Petition: classless system

I wish they would consider your words, we will see. They always say its not done yet and everything can change :slight_smile:

I’m afraid you won’t see it. There will be classes and only two classes will be available to single character as cross-class. So not everthing can change. But they are right saying it is not done yet. Game is still in pre-alpha.

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I was ironic, sry, it doesnt go through well in writing :smiley:

Since this thread suddenly resurrected… lately i’m playing battle brothers, in this game you don’t have classes and your guys choose perks from a pool as they level up.
And then each weapons has it’s own abilities associated, that’s a feature I like very much.

And that’s a question for the people who don’t like classes, Do you think this kind of system would work in pp.

Yes, you don’t have classes and you have the freedom to choose whatever you want, but at the end you want some guys to be tanks and some guys to be snipers, and then there are perks useless for a tank and perks useless for a sniper.
I think a class system what makes is help the player to build a character by not letting him pick the “wrong” perks.

I can see why freedom and experimentation with perks is fun, but some people, me included, don’t have the time or the skill to do this kind of things and having a “guide” to not cripple character leveling it up is very helpfull.

And those are thingss I was thinking while playing BB : p , maybe you can put a toggle that locks perks to choose if you decide to build a defined class and a classles class wich can choose whatever perk, but since I don’t know the perks in pp it may have balance issues I think.

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What if there is a “second wave” option which “disables” class restrictions, with a red warning sign “game is not balanced around this feature”?
You win the game once with the balanced approach, then you are free to mess around if you want. New players will not get confused, and veterans don’t need mods.

I just can’t know exactly how much work it is to include an option like this, so it’s possible that mods are still the better choice for the devs.

Example from ToME, which is exactly the same, you can learn anything you want, making otherwise impossible cross-class combos without modding the game.

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How about a compromise and make either/or/both synedrion and Anu classless/perks based since New Jericho seems like it would be fundamentally opposed to this idea? I’ve gone in depth on prior posts on how it could work specifically for classes but I’m open to the thought as it would probably mesh well with our religion and gmo hippie survivors.

([EDIT] my original thoughts on class is featured here:)

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But it also prevents players from creating builds more tailored for a particular playstyle by being overly rigid which is it’s biggest problem; “wrong” skills are often only wrong if picked without thinking or adjusting the play style.

To give you some examples, heavy armour or autonomous weapon operation skills might seem like a bad choice for a medic but some players might want to build themselves a “trauma team” medic, heavily armoured and equipped with deployable riot shield and an auto turret, Such soldier might be capable to quickly jumpjet in to help a downed ally caught in the open, deploy the shield to create himself a cover, stabilize the downed soldier and then drop the turret to lay down suppressive fire down while he is healing the wounded back to health. Rigid classes simply wouldn’t give you such freedom to experiment and see what works for you.

I understand your argument of “can’t be arsed to waste time figuring out what will work” and I think it’s a perfectly valid concern, especially in a game where risk is high and replacing a killed or even improperly skilled soldier is very costly. I think a good workaround here is to treat classes as guidelines, consisting of pre-made but modifiable starting skill kits as well as suggested levelling paths. This will give player the ability to mix and match both starting skills and skills picked when levelling soldier up, provided all the skill requirements will be satisfied. So instead of “no, sniper cannot learn drone operation skill”, it will be “drone operation is not a suggested skill for this class, you have to learn basic engineering first to gain access to it” so players will be able to build a sniper who can spot for himself with a spy drone if they would want to.

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How about primary and secondary abilities learned from classes with passive and active support skills like above? (Final fantasy tactics a2 is severely underrated for srpgs btw)

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“With great flexibility come great balance nightmares” - Uncle Ben, probably

I love to be able to experiment with unorthodox builds, but it comes with downsides. Let’s look at the Riot medic above. He’s using a lot of specialized equipment borrowed from other classes. This means that :

Anybody can use a jetpack, snipers probably can too, which means their positioning weakness is greatly reduced. Game balance must account for this as the class has effectively gained a massive buff. but then, any sniper NOT using a jetpack is at a comparable disadvantage. The abundance of jetpacks also means melee enemies can be kited more efficiently, reducing their power
Anybody can use a turret. While having a single technician with a single turret in a mission is reasonable, the added firepower of a stack of them could be a problem. You also now have turrets and jetpack combos, meaning one can place them in otherwise hard to reach spot, enhancing their powers.

I’m not saying that any of these are crippling flaws. Many are probably trivial to balance but when stuff is mostly unrestricted, you often have to reduce overall gear’s power to avoid balance breaking synergies.

It also has the perverse effect to actually reduce diversity if one is not careful, because there’s often that one piece of gear that’s too good NOT to have on everybody. On one hand you’ve given creative players the ability to mess up with exotic builds, but on the other the masses will go for the meta-vanilla build. Once again, not an unsolvable conundrum, but something to bear in mind nonetheless.

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You could kinda do both of those things with a class system.

  • Take a squad of heavies and everyone has a jetpack.
  • Take a squad of technicians and everyone can drop a turret.
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This is absolutely true, but just by looking at the sentence above, you’re looking at an “OR” scenario where you either have a full jetpack team or a full turret team. It’s easier to balance than a scenario where everybody could have a jetpack and a turret.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it can’t be done, but I believe that the more interesting balancing point is somewhere between total freedom and shoehorned classes. Something in the line of great freedom in general equipment and skills (basic weapons/armors/generic skills) with each class having its proper class exclusive gimmick and some skills that go with it, just to make sure that said gimmicks cannot be mixed and matched at will for balance and lore reason and can be powerful enough to make a difference if used properly.

