You have literally cut off my argument and answer to the thesis only.
Gear doesn’t make difference. Skills do. Put a “high-end” AR on a rookie and his damage potential will be close to none.
Weapons are irrelevant since midgame. Weapon efficiency mostly doesn’t matter because metagame combo is the source of damage capable of killing enemy. How many rookies and how many turns you would need to kill chiron after midgame?
I am honestly baffled when people bring up this argument as a criticism.
To turn it around: how many rookies and how many turns would you need to kill a Sectopod after the midgame of XCOM2?
Rookies become useless in all of these games once your A-Squad reaches a certain level. At least this one tries to address that by giving you Training Centres to avoid the progression grind of creating a replacement - though as with most things in PP at the moment, it is severely off-balance.
But criticising PP for not giving Lvl.1 characters the strength to kill Lvl.5-7 monsters just sounds like you’re looking for excuses to hate it.
Rookies are still capable of doing serious damage in XCOM. Weapon is the main source of damage. Give a huge cannon to the rookie and it’s still soldier with a huge cannon. Huge cannon is crucial element here.
I’m saying weapons are irrelevant. Do you have different opinion here, because I would love to hear a counter argument how weapon make a difference.
Rookies are crucial part of these games, unless you save-scumm to keep your A-Squad alive no matter what. High reaction rookie with heavy plasma is extremely effective in classic UFO and capable of doing serious damage to everything.
First of all, may I suggest that you break your ideas into paragraphs? It’s very hard to follow your arguments. Just try reading this yourself:
I tend to bring up XComs (mostly Firaxis, but also Gollop’s) because they are the closest reference points to PP. I don’t see any point in bringing up RPGs, like D&D, Divinity, or Shadowrun.
They do in PP. Each weapon type, some armors and some other gear are class restricted. However, there is more wiggle room because you can lift the restriction with a third row skill. That means more flexibility, not a waiver on all limitations.
Yes, there are OP builds/combos, and there are many discussions and suggestions on how to fix them. But this is a balancing, not a design issue.
There is real progression, but it’s mostly horizontal. Some of the best weapons are PP research - like the virophage SR.
That is a very good idea and I wish it would work like that, provided that it wouldn’t be just a return to the legacy 3 tier weapons and armor system. For example, that some Pandas should evolve an AP resistant armor and acid would be necessary to melt it. Or that they developed some attack capable of penetrating the electric reinforcement field, e.g. a slow moving projectile that explodes on impact and PP would have to develop a counter, e.g. an active defense system.
Depends on the chiron, on the rookies and on their position relative to each other, and PP’s squad composition (is there a priest with frenzy? An engineer with electric reinforcement? A sniper with marked for death? A berserker that can destroy the armor first, so that not only the head of the Chiron is exposed?).
I’m in phone I can’t be arsed to type at all. Proper spelling is all you’re getting. You rapidly move posts. Previously it’s “amazing open in builds”. Next it’s restrictive but you might win on a the rng lottery. Again you turn back in your own points. Open builds are important now suddenly there not. Again rolling lucky is also a dice roll which you complain about in xcom. Praise this game for not having which it does indeed have You’re so biased about this game it’s unreal. Borderline delusional.
So am I.
And I’m not going to bother answering you, as you powers of expressing your ideas are on par with your understanding those of others.
On mobile it’s really easy to read blocks of text. Don’t like your “argument” getting torn to shreds. Like you called this a masterpiece. That really sums up your argument. Makes okay game “mastapice”. The thing is you tear down another game to justify why this game is good. Boohoo don’t criticise Phoenix point. Whilst I criticise xcom. You’re a massive hypocrite who’s main points to me is that xcom is bad. Whilst dishing out double standards to Phoenix point. Clearly not biased at all.
…and? You where trying to make some point with this or something?
Classes in Divinity Original Sin for example, are really well done and make sense in the lore of the game and in the mechanics. No problem there, without classes you would have to deal with several hundreds of abilities. What is more, the classes there are not “distinct builds”, they are organizers, inside of the same classes there is always at least two major branches for development.
What makes you think that I don’t like classes? I’m not 12 years old to mix concept and implementation into one bag. You are not going to find many people that dislike concept of ice-cream. But you can find many that will dislike ice-cream that smells like dog shit. To clarify it for you - it’s not about concept it’s about how it is used. Meanwhile, many times I brought another game as example for some of it’s mechanics and you often say that you don’t like that game like it’s somehow an argument if mechanics is good or bad 
This is where you fail to understand how things work:
Builds are particular receipts of development inside a bucket of a single class or multi class “abilities”. If there is no viable choice of development inside of the class then distinction of builds is actually a distinction of class. In your beloved PP, the ability to multi-class is the only thing that stops from a completely rigid single build per class system. There are so few abilities in the game that classes are not even needed and you could simply take Battle Brothers route of all abilities being available to everyone, then the rest of the game mechanics would have to pull necessity to have specific specialization. This is something that could have worked even in XCom but as it was made for children they had to box it up and make simpler.
