Perhaps he means XCom (the old one) not X-Com. Either way, tactical freedom comes from a number of options that you have in your disposal to deal with a threat and ability to use those.
One of the things X-Com got right is to keep event based structure for missions. PP went into another direction - fly around, get into RNG fights and respond to events. What this leads to is making squads, sending them to exploration and then responding to threats using those squads. Combined with rather fast recovery time, you get a system where you are very likely to have the same composition of squads throughout the game.
What it means, is that your tactical freedom is as free as what soldiers you have in your squad and those soldiers are rarely swapped with someone else.
This is very different to X-Com or XCom as in either you will be arranging your squads for each mission as many soldiers will be in the sick bay. You will have to make choices as whom to take and who is needed to support other soldiers.
The other aspect is that pretty much any build in PP can solo enemies, there isn’t really a need for synergy between different classes to have any meaningful squad composition. I’ve played just fine when everyone in the squad as hybrid of heavy/sniper and heavy/assault. You could add some heavy/engineer into mix for limb healing, but it’s not really necessary. There is no synergy between these guys as each just has a high dps, you really just need to take care to put them in position where they can use their weapons effectively.
This is not a tactical freedom, it’s just freedom. The tactical decision you would be making is - who can kill this crab right now? Can we get this syren in single turn? and etc. there is no need to plan for multiple turns ahead. You could do more by carefully selecting builds and chaining some abilities, but why bother? Some people still use assault rifles in mid game, because they use one guy to shred crab’s armor and then use another guy to attack with assault rifles. Why? You can simply take a sniper rifle and shoot off limbs. Or use GL for general AOA damage instead of focused armor shred, you get armor shred from it anyway.
There is a general weird approach towards balancing in this game.
I think it was in BB4 when we got grenade launchers. They where very powerful and a lot of fun. In something like X-Com/XCom their mass alone would prohibit from being used as a side weapon, so you wouldn’t carry one on every soldier or will have limited ammunition. In PP, as you can multiclass anyone into heavy or just get proficiency perk, everyone in squad could carry it, so crabs say hello to artillery barage from turn 1. Then combine it with Rage Burst and you have an ultimate fun weapon.
Yeah it makes game too easy, so it needs to be balanced. Like maybe add spread and a time fuze? Nahh, let’s make it underpowered first, so it can’t kill even a single crab. Then month later add spread, but in such a way that grenade can explode in your face by randomly hitting the same cover you are standing behind…
What could have been done instead is raising mass to a degree that make it’s nearly impossible to be used as side weapon, add spread of where grenades land, add time fuze that sets a limit of minimal distance of the shot. Add other type of ammunition and spawn more low level crabs. Then this weapon could be use through the whole game, by a support class whos purpose is to dispatch mass of low level enemies. Set a firewall, crack open buildings, gas some area and etc.
In last campaign, I had it as sideweapon on 5 out of 6 people in the team. On mission with 2 chirons, 5 just jamped to the tallest building and bombarded chirons and worms for 5+ turns. “Tactics”
USER DFO ERROR ALERT!
No the game is not too hard/difficult to play. It appears that you however, do not have the patience to learn the New, by expecting it to be Played just like XCOM. Which this game is not.
That’s a DUH, moment, sport. Especially when you realize that Julian Gollop, the designer/developer, created that franchise, which has since been taken from the original UFO/XCOM series of games, to create XCOM.
You need to learn how to offer Constructive Suggestions, and not blame anything for mistake created by yourself.
Did I have trouble starting out as a Newb? Yes. But I didn’t *blame the game or my advanced age (67) for those troubles. Instead, I searched the forums, for tips on what I was doing wrong. Then went on to conquer the games individual DLC’s combined and as individuals at Veteran Level.
I could go on, but seriously doubt you read this far …
If you need to consult video tutorial or wiki before playing the game, then it probably game has a steep learning curve. Like dwarf fortress for example. But it doesn’t necessary mean that game is actual complex, it might be simply convoluted or teaching player wrong things through the mechanics. Like PP tutorial teaches you that grenades are powerful, which they aren’t. Or starts you with soldiers with no abilities, so you tend to not use them often. Or start you with a cannon, which is absolutely crap in hands of rookie and player who doesn’t know how and when to use it. In no way game teaches you what you need to achive strategically in first few weeks of the game, it just throws a bunch of research topics at you, half of which are useless till mid game.
The next part is feedback. As game heavily relies on RNG, there is barely any feedback in regards to you doing well or not well in tactical battles. When 1/3rd of your team is incapacitated at starting turns due to chiron/pair of syrenas/poison/mass acid, you might be having hard time pulling of that mission. So what do you draw from this? Do you need better armor, weapons, abilities, maybe vehicles or you change your tactics? Exactly same mission can go completely different if you start just 10 squares away. If enemies just have twice as much HP as before, do you go and research next tier of weapons? Those don’t exist outside of DLC. So what new player is suppose to do if all of the intuitive ways to change how campaign goes are not really available as part of the game. Yeah, he needs to go and watch videos about some meta-builds and cheese tactics like if he is playing a WOW or something.
