This is very interesting. What difficulty are you playing on?
Normal. Not had time to try another difficulty level yet.
Thanks. This is valuable feedback to the devs, it will be read for sure.
IMO, at the moment it feels like the game is making time into a scarce resource by multiplying the attacks on Havens.
Do you like this approach, but just wish the game “told you” that you needed to build more research labs?
Or would you rather the game made time into a scarce resource by other means? (for example, making Phoenix Point soldiers’ Stamina have a bigger impact, so that they could do fewer missions, putting timers on missions - so if you don’t do a mission in a certain number of days it disappears, having to repair equipment damaged during missions, or something else entirely?)
Or would you rather time wasn’t a scarce resource at all?
(of course, it would be great if other players could also tell their experience/thoughts on the subject)
That was also my experience in my first playthrough.
IMO, it runs against Julian Gollop’s criticism o fXCOM that ‘I’d already lost and I didn’t know it yet.’
I think there needs to be some sort of prompter - a note from Symes or some sort of computer warning - telling the player that they don’t have enough Research Labs (or whatever) when they start the endgame research to do it in time, so that they know they need to invest in more ‘Whatevers’ to complete the game.
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I’m not sure. I’m not sure that the problem can be solved well with a case of ratios and tweaking, more that the actual mechanism in place frustrates, and generates inevitable grind toward the endgame, just to stay afloat. Because the pop metre represents remaining humans on a per capita basis, when a base is gone, that’s all the humans in it gone as well, for good. I prefer this to the mist coverage/ODI mechanism, where the number of bases remaining was technically irrelevant, but I wonder whether there could be a feature added whereby factions could actually capture rival bases, not just destroy them? When allied, the player could have the option to instigate these missions. This might alleviate the compromise in allegiance when needing to bail out enemies, just to slow down the clock. Additionally, and supplementally, could there be a feature where PP could donate resources to a faction toward strengthening the faction’s base defenses, either on a per base basis, or overall? Anything to diminish the grind would help. It’s the reactive nature of the gameplay that tends to generate ennui, when for long periods, the player is just firefighting. It’s not that fun.
Narratively, base takeovers could be explained in a million ways - the game already uses magic and boardgame techniques in many places. Automated defenses? Drones? Maybe the doom counter should reflect human settlements remaining, not humans per capita explicity?
Broadly speaking, I think time needs to remain an issue in the current narrative - if it wasn’t, the story would kind of break, and it was good enough in UFO/X-Com, so it should be ok here. My only gripe is that currently, the player needs to spend comparitively a LOT of time on the tactical map to garner a small benefit on the strategic map, which can get boring. Basically, I’m asking for more strategic options to slow down the clock, rather than just building more research labs. Do you see what I’m saying?
Spamming research labs is ok, but it’s an essentially passive solution - once the resources are spent, there is no input from the player toward keeping that thing going. Frequency of Phoenix base defense missions now seem to have been dialled down as well, so the player currently doesn’t need to do too much defending, at least on normal level. Strategic options for effectively slowing the clock (that perhaps need to be researched first) could provide some relief, late game. If for example, you could assist a Jericho base to take over their neighbouring five enemy bases, then pump them with Phoenix-funded (or ‘assisted’) base defenses, this might provide something for the player to do on the strategic layer, rather than it all be tactical.
EDIT: This would enable the player to actively shape more defensible areas around PP bases, allowing for further strategic agency on the part of the player. Something along these lines, coupled with a more tangible way for the player to measure how well (or otherwise) they were doing would be really welcome additions. The lack of a pre-laid out tech tree agrees with the narrative - the player shouldn’t know what’s to come, but in this lies the problem. Perhaps past a certain point of research, say 66%, the remaining required research should be revealed?
Just riffing here really - probably wandered off a bit!
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I think I get what you mean. On the one hand it’s the grind, and it feels like there should be something on the strategic layer to reduce it. Basically doing Haven defenses over and over again is not fun.
On the other hand you basically don’t have the meta-knowledge on how to win the game and the game does a poor job of sign-posting. You just don’t know how far you are from winning and what it will take to get there.
Something like this, right?
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Pretty much exactly that!
With the added complication that at least in the early game, there should be an element of mystery, and the new player shouldn’t know what is going on, or what it’s going to take to win. I think that the player needs to work toward a point where their progress can be measured, but that ability does need to come in sooner or later.
If it isn’t there, the game takes on rogue-like elements, where a priori knowledge of its systems or content gives the player an edge on ‘this run’. Getting better at the game shouldn’t necessarily involve that, and it should be possible for the player to intelligently navigate through the game to victory on a first attempt, by reading available information/signs and making correct judgements.
EDIT: As it stands, it’s practically impossible for the player to measure the effect of their actions, by building research labs, or by responding to haven defense missions. There is no way of knowing what good it did. There could be some research, perhaps ‘Incursion Analytics’, or something like that, that resulted in the player having a UI element that periodically announced ‘At the current rate of Pandoran incursion, the human population will be unable to recover in approximately: 2 weeks and 3 days’, for example.
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I wish the population census was the actual number of surviving humans on Earth, sort of like in Battlestar Galactica, where in the intro they said “42,324 survivors… Looking for a new home”, instead of a percentage and a red bar, which sucks all the drama out of the situation.
I also wish there was a tab with all the Havens, their info and a big banner showing survivors and current daily attrition rate (there is constant population loss from hunger, not only Pandoran attacks).
And each time a Haven gets destroyed, for the player to be notified - “Haven x destroyed, y souls lost. There are now z of us left” . Correspondingly, each time the player saves a Haven to congratulate them on saving x number of people.
