One of the stuff phoenix points struggles more with is difficulty and balance. That is why it is so strange the game provides no options to adjust difficulty settings.

One of the weirdest absences is to me the lack of a campaign length option, since the current length for all difficulties is about 100h long. Making the game repetitive and forcing the player to play some missions over and over again.

Another strange omission is the lack of second wave options, or a custom difficulty setting where the player could select a basic difficulty setting and tune some parameters to make the experience more adjusted to his or her preference.

Those options, that the player could enable or disable could include for example:

- Positive or negative effects as the HPC goes down (the ODI had this).

- Fabrication plants generate material per day.

- Research labs generate tech per day.

- Tune the death rate of havens caused by starvation.

- Tune recruit’s spawn rate at havens.

- Tune haven attack rate from factions.

- Stop one faction overrunning another.

- Tune haven defenses to make destructions more or less likely.

- Tune the number of personal abilities.

- Remove the cap on mutation and bionics.

- Give Phoenix Point the blueprint of all independent gears.

- Remove the cap of one module per aircraft.

- …

Note that most of these features were present once in the game, or are already tuned in some mods.

Hi,

I love the game and I have played it couple of times already. I also agree with the direction it changed

since it’s release.

One thing I would love to see would be modular difficulty. I like challenging, LONG games. I have settled at the hero difficulty as challenging but not too rushed. Especially with all the new content I was busy with missions without pandorans and hit 2 evolution steps without having to fight a single pandoran enemy

My suggestion would be to split the difficulty into couple of modules:

1) speed of pandoran evolution

2) strength of your soldiers (for example XP gain)

3) tactical difficulty (amount and/or toughness of enemies)

4) hostilily of other factions towards you and each other

5) if wounds are not healed/partially healed/completely healed between encounters

6) if disabled body parts are healed between encounters

I would really like to fight multiple tough battles against each evolution step with

not too overpowered soldiers

Kind regards and thanx for awesome game

Hello. First, I want to say, I love most aspects of the game.

However, I'd like more detailed difficulty settings. I'm playing on rookie, and the tactical combat is fine, but I'm having trouble with the strategic aspect. I've discovered 5 Phoenix bases so far, and they're all in Siberia, northern Canada, and the Arctic Circle. So getting to havens under attack is too difficult. Say a haven is under attack in Western Europe or Africa. I have to fly all the way from Siberia to Western Europe or Africa, defend the haven, and then fly back to Siberia to heal my people. By the time my ship gets back to my base, another haven is under attack, and I have to repeat the process all over again.

I feel like I'm treading water. I'm not losing, and my ODI meter isn't rising, but I'm barely advancing the storyline. 99 times out of 100, I'm stopping a haven attack or destroying a nest/lair/citadel, and I'm barely exploring the world or playing storyline missions.

And even if I had bases everywhere, and 2 ships at every base, and 2 squads of soldiers at every base - so that I could everywhere I needed to be, with a healed squad always ready - it would still be tedious to constantly defend havens and destroy nests/lairs/citadels. I want to advance the storyline. But every time I try to advance the storyline, another haven is under attack.

I have a busy life, and sometimes, I just have time to play a mission or two. I don't want all my time being spent defending havens and destroying nests/lairs/citadels. I want to be able to advance the story and explore the world too. But I feel like I'm constantly putting out fires.

Ultimately, the point of the game - for me at least - is to be fun and relaxing. After a hard day of work, I want to be able to sit down and feel like I've accomplished something. Maybe it's too easy, compared to what it would be like if the Pandoravirus were real. Maybe in real life, haven attacks would be occurring constantly. But while that might be realistic, it's not necessarily fun.

So what I'd like is more detailed difficulty settings, where you can separately adjust the tactical and strategic difficulty. For example, under strategic difficulty, a person might be able to adjust how often haven attacks occur.

Presumably, if haven attacks occur less often, then each defense would grant more resources and have a larger effect on diplomacy, so that the game still progresses at the same rate. Setting the strategic difficulty to easier would mean fewer attacks that each defense is worth more.

Again, I love most aspects of the game. The storyline is fascinating, and the graphics and flavor text perfectly convey the Cthulhu-style environment and mood.

And several of your recent patches have fixed a lot of balance issues. For example, I used to hate lairs because it was so hard to find the spawnery. With the recent changes, the lair missions are much more fun. So I think the game has a ton of promise, and your recent balance changes have greatly improved the game. So thank you.

Some players love exploiting the unlimited skills sandbox PP provides. Others find it makes the game stultifyingly boring after a few OP missions. Others struggle to survive without them. To accommodate all these types of player, I propose that you link Skills, the DDA and Big Nasties to the player’s choice of Difficulty at the start of each game:

• EASY/STORY MODE: Max. 1 Siren/Chiron per map (Worm Lobbers only); Disable DDA; Enable unlimited Skills use.