Games advanced quite considerable since UFO/XCOM where made, the expectations from design went up too. But seriously, there is Xenonauts which actually re-implements old games and it doesn’t require reading wiki to play it.
oh i read it alright. Your attempt to portray me as lazy and possible dumb isnt going to work. I played many iterations from different patches, incl. 3 of them with latest. Im the wrong person to be taking your attitude. Everything i’ve said is mirrored in reviews and even some of your fellow players in here. The developers screwed up the game design for sure.
So according to YOU im to blame for this. I dont know who the F you are. You could be some 10 year old but your opinion is your opinion. As for learning to give constructive suggestions, what did you just do to me? You’re a hypocrite of the highest order.
Im happy for you that you think this game is too easy. You’re in the minority. It depends on the target audience of this game. If the intention was from the start to do a long war type of game for PP then they nailed it.
I can understand you but here in the forum you are wrong. You will hear WHAT I have completely finished the game with only 2 soldiers and you scream for NERF??? You will only get an answer from hardcore gamers who won’t help you but only cement their own ideas. It’s best not to ask any questions.
If you ask a reasonable question, in most cases you will get reasonable answers here in the forum.
But if you only show how bad the game is from your own point of view, what kind of answers should you expect? It’s OK, but it’s not a question, it’s just feedback. And apart from confirmations, everything else is usually not taken seriously anyway. That’s okay too, because it’s just personal feedback.
But if you do this with an offensive tone, you shouldn’t get mad about responses that come back in the same tone. A serious answer is usually not worthwhile in such cases. And now I’ve done it again … never mind.
i made some valid points. Some of the designs are sadist in nature and completely unnecessary , and i’ve said the game isnt as fun as it should be because of questionable design issues. Some of the things the developer should have seen coming, or perhaps didnt care or didnt have time to fix it.
You may agree or disagree, but it is feedback. Reviews mirror what i’ve said. Yes there is a lack of games like these, so it’s inevitable the hardcore set of players will defend at any cost. I get that.
Dont get mad if a player who finished all the xcom games comes in here and doesnt worship at your feet of whichever project fancies you this year during covid. I bet half of you wont even come back here once X-Com 3 comes out, along with the mods which will preoccupy most of you for the next 1.5 years following that. At least that company knows how to make game play fun, challenging, without outright sadism.
For those of you who brag of finishing the game with 2 character or 1 squad, and said it was easy, and tried to rub it in our faces, how many times did you restart the game to get to that point, across all version of the game? Once you get past 5x all you’re doing is looking for game exploits and doubling down on the game’s weaknesses. At that point i would say you should go play something else.
Did you even stop to consider how you were playing? Instead of comparing it straight to XCOM?
& 3. I’m one of the guys that reviewed Board and Video games in their infancy in the 80’s. Today I’m a 67 year old, that enjoys the challenges new games present me.
I stand by my post, regardless that it hurt your feelings. The Fact is, this game is not too difficult to overcome, by anyone willing to look at how the game was designed to be played!
If you don’t like something, the simple solution is to ignore, or not do/use it. If you feel you lost money over it … Then by all means give a constructive critique on what is broken, and offer suggestions how you think it would be better.
If you try to play this game with logic, or try and play it like you would any other XCOM game and/or clone, you’re going to get wrecked.
Phoenix Point is all about breaking the abilities your soldiers are given. If you aren’t zipping around the map and 1-shotting every Panda within the first few turns, you aren’t playing the game correctly.
And for the record, I absolutely HATE that. It completely removes any tactics or strategy from the game. There is nothing fun about combat in this game. Either you’re getting overpowered in the beginning, losing precious soldiers (whoever though keeping the recruiting pool limited to punish players needs to be outright fired), or about mid- to endgame you just roflstomp everything because everyone has dash and quickshot and whatever that stupid perk is that lets you get AP back for killing things.
I completed this game on max difficulty back when it first came out, one for each ending. Since then, I have periodically reinstalled it whenever major patches/DLC come out, and inevitably just stop playing once my soldiers reach the rank of “I’m OP”.
I do not see any difficulty with my play style (with save-loads and mass trading). On February 8 I’ve got 4K-13K of each resource, 44 soldiers, 15 aircrafts, 14 bases, 15 research labs, 600-1800 of each of the LotA resources, all LotA weapon blueprints, level 100 of alignment with each of the factions… and I like it. LotA maps and weapons look very cool, by the way.
oh come back - i was only joking with ya. Geez what’s with you guys. You all say im butthurt but when i dont agree with some of you now suddenly you are. Did i call you stupid or dumb? nope. I only said back to you what you said to me. No biggie.
Well, let’s assume that you accidentally spelled my nickname incorrectly. If that’s the case, I’ll take my … noob back too.
But, honestly, what should I write here? I am mostly completely on the other side on many of the points you have mentioned. Overall I personally find the game very easy, especially when you play in the lower difficulty levels. But I still have a lot of fun with the game. Will you really read something here?
