more hp make it any different from BB5? This would have effect only if you don’t use perks properly and to have proper perks you have to keep your team alive - which leads to all or nothing strategy. Of course you can ignore that, but it’s clearly not what they game wants you to do.

In old x-com there was a very simple principal - most of your early hires will perish, maybe 1 out of 7 or 10 will survive till the end game and that’s how you get your A Team for a finale of the game, not for early midgame. Loosing your soldiers was a part of the development strategy overall as it gives you a “statistical” indicator if you are moving in a right direction. You would flip their weapons and armor almost every mission. There are mods for OpenX-Com like XFiles that add all the personality that was missing in original X-Com and you can save scum to save characters that are dear to you, but the game itself is not build around keeping a Joe from a tutorial mission till the end game or you will have a hard time.

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yes, and no. i do use the upside strat on one of my sniper, with upgraded riffles, while i prefer the priest with +2 will per turn perk so i can abuse the double shot for 2 ap each (less overall dps for sure but making able to take down severall ennemy (or ennemy important part) per turn)

Some ennemy start to have 30 - 40 armor at minimum, i’m sure they’ll go higher soon, if you only use the starting gear, even considering you have a lvl 7 sniper multiclassed with heavy, you’ll do 6 ammo dealing 60 - 70 damage each and it’s over. not even enough to one shot a siren. And i frequently cross the path of 3 - 4 sirens, not even speaking about chirons that fire from across the map ^^

Without a proper way to disable armor or penetrate it, it’s gonna be an issue soon ^^

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I have to admit to not liking these suggestions in the original topic - not only are the proposed changes turning PP into the original UFO - it’s also frustrating as hell to constantly miss. It took a while to get used to the firing system in PP, but now I’m used to it I (personally) prefer it.

Let’s not turn it into another clone.