Shots too random

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
103

Both posts were back to back. Which essentially means they were the same post but you decided to split it into two parts. Maybe for clarity, maybe you posted one and then came up with more points right after, who knows? Either way you asserted that you were just giving a “constructive suggestion”, but insulting people you don’t know because you’re frustrated at people having a different point of view is not constructive, nor is it a suggestion.
As you say, a forum is a place to discuss opinions. If we disagree, fine. If you call someone an idiot, that’s not fine. Argue points, don’t insult people.

I get what angle you’re coming from. Make the board entirely fair, right? Aliens have a chance to hit and you have a chance to hit. You can kill them in one hit and they can kill you in one hit. Seems fair right? Well, it’s not because there are about 3 times as many enemies. So how is that fair? If you kill one for one you’ll lose by miles.
The way to balance it is by making the player’s characters more powerful. Give them more options, more health, advantages tactically, etc.
So, as you can see. It’s not just a tantrum about aliens being able to hit me as often as I can hit them. It’s about aliens being able to hit me as often as I can hit them while there are 3 times more aliens than my soldiers. Not to even mention the boss, which is WAY beyond the capabilities of any of the player units.
One of the other big arguments going on, or that went on earlier at least, is that crab men had return fire and how it felt unfair since there were more crab men and they had unlimited ammo. If you think that’s fair then I think it’s you who has the wrong idea of what ‘fair’ is.

Like I said, if you want to have unfair odds where everything is equal between aliens and your soldiers while still being outnumbered then make that the hardcore difficulty. I don’t mind that there are people that want a harsher game. Just don’t make the game that unfair for normal players.

You can try to project a character onto me if you want. It’s just a straw-man fallacy though. You assume I act and think a certain way because you think I’m wrong. Perhaps it’s you that’s arrogant. Perhaps you’re wrong. Perhaps you haven’t considered all the aspects that add together to make a balanced game.

2 Likes
104

Except the second post is not a continuation of the first so go back and re read them. The second post was a suggestion for how to make outlying possibilities rare by moving from a linear distribution… while the first post was an argument against making changes. Lifting parts of sentences to make a person appear to be saying something else, on the other hand is very definitely deceptive.

The problem at hand, at its core, is that the game is too difficult for you and that’s fixable very simply with a difficulty level selection screen and not by changing the underlying mechanics in the game altogether. But that’s not what you’re asking for. Until you and others like you complaining about soldier deaths, etc, as though they are not supposed to happen at all, realise this simple truth I’ll stick by what i said: you and others like you are idiots. What you should be asking for is really an easy mode with fewer aliens on it and so forth, not changing the game altogether and ruining the experience for people who like it the way it is.

1 Like
105

If you think that insulting people is acceptable in any context then you’re completely missing the point. My quotations weren’t designed to make you look like you were saying something you weren’t saying. They were sarcastically juxtaposed to show that your intentions (making a constructive suggestion) were being subverted by your needlessly insulting attitude.
The posts are related because you talk about risk management at the end of the first post but then continue with that theme in the second post, just focusing it on the actual topic of this thread: aiming and accuracy.

There’s a difference between a game being too difficult for an individual and the game being unbalanced. A difficult game is a winnable game, it just takes better play to win it. In it’s current state the game can, in a number of situations be unwinnable, due to a lack of resources, your soldiers missing too many times, etc.
For example, in the first mission I played not a single resupply chest spawned. This meant that I was left with only my starting ammo and explosives. Ultimately meaning that the queen couldn’t be killed at the end of the level since my soldiers ran out of ammo/grenades before I could do enough damage to her.
This shows that having situations too random while having limited resources can cause the game to be unbalanced, not just difficult.

Also, did you even read the part where I said

Cause that’s literally me saying that difficulty options would allow you to play the unfair game you want to play while the rest of us can play a normal game in which winning is always possible with good tactical gameplay.

You clearly didn’t read any of our other posts either where we said things like

You can see from this that we’re not

We’re instead just highlighting when it should be appropriate for soldiers to die and when it isn’t appropriate for soldiers to die.

