+1
I would suggest this for soldiers who die from wounds that don’t bring the HPs below a certain negative threshold. So if the soldier dies with e.g. - 50 HPs or less, instead of dying he or she becomes critically wounded, and can be stabilized with a medkit within 2 turns.
Again, you spread the curve…
For example, dash 1, say level 2, could move your soldier 2 times further… dash 2, say level 8, could move your soldier 3 times further (as it currently works), dash 3, say level 18, you would be invulnerable to interruptions)…
All skills could be spread over the twenty levels in such a manner, and new skills could be worked into the mix… there could even be levels where you only get SP… one could even add AP… say at level 20 you could have 5 AP representing the idea that you now do everything 20 percent faster than a lower level soldier…
This would, as I said, smooth the progression of skills, and give the devs more tools for fine tuning the entire process…
It is more than personal taste… as I suggest in another response to this post, this provides a mechanism for smoothing out the progression of soldiers, and provides the devs some much needed tools…
Seven levels, or more typically five, is fine in a game dealing with large units where the only difference between levels is, lets say, moral gain or perhaps, in the case of a game like Civilization, strength gain… but in a game that makes use of individual soldiers gaining perks, spells, whatever you want to call them… seven levels doesn’t cut it as it gives us the current system where a level 1 soldier becomes almost useless, and level seven characters become indispensable as the only way to handle perks is to load up at each level…
As is, your soldiers max out well before the game is anywhere near concluded, creating a game where max level soldiers are virtually required…
I lack the qualifications in modding and experience playing PP in order to open up the topic more deeply.
But here are my past posts:
I brought these two ideas together, supplemented them with my idea and created a balance feedback. I think the more we make the devs aware of it, the higher the chance that this already good game will be great.
What do you think?
https://feedback.phoenixpoint.info/feedback/p/make-up-compensate-for-the-death-of-an-experienced-soldier
Description:
Make up (compensate) for the death of an experienced soldier
There are many comments that the loss of one or more “L7” soldiers practically means “game over” and therefore old scores are forcibly loaded until the result is correct.
Just a few examples to compensate:
Argument: If an officer is replaced in reality, the qualification is transferred to the next higher rank. This gives the new officer practically “more” power.
In addition, I would like to mention that I find the changes to the training facility and skill system in the “leviathan patch” to be an improvement. This solves the problem of babysitting.
Canny request for modding (the essence is not revealed)
https://feedback.phoenixpoint.info/feedback/p/deeper-skill-tree-for-soldiers
I repeat myself but vote here:
Add „bleed out“ System to the game
https://feedback.phoenixpoint.info/feedback/p/add-bleed-out-system-to-the-game-1
I think it’s the oppose, sure someone else gets promoted, but you now potentially have a less experienced solider in that higher rank - they don’t become more experienced just because they promoted.
Therefore, if anything there should be a subtraction from the general pool of skill points in order to simulate that loss of experience.
Out of interest, where people are finding that loss of L7 soliders to be too much, do you only ever take the same squad of L7s once you get them there? Or do you spend some time also levelling up your less experienced troops in missions so that you’ve got them ready in case they need to step into the main squad?
I’ve tried because I find TF so uninteresting and flawed in design, but it’s not so smooth. It requires babysitting from more experienced soldiers and stage the situation for youngsters to do something for XP. There are no more missions where bunch of recruits could train on its own, just like they did in the first hours of the game.
Sorry, what’s TF?
Training Facility. I try to take level one soldiers on a mission instead of waiting till they get SP and XP in base.
I wish you could send recruits for a patrol or as a part of scavenging expedition to gather resources. Patrol could give passive XP gain upon completion and sometimes trigger low level ambush, latter would trigger low level and small resource gain scavenging missions.
If it will take the same game time to reach level 20 as it does now to reach level 7, I fail to understand the difference except as a matter of personal preference for more levels.
A level 7 is not maxed out - it’s just a soldier who can acquire all the perks of his class (or dual class). You have to look at the actual skills and at the stats that the soldier has to evaluate his usefulness, or whether he is maxed out.
All that levels do in PP is gate access to perks. And you get 2 missions worth of SPs when you unlock one.
If you tell me, “trade you my lvl7 heavy/sniper for your level 4 heavy” , I will say “no, show me his sheet first”.