And they’re also glass cannons because they don’t have enough HP to survive even 1 shot from a late-game weapon regardless of the armour they are wearing. Put a squad of Rookies up against a pod of Mutons or Advent backed up by a Sectopod (or even an android for that matter), and they’re likely to get smeared all over the map.
Give an NJ Defender to a Rookie in PP and he can still do some serious damage. Give him or her a Synedrion Sniper rifle, and they can take down a Crabbie in a couple of shots and contribute just as well to the takedown of a Chiron as anyone else on the map. I have a Tech with a shotgun who joined my A-Squad at Lvl.1 to act as the maintenance guy for the vehicle. He’s now Lvl.5, but even at Lvl.1 he was driving up to Sirens, popping out of the back of the van, shotgunning her in the head and popping back into the van again. That’s no different to what my Assaults or Heavies do with the same weapons.
If you think weapons in PP are irrelevant I have to think you’re not using them right. Like the skills sandbox, they work together as part of the team: Athenas to slow the Nasties down, Sniper rifles to take out key locations at range, grenades etc to shred armour, Assault Rifles to exploit the holes created by the shredders/armour killers, and shotguns and HMGs to inflict the coup-de-grace.
Of course rookies are a crucial part of these games, because if you’re not save scumming you are bound to take casualties. But a Rookie in XCOM is a useless deadweight who hangs around at the back with the medkits hoping not to get shot at until they get to Lvl 3 or 4, when they start being able to participate. That’s no different to PP.
Please keep this conversation civil. It’s only a game, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
While Voland is perfectly capable of defending himself without my help, to accuse him of saying that Xcom is bad, when he has gone on record multiple times saying that he likes xcom but appreciates the differences between PP and xcom is simply trolling him because he disagrees with you.
To anyone engaging me on this thread, please be aware that I have a ton of work to do, so I won’t be replying any time soon.
Rookies means rookies. Team composed of lvl.1 soldiers equiped with the best weapons and armour you can get. So no “marked for death” or “frenzy” or whatever.
…sound like how new players play this game. Vehicles? Playing level 7 guys the same way as level 1?
Don’t want to be rude, but I don’t think you know how this game works. What you are explaining is viable only in situation where you don’t chain abilities and if you are not doing that then you are either a noob that doesn’t know how they work or simply making the game harder for you for some role-play purposes.
Why people keep bringing up XCom into this? XCom is a well made game in technical aspect but it’s game design is just full of compromises between systems. It’s not a well designed TBT from ground up, it’s a game that has a number of fundamental issues that come from a certain commercial goals, like make it in accessible to wide audience, having short turns, being able to play it fast on controller, multiplayer support and etc. Its no way a good reference or some sort of gold standard for most of the mechanics. You are not making a good argument by comparing PP to something that doesn’t have a distinct quality in design. Let’s use Bad Rats as a base line, then PP is indeed masterpiece
Agree, but why does that matter? The meta of the game is alpha-beta strike, loosing some noob after alpha strike is not a big deal. Moreover, let’s do the same experiment but in reverse, take your alpha team and give them all tier 1 weapons/armor against the same enemies - they will suck, there won’t be alpha-beta strikes as they won’t be able to ditch out enough damage per round. Maybe they will survive.
This says more about how XCom is balanced to push both R&D and soldier training but emphasize soldier training more so you develop attachment to characters and don’t get sad loosing them.
Let’s take Xenonauts as modern example of old X-Com. A noob team in top gear is a serious danger to enemy. They will have some problems but this doesn’t flip the game on it’s head from being a cakewalk to a save-scamming challenge. Because research matters in general more than development of soldiers, because game expect you to loose most of your soldiers.
How does PP compares to this^? It doesn’t, there is no progression in R&D. The only progression is gathering resource to print more armor/guns and train soldiers to their full OP potential. I can bring a rookie into an alpha team in both X-Com and XCom and they will be able to catch up with a team, they won’t be as useful but not useless. In PP I would have to abandon using jet packs or dash in order for rookie to be even remotely close to the rest of the team.
Heh, I never claimed to be any good at these games, I just like playing them… 
But seriously, I’m on record all over these forums arguing that the current chain combos are too OP and suggesting constructive ways of toning them down. I’m also on record as stating that I deliberately don’t use what I consider to be the most OP exploitations of the system as it currently stands - and that vehicles aren’t quite as useless as everyone makes them out to be (though tbh I only use them in conjunction with Sheepy’s Unlimited Deployment mod, as they really aren’t worth 3 slots in a 6 or 8-slot team).
