It was long in development when XCom came-out. I don’t know how much influence there where. On top of that it’s based on an actual board game.
Last night I experimented with sniper/heavy armed with cannon and I don’t see it as a one fit all solution. Yes, he has great damage output at a distance, but he has to be positioned, and as he doesn’t have dash he usually can’t fire on the first turn. A sniper/assault has more mobility with dash, but as powerful as the sniper rifle is, he can’t one shot-kill (without rage, and with rage he can’t reload), so he can basically kill one, two max if lucky with pistol.
My shotgun assault is a much better damage dealer, he can sometimes one shot kill, position himself anywhere on the map and have reserves to run away afterwards, but he works much better with support (someone softening up the targets, ideally GL, and a couple of rallies for an extra shot).
Regarding abilities and ballistics, IMO as a design choice they do work together. Ballistics force you into using abilities, abilities run on willpower, willpower is a limited resource (until I find out otherwise). As I said before, PP is a board game with ballistics. It can be tweaked, balanced, refined in many ways to make it better, but the design itself is sound.
Anyway, I will reserve any further opinions until l finish the game.
Happy holidays!
In an Easy play (it’s still quite challenging short sight point of view, perhaps not much at campaign level), the game thrown at me ton of snipers, and many special sniper skills, I ended use some squad with like 4 snipers, for sure it’s not solving anything, I hadn’t any burst, and it wasn’t trivial, but it’s pretty different.
It’s a core design error of the game not not have put more thought on balances between shorter range and longer range.
A simple example, enemies counter, at longer range you’ll make it quite weaker, at shorter range you’ll make it stronger (against you). And there’s ton of elements like that as many dangerous shorter range enemy skills, enemies in general better setup against shorter range or less well setup against longer range, more.
I think the base balance was AP attack costs, but then skills more or less broke it and there’s no general thought on that aspect.
But I’ll admit the game is complex, and I don’t know what design spirit dev target. For example, is dev except very optimized builds at Normal and even at Easy, or is it more classic, and plenty builds will work well enough until extreme difficulty levels?
Not a bad game, but too many game crashes and game breaking bugs that can’t be avoided
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A masterpiece needs no work to be done and no patches at all…if you think that is where PP is now…well its just not.
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Regarding the hit chances - I think the people who “want to see the hit chance” don’t understand how PP does it. If they knew that it was 100% inside the big circle and 50% inside the small, then they would get it and the question “what is my hit chance” becomes redundant.
The game might even tell you how the system works via the tutorials - I played through them once - but I can’t remember and I’m guessing it’s the same for many others.
I’m enjoying PP for the most part but it is missing something that I forget to do in my own games and that is… making it blindingly obvious to the player about what is going on.
A lot of people are used to Firaxis’ XCOM where the information is in your face most of the time (In fact I believe some of the info was removed during play testing - like line of sight arcs/firing circles).
PP doesn’t need “here’s your hit chance” it needs a “100% chance to land in big circle, 50% in small” in text all the time, then people will get it. It doesn’t explain other things either. I have to google about Mutagen because the game doesn’t tell how I’m supposed to be using it for example.
Obviously the Phoenixpedia needs some TLC, but I think a lot of people’s misunderstandings would dissolve if the game catered more to the brain dead (not insulting anybody - I class myself in that category too).
I’ve also played XCOM since Ufo Defence and I’m pumped to play PP. I just wanna see it take its rightful perch rather than being shot down for things that are fixable.
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Except that it can be more complex than it seems. The typical case is a hole in your “full” circle, and eventually there’s few bugs around that for parts too far back from the aimed part and that will be managed as holes.
I still wonder if once the bugs are sorted it wouldn’t be still much better to not show a basic percentage chance to hit something. You don’t see a hole in center or on some border, your fault, it trivialize less the system. It’s a difficulty aspect that wouldn’t be good to remove.
At some points hand guiding remove learning and depth, and it’s not just comfort improvement.
Yeah, that’s my feeling too.
I started this thread when I had clocked somewhere under 20 hours. Now at 100 hours I have to admit that calling it a masterpiece is a bit of an exaggeration 
, but I was very impressed by its mechanics and gameplay.
It is a great game that does something new and I think the fundamentals are solid, despite the many issues that have to be yet addressed. At this point IMO it is clear that the balance issues will be resolved, it’s only a question of how and if the solutions will manage to please all, or most of the players.
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As many posts quoted it already, ok no way a masterpiece yet, but a clear potential to become one, and no way any game half baked or Early Access have this potential, at reverse it’s very rare.
I’d say either dev will bankrupt, either it will be a masterpiece at worse those type of masterpiece not fully polished at level of an AAA game project that’s been achieved smoothly.
From low activity on forums, reddit etc it does not seem like a lot of people are playing. I hope Snapshot have enough funding reserves to survive the botched release.
I said I would be back once I finished the game and I finally did - more than 120 hours, 2 patches and 3 starts later.
In brief, PP is a great game. I will not insist on calling it “a masterpiece” to avoid courting further semantic controversy and because there is still plenty of work to do, as the devs themselves acknowledge.
At its heart, I think PP is a miniatures game with real (not necessarily realistic) ballistics.
As I myself have only recently become interested in miniatures and I have only played Necromunda so far, it’s not like I can offer a thorough analysis on the differences & similarities, but the basic premise is simple: you mix and match attributes, gear and skills of the soldiers in the squad and send them off to fight it out with someone or something in a diorama.
It’s a crude oversimplification (e.g. the RNG based approach to everything in Necromunda is as far from PP’s as it can be), but it shows that there are 2 distinct funs to be had: the kitting out of the squad and the battle itself. And it’s not hard to see that problems of metagaming and balance are bound to arise. It comes with the territory - the more freedom the player has when kitting out the squad, the more likely this is to happen.