In theory, you could even have a lvl1 with maxed out stats, and even some abilities through augmentations.
That’s why I say that the discussion about the indispensability of lvl7’s, is really about balancing issues re skills and combinations thereof, as well as of enemies.
It’s the discussion, for example, whether rapid clearance (in combination with dash, the extreme mobility and damage buffs) is OP and whether it is necessary to beat the game. And to be clear, it is OP - and it’s not just a case that it’s wrong to have something like this in a “tactical” game, it’s wrong anyway you look at it because it removes all the challenge out of the game and makes it into a cleaning chore.
It’s not about how rapid clearance should be gated. Whether you get rapid clearance at level 7, or level 20, doesn’t change anything, IMO.
(I’m using RC as an example - I could also refer to electric reinforcement, which can be cast multiple times per turn and all the WPs recovered because it doesn’t cost any APs, or whatever other combination you have come across that takes away all challenge from the game)
Put another way, these OP holes that can occur with rapid clearance, electric reinforcement, etc. there is no right way to gate them: I think it is safe to say that not one of us discussing this topic in this thread wants them in the game at all, not for the first, the 10th, nor for the last mission.
Yeah, that’d be more interesting. It might be worth making a thread for it, and sticking up on canny.
Yeah, I’m with you there.
It’s a very good idea. It would be nice if the patrolling was also somehow tied in to diplomacy, so that it would increase the rating with the factions/havens.
You know there is bleeding? 0 HP in combat should result in instant death. Don’t add anything after this treshold.
While you make good points, we are addressing separate issues… Do the skills need to be looked at… certainly, and it is difficult to understand how some of this stuff made it through quality control… but the fact that soldiers max out half way through the contest is largely responsible for the fact they become indispensable, as the game is forced to make certain you are fielding level seven teams…
A simple way of addressing this might be to require far more experience per level so that soldiers are only coming into level seven towards the end of the game… The current system of gaining the majority of SP through combat would work well with this.
Once again, I agree that the entire perk system needs to be revamped to smooth out the tactical play… as it is now, it plays more along the line of fantasy (at least they killed the teleportation spell)…
The game does not scale with the level of the soldiers. The difficulty goes up with geoscape time and number of missions done, adjusted by (a rough estimate of) player’s performance*. So it’s not because you have lvl 7 soldiers that they become indispensable, and the game doesn’t make certain you are fielding a lvl 7 team: it throws at you whatever it has to (based on the above variables) and you have to deal with it any way you can.
(*Regarding the dynamic difficulty adjustments I haven’t yet seen much feedback for the Leviathan patch, but the situation prior to the last patch seems to have been that under certain circumstances it behaved completely out of whack - for example, with save scumming, or if the player only attacked citadels, which according to the DDA algorithm are treated as very difficult missions while in practice they are the easiest kind.)
By the way, for me, as I imagine for many other players, the game difficulty/enemies’ strength scaling with the level of the soldiers would be a deal breaker, because it would obliterate the value of the strategic layer.
So the way I see it, increasing the experience required to unlock each level would just limit the player’s options, and make veteran troops far more valuable.
It occurs to me that perhaps you are suggesting adjusting the difficulty at the same time as increasing the exp required to unlock levels, so that Pandas are only strong enough to “require” maxed out troops towards the end of the game.
I see 2 problems with this -
it can lead to the “I had already lost but I didn’t know it yet” situation, because I will realize that I need the maxed out troops when I no longer have the time to generate them.
how to determine what is the end of the game, and even more importantly how to make a smooth difficulty transition from not end of the game to end of the game.
Right now it’s easy - the game is not concerned with it. It just tracks the time and the number of missions. Whether you are closer or further away from finishing the game doesn’t seem to matter. IMO, it’s a good design choice, because it makes the strategic layer important.
And, on the gripping hand, just close the OP holes and make sure that the game is beatable without them. Get that right, then see if progression/difficulty needs flattening, smoothing out, or landscaping.
Voland, I wrote nothing about scaling the game to the soldiers level… so I can’t respond to that… and I have tried to make my point clear to you twice… obviously failing to do so, and I will accept the blame… so, my friend, let’s just call it a day, shall we…