You take time to build up your squad but inevitably people will die, I just lost my best heavy because I had to sacrifice him in order to save everyone else in a haven defense mission.
I spent about 1 hour and 30 minutes in that mission calculating trajectories, damage, movement range, flanking opportunities and as careful as I was there were simply too many. I´am at the point where a heavy´s armor means little so he got shredded, that allowed me to finish the last 6 aliens as I knew where to target my own explosives and get 2 flanks in.
I was tired, couldn´t keep going and had to close the game down. The victory felt shallow and more like a loss since it takes time to train up a new heavy … and they are freaking expensive, that also means my plans for a B team have been halted.
Even on lowest difficulty one can expect to lose a soldier, if it just was somebody else, she was however the only one at the time to serve as bait and I should not have trusted the full cover.
For the love of newbies around the world, us who just want in to kill aliens, follow a story and yes, sometimes we die but do turn down the Siren´s, Chirons, amount of aliens with mortars etc. Just the newbie difficulty, I don´t care if you make it suicidal on the other difficulties … put 20 Chirons there all armed with nukes so the “git gud” lads can have their saying, will never play those difficulties anyway.
I am not doing any lairs though, just going through the game avoiding all lairs. Makes it somehow less painful even if I lose the game in the end.
It would seem to me if you don’t do lairs you aren’t going to advance your research. But maybe your experience is different from mine.
I’ve got 20 hours in playing on Normal and it’s rare to lose a soldier now that I’ve had time to really brush up on my squad turn based tactics. I play very conservatively using lots of overwatch and scouting. I’ve yet to see a mission that used a timer except for the Ambush missions and that timer is in my favor, especially when I bring along a Scarab
Also odd that I’ve yet to see alien artillery, also other people have mentioned coming up against it. Also haven’t seen a Chiron yet either. Weird.
Just be happy you havn´t seen them, the Chirons. Taking them out can be a pain but doable, the worst part is when you simply can´t get LOS.
In a mission in a different game I spawned next to two of them, had my Scarab with me and that was my luck … I sacrificed the Scarab while I got my guys under a roof to deal with the other aliens. Lost the Scarab but not before it hurt the Chirons quite a bit since they were next to each other.
Even worse if you get two Sirens blocking your path and a Chiron is overwatching … good luck if you don´t have a roof, even so … the Sirens aren´t easy kills and they can mind control 3 at a time.
I took me a while to realise that the game creates an autosave in the Geoscape before every mission. There is also a ‘Restart’ option for tactical missions on the escape menu, which let’s you go again from the start. This doesn’t re-roll the enemies, though - everything is as it was, Groundhog Day style, so you can die over and over again until you reload the autosave and go and do another mission.
I dont know why in 2019 devs still cant comprehend that people bond with their soldiers and dont implement any sort of character for them or a personality. No lets just go boring-style and make every soldier utterly boring and look like a storm trooper without his armor.
The weird part is that game is build around small teams and difference in potential between level 1 soldier and level 7 is very very large. So your are suppose to keep them alive as loosing even one can lead to cascade of issues. But then game tries to bring back “loosing soldiers is part of the game as they are just different type of resource” type of thing from X-Com, due to difficulty spike. So design is trying to be two orthogonal things at the same time. Devs don’t want large teams probably because of how much time it will take to make a single turn. At the same time, there is barely any equipment and features, besides exploiting abilities, to support small teams tactics. IMHO, the game doesn’t know what it wants to be.
Oh I dont want to mention the 3 soldiers in my base I had to leave there cause I didnt had guns for them and the ones they brought with run out of ammo in the first mission. And since I cant build the ammo yet, they are useless. Of course I builded a shotgun after that but when you have your first vehicle in your production line, its like 12 days closed for that thing only.
Idk why everyone keep hailing this game because of Gollop. It’s not because this guy alone xcom became great. TFTD was copy paste of EU and they polished it. I couldnt bare to play EU after TFTD came out anymore. It was boring and clunky compared to TFTD. I see so many mistake getting repeated in PP it’s like watching someone walking on Ice and you only wait for the moment when that poor guy slips and fells horrible on his ass.
Dont get me wrong, I am a kickstart backer and I wished this game would become great but so far it’s becoming a “new” xcom clone with many game design flaws. The only thing that stands out is the direct aiming in missions and no stupid rng in % aim. Let’s hope it will get better and Gollop gets some help from someone who still knows how to design a proper game.
Got the same impression. I really enjoyed early BBs as they where closer to the old games. Then all this magical abilities got added, “stealth”, focus on small team of super heroes. Willpower became a magic pool and added meta game of winning by inducing cascade of panic. This is not a re-imagining of X-Com as journalists keep saying but “I want the same game as XCom2 but with 2 features done differently”, which would be fine if it would be well designed around that.
