I've tried.. I really have but now its time to ask for a refund

The factions were always planned to be at war with one another, right from the start.

Infact, in our earlier prototype of the Geoscape, before it was even a part of the Backer Builds, the system would procedurally place the faction Havens and simulate many years of war between them so that the territory for each faction would always be different.

So now it is more “set in stone” rather than generated? Something like 20 variants of haven’s affiliation from which system is choosing from at the beginning?

I personally like it that the factions are going at each other, it feels very appropriate given the three very different ethoses that the three of them have, and it adds an extra level of gravitas to the need to eliminate the Pandorans as quick as you can.

Not giving all of humanity a white hat is a good example of modern story telling, I really glad that PP isn’t following the done to death trope of humans finding united peace against a common enemy.

I respectfully disagree. I do enjoy most of the writing, and agree that if you watch the news once and a while you will see more than enough examples that people can be horrible, foolish, and selfish. I like the fact the the different factions have wildly different views and generally do not get along great with each other.
That said, when monsters are rising from the sea, mutating your friends and family, and basically threatening to wipe out humanity, most people will set their priorities differently.
I’d say in addition to

you might also want to read some history. A bigger threat tends to make allies out of enemies. Maybe not permanently, but at least until the threat is largely gone. Then people can act like selfish a-holes again. I don’t care how much you disagree with somebody’s philosophy, once aliens come out to murder everyone you have ever known, you tend to find common ground.
Thant’s just my take at least. In a resource starved population, waging war between factions just seems beyond ridiculous. Perhaps there is a way to write that so it seems to make sense, but it didn’t read that way to me. It just seemed unbelievable, which makes me not give ‘rat’s behind’ about the stupid factions and pulls me out of the immersion.
Just my $0.02, but I was personalty disappointed, given how much potential I felt this cleverly imagined game contained, and after reading the entertaining and well written “pre-game” lore while waiting for the game to come out.

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I must say i feel that i have encountered my fair share of bugs in the first playtrough. All from the game braking type where loading up old save game was the only option, to the countless small anoyances that follows you all the way through out the game. Even now after the latest hotfix, the game crashed three times in the final mission today…

To be able to overcome this buggy struggle and spend 80 hours in-game says a lot about how great the core game and how brilliant addictive the gameplay is,vanilla X-Com is suddently redused to a shallow stream lined consol game in comparison imo.

So with a couple more months of bug fixing and with additional content coming soon, i hope that in the end of the year PP wil be the the best and most complex/addictive turn based game ever made. Just keep those patches coming!

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Completely and utterly wrong (with the one big exception of the Soviets in WW2, though even they actually planned to push on to Paris after taking Berlin, but were stopped by America demo’ing the Bomb). Here’s my reply to a similar sentiment on another thread:

But actually my current take on this is much simpler and based on the game itself. As the ODI ticks up, we are treated to a continuous stream of ‘Bad Dream’ stories that gradually escalate into people attacking their companions. We also encounter this when we first meet New Jericho in the NJ intro mission. Regardless of human nature, as illustrated by our bloody history detailed above, the Pandoravirus is making the factions attack one another! It’s all part of its insidious plan to wipe out humanity.

It would be nice if this was spelled out more clearly in the ODI texts, but it seems consistent with the game lore (until I get to the end of my first playthrough and discover some spoiler I’m currently not aware of).

And talking of spoilers:

The thing that disappoints me is that, having chosen to go down this route, PP doesn’t follow it through. I ignored the Faction War in this first playthrough of mine (I had more important things to spend my precious squaddies on) - and the war simply petered out. WTF?!?? If you’re gonna do this, Snapshot, either turn it into another timing mechanism where the Factions are literally driven to murder one another by the Pandoravirus, and we have to get to the endgame before it happens, OR have some public declaration of peace when they fight themselves to a standstill. Don’t just have it peter out, because that just makes it feel irrelevant, regardless of how humanly accurate it might be.

I think it would be more natural for the factions to satisfy their bloodlust after destroying several settlements and negotiate a ceasefire.
They could even ask a third party (Phoenix Point) to help them with negotiations, especially if they get along with it. This situation could even result in a special mission.

