Even if they were protected, some of their facilities can still go into disrepair.
Check all their havens with research zone (worth checking also all with factory zone). Save before spending resources. Repair ALL zones in those havens and wait for a week while defending all these havens. If it won’t help and there won’t be any progress then probably there is some bug.
February 15
Evolutions, bomb Chirons. Whatever.
We try flying around and repairing every single damaged facility in every single NJ haven because I vaguely remember reading a bug report saying that might have something to do with it. It seems to help. The Command Fortress jumps to 61%.
We’ve researched everything on the tech tree. Our labs are sitting idle because the remaining techs are Anu/Syn ones that we can’t access.
February 16
Haven Defence, Lair, Lair, Nest. These are really boring now. I haven’t come close to losing a soldier in a dozen of battles. The biggest challenge is keeping my concentration. The game should have ended days ago.
Overgrown Scavenging Sites show up. It’s way too late. We cleared the entire Geoscape a long time ago.
February 17
Really annoying Lair fight that costs us a bunch of turrets. A soldier nearly dies because I can’t be bothered to put him in cover. Battles are mostly just a resource drain at this point.
Haven Defence. Another Nest.
One of our Phoenix Bases gets raided. I don’t care enough to defend it.
Command Fortress is at 91%.
Thoughts
Bored. I just want to finish for completion’s sake.
1 Like
February 18
More Chirons, more Scyllas.
Nothing happens all day.
Command Fortress progress isn’t moving.
February 19
After a “3-day” construction period that lasted 11 days, the Command Fortress finishes at last. Synedrion and Anu immediately declare war, because they’re psychopaths.
We do City Upon A Hill. It’s very easy at this point, we’ve basically had nothing to do but prepare for more than a week. Another Nest in the meantime.
1 day 14 hours until Project Nemesis finishes. Just have to hold off Syn and Anu’s genocide attempts until then.
Anu attack the NJ Command Fortress. They get crushed, but there are a lot more attacks waiting to come in.
21 hours to go.
2 Likes
February 20
Anu attack another NJ haven. NJ decide they’ve had enough of this shit and declare war back.
A Synedrion haven gets attacked. We should just about be able to finish the game before it dies.
We finish Project Nemesis. Pandoran Palace appears and we send out our A-team.
February 21
Last evolutions are yet more explosive Chirons.
Our A-team reach the Pandoran Palace with the Human Population counter at 76%.
Final Mission
By this point our A-team has done something like 20 Haven Defences and 20 assorted Lairs and Nests, and they have a LOT of SP. Since I’m not using most of the really abusive stuff in Phoenix Point (no Rapid Clearance Terminators, no 1 AP melee killers, no Ancient weapons, no Advanced Lasers) they’re nowhere near as overpowered as they could be.
On the other hand, I do have four Technicians with Neural Torsos, who between them are carrying a total of twenty-four Watcher and Rattlesnake turrets, which they can deploy for 1 AP each. So the battle with the Gatekeepers starts off with my team littering the battlefield with twelve or thirteen turrets, which all open up on the Gatekeepers on the following turn.
It’s extremely one-sided. Picking up all the turrets afterwards takes longer than killing the Gatekeepers did. Once we’ve mopped up the stragglers, we line up in front of the Gate, have our Priest use Frenzy, run forward, drop turrets all around the Receptacle, and shoot it to death. Campaign over.
Gametime: 1 month 21 days
Mission Count: 83
Surviving Population: 899,439
Surviving Havens: 92
Soldiers Recruited: 39
Soldiers Lost: 6
Weirdly, I actually kept more of the human population alive in this campaign than I did in my ‘bad guys’ Anu playthrough. I’m not sure how.
Final thoughts to come!
3 Likes
Final Thoughts
I’m going to divide this into two parts: my thoughts on the houserules I played with, and my thoughts on PP/FS as a whole.
Good Guys Houserules – Thoughts
I started this playthrough to answer the question “can you win a game of PP on Legendary without murdering or stealing?” Well, if you’ve read this far, you’ll know that the answer to that is “yes”. In fact, I kept more people alive than I did in my Anu run. While the ‘no murder/theft’ houserule made the early-mid game much more difficult, it turns out that Phoenix Point is actually pretty easy once you’ve figured out how the strategic layer works, and the restrictions I was playing under weren’t enough to change that.
The more important question: did the houserules make the game more fun?
Well, this is going to be subjective, but in my personal opinion: YES. It is just SO much more satisfying winning a campaign without having to act like a psycho-for-hire just because the game devs wanted you to. Choosing to give the middle finger to the “go kill these guys” missions and completing the game anyway just made for a way more fun game experience. Unlike all my other playthroughs, I actually felt as though my decisions mattered.
On an unrelated note: Playing the full campaign with only NJ tech plus a few things reverse-engineered from the other factions was actually much more interesting. I think the campaign would be much more replayable if you had to choose ONE faction to ally with, as opposed to it just sort of being the default that you end up with access to everything. It’d make the choice feel far more meaningful.
Phoenix Point and Festering Skies
On the downside, this campaign also reminded me of all the things that Phoenix Point does really badly.
- Bugs – Dear God, the bugs. Game crashes, Epic store crashes, constant massive slowdowns, lag and stuttering, cover bugs, visual bugs, and dozens of minor nuisance-level bugs that I’m not going to bother listing. Phoenix Point is just so crummily programmed. There’s no excuse for the game code to be this bad this long after launch.
- Economy – The economy in Phoenix Point just really, really sucks. I’ve said this in every single campaign writeup that I’ve done for this game, and I’m going to keep saying it until the devs finally pay it some attention, or I get bored of PP and stop playing (the second one will probably happen first). If you want to win the game you have to get rich, and if you want to get rich you have to do a seemingly endless series of make-work repetitive tasks just to get another 100 tech, 350 materials, and 350 food so you can keep on playing. STOP MAKING THE PLAYERS GRIND FOR RESOURCES. IT’S BORING.
- Length – The campaign is too damn long. My last soldier casualty was on January 22, and I’d basically won the game by the month’s end, but I had to keep on doing easy mission after easy mission while I ground out the research to finish the campaign. It was really boring by the end and the Command Fortress bug did not help.
- Festering Skies – This expansion’s a mixed bag. Myrmidons are fine. Aerial combat is simplistic, but fine. Corrupted Havens are great. But it’s completely unintegrated with the base game – the Behemoth mission is fun, but once you’ve done it, the entire air minigame just stops and all the resources you sank into it are useless. And killing the Behemoth doesn’t even really do anything – a few more Havens get to live, but unless you were doing really really badly, that’s not going to make the difference between winning and losing the campaign.
Overall, I’m not sure Festering Skies is worth it. I had some fun from the Corrupted Haven missions, but that was about it.
See you all another time!
5 Likes
Some of the issues are solved in current patch. Maybe in next will be solved another few.
Great stuff. I must confess though, that I have not experienced all these bugs you are talking about.
‘No good builds/weapons rule’ basically forces technician turret spam. And/or worm thrower mutoids. So much for variety.
Technically Sniper/Infiltrators could still be used, but without ancient/advanced laser weapons they aren’t particularly impressive, and need very specific perks to function at peak performance.