It’s not that metagaming is good, or bad; it’s a case of you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Another way to see it is that meta is the currency your pay for the freedom your enjoy in kitting out your squad. Ultimately, there has to be a balancing act, and I’m certain that a balance will be reached one way or another.
Perhaps some reality or sanity checks will be put in place, or maybe just individual skills attributes, gear, etc. will be replaced/tweaked. Also, new enemies will certainly be added and I hope that more variations of the existing ones will be implemented, hopefully in a reactive manner to each player’s style (the promised “Pandoran evolution”).
A year from now PP will be a much better game. What I don’t see happening is it becoming a different game and that will naturally continue to disappoint and upset some players.
This topic is more suitable to answer this:
I would say, that there is no AI and decision making is terrible. For example, Firaxis’s XCOM isn’t military simulator, but the AI actively looks for cover while trying to flank your soldiers. Compare it to PP, where enemies are more likely to shot before move (or don’t move at all). They shot when it doesn’t make sense. Example? They could move like 5 tiles forward to completly flank a soldier but instead AI decide to stay in the open and put a burst that mostly hits poor cover. It doesn’t have to be milsim to make sense.
Difficulty if the game comes from features that are complementary to poor AI. Bullet sponges, pumping numbers of enemies (quantity over quality), metagame features like RF to punish you for shoting. This isn’t matter of semantic. The only thing this game provides over the games we already have is ballistic shoting system. Everything else is just bad (comparing with other games, as thats relatively bad, no bad bad per se)
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FXcom is a much simpler game, and the decision making of the AI is further simplified by the “pod activation” mechanic.
Again, however suboptimal the decision making by the AI in PP, most players are complaining about how difficult the game is.
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Once pods are triggered, the AI keeps looking for cover and keeps looking for better position in upcoming turns. Even fall back in case of high cassulties. Noone liked pods mechanic, but that’s tiny part of AI behaviour. With or without pods, the PP decision making is just terrible.
Oh, I’ve pointed out some of difficulty sources. They’re there because AI is shitty, not because they’re fun.
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LOL, you can’t be serious. Have you thought about the decision making tree for the enemies in F XCom? They have very limited options compared to those in PP, options that are even further limited by the pod mechanic, the purpose of which is to disguise how bad the AI is. Look at the crazy stuff the Chosen - not subject to the pod activation mechanic - do.
So, yeah, once the pod is activated the Advent will try to stay in tiles marked as cover and get to tiles marked XComs not in cover and shot them from there, having only two actions to consider. Yep, brilliant.
Meanwhile, in PP enemies have 4 discrete APs to spend and they are not subject to activation, and there are no “tiles in cover” or “tiles where opponent is flanked”, as in F Xcom2. So all things considered they do pretty well, the Pandas better than human opponents, not terrible by any semantic stretch. Terrible AI is where the enemy stays stills and waits to be shot at. The only time I have seen Pandas stay still and go into overwatch is when by moving they couldn’t get a good shot, so they chose to stay put to avoid getting in range of PP soldiers, which is not a bad choice considering their abilities and their real capacity to inflict damage (and they do run away from the battlefield when they get seriously hurt, BTW).
And yet even with that most players find the difficulty too hard, and the one ability that is meant to curb first-turn alpha striking (return fire) gets blasted as “unfair”.
LOL
Look, when you say PP is unrealistic, or one mechanic, or other looks odd, or something like that, I can agree, or agree to disagree, but if you are trying to make the point that the AI in PP is terrible (at the same time as you make the point that the game is too difficult because one enemy type has an ability that potentially any of PPs soldiers can have), and then compare it to the AI in a game where the decision making tree is not much more complex than that required not to be beaten at tic tac toe… Well, to the I really don’t know what to say.
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I have seen them stand in the open and taking two shots if that means they can take one of your guys out. Which is smart because if they can kill even one of your soldiers per mission you will lose the campaign. They even seem to concentrate their damage output as a team to achieve that. Especially in VIP extraction missions where killing one person is enough for them to win the mission.
They baffle me. They’re capable of this and all that V said above and yet I’ve seen more than one of them blow themselves up by point blank grenading a fucking barrel of apples. GG crabbo. Even funnier when they survive and just blow their own grenade arm off.
4 discrete AP and all AI cares is if there’s LoS, without care of target exposure. Brilliant alghoritm. 
It isn’t rocket science to calculate angle relative to cover on the way of LoS and exposure of two points to compare. It isn’t even heavy calculation as it isn’t realtime, and can be done for a number of points in range of X AP movement. XCom does that, just turn on second wave angle flanking and see how aliens move to get better shot, with or without full flanking bonus.
Is XCom simplified because of percentage to hit? Sure it is. But aliens behaviour feels far more organic than PPs stand “still and shot because there’s foot exposed”. And this behaviour is notorious.
Being capable of killing one soldier per mission isn’t proof of smart AI and complex decision making doing great job. Even suicide zerg rush has a statistical potential of doing so, and its abusement of game mechanics knowledge. Increase recruitment rate and reduce its cost, things pandorans shouldn’t have knowledge of, and tactic is useless. Theres nothing smart here.
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Right, because that’s what you do when you move your soldiers. Because when looking for a tile to move to, you don’t just consider whether there is LOS, you do a quick calculation on exposure from that point, taking into account position of the soldier’s weapon relative to the target, naturally.
So now the AI is dumb because instead of simulating the individual self preservation instinct of each and every crustacean, it actually attempts to win the game, taking advantage of the forbidden knowledge that PPs resources are limited.
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It doesn’t attempt to “win a game” it just tries too hard to kill one guy in your team. This behavior is very meta and can be even abused. Maybe it doesn’t bother you personally but it is a problem for other players.