Jeez. I reached 20% on the delirium meter, and all hell broke loose (After about 25-ish hours of gameplay).
Suddenly, Pandorans were attacking 5-8 havens at once.
My fabrication plant, unbeknownst to me, turned itself off, so nothing was being built. I realized it when I began to run low on weapons and ammo.
And literally every mission is now High or Extreme threat. Extreme threat is about 8 out of every 10 missions now. This game is unplayable. Its difficulty scaling is truly broken. At first, things were easy enough. I lost a soldier here and there. I didn’t reload saves to avoid it because I knew how the scaling was “supposed” to work. But around that 20% mark, I became unable to win a mission without losing at least 1 of my soldiers. And still the game scaled it up even harder with each mission.
At the absolute least, it should scale reasonably, rather than being pretty darn easy for 2 dozen missions, and then suddenly be insanely difficult for the next mission and every one after that. There was nothing subtle or gradual about this change in difficulty.
It takes my entire squad to focus fire on a single arthron to destroy it. I unfortunately had 5 assault guys before realizing how bad they are at later, more armored variants of Pandorans. I am also trying to get penetrating weapons, but the fabrication plant, as I mentioned, just decided to stop working, and those weapons are days away. Meanwhile, I am doing about 50 damage at most per person on an arthron.
Speaking of brokenly overpowered enemies, the arthrons with a grenade launcher and machine gun are insanely broken with how overpowered they are. Their return fire decimates everything, making my entire squad, level 7’s (mixed with low levels from all the dead soldiers), nearly dead after taking out a single arthron because of the return fire. Next, the grenade launcher decimates my troops even more.
BLEEDING. Bleeding is so awful. It happens way too much, and too easily. 10 damage, but 20 bleeding inflicted? Wow. But virtually every other hit from the grenade launcher or arthron machine gun inflicts bleeding on my troops, no matter how much damage it deals in the process.
Scylla are insanely easy to take down compared to a small squad of arthrons. Essentially, the only enemy in the game I am particularly afraid of is this machine gun/grenade launcher variants with tons of armor. Well, maybe the mortar chiron too, since they can repeatedly hit you from anywhere, inflicting bleeding and damaging weapons with every hit.
So with so many attacks on havens occurring at once. I cannot get the time to heal my squads (two manticores full) before 5 more havens fall. And then I run out and defend a haven, only to lose a few more soldiers. It just keeps skyrocketing in difficulty.
And the delirium percentage has gone from 20-35% in a matter of 2 days in game time because of this insanity.
I am an XCOM veteran. I played that on the highest difficulties, and would let my soldiers die instead of reloading saves. It was a challenge. But nothing XCOM throws at you is as overpowered and broken as what Phoenix Point throws at me after a few hours of play on the normal difficulty setting. And there is a difference between a fun difficult game (where you have to really think and strategize to overcome) and an un-fun difficult game (where the difficulty is contrived and seems like bad balancing and bugs rather than a clever way of upping the anty).
I am probably going to have to stop playing here and wait for this to get fixed. Some people are certainly going to like it. And some people would play this game making circles around me - people who are much better than me at this game and XCOM. If you want this kind of difficulty, play on a harder difficulty setting. Don’t tell me that easy and normal difficulties should be nearly impossible for good XCOM players to make progress and have fun.
