I did. It wasn’t ironic. Maybe not the best comparison. But strategy games require sacrifice of units unless you play RPG where you really want to know story of each unit available in the company.
I’m not sure about which early build you talk about but early build had single missions without geoscape element. Keeping soldiers alive there was pointless so there was definitely no mechanic for reviving them or stopping their bleed in couple of turns. Maybe you mistake Phoenix Point with other game.
Personally I think that you both have some valid points.
It does seem strange that you can’t recruit some more experienced soldiers from the Havens with higher levels of experience . Perhaps it’s because they only give away raw recruits and keep their better people as you or I might (part of your argument was that you don’t like losing lv 7 soldiers?)
This is war - okay a game, but in the game it is war. So one would presume that you would expect some losses and indeed plan to take into account these loses. So you need to plan ahead, recruit soldiers, train them and finally give them combat experience. Who is better a simulator trained soldier or one who has real battle experience? I think that is what the new SP system allows. Keep training soldiers in reserve so they are more ready for live combat.
The tactical layer - earth and stuff is equally as important as the missions, even if it can seem like a bit too much micromanagement. Personally I think it’s just playing style, but that’s me. Once in training, you don’t have to do anything except choose which lv enhancements to give. I Think it’s easy.
Mission training is easy for soldiers. They (rookies) have the same accuracy as other more experienced soldiers. But you still need to be careful. Pool experience points are well spent on new soldiers to help a little. A squad full of rookies is not a great idea hence will planning for casualties is recommended. I recall this being a problem in xcom by Firaxis and there were no training facilities, so it was game over. Even Julian Gollop is on record in an interview where he’d said that he’d already lost the game and didn’t even know it at the time. That’s is presumably the reason why there are training facilities.
It is war - fight! Fight to the last! Go down fighting! But seriously I find that my playing technique only improves from loss and failure. That’s why hard is good. I teach this to my children and it develops fortitude in them. If it’s too easy then the game becomes pointless - hence DDA. But yes a 3 turn bleed out time sometimes would be nice.
Currently playing Cataclysm DDA for a hundred time. It’s a permadeath roguelike and a 50+ hours play on a single character can be eradicate with a single mistake. There is no point in save scamming as you loose because you don’t know something about the game and take bad decision. There is no problem with that. First of all, because your mistake is communicated rather fast, second is because early game and making a new character is as fun as the end game.
The whole angle with game being fair/punishing has little relation to it’s difficulty since arcade machines stoped being main means of playing games. When a game handles loss badly, by forcing player to do boring stuff, watching the same cutscene again and again, or grinding again and again, it’s just a sign of a bad design not a well made challenge.
Yep, that’s the idea. But I think it’s too soon to tell whether it works in practice. So far I like it. I liked the previous system as well; as long as there are means to expand the roster and replace losses the system works, personal preferences aside.
I do think that the havens should provide both raw recruits and experienced troops as part of on overhaul of diplomacy (whether something like what I suggest here Diplomacy and base management overhaul proposal, or completely different).
What I object to is messing with the stats & skill system to address recruiting/loss replacement.
You are picking one element of it but there is not only black and white.
In SC you spit out units every few seconds all over the globe, in PP the number of soldiers you can maintain is limiting itself kinda. With more soldiers you can do mission all over the globe which can become quite costly, limiting your recruitment. Also in SC leveling of units is only relevant for the commander mostly, when its dead the game is over.
So sure, while i dont care about the history of a soldier (the devs probably dont either, or why would i have the same name multiple times in my roster?), i care about not losing it out of economic considerations. To fix this can only be achieved by reducing the economic constraint to sustain the campaign.
Personally, i think new system is a lot better than old one, but it needs slight tweaks… Training facilities practically unlock levels now, but its the combat experience that allows soldiers to get better… which is exactly how it should be…
Only issue is the amount of experience gained from successful missions… I think this should be increased, so you can get decent amount of SP faster… (maybe 15 instead of 10?) or they could link it up with difficulty setting, and easy difficulties would give more SP points per battle…
I think what PP needs is some messing with the stats & skill system to address recruiting/loss replacement. (sorry)
I know that you like things as they are, but I’m in the total opposite camp, I think the gulf between solider levels is far too strong, solider loss and replacement would be a far less painful experience if level 7 soldiers weren’t so much stronger than their level 1 comrades.
This skills/perks system overall I just can’t buy into. Insane skills have got their place in gaming, but I see it as more appropriate in a game like Disgaea or Dynasty Warriors, it doesn’t work for me here.
Someone raised a point earlier saying that the game is what it is, the counter argument to that is that it’s also still being balanced and developed, the skill system in particular is one aspect that I really hope gets toned down.
Someone brought up the point of ‘grinding’ level 1 soldiers up to combat efficiency not being a fun aspect of the game earlier, I thought that it was @BoredEngineer but I can’t find the post now though, so may be wrong.
Anyway, I just wanted to add that what is/isn’t fun in a game is a subjective matter, we can all only comment on what is fun for us personally.
Someone considers training up level 1 soldiers in mission to be a grind, I find that one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game.
Likewise @VOLAND likes playing missions with Level 7 superpowers, I’m the opposite there.
Someone else like to save scum, I don’t as I consider it cheating as I personally play the game.
The point is that we all have our individual preferences, and no one is right or wrong for having a personal taste. What I think Snapshot could do a whole lot more of is to provide options in game that allow individual elements to be selected as per our personal preference.
Possibility to recruit high level troops - on OR off.
Death means - death OR extended recovery in the sick bay
High level perks - on OR off.
Perk use in missions - unlimited OR once per turn.
Saves allowed in mission - on OR off.