However, though I think that would make the menace more engaging and measurable, it wouldn’t really tell the players what to do and how far they are from achieving it…
Probably as @MichaelIgnotus suggests the best would be just to tell the players that Research Labs are key for winning the game and warn them if they have too few. That doesn’t spoil the mystery, but at the same time prevents the first-time players from getting themselves into a dead-end.
What do you think?
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I’m in agreement with pretty much all of that, especially about the specific numbers. However, I understand that there are quite specific mathematics and algorithms regarding whether or not a given number of any species could successfully reproduce given x,y, and z conditions, so perhaps the devs don’t want to go down that rabbit hole - it’s one thing implementing magic teleporting heads, but another to contradict real-world numbers. Or maybe it isn’t, and what do I know? lol
My take on the ‘days remaining’ doom counter would be at least that it showed a historical list of forecasts, maybe day by day, or even a graph. It could be that it was updated instantaneously, and that by successfully defending a haven, you see the predicted days remaining jump up by half a day - something like that. Some way to tangibly feel what’s going on.
Depressingly, research will remain the one and only macguffin in the whole thing, I’m sure of it. Yes, it’s absolutely key and vital to the whole shebang, and as has been said, the game could (and probably will end up) just pointing out ‘Hey dummy, you need more research labs’. I’m kidding myself if I think any more complexity (strategic or otherise) will be added in, when all effort has been made to remove it for for a target audience.
The mechanism by which this is achieved will be the same card game, board game, JRPG, infini-cupboard, insta-robot-head magic that currently permeates the whole game, no doubt.
Sorry to have gone on a downer - I got home from work and hit the wine. lol
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I haven’t played that much of Chtulu, but is there some reward for NOT helping the havens being attacked? In FiraXCom, and I thought that was a clever decision to ramp up the tension, you were given two to three options, and sometimes you had to choose the least bad, and not the one you truly wanted. Say, you like scientists to speed up research? If you go get them, terror in X country wil spiral out of control.
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I like the idea of prediction when the doom will come… And each players action (or player withdraw from action) would cause change to that prediction. Seeing something like that and watching required research time would cause player to rethink the number of his research labs. 
If not it means bad player, and need to start new campaign. I would avoid as much as possible direct hint to the player what he is lacking and what he must do for example “you need to have more research labs, otherwise you won’t be able to do meaningful research before humanity will fall”.
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If hunger affects population depth, would it be possibly to calculate when the game will end? (Population count 426 679. It will reach critical point in 8 months and 13 days) and this number could get adjusted as things go bad/good.
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Legend Difficulty
My only feedback on the subject is that I think mission frequency is way too high.
I’m doing nearly back-to-back missions for long stretches sometimes (where other times it can go days with no missions). I have three teams up in three parts of the world by the end of the first month and they’re all tackling haven defenses, then proceeding to the nests and the occasional scavenge and extremely rare ambush (which are ironically the most fun I think). Challenge is quickly lost in a lot of missions once you get to a certain point so these back-to-backs feel like slogs (opposite of the other player’s feedback) to the point where I kind of want an auto-resolve to handle the immense frequency of missions while waiting for a Scylla to approach so I can continue to progress the game. (Artificially being held back by game progress requiring a captured Scylla when they can’t spawn because it hasn’t been enough weeks even though I’m completely capable of tackling that task)
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In my current game, several Haven have stopped losing pops already. I don’t know if it is intended or a vision issue where you don’t see the ordinary pop dieing in the overview, so i think it is pretty much confusing to have such kind of timer, the timer may repeatly change and the player gets confused and has no issue what is happening there. If you have 8 month remaining in die 30 and suddenly 6 month remaining in day 31 and suddenlty 11 month remaining in day 32 is not really helpfull 
For Beginners
- Quick ending (create a new / interim End for the company), not losing. (For Tutorial plot) (looks like “stage #2” for the option below)
- Divide the game into 2-3 stages / “fateful points” of the plot.
Through Diplomacy.
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Can be used as a rough example
- By the way, Yes, the “Doomsday” indicator should be active and expand into a detailed menu with decoding and forecasting.
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Sadly, this remained the same. Could “first reward” by allies be 1-2 techs or heavens on one continent, and last … 90% or so, full heaven map (when one actually can defend them)
I think you are referring to opportunity costs - so if you defend a Haven, do you lose the opportunity to do something else (like defend another Haven, or go on a different kind of mission). The answer is no, not really, but the constant attacks in different places can make it difficult to respond to all of them if you are not fielding enough teams and will make you postpone (rather than opt out of) doing other missions.
Admittedly, that’s what happened to me in my first playthrough. When I saw some research taking a long time, I spammed half a dozen labs. However, I doubt that most first-time players will perceive, e.g. 10 days as a very long time to complete a research. In PP that’s a life time though.
Also @Tam. AFAIK a Haven will lose population due to starvation as long as its population exceeds its food production/the food production of nearby friendly Havens, so the attrition rate due to starvation should actually go down eventually, though it goes up again once the Haven is covered in mist.
However, my idea rather than giving the players a constantly changing estimate on when they may lose, is to give a sense of proportion, so the player had an understanding of how many people are dying each day due to starvation and how that compares to losing an entire Haven to an attack.
Yes, I think that the general feeling is that the Haven defense missions are too frequent (and for some players it’s frustrating, while for others just tedious).
I wonder though if there is anybody who is happy with the current system and could speak to it…?
PS
I have created a new topic to discuss ideas on how to add strategic options to protect Havens, to reduce the number of Haven defense missions.
I may be a bit biased as I’m on the Community Council and all, but my impression is that it’s not so much about catering to a (‘dumb’) target audience as effective management of limited resources. So sometimes we ask “why is feature x not in the game”, and the answer is “it would take 2-3 weeks to code and in our internal tests too few of us liked it”.