The game feels better on hardest difficulty

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
41

I’m very skeptical that the DDA can possibly work so well at to go unnoticed, save scumming issues aside.

First, because to make it work “properly” you can’t just be basing the player’s performance on the amount of damage received. Fixing it now is obviously not a matter of adjusting parameters (e.g. amount of damage received), but of adding many new ones (e.g. How many apples did that player who took 0 damage save on that last scavenging trip? How often does he/she go on apple gathering trips anyway? Is the player taking little damage because of reliance on (expensive) explosives, so maybe his/her resources are now depleted? Etc) And for the work that requires, just do the real Panda evolution :wink:

(and, come to think of it, how hard can it be? Just instead of looking at average damage done to the player look at the type of damage done by the player to the Pandas, and adjust their armor/hps accordingly to counter excessive use of explosives, AP, or high damage weapons)

Second, because even when scaling works properly, or more reasonably, ie it is less “spiky”, it still messes up difficulty expectations.

For example, in FXcom opposing forces evolve with time/mission count. At least in the first FXcom and expansion, it doesn’t matter what you research. There are a couple of event triggers (as with sectoid commanders and etherials), but you could still be facing mutons with a 1st tier AR (which did happen to me a few times). It’s harsh, but fair - and predictable.

By contrast, making difficulty depend on some behind the curtains formula is, by definition, unpredictable.

Summing up: Just make DDA optional.

And I’m speaking as someone who would play with this option on, because I don’t save scum and I enjoy the extra challenge (at this point I’m pretty good at the game, but I don’t feel like playing at legendary, especially as I play with some self imposed restrictions, so hero with DDA is about right for me).

Unfortunately, I don’t think that would work. Save scumming is mostly used to optimize the player’s turn. Once Panda’s turn starts what most players want is to reload the game as soon as they see things are going to go sour. Actually, there are many requests to enable “esc” to work during the enemies turn precisely for that.

42

I’m not convinced of that. There’s no way of knowing now - except by seeing how it works if it’s been fixed by the time the Steam players come online - but I personally believe that if they’d got it right first time round and not been tripped up by the savescum spike, hardly anyone would have noticed. As it is, they didn’t, and the difficulty spike brought it starkly front and centre to most people’s attention.

Now, it’s a ‘Thing’ and no-one can ignore it. In fact, I find it depressing that so many players on this forum seem to believe that it’s some evil plot by Snapshot to make their games more difficult, rather than an experiment in creating a universally level playing field that went horribly, horribly wrong.

I don’t think you do need any other ‘eg: apple’ parameters. At its simplest, it’s basically asking: “How badly hurt did the player get last time?” and adjusting the strength of its punches accordingly. It’s not bothered about whether you achieved the objective or did it in X turns - it’s simply trying to ensure that if you’ve set the game to Difficulty 0, you will suffer an average of 0 casualties per mission, but if you’ve set it to Difficulty 2, you are likely to take 2 casualties per mission.

Doesn’t matter, if you’re relying on in-game stats rather than end-of-mission results. So you lose 5 men and you save scum to get them back, so what? The game data still records that you lost 5 men… Ah, no, of course it doesn’t - it records the turn before you lose the 5 men. I see what you’re getting at now.

So the devs need to figure out a way of recording the game state as it was before a Restart or Reload - bit like the F12 button - so that the DDA gets the true picture of things, rather than the skewed picture the players are giving it.

Told you it wasn’t going to be as easy as it looked :wink:

Or give players the option to readjust the game state by Resetting the Difficulty level.

As I’ve described elsewhere, I’m not good enough to survive the early game of most XCOMs on anything higher than Veteran, but I find that Vet gets far too easy as the game goes on, so I increase the Difficulty Level at the start of every Story Mission and that just about keeps it at the right level for me (though I had to take it back down in LW2 as I found myself getting slaughtered).

The point is, if the devs gave players the Option in the Menu to Reset the Difficulty - and this automatically reset the number of Nasties to the starting level of that Difficulty - the Spike would go away.

