Yes, that said, on the 1 or 2 turns combats, sigh, for me it’s saying the design gone wild, or is bad, or is full of OP holes.
The problem of killing spawner sites is they won’t generate heavens attack, so no opportunity to increase relationship with factions, and less income opportunities. But then they become Lairs and when you notice there’s too many, it’s tends be only Lairs.
Sorry to labour the point, but I think we might all be interchanging the the terms ‘repawns’ and ‘reinforcements’ incorrectly. In Phoenix Point what people are objecting to is the infinite spawning of reinforcements at the tactical map borders, in lairs.
This differs from JA2, as even if reinforcements arrived, you could kill them, and that was that - there was a finite number of them. Every sector in JA2 was a battle to secure the area, and it was possible to take all enemies down. If this hadn’t been the case, you could never have taken a sector. No mission had any other objective than to kill everyone. In PP lairs, the reinforcements don’t seem to end.
What bugs me most about it is what happens to your soldiers once they kill the spawnery, but there are still loads of enemies left on the map? How do they get out? Narratively this is jarring - it breaks immersion, and stands at odds to elements of the game such as having a ‘realistic’ ballistics system; on the one hand, the game invites you to become immersed in its world based on aspects of realism, but on the other, your team get to magically escape almost certain death because they destroyed the macguffin on the map.
There’s no consistency; on some missions, even though you took all enemies down, you still have to either walk everyone to the exit, or walk one guy to the objective, which seems daft.
Another comparison: in the ‘Seeking Dr. Symes’ missions, you have two objectives - obtain something from a square on the map, and kill all enemies. I didn’t realise this to start with (because I’m inobservant), but simply because there was an objective to obtain, I assumed (wrongly) that you would be able to evac one soldier with it, and even if the rest of the squad died, it would be a success.
What is the point of having the objective when you have to kill everyone anyway? What should happen is that you kill the last enemy then see some exposition about what happened. The objective square here is utterly pointless. You just need to walk one soldier to it when all enemies are down, which is a foregone conclusion.
I’m gonna make a new thread about this, it’s bugging me. lol
JA2 can throw at you reinforcements and then more reinforcements, it’s no way limited to one wave. But ok it’s different. Still it’s not reinforcement your problem, more that kill em all doesn’t solve the mission or isn’t possible.
With the points you add, it’s more like you are looking for reasons to not like PP, all of that is very minor and is looking only some sort of realism, but not gameplay quality.
About missions with picking something and kill em all, ok but it’s not that much a big deal, for me. You got a point but for me it’s minor.
Another case is defense against an ambush, resits x turns then exit, I suppose you find that more coherent, myself I quote the exit phase is rather pointless, most often.
The return of Big Nest is too little. .
Considering that the power relationship can affect the basic technology, the more you develop the power technology, the faster the civil war. .
You will soon fall into a painful cycle of no matter how much Pandora’s offense is, and investing huge resources without return. .
I agree with you on all that. Lairs and nests are a god damn pain.
The labyrinth itself makes it horrible to finish, you spend hours to complete one mission even if you don’t get detected and reinforcements are not a thing. But when the lair calls those reinforcements… Damn, its just a rework of any zombi survival waves game… even when you drop enemies fast enough to not get hurt, their will be a point where you’ll run out of ammo, but they don’t run out of crabs and 4 arms thingy… You walk your way so slowly that even without this issue the mission would be everything BUT fun, but you STILL have to find your way till that last objective that is hidden… somewhere…
Lairs are even worst than nests, with Chirons dropping you slowly but surely from an umbreakable walled bunker, and sirens waiting for you to kill your own squad…
Damns, citadels are supposed to be the most challenging type of alien bases, how comes they are the most easy, the fastest, and funiest to finish? Rampaging armada of Aliens led by a terrifying walking spaceship is easier to beat than just foodcannon…
The sirens are way to OP, making the game not even fun. the labrith makes no sense whatso ever. In the backer builds it was much more sensible, not sure why we switch to impossible maze.I guess a full sniper team would do well. Right now i keep playing the game thinking xcom 2 did it better at almost every turn.
Jetpack should help, very fast units can work. Snipers can find a hole but it’s less safe.
For Chiron, it’s tedious RNG instakill, bad design if you ask me, no link with any mission, Chiron need a deep design change.
I’m working on a lair right now where my squad is being rushed by six sirens at the same time. Not fun.
I hate them. I have restarted, saved, run out of ammo, had 3 sets of screamers right at the spawn point and seemly endless Sirens. Ugh I hate them. And I hate that we have no way to break the mind control accept to kill them. Then I have how many more of them to deal with? Yes a complete drudgery. After I killed so many, they just still kept coming. Was thinking, oh I cant have many more and then I can move forward, nope. Just ran out of ammo and got mind controled.