A custom game ‘campaign’ mode and mods support might come handy in this subject as I and other mention in other thread, but looks like not much players like it including the devs respond in their Q&A session which putting this subject in their low priority .
Speaking personally, I wish it were a lot slower. I’d only want to be fighting with level 7 troops during the end game (if then) I think you get them far too early as things stand.
The idea of more levels would be to smooth out the experience gain… or, as you put it, slow the process down, as perks are spread out and perhaps even modified… ie dash level one would not move as far as dash level two… there could even be a dash that did not get interrupted…
This strikes me as a fix that is well within the design concept, and may well have a host of other advantages starting with giving the devs more control of their world as tinkering would be a more fine tuned process if interval gains were smaller…
So are many other players and I’m aware . There are also many players who are somewhere in between those camps.
I’m actually somewhere in between, because I think some changes are necessary but overall the system is good. As I have gone on record many times, there are OP combinations, too much mobility and other “effects stacking”, and personally I play restricting myself to each soldier using each skill only once per turn, and one use per turn for skills that affect the whole squad.
But I have been playing the game a long time now, so I can play like this and enjoy it - I don’t expect everyone else to want to play like that, especially when they are learning (so yes, please devs - make it an option).
However, why frame the discussion about the stats & skills system in terms of recruiting/loss mitigation? I mean, this is the issue:
And not this:
Because mitigating loss, to make the experience less painful, doesn’t need be by reducing the difference between level 7 and level 1 soldiers (not getting into the discussion of how big this difference actually is). In fact, it’s an odd way of coming at the problem, the obvious solution being to make higher level soldiers more easily available, which the game does through the TFs, a system that can easily improved upon (raw and trained recruits from havens, for instance).
Instead of that, we go into the rabbit hole of pitying our diverging recollections of XComs et al on how well, or how badly they did in the loss mitigation department in the absence of skills.
I wouldn’t so much go there, as towards games like Darkest Dungeon or Battle Brothers, I think those are both examples of games that handle loss of characters/soldiers really well. In both cases as a player you expect to lose some characters, and IMHO both games actually make the process of it happening a really fun experience. I don’t know whether anyone is save scumming their way through those titles, but I would imagine that it’s a loss less common than in PP.
It doesn’t need to be, but it could be, you’re already reducing that gap manually if you’re doing this:
I think that PP actually needs a bit of both that (perks should b turn limited), and the possibility to recruiting higher level recruitment, and some slow down in experience gain, and some reduction in the utility of perks, and then some tweaks to the strength of Pandoran forces to balance against it all.
To place it in a context. The gameplay between level 1 and level 7 soldiers is very different to a point that it feels like a different game. When you first team is all low levels it’s fine, but when it just one or two guys then it just doesn’t mesh well together.
Comparisons to other games are inevitable. I know, “this is not X-Com”, but in the same time game is so heavily inspired by the genre in general there nothing wrong in discussing it could be inspired even more. Just my idea how to resolve the issues I have with game, because in current form I just can’t like it no matter how hard I try.
I wouldn’t say bullet sponge Arthrons, Chrions and Sirens are “gently difficulty curve”. 10th mission is just about them to show up, and depending on luck, may or may not obliterate you. Being bombarded out of nowhere with one or two soldiers on mind control isn’t that rare. Not to mention, clearing first nest full of grenade launcher Arthrons.
This is just bad game design, if wipe early to mid result in game restart.
I wouldn’t compare Jack to skill-less rookie in PP, as damage potential of fresh recruit in classic XCom is exactly the same as damage potential of 40th mission soldier. Fresh recruit or not, they differ only in survivability and you can mitigate this by not charging forward like you would do with experienced soldier.
So it’s not tedious to wait till they get their promotions? Maybe matter of taste, but I wouldn’t say it’s exciting. Why there are no easy missions late game, ones you could train your soldiers at? Killing enemies, apart from getting XP, doesn’t give you much of a reward. Game could generate missions that would give petty (or no) XP for an alpha squad, but a normal gain for fresh recruits. You know, the feeling of missions from the start of the game, without magic fireballs and dragons and teleports and so on.
I don’t know, robbers attack on haven? It would end up with eradication of whole settlement, it doesn’t even have to do anything noticable bad to Heaven, just an event you could respond to or not. Kill some low level bad guys. Still better experience then recruit & wait.
I base it on my insights that “progression” is mostly horizontal. Enemies remain the same for the whole game since very early stage till the end of it. Mutations are RNG and are not affected by progression. Weapon balance is resolved around diversity and there is no vertical upgrade, everything remains more-less useful till the end of the game. Research doesn’t bring advancement but even more diversity. These are not opinions, that’s how game is designed. Only thing that noticably changes with progression are enemies count, HP and Armour.
Don’t get me wrong. Vertical progression isn’t by any means required. Sekiro (by “From Software” developer) is a great title where progression is mostly horizontal.
Just stating the fact here, there’s not much of a vertical progression in PP. So… why do we keep it only for soldiers? Feels like an unnecessary “RPG” element of leveling something. We could remove leveling entirely, make all abilities innate or buyable by SP, you could even buy a subclass for like 150 SP (guessing the price, don’t quote me here). Or some innate like Dash for Assault and some buyable.
The more I think about soldier progression in PP, the more it feels detached from rest of game. Just like someone would decide, that we need a bit of RPG, because RPG elements are a must-have in 2019.
(sorry)
.
. There are also many players who are somewhere in between those camps.
I know, “this is not X-Com”, but in the same time game is so heavily inspired by the genre in general there nothing wrong in discussing it could be inspired even more. Just my idea how to resolve the issues I have with game, because in current form I just can’t like it no matter how hard I try.