Personally, I think it’s very sad that;
a) a noble attempt to give players a dynamically adjusting difficulty state pitched at their optimal ability level was so botched at release that it’s become a ‘Thing’.
b) this has become a poor substitute for the Pandoran Evolution we were originally promised.

2 Likes
43

That’s interesting. Like you, I play HonestMan (essentially IronMan without the autosaves).
I’m only on my first playthrough because I don’t get much time to play, and I haven’t bothered restarting the whole game to get the core adjustments that were advertised in one of the patches - so my playthrough is still using the original DDA that caused so many ructions in the first place.

And I’ve never had a difficulty spike.

My worst experience has been a couple of Lairs with upwards of 15 Crabbies and a handful of Sirens. Had a TPW in one of those - save scummed to get out of it :smirk: Other than that, nothing.

I reckon I lose an average of 1 Squaddie every 2 or 3 missions - maybe less now that I’m hitting the endgame with high level squads. And I’m finding the game balance about right for my level of play - which to be frank, ain’t great (the amount of times I forget to use Rapid Fire to clean up the map doesn’t bear thinking about).

Now, it’s worth saying that a squad wipe will not suddenly make the very next mission you play feel much easier, as the DDA (in my understanding) works incrementally across multiple missions. But if you lost 6 Squaddies 5 missions ago and didn’t screw the records by miraculously takign no damage in the next 5 missions, the DDA should be very subtly adjusting behind the scenes to make such a TPW less likely in future. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work, in my understanding.

44

That’s not strictly true, there are other games that will employ a director in oder to manage the difficulty level that the player(s) encounter.

Where it’s rare AFAIK is in the TBS genre where players have the time to think ‘do I actually want to try to do better here?’

If it’s save scumming specifically that’s breaking DDA, another option is to remove the possibility for the player to save scum in the first place.

Yet more options would be to make replacement trooper cheaper and/or to make the difference between level 1 and level 7 troops less.

EDIT - And I hate to say it, but a pod system would also help here. If the player gets wrecked on turn 1; then take down the difficulty of other creatures on the same map before the player encounters them. - I guess you could actually go that way for maps that have respawn points for the AI.

45

You’re not being punished - the game is simply trying to give you a constantly challenging experience, rather than the usual curve in these games where it gets ludicrously easy once you’ve topped the Level Plateau.

The fact that they haven’t yet got the balance right is simply another in the long list of balancing issues within this game - complicated horrendously by the fact that they didn’t factor-in save scumming to the equation.

2 Likes
46

Right :joy:

Anyway, I think the stat collection doesn’t work that way. Hopefully @UnstableVoltage can confirm, but I imagine it is bulk anonymized data and that it can’t be subjected to that kind of processing.

I honestly think there is a problem with that rationale, because it is ignoring what is happening at the strategic level. I may be conservatively picking few fights (just to keep in the game) and beating them easily while losing the war, and the DDA will react by making the game tougher for me.

I wouldn’t go as far as calling it noble, but I agree that it doesn’t deserve all the hatred it is getting. As I have said elsewhere, looks like it was a compromise so as to not to completely give up on an enemy evolving in reaction to the player’s actions.

On the other hand, I can’t think of a single game with scaling that didn’t alienate a substantial part of the players (anyone remember Homeworld?) Which is another reason why I think that “if only it could be done right this discussion would not be happening” is wishful thinking and that rather than undertaking a massive effort to rework it, it should be just patched up and made optional.

Anyway, just my opinion, as always.

47

As UV mentioned, we shouldn’t be noticing the difficulty adjustments. But how it’s implemented may be a big problem. My strategy management of the game goes in phases.

First I need soldiers, then I need experience gaining missions.
Pandoran bases I don’t care about, they’re waiting and are a different priority for later (actually the more the better).
I need resources and technology, so I need to explore and expand my knowledge of the planet.
I get occasional base attacks - great more training experience.
Build more aircraft and find more bases.
Control the fighting between different factions so they don’t wipe each other out always helping the weakest defenders (thus gaining lots of resources and holding the balance between factions and increasing my trained soldier count).