By calling people idiots you’re not helping your argument. You’re just making yourself look frustrated and angry. It only makes you look worse and people aren’t going to bother listening to you if you can’t talk about issues without insulting everyone that disagrees with you.
Also, pretty sure it’s in the forum rules that you’re not to insult people. So maybe stop before a mod spots your comments and does something about it.

2 Likes
106

I call a spade a spade and I’m not afraid of offending you or anyone else that makes silly arguments from emotion and tries to post rationalise them to make them sound logical. Deal with it. None of this actually changes the facts that (a) you find the game too difficult or you wouldn’t be complaining in the first place and (b) the best way to fix the difficulty of the game for you and others like you is to have an easy mode and lastly that © the worse possible way to fix this situation is to change the game mechanics because this affects everyone that ever plays the game. Back to my second post: Personally, the only change that I think is really possible here, for the devs to make without imapacting the mechanics of the game, is to switch to a bell curve probability distribution. This would at least make people complaining about random numbers falling the wrong way for them feel a bit happier because it would pull the rolls towards the average result.

However I see not everyone would like that so it would appear that the devs are between a rock and a hard place; people who complain when /anything/ doesn’t go their way (chance is a coin toss, “but it didn’t come up heads, the coin is unfair, the coin is cheating!”) and the rest of us who enjoy (and rise to) a challenge and understand the interplay of the various aspects of the game and what it is modelling. It’s kind of why we play these games, you must understand, its to succeed /despite the odds/. Our expectations are that we will take losses. We do not moan about missed shots on forums. It’s ludicrous that people are doing this to the rest of us. Honestly the best thing you can do is ask for an easy mode where the kid gloves are on.

1 Like
107

Clearly you have this erroneous idea that anyone that complains only complains because they find the game too hard. Case and point, I didn’t find the game too difficult. I beat whatever level I was playing every time after that first one. Sometimes I won easily where there were a small number of mooks and I collected lots of grenades from the resupply packs. Other times it was much harder and I lost a couple of soldiers. My point isn’t that it’s too difficult. My point is that it’s too random.

If you want true randomness in the final game then go get mods for it. I, and many others, want the developers to create a balanced game that can be played with more than luck. Otherwise we may as well just sit and toss coins, celebrating every time it comes up heads and booing when it comes up tails.

You say you want a challenge and it’s your “understanding of the interplay of various aspects of the game” that’ll let you succeed despite the odds, but i’d like to see you succeed when your heavy has his right arm disabled immediately, your assault troopers waste all their ammo on reaction fire that misses every time, and you can’t find any re-supply chests. Good luck killing enemies with no weapons. Even if you use your sniper, alone he won’t be much good. No movement space, very squishy, limited ammo. You still wouldn’t stand a chance against the queen, even if you beat the mooks.
Sure, you could retreat, save your guys, but it’s still an automatic loss. There’s no game there if you can just lose with no ability to control the outcome.

2 Likes
108

You are mixing up balance with things going your way. When things do not go your way, you claim they are unbalanced. But when the same ruleset is producing events that go your way, I dont see you complaining on the forums that they shouldnt have. Funny that isn’t it. I put to you that this is not about balance at all, but about whether you’re winning or losing.

1 Like
109

Let’s see if I can steer this thread back from…wherever it’s been. With a buttload of text.

Let’s talk game states, solutions, and uncertainty.

A game can either be solvable or unsolvable. A solvable game (e.g. Chess, Tic-Tac-Toe) is one with fixed game states and by its nature is either unwinnable or is always winnable by following an algorithm to a guaranteed win state; this means that once a player achieves what they know is a solution to the game, the other player(s) is powerless and playing the rest of the game is a formality. An unsolvable game (e.g. Poker, the XCom franchise) is one with elements that make a perfect solution impossible; the two dominant examples are imperfect outcomes (probability) and imperfect information. An unsolvable game by its nature can only achieve a guaranteed win game state by marginalizing the imperfect elements to total irrelevance, in essence rendering the game solvable; an example of this is a Magic: the Gathering standard game where one player assess the board state and the opponent’s hand size to know whether it is possible for the opponent to prevent a loss with any combination of standard format cards they might have or top-deck.