But okay, let’s try it.
Here are some of my points that I like and that are mostly contrary to your opinions:
The whole structure is very consistent for me.
The tactical missions are too many in number. But for me, depending on how I restrict myself, challenging enough without being overly difficult and accordingly fun.
So far I have not come across anything that cannot be solved somehow.
The possibilities to master missions or even the whole game are almost unlimited and I like that very much.
… certainly much more that is mostly against your opinions.
And then a few more points that I don’t like, just to show that everything is far from good for me and some of them are also in line with your “feedback”:
The easy levels of difficulty must be really easy for EVERY player. It can’t be that so many players have such big problems with the game.
A lot has to be done on balancing, there are still some things that are not really good.
Too many missions in too short time. The entire game is sometimes just pure repetition and then it gets boring at some point after the 20th defence of a heaven, the 10th destruction of a nest, etc.
… a lot more can be found in a few other threads.
And then something about the tiresome comparison with Firaxis X-Coms from my personal point of view:
Neither X-Com 1 nor 2 come close to PP for me. They may be better balanced, but the simplifications on almost all levels are now a no-go for me. With Chimera Squad they also brought out something that was pretty disappointing for me. It may be a low budget title, but I think this game is a big step backwards from their two successes. Graphically, strategically and tactically just bad in my eyes. And this from a significantly larger game developer than Snapshot. Since then I have been rather sceptical about X-Com 3. I will play it for sure, but if it doesn’t evolve much, PP will still be my favourite. Definitely.
That’s my personal opinion, even if it may not correspond to yours or the majority. What will you now do with this? Will this change anything of your opinions? I highly doubt it and it is also not my intention to do something like that. Everyone’s opinion is important and don’t have to change, the devs should listen to all and make their consequences out of all.
So why should I stay longer in a thread in which I do not like the offensive tone of your posts, except to argue with you about individual points of personal opinions? That’s useless and leads to nothing …
Those are valid points, but I guess I think of something different when I read “tactical freedom.” What you’re describing with X-com is a structure that governs tactical choices, not tactical freedom.
To me tactical freedom is the freedom to make different choices on the battlefield. In X-com, there’s often only one general way to complete a mission successfully, and if you make the wrong choice, you’re screwed. That is much less true in PP.
Yes, you can take generic soldier builds and win with them, but where’s the fun in that? Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you must. The same thing occurs with tabletop wargames: the power gamers min-max the rules because winning is the priority; the fluff gamers build army lists reflective of the character of their army and try to win with it. (Not a relative judgment of either approach, btw.)
PP definitely gives me more freedom of choice about what I do on the battlefield. That part I enjoy.
Could you make an example of tactical choices you make in PP?
I was talking about X-Com not in a sense that it has more tactical freedom but more in a sense that you need to better understand and use synergies of different classes and game design enforces it.
A game with good tactical freedom, to me personally, is for example Fallout Tactics or Jagged Alliance. In both games, any character can use any weapon if needed but they are good in using some than others. So if you have a set of good specialized character and equipment/weapons for them, then you can assemble the rest of the team to support them. When it comes to battles, you can play those specialties in your favor and you can choose when and how to attack, this is especially true for Jagged Alliance where you can prepare for defense or weaken enemy sector with a cover strike first.
To be clear, I don’t enjoy X-Com all that much, too much meta mechanics for me, I don’t enjoy this side of the PP either.
Another aspect is how often I can change tactics in JA2, as they depend on who and when I attack, which mercs I take, what weapon and equipment I use for them.
In PP your tactics are practically narrowed to abilities of individual soldier, because again, there is barely any synergy between classes as you can multi-class anyone into a single OP combination. I really liked early builds of PP because firefights where around positions, cover, pulling enemy into a deadzone. Now it’s all about abilities especially midgame when crabs become just bullet sponges. The gameplay gets really narrow in the direction of setting maximum damage per turn against specific targets. Precision becomes irrelevant, cover becomes irrelevant, positioning on the map becomes less and less important as you get to run/jump further. Like yeah, you can kill a single crab in many ways but those ways don’t differ much. In this sense it’s barely different to X-Com, it has the same problem.
I don’t know to which extend this game can be modded. The first thing I would do is go back to balance of old BBs - swarm of crabs, they die fast and easy, weapons feel powerful. You lose not from a random lucky explosive hiron shot but from attrition through slowly accumulated injuries from a foe that has superior numbers, not superior health bars.
Sorry, forgot to mention the word “vanilla”.
I did it two times without any mods. Of course I failed more times than I won because of the very dicey early game. Also have about 500 hrs in that game.
Phoenix Point felt okay for me when it released but since the last dlc I cant beat it any more. Something definitely changed.
Also my main pont was that an “easy” difficulty should actually be REALLY easy. So that any casual player can beat and enjoy the game.
Yes.
Without any knowledge (for example paralyzing is way more effective with synedrion weapons) and without any advanced tactics especially terminator builds or synergy in skills.
You not only nailed it. But you did it in far fewer words than I. 