Ultimately, I end up in comfortable situation with troops, bases, weapons, resources etc. But the Pandorans have been busy. So now I have to scan the planet to locate all the citadels. Eventually I get spammed by them attacking my bases (as I read here regularly).

So off I go taking out the citadels. I use snipers to quickly destroy them in one or two turns and generally no injuries - there’s no need. The factions all full in love with the Phoenix Project and the game is going fantastic!

Then BAM super difficulty spike. I was quietly smug with my cool strategic approach, but then the DDA didn’t like it. As far as my tactics on a mission go - I presume they’re average. I lost probably about 10 soldiers and the doom index is about 40%ish, but with my style of play they were all replaceable.

And here lies a problem! How is the damage aggregated? And secondly what affect do medkits have? I often go into battle with soldiers who are almost dead and on the first turn just heal them up. So my squad can often come out of a mission in better health than it went in!

For me the genius of PP is how it enables a wide variety of different playing styles. But I have concerns based on what UV has said and what assumptions have been made about how a player plays the game. Didn’t I choose the level difficulty at the start of the game?

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48

Interesting, I play the exact opposite way under the assumption that leaving Pandorans alone will make them stronger, so I aggressively stamp out the nests and lairs.

I wonder if your difficulty spike is related to DDA, or to letting the Pandas have their way until you are ready to take them on. As far as I know there is a “Pandoran evolution” (not the reactive one as was advertised, but just the Pandas getting tougher) that is independent of the DDA.

49

I’ve just had two full squad wipeouts in a row. So I’m feeling very sorry for myself. Perhaps it’s time for a different approach or wait until Wednesday. But I could send in a whole squad of rookies to a mission to see if some more sacrifices to the DDA gods might work. :thinking::grin:

50

I’m still fighting Pandorans in base defence, but not prioritising destroying their bases. The diplomacy benefits from destroying them means that I can quickly go through research tech levels when I’m ready for new equipment to manufacture.

51

I’m with Voland on this one. It’s good strategy to stamp on Panda bases before they turn into Lairs - and especially to stomp out anything that could assault your base. I get my Resources mainly through trade and the odd occasional Haven Defence against Lair-based Pandas, as Lairs are more hassle to stamp out than Citadels.

So to date, I have yet to experience a single Base Defence, and the DDA has never caused me any trouble.

52

Are we able to scan to detect nests (stage 1) or just citadels (stage 3)? I find the lairs (stage 2) so time consuming and tend avoid them where possible. I take one lair out for research purposes then ignore them. But only after destroying 8 citadels in a row did I encounter this problem of a super-spike . Perhaps I’m being too strategic in trying to milk the numbers in the game!

The base defence missions are great fun and great for training my rookies.

53

Yes, I think that not taking out Panda’s bases might be a source of your problems.

I had a few base defence missions, but not many. Most importantly, I don’t have that many casualties - no sacrifices to the gods of DDA. But I don’t take time off fighting the Pandas.

54

And there in a nutshell is your reason.

As you quite rightly said: Citadels are easy. You just sit back and enjoy the Turkey shoot. By your own admission, it only took you a couple of turns to take down each Citadel. So, according to the DDA, you have just wiped out 8 Scyllas in 16 turns without taking a scratch. It thinks you’re Superman!

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55

Yep, actually that explains it. In the DDA algorithm Citadels are probably treated as the hardest kind of missions, with high expectations of many casualties.

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56

Good to know. As mentioned in the Q & A session recently, they are hoping to have fixed the problem in the latest update. Equally with the diplomatic relations. From my perpective, I wanted to get 75% relations with the Synedrian for the shared tech and that was the consequence of the citadel missions being too easy through no fault of my own other than not prioritising destroying lairs instead. The citadels should be hard, but they’re not. Additionally, the basic boolian logic with the diplomatic relations hopeful will have changed to be a bit more subtle.