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Non class system would be great, but lets face the fact that classes are announced already. :slight_smile: Maybe in the Phoenix Point sequel we can expect classless system. Let Snapshot get experience first with all their ideas and let them see what works fine or not fine.

I suppose they don’t even have full list of aliens, alien mutations and alien skills so they even don’t know what players should expect and what measures can be used to stop enemy. As Vathar said building classless system around that would be hard to balance.

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Fair play… it is an ‘OR’ statement.

And yes, you could achieve the same via other means. Weight limits, or inventory space spring immediately to mind. If OP, then make both items big and bulky so that they can only one can be carried. - And even then it could come at the expense of other alternatives.

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You are assuming that taking skills or using equipment is “free”. Which is not so, especially if you are going for a complex skill like jetpack operations or drone control. Such skills must have other skills as pre-requirements and/or have high skill point cost.

To continue with your examples, trauma team medic is likely sacrificed his advanced medical training to learn jetpack & powered armour operation and is only trained in using a sidearm as he picked auto turret control skill instead of unlocking PDW or assault rifle usage skills. So only capable of basic medkit operation and being armed with nothing bigger than a pistol at basic proficiency seems like a decent trade-off to me.

Same goes for jet-sniper: he spent a lot of skill points to learn the necessary skills, meaning after several major operations he is still only a rookie sniper as all his training went into jetpack/p. armour. On top of that, we will still be limited by jetpack fuel and/or WP usage limit, leaving him unable to climb ladders and forced to spread him WP between sniping skills and jumping.

Out of our two examples, this last one looks like being a questionable choice of skills tbh, especially with p. armour not all being that useful for a sniper who is normally operating far from his targets. TT medic is not much better either, with nothing to contribute to the fight but a one-use turret and, if noone is injured in the open, only being good as a mobile cover for other soldiers. Now I’m not saying that these examples above are bad, but they certainly don’t seem OP to me.

Another thing to keep in mind, both examples are representative of a high-tier character, so they should only be compared to seasoned soldiers of the “base class”, already significantly specialized in their area of expertise.

Another thing to keep in mind, equipping soldiers is not free. So even if someone has a jetpack operation skills. that doesn’t mean there is a jetpack available for him to use. I do hope here that soldiers will not magically grow a drone or a machinegun right after acquiring a particular skill(looking at you, FXcom).

tl;dr: balance skills, their costs and pre-requirements(other skills & stats). Equipment is not free, advanced equipment even more so; skill is of no use without appropriate equipment.

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Since we are on the topic of well… basically skill trees thought I’d bring this up. Dust 514 had passive and active ways of accruing skill points that could be invested in over time.

It wasn’t just isolated to weaponry but everything from: class dropsuits (combat roles), Vehicles, support, leadership, Market was all utilized. (All within unreal engine) I could see this as a viable option for ai based characters allocating themselves to learn a skill ( and we’ve already seen this with Barnabas in briefing 6 )

Just spitballing here but this system was incredibly fun and I think I miss it’s mechanic dearly and hope to see it’s implementation again in some game.

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I would like system that adds some randomness, like beginning perks you would see, one or two per soldier so they would feel special, and would make recruiting more interesting, since now its like buying bread.
But also have huge skill trees that are not that much class based.
My ideal would me something similar to Path of Exile passive skill tree, where only difference between classes are starting points and “ascension” perks that are bound to class.
Myself I love tinkering my soldiers to perfection, or for very very specific role. X-com one and two could not satisfy that, so at least squad management.
Hope they will get skill system right, cuz IMO thats only way they could screw up this game beyond saving.

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I am not against randomizing starting stats and skills as long as total CP pool of a new recruit is not too low(see my “trash recruits” comment). However, levelling up should not be randomized; as long as skill requirements are met and there are enough CP available for a soldier, you should be able to pick a that skill for him to learn.

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I agree that random skills are stupid idea. Maybe if devs wanted to be creative, some sort of “training” could be very interesting. For example I want my sniper to get head-shot skill, so I get sort of mini-quest stating he has to shoot 5 aliens into head from at least X meters to gain it.
And yes I remember your trash recruits post, totally agree with it. I actually dont care for stats like HP or Will to be low at start, just dont boggle accuracy and its fine with me.
And those perks I meant were supposed to be unique, y cannot get them later in game. This would establish unique soldiers, give them little more of “background”. As I said, X-com 1/2 recruiting was boring.

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I feel like Apocalypse had the best recruiting system of the XCOM games. From how things are looking it will already be more flexible than FiraXCOM classes. It will depend on the abilities but I think it would be interesting if the system was like a star where “rookie” is in the middle and the “classes” Branch out from there. At which point you would be able to multi-class but stronger abilities would be deeper down the line.

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While I know this is not gonna happen as this kind of decision must be taken much earlier, I kinda like a wheel/star approach if one can find a decent logic to populate it. This means some classes have more affinity and cross training is easier while learning something from a class on the other side of the wheel requires a much bigger investment.

However, this is also better suited to games where only a few characters level up and may become cumbersome for bigger rosters.