You are following news on PP from articles back from 2016 and 2017? This will be just going in circles of who read what and where.
As stated in first post, comparing previous BBs to the new one. Not an article from Kotaku to what was written on FIG or what constitutes of game being “a like”. We don’t need to speculate when we have actual gameplay in place. You are enjoying it being very much like XCom? That’s fine, some of us don’t. Don’t have to come here and tell us that we have wrong expectation.
Btw, can you point to that discussion in older BBs where according to you, backers where asking for more abilities from XCom? I wasn’t able to find anything like that and amount of posts in this thread seams to disagree with such statement.
Yes, I intentionally searched for the original campaign site and articled before and during the advertisement of the game. Because of:
PP was never sold or advertised as something different then it is. Therefore, articles and Snapshots posts which were advertising the game were relevant to the discussion. My post to you wasn’t intended as a reply to your criticism, but the accusation that PP becomes something it wasn’t advertised as. I thought that much was clear.
That is the point I made, and it had nothing to do with me agreeing or disagreeing with your view on skills in Phoenix Point.
But as you asked:
As someone who doesn’t have access to beta it is difficult for me to say if I like PP design.
I think using will to fuel abilities is a great idea, assuming one can’t recover will too easily (that seems to be the case in BB5).
From what I have seen I do not like current implimentation of some of the skills: dash seems ridiculusly overpowered and too easy to use aggresively and defensively at no danger to you.
I think the aiming system has enough depth, that a lot of gameplay could be squeezed by focusing on this system alone without additional influences: FiraXCOM has very basic attack system (in terms of hit calculation, ability to defend from attacks and variation between different weapons/classes) there for it requires additional system to make things engaging. It works. I am not sure if PP needs it so much, and I do worry that such powerful abilities might make the interesting systems of PP less relevant.
I think that if will would act as a small boost to core actions (prolong dash with one will point per extra tile, boost accuracy with will, more rounds per burst with extra will) it might have been enough. Perhaps, there might be more utility based abilities giving each class unique flavour without dominating gameplay.
As far as inaccurate headlines it seems they come in different flavours.
No point to make, just found it hilarious when following your “google it” advice
EDIT: Enough of distraction from the actual topic at hand. My demand for factual criticism derailed yet another topic, and in this case this discussion is quite worthwhile.
It’s funny you say that. When I discovered how the abilities worked I took a while to try to rationalize it in game space and gave up . It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
Yeah, but they should have kept extertion the way it was and increase the cost like first 2 WP, second 4 WP, third 8 WP, and so on.
Sounds maybe high but if you keep and stack your WP over the max you can easily stack to 20-40 WP.
Extertion was just more versatile. Now you go dash, quick aim, dash, quick aim.
I feel like if they could tone down the available will points to spend on everything and balance the game for that, I’d be happy.
There doesn’t seem to be as much of a consequence for burning through will, which I find results in all of these weird cheesy strategies and what I’m assuming might be a growing apathy towards the system as you play if you’re not interested in breaking games.
That’s just the impression i’ve got for now though, as I haven’t sunk a whole lot of time in the game yet.
If you drain your will points, you are an easy target to mind-control for Sirens.
To take control of one of your soldiers, they need to spend as many WP that your soldier has. Then, to keep it costs them 2WP each turn.
Sirens have 23 WP at start (can vary), so if they need to spend 12WP to mind-control one of your soldiers, it’s easier to lower their WP under 1 (by killing Arthrons or Tritons) so that they cannot keep control on the next turn (and you regain control of your soldier without him turning against you).
The biggest grief I have against it is that the mind controlled soldier loses WP the same way aliens do (as if is will was in control and not the alien’s).
It would be great to have a separation between:
the mind controlled soldier’s will
goes up and down like the aliens
the soldier’s will once he regains control
took a hit for being mind-controlled
decreased as much as it went up when he was mind-controlled
Example:
A soldier had 10 WP before being mind-controlled
While mind-controlled, he kills a PP operative, his mind-controlled self gains 3WP (don’t remember how much WP they gain)
Once he gets back in charge, he loses 3 WP for the shock of being mind-controlled. And, 3WP for the damage that he did (assuming that he’s still conscious about what is being done even if not in control).
I had more than once 5 or 6 Sirens on the map (not counting lairs).
You start and search the map for enemies and find one triton that you kill.
Then comes the Pandorans turn and 6 sirens appear.
Fortunately for me, only one did a mind-control so I got to kill it and enough tritons to make all panic.
Having some difficulties in playing some odd missions is not an excuse to claim that this is somehow balances super powers. It doesn’t balance anything for a simple reason of not being an issue in most of the battles. Second, there is no other path of development of the soldier besides giving him top notch abilities that make him OP. So again, your perceived danger of being susceptible to mind control has no bearing on development of your soldiers, as there is no option in regards to it.
At high level there is pretty much nothing that can pose any problem. When your squad of 6 obliterates squad of 12 of New Jerico, you kind of loose understanding if there will be any challenge in the game at all.
