Howdy!
I’ve played alooot of 4x games and one feature I always love after a while is the ability to speed up combat at some point.
IE - At some point, you don’t really neeed to see the same animation of NPC’s running, stopping, shooting, etc … You kinda wanna speed that up a bit …
So… Anyone else wanting this feature?
Example - I’ve clocked almost 500 hours in CIV6 - Movement and combat is on fast, so its almost instant.
Love
'Kal
Speeding up animations is something that we have (and still) look into, but it’s not as straight-forward as it may seem.
In the Firaxis XCOM, as soon as you click to confirm an action, the game has already rolled all of the dice and already knows all the outcomes. It knows if you unit is going to be spotted, spot something else, activate a pod or trigger an overwatch. Much like taking a shot, the outcome is known before you even click to fire. The animations are purely cosmetic, and can be speed up or skipped with no effect on gameplay.
In Phoenix Point, a lot of things are driven by the animation - this is especially important for the ballistics system and terrain destruction. Being able to skip the animation completely is almost certainly off the table. We continue to experiment with being able to speed the animations up - but this can cause issues with the in-game physics
I think the animation is less of an issue as it is simply waiting for the AI to decide what it is going to do.
There’s a lot of time spent just staring at the Pandorans turn with what appears to be no activity.
No AI computing during an enemy move is also because of two aspects:
In my playthrough the AI time was ok. Only in missions with the third fraction in battle (NJ last mission) it all tooks langer… the Pandas turn was long…
But in the end iam not a friend of faster moves without Animation. I Think you cant compare 4x games and fights like Civ with PP
For me AI time is never ok but I don’t care. But could be a Mac specific problem or my computer.
Probably a bit because there would be more complain on AI time if most players had the same AI speed than I have.
Faster move and animations is certainly possible but again is facing different problems than similar games:
EDIT:
That said, if JA2 AI tend be not that good overall it is also not that bad but on some aspects, it’s a game facing similar problems and I don’t remind any problem in speeding up animations.
@kalqulate Sorry I’m not agree…it doesn’t have much depth to organize, perhaps a “fast forward” that similar in Geoscape is fine, but not something instant.
For instance, imho this vids below is much more like point and click, it has no “soul” in it. Everything looks instant with a bunch of cosmetics - just saying.
“Looks” can be deceiving… I have played Mutant Year Zero and it has plenty of soul. Corruption 2029 is based on the same game play and mechanics. As a matter of fact, until the next patch release for PP I think I will give Corruption 2029 a try.
True indeed, I own and played MYZ as well and they looks overrated.
I prefer goes with Battletech or Valkyria Chronicles which is underrated and they have a lot more variety in their content and features + good gameplay imho.
There is always the universal solution of using cheat engine speedhack, which works with PP.
It wouldn’t have worked if all delays were due to AI/simulation processing, so clearly significant part IS just animation.
@YetAnotherGuy, solution would be the devs need to optimize PP’s to the max and add that “fast forward button” 
. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in this particular area. It’s something weird with Unity for such huge assets going on to handle.
Was starting a new topic but responding to this thread since it’s about the same thing.
I started playing past two days and my first impression is, this game is too slow. I can say “the heavy’s jetpack animation takes too long” about 7 times while he’s doing it. It makes me feel like I’d just rather not use the jetpack.
Xcom 2 let you tab to other soldiers immediately after assigning a move order rather than forcing you to watch the animation and I loved it. Because of the movement interrupt system it’s probably more necessary to let the events play out with no player input in Phoenix Point, so please just add an option to double the run speed of all units instead.
As a comparison, I started playing Fire Emblem Three Houses this week as well, another tactical game. When I first played that game I thought the unit movement was comically fast and looked cheap, but after several hours with the game I’m really grateful for it. Phoenix Point ends up being the cheaper feeling experience, despite more polished movement animations, since it leaves my mind with nothing to focus on for so many short stretches at a time.
I’ve tried indie tactical games in the Steam store and returned them within minutes because the unit movement speed was too slow. It’s that important to me.
On the bright side, at least there’s no Bradford here.
Overall gameplay geoscape
No intro animations
No game animations (event based, after important discoveries), can be replaced by text screen
In battle
No combat animations
No climbing animations and sounds (too slow, even its not cinematic)
No overwatch animation