As the title says. I get along fine in the game until around the time the Sirens and giant artillery crabs start showing up (about halfway through the first month, usually), but I find the new Pandorans have so much armour assault rifles are more or less useless.
Normally in games of this sort there are better weapons you research/build, but so far I haven’t survived long enough to be able to do that, so I was wondering- what research/quests do you have to do to get better weapons and/or armor?
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in phenix, on the start of the game, you mostly have to relly on other factions. Most of them have some sort of orientation about gear.
Some are specialised in stunning / capturing.
Some are more into fire and big explosions
And one, especialy usefull, is all about caustic / acid damage and armor penetration ;p
In order to acces them,
You can choose to work with a faction and befriend it to gain acces to their tech, or steal them, or recruit some of their soldier, get them unequiped, and researsh their weapons.
In a general sense, there ARE no upgrades. The way the gearing system works in this game is that the Factions provide you with basically sidegrades…one faction may be better in ACC but lower in everything else, etc. Beside the fact that basically everything that Phoenix Project makes is complete trash, the Faction gear is more tailoring to how you want to play. There isn’t a research progression like the other X-COM games.
I actually find the gearing system overly complicated for no reason. My soldiers always carry extra guns in case I need one that just does lots of raw damage, or one with pierce, or one with acid, etc. I find it rather annoying. And as far as armor goes, it’s basically a Venn Diagram with no happy middle - You can have Armor, Accuracy or Speed, any combination of the two, but the other will suffer. Or in some cases, you can have one and the rest suffer. If you want high Accuracy go Sniper gear, but have low armor and lowered speed. If you want Speed go Assault, but have so-so armor and small boosts to Accuracy, based on which faction’s gear you’re using. If you want Armor, go Heavy, but suffer massive drops to Accuracy and Speed.
Seriously, Heavies need a serious buff, as they just can’t keep up with late-game Assault/Snipers or Sniper/Assaults. They have terrible accuracy, terrible speed, their weapons cost too much to fire, and while they have exceptional armor, it serves little to no purpose as they lag behind the rest of the group. I typically put my soldiers in Sniper helm/Assault Body/Assault Legs for a good balance of Armor, Accuracy and Speed.
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Wait, there are no better weapons or armour to get once the game has started, just the very slightly different but not better faction guns?
That is… that’s such a staggeringly bad design decision I literally have trouble believing it could get made. Improving your gear to keep up with the escalating threat is like half the gameplay loop of any XCom clone. Wish I’d taken the time to do some more research before picking this up, that actually would have stopped me buying the game if I’d known.
Oh well, back to building a team of six snipers since they’re the only thing that can both hit later enemies and actually do useful amounts of damage.
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You get stuff that is better in every way. it just takes a while to research and coax from the factions and the game does not show you the requirements so it is hard to know what to do.
Like for example?
So, just to be totally clear- are there actual gear upgrades, as opposed to the side-grades the initial faction tech gives you?
If so, how the frig do you get it in time to actually make a difference? I’m running into enemies that are basically immune to my starting assault rifles before the first month is over.
You may have to wait for mods to fix the game. That is, if it can be fixed with mods. The amount of work involved might be equivalent to making your own game, which could make money.
I came here looking for a post on upgrading armor, as I reached a point in the game where enemies do serious damage. Kind of disappointing that it seems there are none…at least what I am reading in this thread.
@ImaginaryFriend What ‘stuff’ do you get that seems better in every way, and how is that accessible? I am currently allied with Anu (Anu haven around me in China apparently), but the only enhancements I see are mutation enhancements, but I don’t think I will see those anytime soon due to the ridiculous amount of Mutagens required, and I only get +2 Mutagens per/? (no specification if per hour or what). This seems to take a long time to accumulate. Depending on the body to mutate, it costs either 80, 100, or 200 Mutagens. I only have 14, and across 6 to 8 squad mates, it feels very far off to upgrading. Building a second Mutation Lab now, maybe thinking a third as I write this to hopefully accrue more.
As with what @Stinchkopf mentions, is there really no gear or equipment that scales with your enemies as time goes by? Are we stuck on Tier 1 gear? Right now I am trying to capture Pandorans to research increase damage, to offset the balance a bit. What do most people research tech wise to increase their odds?
It’s an ambitious design. Having linear progression isn’t particularly great - enemies gain more health and more damage, so you gain more health and do more damage. Nothing really changes.