Please don’t make me say what I haven’t. I said that depleting all your willpower makes job easy for Sirens. Neither that they were there to balance the super soldiers we have nor that I support all this.
I think I expressed in this very Thread that I’m against super powers in both our forces and aliens. Having very strong aliens forces an alpha-strike behavior which means the need for super powers to do it. I don’t want this stuff.
To prevent alpha strike they have more aliens with more health and crazy powers. 6 Sirens that would live after my turn could mean 6 mind-controls on my 6 soldiers … game over, it was fun.
Now, if we have soldiers without super powers, the aliens don’t need to have that much HP and killer abilities.
The arthrons would swarm you with numbers
Tritons with sniper rifles would be rarer (max 1 or 2 per mission) so you can position yourself to prevent their shots from hitting you. With 20 of them, it is much more difficult to protect against every one of them => dash, quickaim, rapid clearance becomes a necessity to not die. The others it’s OK, you can force them to keep their distances and take potshots (still not a swarm of them). We need something else than grenade to remove their mist, some early research (after triton autopsy or vivisection) for a grenade that would clear the mist that would later evolve into the mist repellent for havens.
Mindfraggers are great that way. Sneaky little b…ds really manage to take you by surprise.
Worms are great that way also.
Siren’s mind-control should work only in a 10 tile zone around it and have visual contact (I guess telepathy works like sound and needs a clear path to work). Control lost if Siren moves too far or sends controlled unit too far or behind a wall. That would mean that Siren and controlled units would need to move together during the Pandoran turn (a pod ).
Chiron are great but having one or two max by map would be better. You can protect by going under a roof, but when the first one blows the roof, the second one hits.
Scylla (I guess that’s the queen), haven’t fought one yet even though I left some zones develop for quite a while.
I am fine with having two Chirons as they are easy to kill… My problem with them is the fact they activate as soon as first alien spot you. I think it would rather works like ‘line of sight’ with a maximum one alien (to adjust position). I can only imagine a mess with two chirons when you have one hidden on the other edge of the map constantly bombarding your positions
I just don’t understand why you brought them up then. In your post you went with a lengthy description of how Sirens work, saying nothing as if you think their existence solves the issue of willpower or not. I don’t see how we could arrive to what you are saying in the last post.
I had 4 chirons in one of the diplomatic missions, at first one looks for some new tactics. After restart you just do what you always do - aggressively crash opposition with all abilities you have. The only thing you have to fiddle around is positioning of your soldiers.
To me, this is the core problem of the game so far - it’s a race to getting essential OP abilities after which gameplay becomes stale as all problems are solved in exactly the same way. This is not a problem of balance but a pure meta game, where reading single post on forum, on which subclass to take and which abilities to use, completely kills all your own learning of the game mechanics or designing and improving your own strategy. I don’t want to offend anyone but this is just “easy” design as it doesn’t take as much work to come up with some magic abilities which don’t require orchestration with any other soldiers on the field. Like I don’t need to have assaults covering sniper from getting enemies to close to him, because I can just crash them with assaults. I don’t need to sneak up on chirons because sniper can kill one in a single turn. As of now, there is very little depth to a gameplay when you have a team of Thor’s on the field. Your team composition doesn’t matter either. Had a mission where I took a scout vehicle and 3 soldiers against a dozen of New Jericho. It was a damn joke, at the end, my assault took pistol from sniper and was chasing helpless NJ heavies who had no weapons and won’t retreat from the map. Something that was suppose to be a challenge, turned into a wack a mole.
And using more than one line to remind how Siren’s mind-control worked for those interested (as @Yokes had written somewhere).
And put some ideas while I was at it.
I agree with most of what you’ve said. Simple retexture here and there and it could be kinda fun “wizards vs dragons” game.
I don’t mind active skills in general, but I wish they were much less “magical” and we deffinately don’t need mana resource at all. If we had “Dash” ability that would allow you to move a bit further but would exhaust you decreasing accuracy for the rest or even till end of next turn, we wouldn’t need the whole nerfing and balancing process of making metagame not so OP. That’s single example and there are dozens of other skills that are even more magical. Skills should, at most, provide situational tactical options instead of turning every single battle into skillfest. Right now we have Magic: The Gathering every turn, as you chain one magic skill with another and another to make some OP epic action… and you have to do this, because there’s like 20 froggo snipers out there on the battlefield. You are expected to cast few teleports, a magic missile, leach magic from dead goblin shamans to cast barrage of fireballs and channel some mana from other wizards to teleport away to safety. So not only there’s a magical metagame puzzle implemented, but whole balance is built around it. That’s so… disappointing.
1 looks a bit fantasy.
2&3 some players argue it’s impossible, you don’t have the time of doing multiple shots in same time than doing a single shot.
Otherwise perhaps I don’t see some realism problems but other looks fine. Such design assumption would have a huge impact on gameplay, it looks a lot to late for that.
. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
even though I left some zones develop for quite a while.