I would wait. I was very happy when it came out but stopped playing after 3 or 4 days since it needs more updates. Looks promising, though 
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Almost sure it’s not the problem and my current testing seems confirm it.
There’s a difficulty scaling mainly based on number of combats done. The point is favor a lot explore, skip as many combats than possible, and use training facilities.
This should allow reach a team level 7 able to sustain difficulty scaling thanks to various OP builds.
Until I realized it, to face the quick difficulty scaling I was trying be the most efficient than possible, more teams and planes faster, do as many missions than possible faster. This was only leading to an even faster difficulty scaling.
Now I know the trick, I have yet to suffer the problem. And will certainly be quite ready to face stuff when it becomes big.
EDIT: This even setup the plan for the easiest path, the easier path is the faster path, so it’s rush only one faction to get its end and get game end a lot sooner. For sure you can’t totally rush it, there’s trick to find to speed up factions wars. If it’s possible, rush one faction, rush factions war, rush to end, easier path to beat the game.
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I’m probably one of the biggest fans of the game on this forum - and I would advise you to wait.
I was planning to buy this for my best mate for Christmas, but it has so many balancing issues and the difficulty spike is so punishing that I don’t think he’d enjoy it at the moment.
It is going to be brilliant - once they’ve ironed out the wrinkles - but it’s nowhere near there yet.
That said: I’m playing it every spare hour I can possibly get, and frankly not doing other stuff I should be doing because I find it so addictive. I love the game as it is, crazy difficulty and all - but then that’s what I signed up for. I was one of the strongest voices for nerfing some of the more OP Squad Skills in the BBs because it made the game far too easy - and I still refuse to use some of the cheesing tricks players have posted on these forums (Sniper Rage Burst & 100% Stealth Infiltrators immediately come to mind).
So… no gamebreaking bugs that I’ve encountered, but only try it now if you like your games HARD.
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After 10 hours I decided to wait a year for steam/gog release and see how the game holds up then. I don’t know how much work there is planned for the base game, but there is a lot of work that can be done, not to mention some new content I would like to see (like more stuff in the strategic layer).
It is BAD now, Badder after the most recent patch.
PP isn’t really demanding game at all. I am running it on Zotac GTX1080TI on 2K resolution/Ultra settings pretty much 100-130FPS.
Then suddenly game drops to horror or 30FPS for no reason.
It happens randomly every 10 minutes for 20 seconds, for example, when game zooms out for Chirons to shoot their lovely fireworm payload.
When Scylla goes trough objects and destroys everything, it is like someone showed scalpel in my retina.
It is definitely not my computer or NVIDIA drivers because I installed PP on my fathers AMD Ryzen7 computer with RX5700XT GPU and same thing happens.
Merry Christmas.
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So the basic conclusion of this thread is that it’s a bit of a disaster at present. However fingers crossed they’ll get it fixed in the future but we don’t know when. Have the devs at least acknowledged the state of game at present?
Ha, Grammar nazi.
Hi, thanks for the long thought out response. Could I ask you for your pc specs?
Thanks for the heads up
Hopefully it shouldn’t take a year to fix!? One would hope?
The one year is a wink to Steam, that would be a lot in my opinion=
- It’s possible, but I think they need get a clean enough version before that.
- What game release that took a year to clean, I didn’t noticed much.
- Not only they need clean the game but they also have 3 DLC to release, the cleaning cannot be one year, and DLC past that.
- The DLC can hardly get released before a fair cleaning.
For the disaster aspect there’s been already many arguing on that, it’s no way a disaster, it can become a disaster but I don’t see why it should. Ok there’s been some regressions with last patch, ok it’s more a bizarre Early Access release with most contents but lacking of polishing in multiple department. But still many players agree there’s already a lot of interesting elements, in fact a large amount of discontent is about difficulty, and many players find the game very fun until it’s like they hit a wall.
There’s hugely more material to experiment around equipment, character building, and party building. XCOM no way can compare on that aspect. The shoot system is very interesting to use, and even if JA2 (with mod?) did something similar, it’s still rather uncommon. Plenty combats can be very fun, I noticed only Lairs missions types that really generated many negative feedback. The general management is a lot more developed than in most similar games, without to reach a 4X level that in my opinion doesn’t match well with a game focused on combats.
For me main negative are only that there’s something fishy in difficulty management, and too many problems, bugs and some weak design in UI.
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I play on an Inspiron 7700 Gaming Laptop with an Intel Core i7 2.81GHz and 16 Gig of RAM.