Now, let’s apply this to Phoenix Point. It includes both imperfect outcomes (accuracy and armor shred randomness) and imperfect information (line of sight blockers and eventually fog of war); we can agree that it’s an unsolvable game. So, there are two possible ways the player can lose their soldiers: firstly, an alien the player is aware of, that is capable of performing an action the player is aware of that can potentially kill the soldier (no matter how unlikely), performs that action and succeeds; secondly, an alien can be unknown to the player or use an unknown ability and its unaccounted for actions result in the death of the soldier. Without one of those things, your soldiers in that game state cannot possibly be killed by the aliens, rationally speaking.

Now, back to the main topic which is ‘amount’ of randomness, which more accurately needs to either refer to number of random events or to possible outcomes and the probability of those outcomes; my guess is that the majority of people are referring to the latter. My understanding is that some players are against limb crippling/healthy soldier deaths being possible in all game states where an alien can attack, while others are against the probability of crippled limbs/healthy soldier deaths when they are given a chance to occur.

For the former, the only alternative I see is making it impossible up until a certain game state where the soldier is damaged enough to ‘be at lethal’. In order to not reduce the game’s difficulty, the enemies one way or another need to become harder to defeat as well, which makes losing limbs/soldiers more punishing when they do happen. It also provides the player with a definite comfort zone, which historically has also been looked down upon in the XCom franchise with gameplay elements such as decrease in campaign difficulty over time and overwatch spam. The player’s overall gameplay experience becomes more binary.

The latter is a matter of subjectivity; everyone has a different idea of ideal probabilities and the bulk of that simply comes down to simple taste (and I’d bet the developers’ against anyone else’s). One can fall back on allegory and edge cases to argue theirs while still allowing for randomness fundamentally, but at the end of the day that’s granting that something is possible and finding its actual happening unacceptable.

Once Phoenix Point’s further in development I am sure the increase in player agency from additional systems being added and the adjustment of game values for balancing will find more people in their happy medium. With that being said, I don’t see the need to fundamentally change the current systems, but then again I enjoy unsolvable games over solvable ones exactly for their thrill of uncertainty.

3 Likes
110

Again, you’re making massive assumptions. As I’ve said many times, it’s not the enemies winning that’s the problem, it’s the sheer randomness that can prevent you from winning or make it trivial. For example, the scope of randomness for the number of enemies that spawn (I think it ranged from 6-12 or so in the first build) and the randomness for the number of supply caches that spawn (anywhere between 0 and 12 or so) could mean you were fighting 12 aliens and a queen with almost no supplies, or 6 aliens and a queen with more supplies than you’d ever need. It needs restrictions so that it’s balanced and players don’t get shafted or given a free pass by the occasional bad mission setup.

@Arc What you’re saying makes total sense. However it’s not a dichotomy. You can have a mix of rigid rules and random chance that provides a solvable game while avoiding a set solution. That is ultimately the goal for a game like Phoenix Point, since it’s not a fun game if it’ll all simply down to luck, but it’s also not a very fun game if it has a ‘fix-all’ solution.

The reason I started this thread is because I felt the soldiers were far too inaccurate. I don’t want them to be perfectly accurate because then it loses the risk factor, which makes the game more exciting and tense. However, I would like to see the accuracy improved a lot. Perhaps reducing the circle sizes by 1/3. Either that or making the centre yellow circle smaller while leaving the red circle the same size, since this would allow a lot of spread but would also mean the shots in the yellow circle’s 50% would be more on target.

You also have to remember that it’s got a randomised set-up. In chess you always start from the same start point. In Phoenix Point you have a random map layout, random amounts of enemies (hopefully less random in the final game than it is now) and random amounts of supply caches (again, hopefully less random). So that itself helps remove any ‘fix-all’ solution.

