Is there a guide to play this so I dont get the ridiculous difficulty spike. Apparently the developer has some specific way to play this game to avoid setting off the difficulty algorithm. So what do i need to do. My current dead game has me at august 2020 with a base defence with 470 hp sirens and my best weapons are ar50’s
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From what i’ve seen in feedback,though its hard to verify what really causes the spikes, avoid any combat you can avoid. Skip the scavenge missions early on, hold off on quests… just do the haven defense and destroying pandoran lairs. That or fail missions or complete them with heavy losses from time to time. Lose 4 out of 6 guys is one suggestion i’d seen.
For tip’s i’d say get both triton and arthron autopsy early, one unlocks the grenade launcher and the other a shotgun for your assaults. Even the basic shotgun up in a sirens face disables their head in a blast or two, though you may need to switch to the disiples armor shredding shotguns down the road. Shotguns stay relevant throughout the game, even on a scylla two shotgun assaults up int heir face is some major damage. I find them to be much better than assault rifles, especially given the lowish range of the ARs and the damage comparison between the two.
One thing i’ve found that helped a lot on my last game was a mod to disable faction wars. As havens are lost the ODI ramps up, which from what i’ve observed really ramped up the difficulty, especially as we are required to recruit from havens. Seeing 8 havens go in a 5 minute period of play sucks. The pandorans aren’t half as destructive as the factions.
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I’m struggling in a similar way to Kodiaz. I will note your advice.
Lose 4 of 6 guys dude thats awful.
if you dont do scavenge missions how do you build stuff
Use the rewards from haven defense to build up food production, then trade off excess food for the resources you need. Kind of sad that the game seems to encourage this style of play, but in my most recent (and most successful) run at the game it did seem to be working. I’d gotten up to my 9th base uncovered, 6th squad trained to level 7, revealed the whole map and kept the pandoran structures wiped off the map without needing to do very many scavenging missions, and it was fairly easy.
Doesn’t seem right to encourage skipping the combat scenarios like this in a game where the combat can be so fun, but doing so it really felt like the difficulty wasn’t hitting that absurd spike i’d had in all my previous attempts. Of course the mod to prevent the full scale faction wars helped too, but in a normal game you can intervene and wipe out attacking forces to slow their wars at the cost of your relations and sort of get the same result.
Steal aircrafts (one or two) at the beginning of the game
Edit:
Btw. Where is the Problem killing 470HP sirens with an AR-50? All you need are soldiers at Level 7. To get them build 4 or 5 bootcamps in your second Base to gain exp fast. And a second Base is no Problem when you stealing the aircraft early in the game
You should notice that a lot of explore results just give you resources. So explore a lot and avoid scavenge missions after you have enough to get you going.
Choose a faction to raid.
New hypothesis, take your time, don’t rush, instead slow down.
Manage the doomsday counter but don’t rush anyway.
Otherwise skip scavenging missions seems a way to slow down as combats seem important in the scale up.
More or less past 1.5/2 months it seems work differently and then if take it slow can still help, I doubt you can find a way to always avoid huge spikes. At this point (not during first month), it’s to setup a pace that fit you, and be ready of having regular level 7 death. Build a base with 4 or 5 training center to ensure a replacement of death, the good point is it will allow try more builds.
Does sacrifice works, perhaps, but it’s lame and you’ll fell lame if you start play with that.
Or you can ally with Anu faction and declare these sacrifices a ritual cleansing =P
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DON’T SPOIL ME, I hate so much those Anu, frankly the dev should have make it a bit more ambiguous like on Xmen side.
Well, after reading some Phoenix Point lore neither of the factions seems “evil” to me. Just people looking for different means for survival of Humankind in a post-apocalliptic world. Power, science, faith…
To be honest there was nothing about Anu and blood sacrifices in the fiction stories. It sounds more like stories OTHER factions could tell about Disciples of Anu to discourage people from joining them =)
I didnt have any level 7 soldiers i was at level 5 after winning all my combats and it isnt the one siren its them and the seven other things coming with them. And the armor seems to go way up to i hit the siren with 5 head shots and its head still worked
There’s no need of level 7 skills, but you need use tools to manage armor break. Perhaps you got a special Siren mutation or you tried shoot with AR like the pp AR.
Yes the game is hard, but methods and styles matter. Disable a siren in the head. A shotgun can help. But there are so many ways to disable rather than kill an opponent. When the danger is minimalised then finish off the enemy. Reducing the enemies’ will can also help. Whereas with other games like previous xcom games - the process of outright killing is more important. Much of the tools provided in the game cater for disabling first. More critical units like the wormy things and head huggers are more vulnerable and can be quickly killed outright. Your soldiers need to focus on cooperation to disable the most lethal threats!
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- What shall we do with pandorean Siren?
https://youtu.be/qGyPuey-1Jw
I agree it’s refreshing how in PP there’s a lot more than mass killing.
Siren could have only close range attack that a soldier with good armor can ignore more or less, it’s not a shredding armor attack. So disable the head is very effective.
Siren with a throw torso attack can be more annoying, if it’s poison, you can cumulate anti poison protection on some soldiers and manage it better throw them.
Panic a Siren is classic, it can be the extra turn to manage something else.
Siren are very close range, from afar disable their tail can slower them to manage them better.
But yeah there are other enemies more easy to manage like triton disarm, disarm crabs with a very nasty AR. A typical example is when later game you have more crab with 6*50 AR, it’s most often a lot more efficient to disarm two than kill one.
You need a Base with 4 or 5 Training Centers to gain exp faster than in battle without any losts
You don’t need to skip combat missions - I don’t and I’m still chugging through my first playthrough on an ODI of 55% without the difficulty spike.
The key to me is to simply play ‘HonestMan’. Treat it like an Ironman game, where you run the autosave. If a mission is overwhelming you or proving costly in casualties, don’t hit Restart: instead bug out and take your losses on the chin. That way, the DDA registers it as a loss with casualties rather than another miraculous win, and adjusts accordingly. There’s nothing to stop you coming back to the same location later - even straight away - and trying again; but instead of restarting and trying again, bug out and try again.
The Difficulty Spike seems to happen because the system is adjusting itself to your record of play. So when you restart a mission multiple times until you win it, it registers that as a ‘win with no losses’ - not as several losses followed by a win. If you bug out, instead of restarting, it records the loss and adjusts accordingly.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a brutally difficult game if you don’t cheeze it - and most of us like it that way. So you’re gonna take losses, and you’re gonna lose missions; and you need to learn fast when to say ‘enough’s enough’ and stage a tactical withdrawal. For me, that’s the fun of it - it’s not like XCOM which is essentially a zero-sum game; it’s a gruelling campaign where you have to manage your losses and learn to fight another day, rather than acing everything first time.
And if you do, the DDA doesn’t crucify you.
I believe have seen clues on two very different behavior of the auto scaling, first month and a bit later and duration depends on how auto scaling behave during this first phase. The a second phase past this firs phase.
During first phase, no way even 3 soldiers death changed anything, play Ironman won’t help.
Past that phase yeah register soldiers death seems influence a lot and quickly the auto scaling.
Then a third point, at Easy and Normal during first phase death are a lot harder to manage because you are forced to buy again an equipment you already have from death.