Sorry, but no, I hated this time pressure part of looting something. For me this would be the worst case.
I hated it too, but in a good way 
For me at least it was never boring.
This is right now. Kill everyone and then pick up x turns.
I don’t think that there is only right and wrong in level design. Everyone has their own taste.
Edit: My personal opinion is that PP would have more mass success if it became a little more dynamic and not even slower (long picking up, trading, repeatable skills activating, confirming, long evacuation, long opponent turns)
Very true, thats why I almost write “For me …” when ever it comes to something that is not clearly objective 
Quite. One man’s tonic is another man’s poison. As I recently suggested in the post on inventory management I would like it there could be extra Gameplay options for users to personalize their game. In this case it might be turning on an option to have time-limited resource collection missions…
I’m ambivalent about timers. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In XCom EW the timers for Meld were absolutely essential in making the tactical battles more engaging.
Now, tbh, I don’t even care that much about the looting, or even merging the Haven Defense and the Raid missions; it does seem like a cool idea to me, but what matters more is the problem it is attempting to solve.
That problem is what I think ultimately prompted the OP, and it’s that the game seemingly charges PX with being the caretaker of the whole world while not providing a meaningful way of obtaining resources for that job.
Now, the OP is coming at it from the perspective “I want more meaningful ways of obtaining resources to do my job!”, while my point is “I don’t want this job at all!”
I don’t want to play the role of the caretaker of the Havens, protecting them from attacks, or repairing stuff that gets broken (the repair option in Havens I find absurd to the point of hilarious - what is PX here exactly?).
It’s charging the player with fighting entropy: he is fighting a force that will prevail no matter what but he is given to understand that if he makes an optimal use of time and other resources he can hold back this force indefinitely.
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I really don’t like the concept of mutants = meat = food (considering that these are mutated “people going to sea”).
For me, mutants = biomaterial = mutagen, which should be sold / exchanged for other resources (including non-standard ones, for example: diplomacy, research, recruits, finished products, PP / SP - teaching passive skills …)
My opinion on HD is still here:
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[quote=“noStas, post:46, topic:11287, full:true”]
I concur. Mutagens = food is not particularly lore-friendly to say the least.
I believe desperate times require desperate measures. Life must go on. So mankind should do anything necessary to eat even if it is pseudo cannibalism (part man and part alien monster). Genetic mutation with alien DNA, that’s leaning more in the direction or an aberration. But again, desperate times require desperate measures!
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It’s more that the game DOES provide you with ways of obtaining enough resources to do that job, it’s just that they’re repetitive and tedious.
Trading between havens, picking a faction you don’t like and chain-raiding them, capturing Pandorans en masse and turning them into food . . . there are various ways to make money in this game, it’s just that they all require large amounts of micromanagement. Even the ways of making money that are fun to begin with, like scavenging missions, get a bit old when you’ve done 15 of them already and when most of the contents of crates are ammo packs for weapons you don’t use, each of which you have to click-and-drag to transfer over into your inventory.
For whatever reason, the developers of Phoenix Point seem to have made the decision to make passive income very weak, and active income very strong – even when the active income requires no more risk or strategy than the passive income would. So Food Production Facilities have been nerfed into near-uselessness, but flying a Helios back and forth between havens on a manual trade route is apparently fine.
The reasoning seems to be that it’s okay for the player to earn huge amounts of money as long as they ‘earn it’ by clicking their way through boring tasks? Or something? I dunno.
It’s hard to figure out what the devs are trying to do here. They seem to have very consciously decided NOT to go the passive income route that every other 4X game uses, but I don’t understand what benefit it’s bringing to the game.
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Yeah, thats why I qualified that those ways have to be “meaningful”; they have to be satisfying, or at least not tedious. 
I think what happened with resource procurement is that prior to Cthulhu it wasn’t much of an issue.
First, because there was no base activation, and second because with the previous ODI system PX was much less of a caretaker. There were less attacks on Havens and you really didn’t feel like you had to protect all of them (at least I for one completed ignored them after a certain point).