As for limb damage, I wouldn’t like to see this go. I would like to see it changed a bit. Instead of disabling weapons it would be better to make them less accurate, and maybe cost willpower to use. Bearing in mind that there’ll be an engineer in the final game that is able to repair injured limbs.

So, ultimately I think we agree the game wouldn’t be as good without some element of chance, and you’re right in saying that it mostly comes down to a matter of taste. I don’t want soldiers to be able to die instantly when having played a perfect tactical game. Other people might want their soldiers to die easily. I don’t know how they wouldn’t find that frustrating but fair enough, make that the hard difficulty setting. Xcom did that well with their ‘classic’ setting, and then they had another harder one after that too.

2 Likes
111

Dude, the build is just an extremely early demo. Unstable Voltage himself said they haven’t even looked for balance since this is way too early. The final game will have much less RNG, and most things will depend on your decisions in the strategical lager. Julian himself said in an interview that ayys will have a set number of deployment points for each mission depending on how well they are doing. Why people keep mentioning the backer build like it’s the finished game?

2 Likes
112

That’s good to hear. :slight_smile:
Really, we’re not treating the backer build as the finished game. We’re giving feedback on the backer build, as this forum is designed for. Then suggesting what we think would be good improvements to consider for the final build.

1 Like
113

Bingo!

That’s exactly what I’m doing with my troops at the moment in Xenonauts - As opposed to staying in heavy cover where I know that there is still a small percentage chance that they can be shot and killed.

A small percentage, even a 1% of death still means that you can have somebody die. As long as that cuts both ways, I’m absolutely fine with it. It’s bad luck for me if it happens to one of my guys, and bad luck for the aliens if one of my 1% pot shots from the pistol wielding guy happens to kill them.

It is absolutely fair either way to experience a low probability of death if you leave a solider in a position when they have a chance of that low probability of death, just as it is fair to have a low probability chance of killing your opponent when they do. I don’t think the player should be in any way entitled to mitigation against low probabilities of death any more than the opposition should be.

1 Like
114

This isn’t actually a guaranteed way to not get a soldier killed. Aliens can still flank. If one moves forward enough to get a line of sight on you soldier another could use grenades to blow open the wall, then more could shoot them and your soldier might die.
Plus there’s other disadvantages, like breaking your own line of sight. No return fire from your assaults, no overwatch. You can’t even see what the enemy does during their turn since you can’t see them, which makes it easier for them to flank you next turn. Plus it means you have to use an extra AP to move into line of sight before firing, which might prevent you from doing more with your turn afterward.

What I would prefer to see is enemies with limited ammo, and because of that the coding to pick reasonable targets. So they don’t just take pot-shots at 10% chances to hit because it would be a waste of ammo. Players will pretty much never take a shot with less than 20% chance to hit, simply because it’s such a waste of ammo and AP. Enemies just fire way though, and that’s what leaves room for these very unlucky moments. An enemy really shouldn’t even bother trying to hit someone in full cover.

1 Like
115

[quote=“Duskmare, post:114, topic:557”]
This isn’t actually a guaranteed way to not get a soldier killed. Aliens can still flank. If one moves forward enough to get a line of sight on you soldier another could use grenades to blow open the wall, then more could shoot them and your soldier might die.[/quote]

If an alien flanks then they’re regaining line of sight.

If they’re blowing holes in walls with grenades then they’re playing really smart - That is something which I would really like to see, and in fact given what we’re experiencing already with the Crab Queen’s behaviour in PP I think it’s quite likely that some aliens will behave in this way.

Both of these tactics would be as applicable to a situation where you’re behind full cover as much as completely out of sight. I fact, I would expect to happen more so in a situation that you’re only behind full cover if the alien can still see you whilst you’re behind that full cover, as in that situation the alien knows exactly what position to blow up or flank, whereas if they can’t see you, then they’re making use of guesswork, which as I say, would be pretty smart.

And that’s why, when in full cover, where you have the advantage of return fire etc, that you should then also experience some disadvantage, namely that you have a small percentage chance of being shot.