We can mind control but it only lasts a couple of turns. They mind control and you can control them back, but it doesnt break the mind control on your soldier. I thought stunning it would, but no. Your just stuck till you kill them while 3 or 4 more of them are slithering closer so you can do it all over again. So how can I capture one if incapacitating it doesnt break the control on my guy. I tried twice and got out and did something else. But I can see from what you guys are saying, its pretty much the same and really really needs work. I thought after killing so many I would at least have level ups, but I didnt. So probably go back to Xcom till all these things actually become playable so you can finish the game. Then for me, all the freezing and having to save, save and restart and save and hang and restart. Gets tiring. We need tools to fight deal with the mind control and many other things that have already been said. At least in Xcom you have tools to deal with things if you are clever and figure things out. Hope this gets straigtened out, I was so looking forward to this.
Having to escape from nests could be interesting. Especially if you cheesed your way in, but then are left lacking in willpower and still needing to find a way out past all those incoming reinforcements. You might just have sent that 1 jet-packing heavy to their doom. 
Exactly: I came back a week later to see if anything has changed, nope it’s only more complaints. Game needs a few more months of development, for real.
Did a lair yesterday and it took me 2.5 hours to finish it (with me taking a break to say WTF lots of times and think how to get out of it alive).
Everything was rolling until I hit a choke-point where there was a Siren. Any troop that would go through there and she would scream (-10WP) and panic them (and the fireworm Chiron shooting at us). My heavy was panicked so no grenades or rockets to make it pay. Assaults were too close so no dash and quick aim to dispose of it. Then a second Siren comes. The biggest problem was the impossibility to have line of sight on them with my snipers.
I concentrated on killing the other aliens with my snipers until the Sirens had no more WP to scream. And once I could go and kill them, 2 more Sirens show up (but this time I could rage burst them into hell). Oh, and after that 2 more (I think they spawned).
I had to use all the tricks I could to get out of this: war cry, rally troops, rage burst, dash, quick aim, (bash on fireworms). I even did a rage burst with the pistol because my sniper had to climb to get line of sight to remove a threat that was going to kill one of my other troops.
Situation was so desperate at times. I feel a sense of accomplishment for having gone through this without a KIA and no save-scumming (had forgot to make a save and wanted to see how badly I would lose).
But … I’m really used to those kind of games and I play on the lowest difficulty. How do you expect a real newbie to get out of this ???
I have a quick and dirty solution to lairs - get a berserker (from the anu faction), level him up to 7 (6 is mandatory). Pick the passive that makes him immune to mind control, and dual spec with assault for Dash. Equip him with a shotgun.
It’s actually really easy to solo the lair like this since the worm is always in the top left just run over there. Use dash early because those dancing poles will suck your will away anyways. Shotgun to the face bam finished.
I played this game 10h and quit because nothing had amazed or thrilled me once. Never got to these lairs either. But reading all these weird unrealistic strategies to win this game certainly is funny as hell and much more enjoying than the game itself
The mission I was talking about had 3 places where the target could be. And of course it was the last one that was the right one. The problem in the mission was going through the choke-point with the Sirens removing my soldier’s will.
At least now I know that if there is a choke-point, I dig a hole in a wall with my hell-cannon to give myself some other options.
I find it interesting that at no point did you mention explosives or trying to blind fire area AoE explosives through the chokepoint to where you knew the Siren was.
If you know the rough location of something, a heavy with a grenade launcher doesn’t actually need LoS due to how the grenade launcher arc and fire distance works. It is inaccurate and may take more than one blind fire attempt, but that’s how I typically get around similar scenarios.
In fact the sheer number of posts I see where it seems everyone is mostly just running around with snipers, infiltrators and some token assault units and think all heavies are for are jetpack cheese… are people really not using the miracle that is blind firing into locations without needing clear LoS in order to hit things? As I have lost count on the number of times that blind firing at a location I know a enemy is at but don’t have clear LoS has saved my ass and turned a potentially dangerous threat into nothing but a bug splat on the floor.
This isn’t Back Build 5 anymore where one or two snipers can solo win every mission, fortunately it seems Snapshot did some tuning to account for that though it’s still not quite perfect coughinfiltratorscough. 
You assume too much.
I knew the Siren was there once it screamed. Had no line of sight on this place before, so couldn’t see it. The choke-point was some kind of elevated platform. You can go there with a ladder and fall on the other side. Siren was placed behind the platform completely hidden until I eared the noise of it moving … too late.
Heavy and 2 assaults (front line) got panicked, so no explosives to throw at it. And it is written in my post (at least for the heavy) so don’t know how you missed it. Also two snipers were in range but they had enough WP to not panic.
A Siren scream is -10WP, so if you just used powers like jetpack, dash or quick aim, you can quickly be panicked if one shows up round the corner.
Since the Siren was only screaming to make them sitting ducks on the platform (and AI stupid enough to make one of them move out of cover into the open), I used my snipers to remove all other baddies (fortunately not hidden by the platform) that could potentially shoot them (including a pistol rage burst on a Triton). Once they got free from panic I did nuke the place.
The spawnery is not always in the top left. I just finished a lair where the spawnery was top right.
Should still be doable even in the top right. You’re moving much faster than the enemy is and you only need 1 or 2 turns with the hatch to blow it up.
The point is that you don’t know where it is. If you commit to a corner and are wrong, you’re screwed.