The original pitch for the system was, that enemies will have varied unpredictable mutations, and certain gear will be better equipped to deal with certain mutations. That was to provide ups and down in difficulty, as players switches from being well equipped to deal with alien threat to being vulnerable.
That’s a complex and ambitious approach, which would make progressing through research tree nonlinear and different between each playthrough.
What we got, however, is what we got. Due to feedback it was changed that faction and researched equipment is straight up better then PP’s starting equipment. As far as I can tell, that’s about it.
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I’m not sure describing the linear pogression as a bad thing is accurate. I mean, “Gradually build up better capabilities to handle the escalating threat” is a part of the core gameplay of, off the top of my head, UFO defense, Terror from the Deep, Apocalypse, both Firaxis Xcom games, all three of the UFO: Afterblank games, Xenonauts, and I’m probably missing one or two games of this type.
It’s there because it works, and it’s fun. (To me, anyway, someone else may not like it I suppose)
I can see the value of having a more non-linear, varied approach, where you react to specific mutations with specific responses, but that doesn’t seem to be what we have either.
Instead we’ve got a system where the mutants get better armoured and have better weapons, and you’re stuck plinking away with the same crappy guns you started with.
So, to be completely clear, there are the starting PP manufactured guns, there’s the starting equipment each of the factions has that comes on the soldiers you recruit, and that’s it?
You never get better weapons to deal with the enemies getting more and more hp and armour, or better armour to compensate for the increasingly lethal enemy weapons?
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Actually, a lot of faction equipment IS better than starting PP stuff. Assault armor with less weight and faster movement (Anu, though Synedrion is slightly better than PP too), better Sniper gear (NJ, especially the helmet), better Sniper rifles & pistols (Synedrion is straight upgrade, NJ trades accuracy for damage), etc.
Not several times better, but still notably so.
once you can capture alive aliens, go in personal -> containement, you can there vivisect manualy the aliens to obtain mutagen (top right of the containment windows when you ahve one selected). A simple scylla can go around 600 - 800 mutagen per unit captured and “gathered” . While a triton give around 200, so enough for a mutation ^^
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Wow! I did not know. Thanks for the tip! 
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There are definitely better weapons. I used some in BB5, but haven’t played far enough into the release to unlock them. NJ has piercing weapons that do slightly less total damage but punch through armor. I don’t know what the next level Synedrion and Anu weapons are, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t exist.
I’ve yet to play a missions where assault rifles couldn’t scratch anything, but you definitely need to pick your targets. There’s nothing like that first time when you fire into the back of a Triton at point blank range and just hear that metallic “clank, clank, clank.”
And how do I get them?
Im around 15h in Game and the only “upgrades” are the starting weapons of the other factions. Which are things like “oh you get 10 + on dmg and some range” which… is not much at all. Basically my Synedrion and NJ Snipers I recruited have the “best” gear available already? I put them in Synedrion Armor with NJ Weapons… thats all?
Sorry but… that feels a bit like someone forgot the implement a TechTree…
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I wonder if it’s too late to request a refund.
There are upgraded tiers of weapons, but the tiers do not include weapons of each class. For example, the piercing tier that you can make allows sniper rifles, assault rifles, PDW’s, but not shotguns or handguns. The laser tier PP invents after improving synedrion tech includes just PDW’s (but what a PDW, btw!) The retroviral / end game tier includes only sniper rifles.
No, I have no idea why they pursued this design decision.
Yes, that’s what they call an upgrade… Maybe they perceive it as an upgrade because just a little extra armor penetration make a bit of difference. But it’s not a type of upgrade where the same enemy goes down twice as fast.
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Well, i think it’s also a design choice. In other xcom games, the trick was that human used retroingeniered high technology caming (litteraly) from the sky, as alliens bringed new high tech and fancy laser stuff.
In Phoenix point, aliens do use weapons, but it’s… factions weapons. So by themself they bring nothing, technologicaly speaking.
This plus the “war” agains pandoran goes for years, so most of the researshable tech linked to them is probably already done (just have to see how anu mastered mutation). At the opposite with xcom (except firaxcom 2 but it’s… deffinetly stupid that the xcom soldiers haven’t be able to stole a single weapon in years before the commander came back).
This being said, yes, that feel like we really lack a way to “upgrade” on the long run. Yes, the new jericho armor piercing almost double our damage and make us able to almost entirely ignore ennemi armor, witch is a fantastic gain of time and power by itself but… Damn, armor piercing… that existed back in 1940 and the game is a whole century behind, it should be build-in xD