What's the experience with raiding vs trading?

So I’ve come back to Phoenix Point after a long absence while they got stuff built out. It’s become quite a solid game and I’m loving it so far, but I’m trying to decide how I want to do my next playthrough.

This time out I’m trying to ally with all of the factions, but New Jericho is being a pain, and I’m wondering if it’s really worth being allies with them and waiting to get enough gear to reverse engineer/get their research, or if I wouldn’t be better off making them a punching bag that I constantly steal tech and resources, and ships from.

What is the general wisdom on playing nice vs. playing rough with the factions? I constantly find myself strapped for resources with my current strategy and it seems like picking one faction to be a loot pinata could be better.

Besides, Tobias West is a dick and has it coming. :wink:

Yeah. The added DLC doesn’t really add too much love too Tobias either if you hear what he does.

It’s just about balancing reputation and getting all the resources you can in the end though right?

Saying that, immersion wise I didn’t like stealing food from a bunch of messed up EMO’s during an Apocalypse just because I wanted to get in with the Radical Left.

But that’s just me.

LOL, I’m good with altering my loot pinata each playthrough for variety, I’m just wondering about the trade-off. For example, the factions occasionally give you large gifts, maybe 2 or 3 as you go up the alignment tree, but would they be worth more, and drive the other two factions to their gifts faster, if you simply stole from one consistently?

Only benefit from having everyone as an ally I think is that there is certain tech that you can only get as an ally, the passive bonus tech like getting extra str with NJ.

Otherwise though I’d say you really want to have an enemy faction to keep raiding it constantly. Trading otherwise is pretty tedious and even though it’s viable technically, it will require a lot of food processors before you can get to a point where you can get steady income that you can keep trading and you can keep up with all your resource requirements.

Not to mention the easy SP farm you can get with steal research missions. Bring in an infiltrator and complete the missions in 2 turns - steal some research or alternatively research points to complete research faster.

Anyway all of this is about optimal play anyway. You don’t really have to play optimally either, I just find that assembling second and especially third team becomes rather hard if you don’t constantly do raid missions.

Each of the faction has it’s owen research speed. If you ally with a faction, you can increase the research speed. So if you are at war with a faction, it needs more time to get access to the later techs because factions my need 1 week to research a new tech.

I think NJ has one of the best techs in endgame: A tech that adds 4 hours alert time if an attack is ongoing, so you have 4 hours, while no combat is running during the attack.

About trading, trading is totaly not worth it, the amount of resources you get by trading is way too small, if you really want to do some kind of progress. If you fly by a haven, you can trade, but to fly to a haven only to trade and traveling huge distances is not worth it.

The point here is ‘huge distance’, then you’re right. But you can stop at every heaven to trade and you can do almost nothing wrong (exeption Anu trading tech for food, NJ trading tech for materials and Synedrion buying food or materials, but even these trades are always a win for you as long as you not do these three all the time).
That said, trading is worth it by stopping at almost any heaven but it is endless tedious to do so.
And yes, compared to raids the outcome of trades is pretty small. But I feel better to play this way instead endless ‘farming’ the ones I should protect.

Trading is very boring and absolutely worth it if you’re short of resources, which you always are.

A good trade gets you maybe 100 or so resources. That’s as much as you get from a scavenging pack. Except the trade costs you about 10 seconds of real-world time, while a scavenging mission takes more like 20-30 minutes.

It’s tedious, but it beats doing the same raid mission 20 times in a row.

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So what is the mean time for equipping a 2nd and 3rd squad? I’m up to 5 squads now, and working on a 6th, but it’s taken forever, and my second squad took a long time to get up and running.

I was generally buying troops from factions, and I’m not sure that’s too bad. A raw Recruit still needs armor and gear, which means building it, and that cost can be similar to a recruit, plus recruits come with gear I don’t have and levels, so they seem like a fair trade.

That said, maybe that’s not the best approach for the first squads…

I feel like I’m behind the “pace”, although I’m still wining battles and not losing guys, so I’m probably OK, but I still think I’m not where I should be yet. A benchmark from the community would be good for helping me judge where I am.