Indeed i like Phoenix point a lot, it does a lot of things better than X-Com did, like stopping the movment, when you encounter an enemy and in the early phases of the game it is pretty balanced in all regards.
But in midgame certain synergys of soldier skills start to outweight others skills and some aspects of gear start outweight others. In the endgame phase, most classes, skills and weapons get insignificant and only maximum movment and melee dammage outweight the rest, because melee weapons never miss and do way more dammage then ranged weapons can and armor becomes useless when it impedes movement, and does not really help a lot anyway, against mid/endgame weapons.
And some classes are pretty useless right from the start, like a berserker. An assault/heavy is way more versatile and can do everything important better then a berseker. Indeed a maxed out assault/heavy, is the only class combo I need for dammage, the rest is just for support or fun.
The vehicles in Poenix Point are a real cool idea, but that you canât upgarde them, makes them useless later on in the game. Also most weapons that you have to put a lot of research into are basically useless and not even worth the material building them.
To demonstrate my point vividly, I linked two vids, one at midgame, one at endgame, that show pretty good what i want to say, no shots fired in both and both are first round wins.
Yes, one certainly can do that, but itâs not very entertaining. I donât play that way. It would be nice if it were not possible so that people wouldnât go âsee, this game is broken!â, but personally, I think PP provides the best turn-based tactical experience of any game Iâve played on Mac. The strategic layer can be frustrating and some aspects of the gameplay are maddening, but the battles themselves can be excellent. Provided that you restrain yourself from min/maxing your squad and skill combos, of course.
The perennial problem with PP. In order to enjoy it, you have to tie your hands behind your back and treat it like a 5-year-old.
Thankfully, the devs are aware and are working on it - but I doubt it will ever be as balanced as some of us would like it to be, unless they finally bite the bullet and put a hard divide between Easy/Vet and Hero/Legend, where E/V lets you min-max super-soldiers to your heartâs content & H/L curbs the excesses to give you a proper tactical challenge.
Quick, dirty and cheap (and pretty sure it wouldnât resolve issue in all cases, like melee pandorans, or even fact you could hunker down and still unlesh âthisâ next turn) nerf would be if enemy start first turn with OW cones over his own mates in LoS.
Edit:
I would remove/nerf Rally the Troops AP bonus as well. It always, inevitably leads to âproxy exploitâ. It bugs the Mordheim game as well.
While I agree that there are mid/late game balance issues in general, that first video really comes down to one issue: Rapid Clearance. Iâve argued in the past that the devs should just remove that stupid ability from the game since itâs hopelessly unbalanced (general rule of tactics/strategy games: no ability should give you back more actions than it costs to use) but now that itâs been there for so long itâs hard to get rid of it without upsetting the players whoâve come to use it as a win button.
Maybe Michaelâs right and the only solution is to have a really hard divide between the lower and upper difficulties where the upper ones ban a bunch of stuff. More realistically, though, weâll just have to wait for someone to put out a mod and heavily self-restrict in the meantime (I never take Rapid Clearance for exactly this reason).
Mate, Iâm afraid youâre preaching to the converted here.
Iâve been arguing for 2 years that the AP-regeneration loop of RC should be closed, and despite some token nods in that direction, it still hasnât happened.
As I understand it, the devs donât want to close it to casual players, who feel they need it to cope with the supposed difficulty of this game (Iâm being harsh here - some players really do find this game really difficult to cope with).
Iâve long argued that we should have Second Wave Options that should give those who donât want these stupid exploits ruining the game the ability to switch them off.
Iâm grudgingly coming to the conclusion that SWOs are never going to happen - but I do hold out some hope that the devs are listening about the need for a hard divide between ludicrously easy and challengingly hard, and may take some steps in that direction.
I hope so, cos while I love this game, Iâm growing tired of having to compensate for all its idiocies.
If Firaxis brought out an XCOM3 tomorrow which incorporated all the good bits of PP and balanced it properly, Iâd drop this like a hot potato right now 'cos Iâm fed up of having to treat it like itâs a 5-year-old.
Why just donât do it like in X-Com, add diminsihing returns of dammage to RC, which I like a lot, because the soldier thatâs doing the RC does not have an endless dammage output and you got to think about the sequence and need to dammage the enemys from the later stages of the sequence before you use it. And add a long coldown or only once per battle use to it. That would make it still usefull without removing it completely.
Well, yes maybe, i am sorry for being new to the forum and not knowing that, but i think another voice backing up your opinon and mentioning it again doesnât hurt either?
Because I love the game and I have seen it change gradually over time in response to my repeated arguments.