57

I prefer making the difficulty settings more optional. Similar to mods.

58

To answer this question yes, you can detect all three levels once you get the tech. The thing is by the time you get the tech all there generally is left to detect are Citadels so it just seems that way.

59

Take out a Pandoran lair. Second Pandoran lair is always impossible, on any difficulty setting, on any game I’ve played. Considering that one of the mind control naga creatures takes the entire squad to bring down and just can’t normally be done in one turn, so on average two of the squad are mind controlled… and the game keeps dropping more of these every few turns… this is the key point at which every one of my campaign attempts turns and fails. There’s just enough resources to replace the squad. I normally get two attempts on the second enemy base (thanks to retreating with, for example, the two remaining squad members) during the campaign, the second of which is with a weaker squad due to lack of resources making full replacement impossible - but with some new tech that makes no difference at all - then not long after that I sit there and spin the timer out, watching the game generate messages about non-existent soldiers losing Stamina, red mist growing over the globe, havens falling, phoenix point bases falling and finally the game realises its won when the ‘ODI’ reaches 100%. Research doesn’t seem to help either, or recruiting elite soldiers (in my most recent game, finished about 10 minutes ago, one of my two remaining squad members was inflicting 60 damage per shot and the other 40 before they were wiped out in ambush after one of them got mind controlled twice!). I do wonder what everybody sees in this game and why they think it’s so balanced. The enemies have far too much health, the elite units are anything but, the new cybernetic options don’t really have much effect either. Plus the new skill point nerf means it’s even harder to get soldiers to scale with the difficulty spike (if it was even possible before!).

60

Nobody thinks this game is balanced - not even its biggest fans!

We all think it is horribly out of whack in all kinds of ways - massively OP Squaddie skill combos; too many Sirens on missions (though these are pretty easy to deal with once you get the hang of them); weapons not scaling with Panda (non)-evolution; Pandas massively overarmed and armoured.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real gem of a game struggling to get out. So we chip away and we chip away - and eventually the devs realise that the vast weight of opinion is pointing in an obvious direction and respond to it.

That’s because they haven’t adequately dealt with the difficulty spike yet. Don’t confuse the one with the other - there are several vaguely related problems here that need to be solved in unison, but are actually separate issues:

  1. The Squad progression system was making it far too fast and easy to get your Squaddies up to Lvl 7 without ever having gone on a mission. Squaddies in dedicated training centres were actually progressing 1.5 times as fast as Squaddies out in the field. They’ve now fixed that, though they probably haven’t go the balance quite right yet.
  2. Squaddies are stupidly OP. If you don’t limit yourself, the kind of combos you can create will generate semi-infinite feedback loops of AP/WP that allow super-soldiers to charge around the map committing mass murder on a grand scale. Even if you DO limit yourself to 1 use of each skill per squaddie per turn, it is still stupidly easy to average 8 AP per turn with most squaddies.
  3. In order to compensate for stupidly OP Squaddies, the DDA ramps up Panda arms & armour to stupidly high levels. The devs have yet to admit this, but in their heart of hearts I believe they realise that something will ultimately have to be done about this. At the moment, they’re just tinkering at the edges, but as time progresses it will become ever more clear that a fundamental rethink of this system is needed.

Even with the self-imposed limits I described above, you should be able to deal with a Siren in one turn using only 2 or 3 squaddies. Dash+Move+Rally+Shotgun to the head is a classic. So is a Quick Aim double-tap with a sniper rifle - or Mark For Death with a couple of Snipers. If she’s really far away, try Jet Jumping your Heavy next to her, then use 2 of your guys to Rally (if you can Rally with a Sniper, then Rally with someone else, that leaves your Sniper still able to fire) - this gets him back up to 3 APs, when an HMG burst to the head or a full Rage Burst will either take her head off or take her down. If you can muster another Rally, you can then Dash him back to safety. The key thing is take out her head - once that’s done she’s a straw pony.

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