Have I already lost the game?

Phoenix Point
1

I’m going to be seriously annoyed if I have, but here is the situation.

I’m down to 18% on the human life counter, and the 3 factions are all at war killing each other off. The dang percentage is dropping fast, and there’s nothing I can see to change it.

I have researched all the way to the yugothian entity, but i haven’t found a single lair, let alone a citadel. I haven’t seen any research or mission to find one, but i assume I have to to advance the story.

I’m down to just a few faction cities left in Asia, North America, and South America. Everything else is dead and covered in mist. The problem is there are so few cities left that it’s hard to find another nest, let alone lair.

I can’t see anything I can research that will make a difference with this. I’m going to be seriously pissed off if I lose this game because of the factions killing each other off. I can’t believe snapshot would have the factions cause me to lose the game because they all killed each other off.

I know some would say “just defend the haven from whoever is attacking”. Which sounds great, but I’ve already lost too many high level soldiers to haven defense missions, and if this keeps up I’m going to be going into the final mission, (if I can get there), with mid-level soldiers. My A-Team already consists of 5 lvl7s, 2 lvl6s, and 1 lvl5. The B-Team, (on the other side of the world), consists of 5 lvl7s, 1 lvl 6, and 2 lvl5s. While I can buy soldiers and leave them in the training areas, replacing the armor/weapons is costing me too much material.

Can someone tell me exactly what I have to do to trigger the final mission? Is it just defeat a Lair? And if so, has anything changed with the latest release on how to find a lair? I only have radars at around half my bases, (and only half my bases are online), due to not being able to harvest food to sell. I have no idea if a lair or citadel is around any of my bases with a radar.

Why do I have a feeling I’ve already lost the game?

1 Like
2

This sounds very wrong. I What difficulty are you playing on?

3

I feel your pain and yes you have probably lost. For me opening up and discovering the world quickly is now very essential. If you can’t help defend havens in the early game and are losing too many soldiers, this game is not winnable. Losing soldiers is okay, but it depends how ready you are to replace them. Being able to consistently win battles without losing soldier helps. I personally have three teams of soldiers so that they are mostly balanced and taking occasional loses are acceptable.

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I’m playing on Normal.

5

Exactly my problem. That’s why detection of bases by haven defense doesn’t work well.

Sadly I believe, that your campaign might be lost.

With what faction do you wish to finish?

6

I don’t lose soldiers on every mission, (thankfully), but it happens on a regular basis. The only other option is to save scum through every mission.

I did one Haven defense mission where there were 2 chirons, one spitting goo and the other fire worms. It is VERY annoying when you can’t get a shot at the worms because your soldiers are stuck in goo. I lost 2 soldiers on that mission. Fire kills soldiers fast. I was really unhappy with the nerf on Rage Burst that mission. I had dual classed 2 of my snipers into Heavies before discovering that little change. I can’t see ever dualing anything into a Heavy again. The jump armor is handy for a sniper, but that is the only thing I ever use of those sniper’s heavy skills.

Part of my problem is that I got up to 25 diplomacy with Synedrion and NJ quickly, and got the locations of all their havens, but immediately all the defense missions were happening all over the world and I couldn’t get to them, so I was losing that status quickly. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to rush a team to a haven only to get there a few seconds too late. Then, the ones I was able to make it to didn’t have either a base activated nearby, or the base didn’t have a radar, or the base’s radar was being repaired, or whatever.

I VERY much miss the ability to grow food. I was never able to get my Anu rank up to 25, let alone to 50 to get the research, so I started raiding them for tech. My ranking with them was down to -60 by the time I finally got the food one, and then it took forever to get enough materials to build farms so I could start selling the food. Because of that half my soldiers were going into battle with no armor because it was either build armor for new soldiers, or build radars or (eventually) farms.

I don’t mind losing games after a few hours, but boy I sure hate losing a game after 40 or more. I sure wish snapshot would include some method to allow you to bring the factions together to stop the killing, or when a faction takes over another factions base it just incorporates that into their faction.

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That’s another thing that annoys me about the priority being on the Haven defense missions. Yeah you are supposed to get a bunch of materials/tech/food as a reward, but all it takes is losing one soldier and that’s all wasted. Often you lose a serious chunk of the reward just replacing ammo/med kits, but if you have to spend 400 food to recruit a new soldier, then several hundred in armor, weapons, ammo, and a medkit then that really hurts.

That and the loss of the SP’s that were built up on all the previous missions. Yeah training areas are great, but without the SP’s from the missions a lvl7 is pretty worthless. You have nice skills, but no WP to use them, or the strength to carry real armor. My initial soldiers all had a strength of 18, but any I recruited later all just had 14. Those 4 points make a WORLD of difference if you want to actually wear armor, carry a good gun, and maybe a medkit as well. Forget having a lowly newbie carry a neuralyzer, because that’s not happening unless you opt to spend SP on strength instead of a skill at level up time.

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These are the recruits that come to your Base every 3 days, right? Or are getting this also in Faction Havens?

The base recruits on all difficulty levels seem to be coming with the stats all recruits have on Legendary. Hopefully it will get fixed…

By the way, in Faction Havens and Recruit Scavenging missions you can find higher level recruits with good stats. The price at the Havens will depend on your diplo rating with the faction.