There is something to the notion that the devs have consciously opted for not having passive income in the game, since they have created what (at least on paper) looks like a more interesting choice, which is to raid Havens for resources if you really need them. (Tbh, I have never done this in 400 hours of playing because I haven’t felt the need and because I feel like I’m already doing too many tactical missions in the game).
I think it works if it’s something you can’t do very often and you don’t have to do very often.
The thing is, the devs don’t expect you to save all the Havens, activate all the bases, get the best equipment/augments for your operatives…
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The are 18 (?) bases not so that you activate most of them, but to give you a choice as to their location, as an alternative to allowing you to build bases where you want.
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Bionics are powerful because they are supposed to be expensive and rare in your team. Similarly, so are most explosives.
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The devs expect you to go for defeating the Pandoravirus, not saving every Haven and destroying every Pandoran base. The attacks on Havens are just the main instrument by which the Doomsday Clock operates, and the possibility of defending them is a way of giving the player some agency in slowing down this Clock.
This role of the caretaker that got thrust upon the player was not intended: the devs underestimated the pull that many players would feel towards saving every Haven and that they would base their strategy on slowing down the Doomsday Clock rather than finishing the game before it runs out.
And it’s not just that the players feel morally obliged to save every Haven that they can, it’s that the game encourages it on a meta level: doing HDs provides resources and experience and there is no downside/opportunity cost for doing HDs because you can always do other missions later.
Apologies for the long post 
…
Anyway my question is, do you want to be the caretaker of the Havens, or would you rather not?
Because ultimately on the answer to that question depends how many resources you need and thus what means should be available for obtaining them.
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I think, like you, I’d prefer not being the sole global caretaker of the world’s Havens. It feels a bit silly to me that the Phoenix Project with its 12 guys is responsible for doing all the large-scale military defence that the factions with their 10s of 1000s of people somehow can’t.
But the decision to remove the ODI and replace it with the global population tracker seems to indicate that the devs do want the game to revolve around the Phoenix Project saving humanity by means of defeating the Pandoran haven attacks, one at a time. It doesn’t seem likely that they’re going to change that back.
Honestly, I think either approach can work, I just want to spend less time on boring stuff. I’m planning to try a new campaign this Wednesday when the patch comes out, and while I’m excited to try the strategic/tactical stuff, the one thing I’m really not looking forward to is figuring out how I’m going to earn the thousands and thousands of resources it takes to activate all those bases.
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Don’t get caught in the Science Lab trap.
I can tell you from painful experience that science labs don’t look like a very good investment - until you are going through the lloong, slow grind of endgame researches and it suddenly dawns on you that you don’t have enough science labs to research the ‘win game’ Maguffin before the timer ends the world.
WOW, food around. Oh, am I growing a tail?
You cannot stomach it. People will always find better food or ways to create it.
IMHO, this is a lazy and stupid design to replace the production of food (resource) instead of building farms, and reluctance (lazy design) to give the “mutagen” widespread use.
No, not really… The ODI was replaced as the Doomsday Clock because it was hard to understand what it was and how to interact with it (slow it down). The Human Population Census addresses that - it’s easy to understand what it is and how its decline can be slowed down (at least in practice - things get a bit murky with the attrition rate from starvation).
However, it wasn’t intended that the player would say “I’m responsible for every Haven out there, so I have to activate as many bases as fast possible, get as many teams as possible, and protect as many Havens as possible.”
It’s more that a bunch of different mechanics conspire to push the player in that direction, and the reason for some of these mechanics is not as much a design choice as a lack of it.
For example, the player can do as many missions with the same team as he wants, only being limited by distance, the time to travel it and Stamina. All missions, with the exception of HDs and some in DLC1 never expire. Would you do as many HDs if other missions expired too? I’m not saying they should, just that there is no opportunity cost for doing them, and that’s because the devs as of yet simply haven’t come up with a opportunity cost mechanic that they would find satisfactory.
And I’m not criticising the devs on this, because in a game as complex as PX small changes make a huge impact and they have to really things through before committing resources to something.
