Phoenix Point - new Julian Gollop turn-based strategy game

Is that why people spend so much time in Leone westerns staring at each other? They’re calculating attack modifiers?

Nope :) The whole gunfight mechanic is to force the other player to break and draw first, just like the Leone films. Each character is rated for his “Cool”, so someone like the Man with No Name is rated with the top rank “Cool” and Tuco would be rated as “Panicky”. The first one to draw has a big penalty to hit so it’s a big disadvantage.

@tomchick This isn’t a boardgame it’s a miniatures tabletop game :)

That’s how far away they were from inventing good boardgames! They hadn’t even really invented boardgames yet.

-Tom

Why sir, I will have you know that Statis Pro Football came out in 1973, 1973!!!

Holy $#!t - buried deep in the recesses of my mind, a memory comes forth of me actually playing that game back in my elementary school “game club.”

ONCE. Yes, only once. I remember being the next to last alive in a four-person shootout, finally gunned down in the street by the teacher who was running the club. Side note; I only got one kill, and it was my friend who wrongly assumed we’d team up together. Yeah, I was a jerk, but there can be only one.

Rather than get sucked into buying DW2 I started playing this, a game I already own, with the latest DLC and all the earlier ones I haven’t played with yet(anything after Blood and Titanium). I just completed the first mission for the Festering Skies content, so now there is a big alien flying around. How disruptive is that going to be? The Kaos marketplace from the latest DLC looks interesting, but everything in there is way too expensive for me right now.

Depends how close it lands and which allies you have. It’s in your interest to stop it from destroying or infesting sites but you can’t do much to it at the start. Ideally if you have a spare aircraft, spend the time to destroy it’s scouts because without them it won’t find places to attack.

DLCs are over, but full mod support this summer!

I wasn’t blown away by any of the DLC content and it was easy to kind of lose the main thread with so many quest missions available at any time. So I’m okay with that not continuing. I do hope the mod community develops for this as it seems like a great framework to build off.

Haven’t played in ages, nor touched various DLC. So it’s time to dive back in finally.

I’ve tried to play through this twice.

Both times, I gave up late game when all the strongholds on the map started getting regularly invaded. I had enough soldiers and fliers to fight these, but it got really boring having 3 out of every 4 missions be these rote, time consuming stronghold defenses.

Have any patches/DLCs changed that?

This. I won’t ever play PP again because of how sloggy it gets – how much meaningless and time-consuming activity is forced on the player late game. I really got into my playthrough of the updated version of PP, but, given their resource limitations, I would rather have less content padding, no bullet modeling in combat, etc., and a tighter experience.

The XCOM reboot series has the tension of each battle going for it. It’s very tight; and it clearly sacrificed some “realism” for drama and quality of the player experience. Despite its annoyances, it rarely fails to deliver excellent tactical challenge – at least at the highest difficulty level. PP is all over the map (pun intended) with this – sometimes it’s fun and interesting, sure, but almost as if those qualities are emergent rather than designed.

I agree with the late game slog (that’s where I petered out) but I’d take PP over the XCOM reboots any day. I just think the decision space is so much more interesting, from creative hybrid classes to a much more eventful and simulated geoscape (including faction alliances that open up different types of tech) to the VATS-style limb damaging and projectile modelling. I rarely felt like I couldn’t escape tight spots in PP thanks to the more deterministic combat.

With all the DLC now out and mod support coming, I hope that PP’s quirks and shortcomings get addressed by the community. It’s a fantastic send-off from Snapshot.

nailed it!

I can’t repair an augmentation on one of my soldiers. It’s showing as damaged. I can go into the screen to repair it and I have enough materials/tech. And the button to repair it is lit up. But clicking it does nothing. Anyone seen this?

This is where I am, too. Seems to me Hotfreak’s complaint is endemic to these kinds of games, much like complaints about the endgame in a 4X. As such, I feel like Phoenix Point learned a lot from XCOM and subsequently improved on it by providing more content, gameplay, variety, and meaningful choice during the late game. I expect the next game of this type by a developer with the insight, experience, and skill of Firaxis or Snapshot will do even better.