Can’t remember what the Nvidia Processor is off the top of my head.
It’s not a disaster - it’s just not what a lot of people expected. Remember the cries of pain in the early days of Firaxcom? A lot of players simply weren’t ready for a game that didn’t let them act like idiots and refused to hold their hand when they got themselves into trouble. That’s because XCOM was a watered-down version of a Gollop game.
This is a ramped-UP version of a Gollop game, that is obviously and specifically designed to address the common XCOM veteran’s complaint that the game gets easier as your squad gains superpowers. Cheesing aside (Sniper Rage Burst anyone?), this game doesn’t get easier - it gets so phenomenally hard that simply surviving a standard Haven Defence with less than 30% casualties is a reason for celebration. Some of us love it that way, others hate it.
Yes, it has balancing issues, but my experience of feeding back on the Backer Builds is that the most egregious of those issues will eventually get fixed. Snapshot isn’t Firaxis - it doesn’t have a vast bank of resources it can throw at a problem, so things get solved incrementally over time.
While I often disagree with Zzzz on these forums, I think a lot of what he says in the post above this is valid.
If you want a smooth, clean playthrough that is punishingly difficult but bug-free and balanced, wait a year. If you can cope with bugs and OP combos, give it a try now and then feedback to the devs on these forums about what to improve. That’s my two-penn’orth.
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Well, to me its not just the bugs but the mid to late game is just super boring… there’s nothing to do except to wait for one research after another to be given to you leading to the end gaem all the while just sitting in your base taking on repetitive waves of base defense mission.
Interesting… That’s not been my experience, but maybe that’s cos I play a lot slower than you.
Yes, it can get a bit Long Warish at times - but I love the LWs, so I don’t really mind. So I have 2 teams - the A Team in a Tiamat with a Scarab (until it was destroyed and I just bought an Armadillo), whose job it is to take on the static non-time sensitive missions, because the Tiamat is slow. Then the B Team zips around the map in the Manticore, running Haven Defenc against Pandorans (I leave the Factions to duke it out between themselves, unless one of them picks on a Haven that’s too close to home).
That leaves me with my hands pretty full, so I’m working on the resources to build a third aircraft and send a Stealth Team out to investigate the long-distance Phoenix Story Missions.
All this makes for a very absorbing game - albeit a tad repetitive at times (‘Oh no, not another Haven Defence!’). But then, I like the Long Wars, so I don’t mind repetitive as long as it plays to the theme.
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Sorry, Reply didn’t register. See post above.
Compare that with XCOM1 and XCOM2 releases makes no sense, there’s always whiners for such tactical games, first it’s too difficult or too easy, second RNG is wrong, third LOS is wrong. For PP it’s hidden by much more significant problems and many more problems.
If you never experienced the difficulty goes totally wild very fast in PP you just don’t know the amplitude of the problem with difficulty management. There are also serious UI problems from bugs to bad designs and polishing missing.
Now I finally understood how avoid difficulty fo wild fast, I finally reach second month and close to second month, but also many characters level 7, I think there’s a high possibility that aspects quoted as OP holes aren’t OP holes, like Rage Burst, are deliberate design. There’s perhaps ways to abuse but it’s not elementary and probably more about balancing better all aspects than a wide nerf to Rage Burst.
Even at Easy and when manipulating auto scaling on purpose to avoid difficulty doing wild, it’s a dam tough game I believe even harder than XCOM1&2 Veteran, which isn’t a good difficulty tuning in my opinion. That said there’s perhaps major aspect I didn’t identified yet, and I include about manipulating even better the auto scaling.
I suffer, it’s harder than I would, I have to endure many UI problems and bugs, but my last campaign has still a lot of fun parts. I have doubts I’ll be able to finish the campaign, probably screw up too much with factions or perhaps I should start consider pick one or two and not all, and steal one or two. So I stay positive and believe there’s a good hope dev will achieve a fair version fairly cleaned (even if not totally) long before a year.
The game is a treasure! By all means get it. I hope it will get even better with the upcoming DLC and patches, just like wine with time 
I completed all the story missions by mid of month 2 on Hero difficulty and after that, its just a drag clicking and waiting for time to pass and just taking wave upon wave of base defense while whichever faction you allied with come up with the ultimate solution… it is very boring and draggy and not in the least bit like long war where there is something you can PROACTIVELY pursuit. In the mid to late game, after you have done all the story missions, the game comes to a passive grind.