So, in summary, no it’s not that the game has taken the route of turning PX into the caretaker of the Havens, which is why I think this kind of debate can be helpful to the devs.
One idea that I have been thinking of to roll back the caretaker role, in addition to the other changes I suggested in the previous posts, is that PX cannot stop a Haven from getting destroyed if the value of the attack is higher than that of the defence. The purpose of going on such a mission would be locate the Pandoran base before it launches a new attack against a different Haven.
Thoughts?
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The issue of Haven Defences and how many the Phoenix Project should be doing is pretty complicated, and comes more down to the game’s vision than anything else. How do the devs want the game to be played? I’m not quite sure, and I could see arguments for handling Haven Defences lots of different ways depending on exactly how you answer that question. (Have more of them, have less of them, have only some of them be fully winnable, have some of them revolve around holding a set number of turns against an overwhelming force to buy time to evac, etc.)
What I’m much more sure about is the way the economy works. At the moment, your primary resource in the strategic game is, well, resources. Tech/materials/food, they can all be traded for each other. With enough resources, you can do basically anything – they buy you more soldiers, more gear, more aircraft, more bases, higher research speed (via Research Labs), higher production speed (via Fabrication Plants), more XP for your soldiers (via Training Centres), etc.
That means that the game’s economy becomes REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT. Because if enough resources are an ‘I Win’ button, then you have to work really hard to limit ways for the player to get resources. And if the most effective ways for the player to get resources are to do repetitive tasks, then that means that the best strategy for playing the game becomes spending lots of time doing repetitive tasks.
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Just wanted to say that I’m with MadSkunky in everything here - I like the idea of a slow steady automatic income, but please no time pressure as a constant mechanic nor evacs or loots everywhere.
I would say that the primary resource in the game is time, which is what allows you to do, among other things, the repetitive tasks that provide you with the other resources.
And the player has too much of it because there are many systems that are yet missing (for example, recovery from injuries and augmentations, equipment management).
It’s not really a design choice - it’s like many other areas of the game (for example, tactical combat) that have balance issues: there is a lot more content coming so there is no attempt to close all loopholes ASAP and balance what there is right now.
Similarly, when it comes to raiding Havens, since diplomacy is going to be overhauled eventually anyway, the devs are more interested in seeing what the players do with Raids rather than balancing them.
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Resources buy you time, though. The main clock on the game is the ODI/population/doomsday timer, and you have to finish a ton of research before it hits zero. And research speed is linear, based on number of Research Labs. I had a total of 9 Research Labs by the end of my last campaign – at 200 Tech each that’s really expensive, but it meant I could power through the lategame research very fast. With hindsight, I probably would have built even more of the things.
(This is a good reason to make research speed be nonlinear, BTW – XCOM Long War has a target number of scientists for each tech. Having fewer scientists than that number gives you much slower research, but having more scientists than the target number gives you diminishing returns. This de-incentivises the player from brute-forcing research by just throwing money at it. In PP, throwing money at it is the optimal strategy.)
Good to hear that diplomacy’s due for an overhaul. I was getting very jaded about the diplomacy system. By the end of my last campaign I’d killed members of every faction on the map on the orders of every other faction on the map – I’d done so many ‘go murder these guys’ missions that I couldn’t even remember them all. And yet I was at 100% with all three factions.
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There is a lot of new stuff coming, the game will be in a much, much better shape for the Steam release and that won’t be the end of it either, because they will continue working on the game after that.
I can say without breaking any confidences that the devs are working really hard and listening to feedback from all players, and looking at the actual data of how people are playing. But it’s a small studio and resources are always limited, plus the player base is very diverse, so they have to weigh carefully all the options.
Anyway, feedback is very important - hearing from players what they like doing, what not, why, what would they rather be doing…
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Still easily the best X-Com style game I have played since TFTD. I think the Developers are doing a great job, especially given the Corvid-19 situation. It’s getting better all the time and I find that very exciting. 
Edit: actually Xenonauts was pretty good as well… but still lacked something