But at times it feels like trying to turn the Titanic. You can see all the icebergs and you know whatâs going to happen if you keep on the same course, but no matter how much you talk to the engineers, it seems like the Captainâs dead set on maintaining his course, and the helm can only be turned 1 degree at a time.
Still doesnât stop me loving the game and trying to improve it - but if someone else came along with a game that took all the good bits of PP and added Firaxisâ understanding of how to balance massively OP skills like Bladestorm to make them something cool that you want to use without completely breaking the game, then Iâd go rushing to it like a wanderer in the mixed metaphor of the desert.
Yea, sorry if that sounded harsh - it wasnât really aimed at you.
But we really have been trying to get SG to recognise that RC needs a âBladestorm-likeâ rebalance for years and it gets very frustrating at times.
I seriously believe that there is someone very high up in SG who has a Thing against cooldowns, and who is terrified of alienating the casual audience that pays 50% of the bills. Itâs the only explanation that makes sense of their resistance to such obviously needed changes.
Though I donât think Iâm breaking any confidences when I say that the devs did think theyâd fixed it once, after an extensive consultation exercise with the CC. They simply wouldnât believe that you could still generate an infinite AP loop until one of us built a Terminator that demonstrated it in front of their eyes.
Yet still we have no cooldowns or diminishing returns, which brings me back to my earlier surmise.
You really think thatâs what it is? Iâve just been assuming that theyâve been putting 95% of their dev capacity towards new DLC, and most of whatâs left towards bugfixes.
Based on what Iâve seen (admittedly Iâve seen less than the CC members have), Snapshotâs behaviour doesnât read as âwe have a thing against cooldownsâ. It reads as âwe regard PP as a finished game and weâre not interested in making any major changes to itâ.
We all love this game. There is no problem about that. SG changed/fixed very few things at beta period before one year edition too, I accept that.
BUT there is something you need to accept too. After LotA, that period is over. This game is finished for SG as development. LotA and FS including the mid patches which suppose to fix something showed us that Titanic is beyond save already and SG left the ship with few DLC⌠You are on the ship.
Devs does not speak with anyone, CC or here for months (I donât count little to no help one dev answers at CC), they donât make their promises as Q-Aâs, they are just closed many planned topics âdoneâ labeled without doing anything, like they just closed âgetting aircraft with more creative wayâ with the FS free ones, like an insult.
Yes, they will change some little numbers time to time with huge âBALANCEâ announcements.
The only way to take attention of SG as CC, you need to retire all together to show them something was wrong and it gets worse.
From my experience since the inception of this game, polite engagement with the devs slowly and incrementally pushes it in the direction most of us on these forums would like, whereas being rude about them generally gets ignored.
You chose to leave the CC, so you have no idea what conversations are going on atmo or what they are working to do. I canât tell you, bc part of the deal with being in the Council is that the devs talk things over with you on the understanding that what they tell you wonât get plastered all over the internet 5 minutes later, and I donât intend to betray that trust.
But they havenât abandoned this game, and they are working on fixing at least some of the more egregious problems we have all identified.
Whether they will be able to fix them in a way that weâd all like, I seriously doubt - but thatâs as much because what I want doesnât equate with what @Nattfarinn , you or @Spagetman43 wants: and thatâs as much a part of the square they have to circle as anything else.
I still think SWOs in the same vein as Madâs Assorted Adjustments is the best way to square that circle, but I donât think weâll get those, so Iâm pushing for an Easy Mode and a Hard Mode instead, as that door seems slightly more ajar atmo. Weâll see.
Sadly, your âthey should be the good guysâ mainset just does not allow you accept the harsh truth.
âWe are working on itâ, âwe want a balanced gameplayâ, âwe want a nice TBSâ kind of words cannot be named âlieâ as you cannot know the result until the development is finished. But those words and actions are very politic ones. You can never know they are saying truth also.
Eric told us we could have a bit more influence on FS design, but after FS we saw that everything is done what they planned. So I can tell that, this was a lie clearly.
You can be nice-naive guys to wait the results and after development is done, you can come and say âyeah they lied to usâ⌠but you are not teenagers so I think you know how âwords-actionsâ works at that age.
I am ready to say sorry IF they take an action and stand behind their words. AND I can just bet on that sadly, I will be probably right at the endâŚ
So you can have your "butâŚ"s for one year more with believing⌠I am just sorry for you as you know that you are good guys with good intentions⌠You can see me as annoying angry guy too⌠but I know how this kind of things end well from my experiencesâŚ