Even back in Middle Ages people figured out that just wiping population of the city is not the best long term decision. It was still done occasionally but wasn’t the usual practice. Regardless of what is subject of war, even if it’s based on ideology, wiping out civilian population and destroying all industrial capacity, instead of occupying it just looks stupid. More over, why would NJ strike any faction first if there are independent havens all around the place that are not occupied? Wouldn’t you deal with them first? Convince them to “join” you. Even just in case if they might change their neutrality when faction war begins.

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I think what is trying peoples patience is Snapshot’s very relaxed view when it comes to patching their games. The verse “Take your time” being the order of the day.
Gamers are known for not being to big at being patience. :slight_smile:
When PP is balanced and polished people will drift back, but for now it’s a rocking boat.

Some did, some didn’t - I refer you to Merv and the Tangut Kingdom of Xi-Xia.

in any case, that hardly matters if what’s really driving this is the Pandoravirus.

I completely understand why NJ want to eradicate Disciples to the last one of them… or why Disciples want to eradicate/capture any other living human. Just a NJ terminating Synedrion is not completely logical or Synedrion erasing any other faction from existence may be not completely logical.

I don’t think destroying havens by a faction literally means genocide of all population. As I can see it they just destroy faction-specific infrastructure and (possibly) execute the settlement leaders. After that the settlement remains as neutral or maybe people start migrating to some other place or maybe Pandoravirus gets them.

If you read Phoenix Point lore you will see that neither of the faction ideologies is bloodthirsty enough to order mass-executions.

Pay attention to population counter next time…
Yes maybe they pack their stuff and go live in the mist somewhere.
Why make excuses for something that shouldn’t exist in the first place? Heavens should be occupied by factions and eradicated by pandorians.

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That “shouldn’t exist in the first place” is an approach more suitable for New Jericho faction. And I prefer allying myself with Synedrion because their “learn to coexist” approach is more appealing to my life style :relaxed:

All factions genocide heavens anyway.
The grand idea was probably that amount of usable heavens goes down as campaign progresses, either by player unable to defend them by pandorians or faction wars. Fine, but this is where desired game mechanics just goes against believable world. What’s make it worse is that such policies are not acknowledge by either of the factions.

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Only if you believe that a) humans are far less genocidally tribal than history demonstrates them to be and/or b) this behaviour isn’t being triggered by the PandaVirus.

Personally, I think the only thing that’s ‘wrong’ here is the fact that the in-game story boxes don’t spell out what’s happening a little more clearly.

Things changes significantly since industrial revolution. In modern times, even if genocide happens, the industrial complex would be still occupied instead of outright destroyed. This was one of the reasons why nuclear war never started - it makes absorption of industrial capacity rather difficult.

We’re not playing a game set in modern times though, it’s an apocalyptic future. Judging any faction’s action based on our current society is like The Victorians judging our ‘modern times’ based on the morals of the late 19th century by which probably most of us here would be a lunatic asylum.

The factions aren’t trying to expand, they’re just trying to survive, and the rival factions are a perceived threat to that survival, so yes they would try to wipe out each other’s havens.

Populations of factions may disperse rather than be exterminated, we just don’t know (though the fact that thoes haven don’t appear again later in the game points to the 2nd option.

And the reason that the conquering faction doesn’t move in, could be as simple as that they don’t have the resources to shift that many people from one haven to another and/or they’re not at their capacity for production in their existing havens.

So you are assuming that they wipe out everyone because people in other heavens are so indoctrinated that they live by ideals and not by day to day life so it’s impossible for them to change faction they belong too. If they disperse then where do they disperse? Why they don’t just stay and work for new factions? If luck of people is what prevents expansion, then we would should see such dynamics reflected in heavens when they are building up. Meaning there should be a surplus of X population before new buildings start to pop-up. Does that really happen?

TBH, I don’t care how it can be explained, the point is, this is like 5th discussion on the subject of this behavior looking like illogical or at least contrived. It means that to many players it doesn’t make much sense. To me personally it doesn’t, the game doesn’t provide enough lore or interaction foundation to establish that this is how faction war should be. Coming up with some outside of the game stories is like trying to explain new trilogy of Star Wars bus some comic books - it’s irrelevant to most people.