You are probably right. My line of thought came from Civ games with “x turns until victory”. It’s a indication biased on current situation, which will change potentially every turn. Still it gives player insight into current situation, and is clear what actions will slow/accelerate this process.
If there was a way for players somehow judge their progress vs. Panda’s, it could give them an idea on how/if they can improve their situation. I don’t know nuances of PP systems to make a more precise suggestion.
Algorithm calculating starvation and mist influence on the pupulation surely can predict values for few days ahead so it can give average estimation. What has definitely higher impact on estimation are these points:
alien base presence - algorithm can predict how many havens will be affected in near future and show estimation as if the haven(s) would get destroyed in some average amount of time (but I’m not sure if this part should be calculated and shown to the player, as it would be clear indication that there are new bases somewhere, maybe it should only calculate it based on nearest target for alien base with the longest time available for the attack - so when next point is happening then prediction is recalculated to ‘now’ event)
alien attack on haven - when attack occurs, estimation can show change if populaiton would get wiped (so player see what is the cost of his lack of reaction)
after successful defence - if player will decide to defend with some tardiness, population will drop by some factor and estimation will take it into account (so player will see what happens when he is not reacting fast enough)
player attack on alien base - estimation can take time saved by the player and time needed for new alien base to emerge and threaten estimated havens from first point (player would see that destroying base would postpone doomsday)
They would perceive it if game pace would be slower.
Heavens no, I can tell you from experience that on my very first playthrough, a long time ago, that 1d was a VERY long time.
Actually, new players are more likely to gauge whether a research takes “too long” or not by the number of tactical engagements between researches.
So they’d perceive 10 days as a very long time in, in fact, a faster paced game. If it was slower paced it’d seem that they definitely have 10 days to faff about.
What ? You should know by now that the speed in which the globe progresses has absolutely nothing to do with the actual pace of the game … it has everything to do with how many missions there are in between events.
Time speed control doesn’t really mean anything here, though. All that matters is number of things that happen between other things, in this case in particular number of tactical engagements between researches.
You’ll see 10 days as either a long or short time for research depending on how many fights you get in on those 10 days, it’s pretty simple like that. And skipping events/missions is in fact a thing the player can choose to do, but the game doesn’t help when it has a loud warning shouting the player should do something about an event.
Yes, that is true and tbh I don’t like this approach because it makes time - as measured in hours and days - meaningless. Your soldiers can do any number of missions per day, they are only constrained by their Stamina (which, if we go by the average of 5 turns per mission - mentioned at some point by UV as what Snapshot stats show -, allows for 6 missions in a row before having any impact) and travel time. Travel time, in turn, ceases to be an issue with multiple crafts/teams.
So, is 10 days a little, or a lot? IME, for an experienced player it can be enough to achieve supportive status with all factions, activate 3-5 bases, have 2 teams, the first wih LVL5-6 soldiers… For a new player who doesn’t have the meta knowledge and is used to ordinary human passage of time, I think it’s hard to imagine that 10 Days can be enough to do all that:
Many players don’t understand how Stamina works, and assume there is a benefit it doing missions with full Stamina.
Of course only experienced players understand the need to field a second and a third team as soon as possible.
How to foresee - without meta knowledge - that by February attacks on Havens will increase several fold?
IMO, time needs to have some meaning in the game to act as guidance for the players.
This, I believe, is what @Yokes means when he says reduce the pace of the game (to where events happen within a time frame that a player can intuitively understand) and the player can then interpret whether research times are long (and thus more labs are needed), or not.
Eh… For what’s worth, I don’t think the passage of time in the game can ever make sense. It never feels like time passes, in fact I don’t think even on the first time I ever played the game the terms “hour” and “day” made sense. There was simply tactical missions, progress bars (for research and construction) and the ODI bar (or now the new population counter).
Days? Dates? Meaningless, absolutely meaningless. Both in this game and in XCOM the actual date, the genuine number of days and hours that passed, had always been unimportant. It’s not because there’s some kind of approach being taken here, but because there isn’t a… Thing, that defines each day as a unit. What WOULD define each day as a unit of time?
Bringing in entirely different game genres in this discussion: Persona, Fire Emblem Three Houses, Atelier games. Where you have a limit of things you can do per day, and each day has a distinct Start and End. Once you start having the days flow past seamlessly, and they’re just a value that fills a progress bar, they stop being meaningful as days.
And implementing something like that in this game would make it feel like a very different game. Better? Worse? Neither, just different. A different feel.
I disagree… In X-Com and XCom each month acted as a sign post. You were getting paid at the end of the month, in each month you could expect to do one Terror mission, etc. In XCom 2, and more so in WOTC there was an even more elaborate schedule. So you knew that if a research was going to take more than a month you were doing something wrong. You knew you could usually expect a few days before missions, at least.