All players play differently, you might take a 20% shot, I will if the situation warrants it. I don’t think any of us on the forum can speak for what ‘players’ will do en mass.

I think the ideal for me regards enemy behaviour would be to see variation in how different creatures will act. Some species being more likely to take pot shots, others trying to close for a better shot, some prioritising suppression of the player (regardless of ‘to hit’ percentage’ in order to keep them pinned down for their comrades, some like you say throwing explosives at cover in order to remove it, others yet again staying out of the player’s LoS and/or attempting to flank. I think that variation makes for a more interesting game as a whole, and leads to the player having to switch up their own tactics.

Breaking that down further, I’d also like to see some random elements added to the behaviour of enemies so that they don’t always take the optimal solution to a situation. i.e. they take a shot from range even when they could have moved to a better position, they on occasion shoot at the wrong target, they can accidentally expose themselves, or they rush into a hail of overwatch even though doing so is suicide.

However, what I wouldn’t want to see is a game where the player can safely hide behind heavy cover with absolutely zero risk because they know that none of the enemies on the map will even attempt to shoot them, or in any other way flush them out of that position. The goes for any other given tactic, once a game has a solution in this way it, to me, becomes boring very very fast.

2 Likes
116

For your first point, I was simply pointing out that there’s not a way to 100% protect your soldiers, since you said breaking line of sight would make it impossible for the enemy to hurt your soldiers. Your points there are valid. Though I do question your play-style if you’ll take 20% chance shots. You might find yourself running out of ammo a lot in PP, hahaha.

Aliens using guesswork would be awful if done wrong and great if done right. It would be extremely hard to emulate though. It would be awful if aliens could just throw grenades that hit you most times when you’re out of their visual range.

That’s thinking of it the wrong way. There should be no disadvantage to positioning your soldier more tactically. The advantage is why you position them tactically after all. The better question is “what risks should still be applicable?”
If there are aliens close by then maybe one would land a grazing shot. So you can have a small chance to hit, but have it do reduced damage too, since your soldier’s vitals are covered by the wall.
You would also still be vulnerable to grenades and explosives if they came from the side. And your cover could be blown away if it’s weak. Grenades that land in front of the cover shouldn’t do damage to the soldier unless it breaks the cover. If they’re at an angle then they should do proportional damage depending on how shielded the soldier is from that angle.
Of course, aliens flanking can be another risk. High cover doesn’t defend at all from melee aliens since they come right up to your soldiers anyway.

There are plenty of ways for your soldiers to be injured fairly while in full cover. Pot shots that crit are not one of them.

I think we can. Considering that a player who takes 20% or above shots constantly will run out of ammo and lose the game, we can easily surmise that any intelligent player will almost never take 20% shots. The only time it would be appropriate to take a 20% shot would be if one of your soldiers is in immediate danger, you only have one guy left to attack, 20% is his best shot and the alien targeting your vulnerable troop has 1 or 2 bits of health left. This is a really rare situation and you honestly shouldn’t even get into it if you play tactically and don’t put your soldiers in harms way.
I mean, this is essentially just a “please save my guy” pot shot. Which will, most times, completely fail.

I like the idea of enemies with specific characteristics and randomised ‘personalities’. I suppose most of that randomised detrimental behaviour would pretty much be their panic options though.
It might also make certain enemy groups too easy to deal with. If they only take pot-shots, for example, then they’ll rarely hit and it’ll be possible to take them out with snipers without much risk.

So yeah, going back to the point, high cover shouldn’t make a soldier invincible or untargetable. It should definitely add both a hit chance penalty to the enemy and a defence bonus to the soldier, depending on what kind of attack they’re under.

1 Like
117

I didn’t say that breaking line of sight was a 100% way to prevent your soldiers from being hurt, and you made a valid point about grenades. I agreed with Vathar that breaking line of sight was the way to avoid being shot. This is as opposed to heavy cover where you still have a small percentage chance of being shot.