But until then, Phoenix Point is easily my game of choice for leveling up little dudes through tactical battles.

-Tom

Ain’t no slog in the Xcom games, in my experience. You either get crushed or you have tense, meaningful, variety-packed encounters with significant consequences and progress.

In that case, you will definitely appreciate Phoenix Point’s endgame. As I said, they benefitted a lot from XCOM’s experience.

-Tom

So with all de DLC out, I’ve started this again (I’ve started several times, but never finished while waiting for the next DLC).

I was playing in Veteran and all was going just fine until Festering Skies started.

Oh my! I did not like this one. Too much pressure with so little reward. I don’t know if I’m playing it right, but the hunt for resources only to keep my ships up to date is exhausting, and the aerial minigame after 5 times is boring AF.

Some tips regarding the other DLCs?

I’ll start again and try to finish the game. I’ve thought of playing with all the DLCs except Festering Skies, of course, and maybe Legacy of the Ancients (I’ve read that it becomes too grindy, and the game is long enough as it is).

It sounds like you’re where I am, @Grenyes. Getting accustomed to all the new stuff in this world, now that it’s gotten so much DLC.

The Festering Skies stuff is quite a lot, and I’ve by no means mastered it, but it seems to me that it’s a balancing pass to assist the aliens. Previously they had to crawl onshore from out of the mist, which was always rolling in from the sea, so settlements were always attacked from a fixed front. You could always see where they were coming from, and it was always the shore that was threatened, and you had a convenient way of shutting down the threat by whacking alien nests.

But Festering Skies is a way to let the aliens strike deeper inland, more persistently, and more predictably. Early on, you won’t be able to do much about it. Don’t try! Just stay out of the way! You are going to lose large swathes of territory and population, so just accept that it’s going to happen. In the words of that Disney movie about snowmen and princesses, just let it go!

The trick is figuring out when you’re tough enough to start hitting back and fighting the recon, supply, and raid flights to drive the Behemoth back into the sea. You might not know when you’re ready, but it will be painfully obvious when you’re not ready, in which case, try again later. :)

But until that happens, until you can reliably shoot down the Behemoth’s flights, just let it do its thing. It’s just a way to give the aliens a fighting chance by letting them strike at population that would otherwise be effectively invulnerable.

Are you winning? Because if you’re winning, “boring AF” is good! But I’m guessing you’re not into the full aerial game yet (I might be wrong about this, but I think the Behemoth’s first appearance might be a gimmie; you can just drive him back into the sea after shooting down a couple of non-committal recon flights). But there will eventually be difficult decisions about weapon loadouts, countermeasures, and breaking off! It’s never going to be as hearty as an actual ground fight, but air combat should involve actual difficult decisions and risky choices once it comes into its own.

Snapshot was certainly true to their word to flesh out the vehicle gameplay! I was already a big fan of how vehicles worked (a must for scavenging missions!), but now they’re even more badass with the Kaos market upgrades. In fact, that Kaos marketplace basically violates the entire game progression! I love it. If you’re willing to pay the resources – it’s not cheap – you can break Phoenix Point in some very interesting ways with careful use of the Kaos market.

Otherwise, it seems like the DLC is basically fleshing out side options for developing your team, right? With mutoids, bionic advancement, and the forsaken body mods as three separate “threads” of squad development. I’m guessing you could ignore any of these if you wanted?

In my current playthrough, I’ve been “crafting” mutoid scouts to great effect. Basically, semi-disposable drones with high perception values that I can send out onto the map before venturing out with my higher-value teammates. I feel like the DLC is full of options for this sort of creative expression, and it’s an absolute joy to discover how it all fits into the Phoenix Point world.

Thanks to the DLC and Snapshot’s post-release support, I’m in love all over again!

-Tom