It wouldn’t make a lot of sense with the current remote base activation mechanic. The food production facilities take a long time to break even - the resources spent on that are better used on activating a base and scanning for locations of interest.

A much, much, much bigger source of resources past the very early game is capturing Pandas and turning turn into food.

In the very early game what you want is to explore as much as possible, because those text adventures and scavenging missions are where most resources are.

Anyway, these are just some tips - I’m not particularly happy with how Haven Defenses and resources work right now either.

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Yeah, the soldiers you recruit at the Havens all come with an 18 strength, but I rarely have the extra materials to be able to afford to recruit them. It’s a trade off. Recruit at a haven and get 18 strength, armor, weapon, etc. Or recruit at your base and just pay food, and then let them sit there accumulating EXP while you save up mats for armor/weapon. At some point you will have to trade a level or two worth of SP’s to bump up the strength though.

I must suck at the capturing of pandas, because I lose way too many soldiers trying to do it. The change in the skill that let’s soldiers give movement points to the others, (can’t remember the name off the top of my head), kills me with trying to capture pandas. Now soldiers have to be within 12 tiles to do the MP transfer, and that’s tough if you have a zerker rush forward to taze a panda. Usually you have to taze them several times, so you need another couple soldiers to also move forward, find cover, and then do the MP transfer. I can’t see getting enough food that way to make up for replacing the lost soldiers and gear.

Which is another thing. If a soldier gets shot twice in the head and dies, why does ALL of his gear go away??? I can see it if he gets machine gunned in the chest a couple times, but even then why would that affect the medkit or ammo he’s carrying? Yes I can see on the missions where you are raiding, or things like that and don’t have time to strip the corpse of gear, but on haven defense once you have won there should be plenty of time to go around and recover gear.

It’s funny how if I am fighting enemy bezerker they always drop their club, but if my bezerkers die they don’t.

Oh, and one more thing, why doesn’t every panda that you have mind controlled automatically become captured at the end of a mission?

3 Likes
10

It shouldn’t be, AFAIK it’s a bug. On Legendary all operatives come ‘nude’ and with those low stats (including your starting team), but on lower difficulty levels they should come with higher stats.

Also in the future we should be getting access to higher level soldiers via the base.

Are you using just the Neurizer (the melee paralyzer)? That can be a bit tricky… You want the Hera, the Synedrion paralyzing pistol. Also, if you disable a few limbs of the Pandas first it’s much easier to paralyze them (just don’t overdo it or they will bleed out). Bear in mind that you don’t have to paralyze the enemy in one turn - what you want is to apply enough paralysis damage so that they lose some APs (when the paralysis damage reaches a quarter of their strength - i.e. when the first green number is a quarter of the second, they lose one AP, when it’s half, 2 APs, and so on). So if you want to paralyze Chirons, you want to do something like take out a leg, or the head, and then shoot them 3 times with the Hera. That will basically disable them, as they won’t have enough APs left to launch worms.

Once you get rolling with this capturing thing you can get massive amounts of food (like 1k per mission), so the yield from converting Pandas to food will probably be reduced in the future.

This happens on all missions that require Evac, on missions that don’t (like Haven defense) you should be getting everything back, including all the armor pieces. If you are not, you should F12 it.

I think it’s because it could create some balance issues - mind controlling enemies can be very easy, but that’s just imo.

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Yes, I’m not 100 % convinced about the different level balancing with the game at the moment. My honest belief is that Snapshot are trying to get there. But with each update although there are improvements and I suspect rely on sufficient data collected from players to get the balance correct.

There are always exceptions to how the RNG turns out and I’ve been on the receiving end of it myself sometimes. I think that the most difficult balance to achieve is between the difference in the tactical and strategic level. After each update released it seems to change. But ultimately one shouldn’t always expect to always win. I like to lose at times because the reward is greater then when winning. But not everyone has the time for this. I do think that the easy level should be easy for players to give the opportunity to understand the complex dynamics of this game.

Perhaps start again. This game can be about extracting the most out of your learning experience with it.

12

I don’t mind losing games, but after 40+ hours it’s annoying. It’s even more annoying when there’s nothing you can do to affect the outcome.

Ever played the board game “Ticket to Ride”? There is now an electronic version of it that I play when i want to play a fast game. If I am playing against 3 opponents I will roughly 1/3 of the time. That’s pretty good in my mind for a game that is very much RNG dependent.

This is a strategy game, and there should be some way I can save this situation, but I doubt there is.

Honestly I think I’m going to just put this game away and come back to it in a few more months. I enjoyed the other 3 play throughs I’ve done with this game, but this one is really starting to annoy me. Once you are pretty sure you have lost the fun goes away quickly.

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I’ve also explained in other threads my current campaign that is going a similar route. The pandorans already have citadels but I’ve only seen 2 nests. I’ve done my best and I do know how to play the game effectively enough. Plus, this is on veteran difficulty.

The way we discover pandoran bases and get HD’s is currently in need of tweaking, because it can be no problem for most of the campaigns but simply make some unwinnable depending on RNG only.

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