The new skillpoint system in leviathan patch

And I wonder how would you like it to be? Do you recruit:

  • level 5 soldier with all his abilities and perks selected, all stats increased randomly (so his SP are distributed), and let say that you can preview all this stats to decide if you want him, or
  • blank level 5 soldier where after recruiting you instantly pick up all necessary skills and attributes to fit your needs (so you have all his SP available for your imagination)? :slight_smile:

If latter option is your preffered then this makes whole leveling system irrelevant. All the time spent on upgrading soldiers previously, all the fights are meningless, when you can pick new recruit with high level and give him any ability that you think would be ok.

4 Likes

I do think now, that leveling part is irrelevant and unnecessary. If you could recruit lvl 7 soldier at any point of the game, but without SP, it wouldn’t change much. With some SP price adjustments you could decide which skills in which order you would like to buy. The soldier development wouldn’t be linear as it i right now.

It shouldn’t be linear in first place. :slight_smile:

I personally wouldn’t do either, I prefer the game with level 1 soldiers that I’d build up over time :wink:

1 Like

It is a different game certainly, and I prefer that level 1 game.

But I also enjoy having a level 1 guy who needs to be nursed a little bit so that he can develop. I can understand if you don’t, but that the objectiveness of what is or isn’t fun.

The bit I don’t like, is playing a game where everyone needs to be level 7 in order to have a chance against the AI. I think that reaching level 7 should be the exception and something that happens in end game, it shouldn’t be the norm in the first place.

3 Likes

Yeap, that’s the point. It’s not that I like/dislike nursing a soldier, it’s not about that. It about doing some meta playing so that one of your resources is reaching proper state so you can come back to your regular play style.
Imagine you play chess and every time you loose a pawn you need to sign a song. It doesn’t matter if you enjoy signing or playing chess, it just becomes neither of those things. It’s a contrived example but I’m making it ridiculous on purpose.

2 Likes

Ok… how so…?

Tedious by definition is something that requires many small actions. Putting the soldiers in a base with TFs may be uninteresting, but tedious it’s not. Having to grind the rookies through easy missions arguably is tedious, depending on where one stands on grinding. e.g. @SpiteAndMalice likes it, I don’t.

That it is, and I would add that it’s mostly horizontal - there is some verticality, both in terms of better weapons and equipment, but more so in terms of augmentations. Which is any case very different from “progression in the game is nonexistent” :wink:

That’s an interesting idea. And here is the thing: it actually kinda works like this at the moment with the TFs. The levels largely cease to matter once you get the “stables” set up. However, they are important in the early game to slowly introduce the different skills to the player.

This all the way. What you should basically get is the same thing you would get through the TFs, but paying a premium to get it faster.

If getting the capskill takes more time, wouldn’t that make losing soldiers with it, or on the way of getting it more painful?

It’s like saying a bike works like a teleport, but you just have to buy a bike and ride. Sure, it gets you from one point to another, but the similarities end here.

So reading this, it occurs to me: what level 7 skills do you consider absolutely necessary to win? And why do you need all the soldiers in the squad to have them for a late mission?

Say you expand to 20 levels… the difference between level 1 and level 20 would represent the same power gain as is currently levels 1-7. The advantages in spreading the curve, so to speak is multifaceted…

It allows you to save the highest levels for late in the game while giving players the sense they are making steady progress as they still get regular level gains… It allows you to make each gain smaller in impact so that fine tuning a game parameter has less potential for unexpected consequences. If over the course of the entire game a player chooses to only develop one super team that is his choice… but the narrow gap between levels makes it easier for the player to trade soldiers in and out of the lineup creating a steady reserve…

Alright, I understand now.

TBH, I think this comes down to personal tastes and preferences.

But if you like this kind of system I can’t recommend you enough Trese Brothers’ Templar Battleforce. Also has great setting (generously borrowed from Dune and WH40K) and story.

If there were 20 levels, what would each level contain? What would be the difference between each level. Current each level has a distinct benefit.

No, I also dislike grinding. The difference is that I don’t consider playing that part of the game to be grinding. Taking a level 1 soldier on a mission isn’t just a means to end for me, it’s an end in itself.

1 Like

I said soldiers need to be level 7, not that they need level 7 skills specifically.

Regards to which skills in general are need to win, it’s not about any one particular skill or another, it’s the fact that skills are needed wholesale in order to win, and many of those skills (at different levels) are superpowered. The game throws overwhelming odds at you, and the only way to overcome those odds is to make use of these skills. I don’t find this type of combat to be in any way engaging. It moves PP from being a strategic combat game, which I would enjoy, into being a tactical puzzle game which is nothing like what I was expecting when I first backed.

2 Likes

The reason I asked is because I like the early game where there are very few skills in play and the game after that provided I don’t use OP combos - in fact, it remains the same game “just more”. But when using OP combos, it’s not even a puzzle, it’s a challengeless clean up chore.

That’s why I think that once the balance issues are fixed (and they slowly are) maybe a lot of the grievances against the skills & stats system will go away.

Sorry, my bad.

1 Like

maybe if there was a mechanic to save a soldier which was gunned down, there would be a lot less complains in this area as well… something like Firaxis Xcom had with countdown to stabilize with medkit… plus it would create an incentive to save own soldier and risk another one and entire mission…

Of course, stabilized soldier should then take some time off in medbay, but still better than losing him for good…

1 Like

It was already in the game but later was removed.
It’s almost like someone else made those early BBs and then other team took over from there. No idea why it was removed, maybe to cut down on animations or maybe battles where becoming too tactical - you ain’t evacuating dying super soldier, he is too cool for that. Maybe because when teams are small it becomes prohibitively expensive to use a soldiers to carry someone when he could be killing enemies left and right (reminds me of FiXCom again). Or maybe because if the game is suppose to be about super soldiers clearing a map in three turns, so why bother with wounded. It’s hard to tell when you look at something like ACID grenades and think - was everyone too busy to think about them and just do a little bit of math in excel? We will never know.

3 Likes

The other part of this is that these discussions seam to be just us (player)s arguing. I don’t see how these debates lead to any meaningful changes in the game. Like hey you guys complained about training centers… We could make it so you need to assign a rookie to a single training center and each center just gives 5 spots. Then whole exploit with farming SP by building 10 training centers would go away. But that’s like work - you know, have to make a UI for this, why not just tweak numbers a bit, who cares that this brings other problems the most important is that blatant exploit is “fixed”. Which wasn’t even an exploit but a legit game mechanics with poorly chosen variables.
I mean, some people here are arguing about the numbers of this “fix” instead of raising a question why its fixed like this at all?