Regards my playstyle, I certainly don’t take all 20% shots, and I am ammo conscious - But I do take 20% shots when the situation warrants it, this is what I feel the AI should do, take 20% shots when it’s the right situation.

Re Aliens chucking grenades when they can’t see you, and I think we’re going on a tangent here, but I wouldn’t want to see them always doing that either, but if they’ve just seen you run behind an obstacle, then I don’t think it’s unreasonable to try it, it’s something that a player might do. It’s also not unreasonable if there’s a type of alien that can hear the player’s footsteps, or a type (maybe a boss) that simply goes berserk and starts lobbing incendiaries about when hit.

2 Likes
118

The thing with PP is that cover can’t give a defense bonus or shot penalty because that’s not how shooting in this game works. If this was the FiraXCOM games it could, but with the ray casting of shots you can’t reasonably make the shots less accurate. Likewise afaik the game doesn’t have crit chances for shots.

That said high cover is still extremely useful and imo better than breaking LOS. When breaking LOS you don’t know what the enemy is doing and they can even end up taking a better position in their attempt to regain LOS. Likewise you can’t use things like OW to try and control the enemy’s actions.

The potential drawback to cover in PP will more come from the animations. If the devs don’t get the idle animations right then it will leave too much of the target exposed and thus render the cover ineffective. Now they’ve already acknowledge this issue and are working to get them right but it is something that we will need to watch and test with these builds.

2 Likes
119

I think you’ve misunderstood my point there. You were putting forward that there are advantages to being behind full cover in comparison being completely out of sight. I was pointing out that if there are advantages as part of that comparison, there should also be disadvantages, the obvious one being that being behind full cover brings a higher risk of being shot, in comparison to being completely out of sight.

As for the type of injury you sustain when behind full cover, I think that anything goes. If you’re able to see aliens from behind full cover, then you’re presumably sticking out a part of your body which is potentially going to lead to a pretty serious injury should you get shot in it.

1 Like
120

If by intelligent you mean rational, then I think it’s an assumption itself to say that players will always make a rational move. Maybe the hardcore player who both knows the game and understands maths will, but normal players don’t play a perfect game, they will, on occasion, just make a move that they shouldn’t do if they had put more thought into things… on that basis alone there will be players that take 20% shots.

There’s plenty of reasons to take 20% shots, it’s a risk/reward calculation. Ammo and the danger your soldier(s) are factor, but so are others such HP of the enemy, killing power of that ammo, type of weapon being used, number of projectiles fired per shot, position of the enemy, position of other enemies, number of enemies remaining, positions of allied soldiers, position of neutrals, number of turns remaining, environmental conditions, map objectives… each of these in isolation, and combined can lead to plenty of situations where 20% shots are worth taking.

I think only snapshot, if they are tracking this kind of thing, can say with certainty how often players are taking 20% shots in PP. But as far as our speculation goes; whilst it won’t be a thing that players do 100% of the time, it won’t be a 0% occurance either.

I think we’re on the same page there regards hit chance penalty. - I think where our opinions differ is with regards to what the enemy should do when they come across a target with that hit chance penalty, and also with regards to the defence bonus. I think the hit chance penalty is enough, and the AI should go for the shot if it’s the best option for them, chiefly because that’s what I’d do as a player.

1 Like
121

I know what you’re saying, but doesn’t that still provide a defensive bonus, all be it in an analogue sense? ‘Cover’ might grant the bonus of covering 50% of a soldier/alien’s body.

Likewise, are crit shots represented by the fact that you can target different body parts?

Again, I think it’s situational. In general, I prefer to use heavy cover. I’ll certainly do that as I’m advancing across the map. But if I’m low on AP and don’t have the means to take the first shot against an opponent then I’d rather scarper completely out of sight somewhere and try to approach from a different angle, or in such a way that I do have the AP to take that shot on the next turn. I’ll definitely try to break LOS rather than stay behind cover if I run into a room and suddenly find myself outnumbered.

Amen to that.

1 Like
122

Ugh - I hate how this forum works for quoting (sorry Aknazer)

1 Like