Yes, PP is unbalanced. Yes PP is frankly broken in its current configuration - any game that allows you to end a mission on Turn 1 by exploiting the system is broken in my book. So I don’t play it like that. I play it the way I ultimately hope it will be once the devs have taken on board all of our feedback and rebalanced the game so that you can’t Dash or Jet-Jump right across the board one-shotting everything in sight and recharging your WP as you go.
If they don’t, then ultimately I shall put this aside and go play something that is less about Superheroes running rampant and more about smart, challenging tactical play. But I think there’s enough potential in this game to keep playtesting it, keep feeding back, keep plugging away until the devs recognise (as they have) that eg. Dash needs an AP cost to make it less of a teleport, or RB needs a nerf to stop Snipers one-shotting a Scylla on the other side of the map.
And I (and others) keep referring to XCOM because people who don’t like this game keep comparing it to XCOM. Which is fair enough, as it was billed in people’s minds as its ‘spiritual successor’. But just because it’s the spiritual successor to X- or XCOM doesn’t mean it has to slavishly follow everything it, or JA2 or Xenonauts or Invisble Inc or whatever your particular flavour of the month does ‘better’ than this. If this game sucks so much in comparison to those, go play them instead. PP is its own beast, trying to do something different and to be taken on its own merits, and I for one hope that once it’s properly balanced it will be an even more interesting and challenging game to play that it currently is at the moment.
My point is that classes make for distinct builds, and the flexibility in PP when mixing classes and third row skills makes for builds that are very distinct from each other. This is the freedom I was referring to - the freedom to make distinct builds, which can in turn fill different roles.
And your argument was why have classes at all when in a classless system a soldier can have any role just by giving him a different gear. So I (naturally) assumed you don’t like class systems, to which you replied that you just don’t like the one in PP.
I’m sorry, but this shows you take a very constraining view on the subject and one that just doesn’t hold to an elemental scrutiny of reality: in PP there are distinct builds even within each class depending on the level of Strength, Willpower and Speed, the class abilities and the third row abilities chosen. It’s a noob mistake to pick all the class skills, or even cross classes immediately at level 4. Sometimes it’s better to invest in skill points and third row skills, and as a rule it is not a good idea to have all the class skills at level 7.
IMO, the problem is you are picking the wrong comparisons, like when you point to D: OS as a good class system opposed to a bad class system in PP. You are not comparing oranges to oranges. The requirements of an RPG when it comes to character building are completely different from those of a TBT game. The only thing they have in common is that the combat is turn based.
My point when I criticize mechanics in other games (many of them I like very much, BTW) is that all mechanics come at some price, and I do it because you keep bringing up these mechanics as examples of what should have been done with PP instead.
Anyway, I do enjoy this conversation but I have to start working on my Necromunda gang, so might take me a while to get back.
So you are sending a squad of lvl 1 rookies on a mission past midgame? Do you do that in XCom, or Firaxis XCom?
In any case, for 1 chiron I would say 1 turn and 2, max 3 rookies. A lot depends on position and gear. The head is unarmored so you can take it down with basic AR even, but a shotgun blast is better.
So you are playing the game in a way how YOU think it should be and arguing with people as to how this game actually works… yeah, I’m out of this fragment of discussion.
Some people expected this to be closer to X-Com, others expected an XCom but with ballistics. Since I’ve played it from BB1 I saw it as modernized and streamline X-Com with a refreshing setting and different take on strategic operations. It was doing it’s own thing and it was fun. But that is long gone, whatever innovation this game was trying to deliver is lost in abyss of it’s own design nightmare. Trying to do something different for a sake of being different is what created Phantom Doctrine…
I do play other games, I don’t see a reason to spend time on PP for at least a year. When it gets redesigned, not just crash fixed, I might return to it.
A freedom to select some random crap like melee proficiency on a sniper? Can you give us some non-hypothetical examples of such distinct builds.
This doesn’t follow order of discussion. You made a statement that you don’t know any TBT that has flexibility in building characters and that makes PP unique. I’ve just pointed out that this is not the case. For some reason from this you assumed that I don’t like classes.
A practical example of this?
Well, JA2 is an RPG too, didt you know that? I’m comparing game systems not games. The class system in D:OS is reinforced by each class presenting a character from a different cast/race/ideology/organization/culture. On top of that it organizes hundreds of passive and active skills. It being an RPG has nothing to do with this particular aspect.
So please elaborate of these differences in requirements between RPG and TBT, really want to hear it.
Ehhh, most of your criticisms was “I was playing it for hours and it was boring”, " its not my cup of tea", “it’s a great game but I prefer chess”… So far your main argument in defense of PP is that you like it, great, I’m happy for you.