Yeah they copy pasted a lot. First review of PP I once watched in bed on youtube I was having trouble to distinguish what is xcom new or PP as of the menu and all look very similar.
What I wished for , since they are not bound to stick with anything, they would improve the soldiers game design. Like make them RPG-like and give them xp for using stuff. Like if you use machine gun you level up your skill for machine guns and when you throw grenades you earn xp there and at some level you get level ups and maybe can throw them further or maybe each level of machine gun you gain xyz per level. So even your soldiers would feel more valuable (which was his goal I guess).
Now my soldiers are leveled up to max in about 4-5 missions and then I dont care anymore about them unless they die.
I guess Gollop thought making games in 2019 is as easy as it was in 1997 but now experiences that it isnt anymore
We gave a lot of feedback like that in the past, seeing as nothing came-out of it, it just feels like a wasted time.
The problems of original X-Com are well studied and many where fixed by various mods for OpenXCom. Many other games came-out since then too, that demonstrated other mechanics and interesting ideas that could have been used. Instead, they decided to go for a copy of what sold the best and just try to fix what annoyed the most many players - non-sensical random chance to hit. Which would have worked, assuming everything well implemented, if XCom in its core wouldn’t have a long term issues.
Like for example class specific weapons (which PP didn’t have at the start and then added fumble mechanics) in combination with class specific abilities synergising with other classes makes every unit super precious, forcing all or nothing strategy. Which has long term consequences to the difficulty balance of the game and a “fail spiral” where player might have already lost his campaign without knowing it. In a game where you can directly guide research of technology and weapons, you somehow depend on more on the meatbags. This is why I liked features of turning your soldiers into mechs later on as it felt like a direct controllable upgrade. Clicking some abilities points in soldier upgrade is not the same as replacing body parts in Syndicate, something that took research, cost to build, cost to install and cost to loose. There are other things but I don’t want to have a long rant post about it.
The point is that why copy the game with all it’s flaws if you have no resources to remedy those flaws?
Like all the resources spent on making different factions could have been spent on adding content where PP as organization is evolving just as Pandorians but using technology instead of evolution. Where we are not just get sidegrade guns, but have a choice of cybernising our troops or using biologocal mutation to augment them, so turning a rookie into a somewhat competent fighter is a matter of tech and resources + training, so that looses can be bearable. Or how come with all that tech we can’t have a large size squads for late game missions, so that multiple teams operate on the field pursuing different tasks.
Chirons are pretty easy enemy. One heavy unit and it’s done. No fun or challenge here, srsly
Same with Sirens - one sniper, shot to the head and say good bye to the mind control OR again, heavy unit with sniper riffle and say good bye to the Siren you got spotted.
Totally agree here - 4xDash abilities in one turn - that was most stupid thing I’ve discover in the start of the game. The soldier that can travel thru the WHOLE map and kill someone (or even few) in one turn is stupid as hell. Whole game looks like - ok guys, just spam your will power.
Dont know what difficulty you play. Sirens head in my game has about 200 HP and 30 Armor, so a single Sniper shot barely removes half if the heads health. Sure i can quickshot twice. However that tactic is screwed the moment i have to either move to get in LOS or (which happens almost every second mission) there are 2 of them right next to each other.
Problem with the Heavy tactic against chirons is they have an abysmal movement range. So unless i can sneak up to them through buildings i cant get near enough for the heavy to actually hit it with the cannon without getting permaglued or wiped out by the mortar while fighting off the infinitly return firing anthrons.
Mix them with assaults for dash. Sure heavy+sniper is a cool combo for the rageburst with sniper rifle but dash is just more versatile. I find it hard to not have dash an all soldiers as those without it will be lagging behind everyone else.
Yes, quick shot or dash with a shotgun or heavy unit with sniper rifle spam or 3xmortar spam with an assist from any other unit. And srsly without any trolling, I’ve no idea why it doesn’t work for you.
Glue is the most stupid fix of “difficulty” in this game. This is the most broken mechanic in this game in pair with return fire.
Chiron has the largest hitbox. So again just spam heavy unit 7 lvl ability in it. I was able to capture Chiron in our 1st meet without a joke in 2 turns (71/130 paralyze in 1st turn). And before this turn, I’ve already captured the “glue” mob. And this is not on medium or easy difficulty if it is important to notice.
P.S. "As x-com veteran (since 1996) after 3 days of playing and streaming to my friend (who is old fun of x-com and jugged alliance too), we decide that this game is much easier than even a War of Chosen (which I really like). Because in x-com you spent about 20-30 or even more minutes for the perfect decision in ONE TURN, but here in PP you just spam the will power =( ".
