I appreciate the opportunity to kill and fight among factions. However, I can’ help but think that a pathway for Phoenix Point to unify all the factions, or at least those surviving near the endgame, against the Pandorans… Just an idea…
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You need a ‘Path of the Peacemakers’ DLC or Mod, but I don’t plan to make any detailed suggestions until I have finished my first playthrough and seen how the Faction Wars etc pan out across the whole game.
I’d love missions that do nothing else but de-escalate tensions between factions : Anu is almost at war with NJ, but if you could just liberate this place (first mission : Anu postpone attack) and rescue those guys (second mission : NJ postpone attack), you’d get a temporary cease-fire. Have a few of those cease-fires, and tensions lower.
Maybe it won’t prevent a war in the long run, but simply being able to manage the conflict in a less destructive way than “thrashing 1 Faction to make the other 2 happy for a while” would be interesting.
Ideally, I’d love a way to bring them together : maybe “liberating” some outpost for a cohabitation experiment, purely “PR” missions to show how efficient PP’s multi-cultural forces can be, etc.
On my first campaign (with BB5), I tried to play neutral, refusing to pick a side, waiting for proof when I had the “death-squad” mission (I considered I got it when I found a listening station), and trying to cool things of until NJ attacked Syn’s Mist-repeller. It had very little bearing over the gameplay, obviously, but I liked “roleplaying” as the adult in the (war) room.
Maybe “Cease-Fire Protocol” could be a research ?
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Something needs to be done to tone down the mutually assured destruction. Almost any action one takes only escalates the faction warfare. This only loses trading and recruiting havens. Fewer havens makes it harder to find attacking Pandoran bases. This feature could add more immersion into the plot line. PP should be a unifying faction. Instead, almost every action it takes escalates mankind’s hope to not survive. I am disappointed that currently there is only one direction the game takes.
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I think there’s a significant difference between “that’d be cool” and “something needs to be done” because, for my money, the all-out war between the three Fcations is not a problem but an econometric, strategic and plot solution to balance the middle-to-late game and focus players toward one of the endings.
Economy-wise, this war seems to be a speed regulator : without it, PP would constantly prosper from defending every faction, wouldn’t have to ever chose a side nor steal any research, and therefore would keep acces to most of the Havens and Scavenging sites untill the end of the game.
Not only is Havens’ being wiped out a good way to push the Player to act on their plot-missions while depriving them from some of the numerous resources on the map, but I was actually pleasantly surprised when NJ ended up declaring war on me after I raid its research centers 9 or 10 times (steal reasearch is so easy to abuse and I wanted piercing rounds) then quickly invaded a number of scavenging sites, raising their threat-level a good notch and forcing me to fight and loot its units in order to reverse-ingeneer those elusive piercing tech.
Re-introducing some artificial scarcity felt necessary to me after I acquired enough vehicles, level 7 soldiers and fire-power to raid Citadels without really taking a hit and even “extreme threat” missions weren’t that much trouble (sometimes, I had one or two wounded…).
The new difficulty settings are another solution to that “prosperity” problem, but it largely stays a “positive” feedback loop : once you got the hang of global strategy, mix-classes and tactical missions, you tend to profit more and more, missions difficulty doesn’t rise as quickly as your soldiers fire-power… and you keep on winning and getting new toys, slowly eroding any sense of challenge. This, to me, is an actual problem the factions’ war tend to aleviate.
It’s also one the reactive elements that make the geoscape feel more alive, and the one good plot reason for PP to be the only organization discovering techs inspired by the science of two different factions. (On top of being kind of logical from an ideology stand-point : when you have a proto-anarchist “symphony”, a fascist army and a mutant theocracy, chances are they won’t find a middle-ground unless you put a chain-canon to their heads.)
So, yeah, it’s not perfect in every way, it can feel a little rail-roaded and I’d like more means to slow-down their war or even broker some kind of peace between 2 of the main Factions. But I don’t believe the rising tensions to be a problem per se : I’d simply like for it to be more interactive, allowing the player to either soothe, fuel the conflict or profit from it.
But if there ever were a way to broker actual lasting peace, it should be very, very difficult to do in order for the rest of the game to keep its already shaky balance (wide-open strategy being very hard to balance anyway).
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