Of course we are not talking about any realistic portrayal of how long it takes between events and how much it takes for them to happen, but rather of a certain rhythm that would allow the players to form reasonable expectations/predictions and to measure their progress.
I noticed too that with the way the new ODI bar works, the game basically pigeon holes you into non-stop protection missions for the havens. You don’t have time to explore or do anything else, it’s just one haven defense after another. Doesn’t matter if you destroy the nearby nest, another will pop up in a matter of hours somewhere else and start going non-stop again.
Maybe it’s because I’m playing on Legend, but this is getting out of hand. I don’t have time to manage anything else other than haven protection missions. I have 4 ships constantly going back to base to heal and then back out to faction havens. This is just beyond tedious and not fun at all. I am actually using a trainer right now to STOP haven attacks for the time being so I can get some breathing room. I shouldn’t have to cheat to enjoy a game.
This actually brought to my mind a feature of the original 1994 XCOM. You could check alien activity graphs, notice a spike in a certain area, and send a airplane to patrol that area. This was a way to maybe catch some UFOs or even signs of an alien base without having radar coverage there.
As a suggestion for Phoenix Point, maybe the havens could notice signs of suspicious activity and give some kind of a warning before the actual haven assault happens. Thematically, it would make sense that havens share this kind of information with nearby havens, and it’d give Phoenix Point an opportunity to react by sending an aircraft that way if they so decide. Game mechanically, this would be shown visually on the globe to indicate the rough area where a new Pandoran base has become active. This would at least lessen the problem of Anu Tiamat (or other craft also) being unable to reach new haven assault sites before the haven is destroyed.
Sorry for the necro - been away from the game for a few months - looking forward to coming back for Polaris.
Just spotted Julian’s post here - the issue of time was being discussed, and also how the player could better measure their progress in the game (I think) with regard to this, and other factors.
I’m very puzzled by this, as both X-Com and PP feature a calendar, or at very least a ticking clocking, that represents the passage of time, the very existence of which goes some way to seeding the win/lose conditions central to the whole game, given x difficulty level. Whether adversity in any game is manufactured by being entirely tied to a clock, or whether it is independent of it, but can be measured by the player against said clock on subsequent playthroughs, days and dates are no more meaningless than they are in real life - which is either a. meaningful or b. meaningless, depending on how ‘real world’ or philosophical you want to be about it. The worth of marking the passage of time in the game, I would have thought, would be self-evident. If it’s meaningless, why bother to render a light source revolving around a representation of a planet? Why bother to inform the player of what date it is?
Surely this isn’t ‘absolutely’ meaningless? I know it isn’t, because I use this value to compare how I’m doing game to game, and what’s going on. Things happen at different rates on different difficulty levels, and we use this as a yardstick to even ascertain this. If the player didn’t know what date it was, how would they even compare their in-game progress between games?
Why not just do away with the date being shown altogether? If it’s so unimportant, why not just ditch it?
I think there was some conceptual misunderstanding about the questions being asked. For my part in it, I was wondering whether there could be more options on the strategic map for the player to avoid so many repetitious tactical engagements. If I used the term ‘slow down the clock’, I probably meant ‘buy more time on the strategic map without the tactical grinding’.
The tactical combat is the lifeblood of the game, but when I last played (a few months back), toward the end of the game, due to balance issues, it felt like haven defense missions were all I had time to do, even on normal difficulty. It got to a grind.
The best way I can put it is like this: even if you married the most beautiful woman in the world, you’d take her for granted eventually, and be schlubbing around the house in your tracky bottoms, scratching your arse. This is what Phoenix Point made me feel like on the last playthrough - too much grind on the tactical map - it’s so good, and beautiful, in essence (barring balance issues, which I hope are improved now), but it’s such a demanding mistress - it wants my attention all the time, and I’m afraid I just don’t have it in me. lol
It sort of feels like PP needs a ‘third place’ - some other environs, neither tactical, nor strategic, nor ‘interception’. Crap suggestion, as I don’t have anything constructive - it’s been on the tip of my brain for months, possibly years, but it won’t come to me.
It should be clearly communicated that lose of havens have no bearings on progression of the game in long term,
Losing havens with research centers slows the research that the faction does. Admittedly I’m tempted to let the NJ research havens fall to keep those damn alpha sniper tritons away. 2 hits from the NJ piercing SR will kill any soldier you have.
Losing nearby havens decreases the defense and production of the remaining cluster.
It’s independent. On Legend, even with NJ as an ally and me helping in their research, the Pandoran’s got the Armor Piercing before we did. lol (I just didn’t find it to be a valuable research opportunity, and neither did my ally)
If they want something happen fast, then they should click fastest timelapse and skip some events/missions.