• VETERAN/XCOM MODE: Max. 2 Sirens/Chirons per map (Worm & Goo Lobbers only, except in Story Missions); Enable DDA; Enable unlimited Skills use.

• HEROIC: Max. 3 Sirens/2 Chirons per map (inc. Bombard Chirons); Enable DDA; Skills limited to 1 use per turn.

• LEGENDARY/MASOCHIST ;0) Max. 5 Sirens/2 Chirons per map (inc. Acid Chirons); Enable DDA; Skills limited to 1 use per turn – Squadwide skills limited to 1 use per Squad per turn.

Devs, if you do this, I guarantee you will get far fewer complaints about the difficulty spike – and you might even keep the old X-COM fans who are currently abandoning this game because it is boringly easy.

Right now the game feels too fast, every game mode. It feels like that everything should have been slowed down by a factor of 2-4 - slower research, slower faction behaviour, slower level ups, slower progression of the pandorans... If not in the default game, then as a "Second Wave" option so to speak, if I remember X-com terminology.

It may be better to have game start a month or so before mist appears and here is where some more enemy types are needed - the one that was teased once, infected human kind.

So the first tier would be these infected, infected soldiers and worms, pretty easy enemies, with at best 10 armour and 200HP.

Then the mist will appear, and crabs and tritons are introduced. Nests start to appear. Another month or so of ingame time.

Then soldiers would be gone almost completely and sirens/chirons are introduced. Yap, another month or so, you know the drill.

And from there it's basically the usual composition that we have now in the game after 3-4 weeks. That will continue to escalate as usual. Somewhere along this time the Juggernaut should be introduced as well.

All that is so that the game would take at fastest 6 months of creeping in more advanced enemies as your capabilities grow. The frequency of events will also be adjusted by a factor of 2-4, so it'll feel almost like old X-COM basically.

The idea is to rename the Difficulty Settings and adjust them to cater to the type of game that the different player-types identified by the PP Forum really want:

STORY MODE would disable the DDA and limit the number of Big Nasties based on the type of mission (so Lairs get more Sirens than Scavenging missions, for instance). It would create a game that feels like it’s getting more difficult as it goes along, but is never truly impossible.

CHARACTER MODE would buff the stats & armour of the Squaddies. Squaddies would be harder to kill and the DDA would take Restarts into account, so that a player isn’t ‘punished’ for Restarting and getting a perfect score.

SUPER-SOLDIER MODE would have no limits on Squad Skills. You can create whatever exotic combos you like. The DDA would ramp up as it does now, but it doesn’t matter, 'cos you’re the Avengers and if you can’t ace the Mission in one, you ain’t doin’ it right :-)

TACTICIAN MODE would put a strict 1-use-per-turn limit on ALL skills (including passive skill buffs received from other Squaddies, like Rally). The DDA would do its thing, and you would revel in the pain of defeating this damn game with your hands tied behind your back ;-)

CUSTOM MODE would institute Sheepy’s ‘New Campaign Settings’ idea, which I really like but think would be a tad daunting to a brand new player who doesn’t know how the different parameters can interact. This would allow you to set the basic parameters to fit your own personal preferences, if the modes above don’t do it for you.

In this way, you the player get the game experience you want, without hamstringing the devs as they work to shape a beautifully complex fractal diagram of a game in the face of the mutually conflicting desires of multiple players.

I've posted a more detailed explanation with the same title onto the Forum for discussion.

If you had the ability to turn the TIMER on and off at the start of a new game, but achieve victory the same way by killing the end boss. In fact I would love this it would allow all the time you need to research anything, build anything, explore anything. Then if you lost men who cares you would have time to replace and train! if you lost a base you would eventually repair it, you could really be able to get into in and fully explore ALL the factions and side missions. Everything else could stay they same outside this but the game would only end if you were able to take out the final boss, evolution stays, mist spread etc… Now that would be one awesome game! AND… It would NOT effect anyone who did not want to play this way (they could leave the timer on) and it could still be as hard as it is now because it is all about the TIMER when you boil it down. I could live with it being difficult as long as I had the resources and time to recover from the hit.

So simple solution:

1: just add the ability to turn on and off the TIMER in any level at the start of a new game

2: Play could chose any difficulty they like and decide if they want to add the pressure of the TIMER

3: It would not effect the game in anyway except for those who turn it off

PROBLEM SOLVED… and you can make all the “balancing” you like and keep everyone happy at the same time!

As far as programming goes all you would need to do it take out the END GAME switch once the red bar reached the end. And only had END GAME once the boss was eventually taken out, it really is that simple!

Hi I see a lot of people complaining about lots of different features in game.

I think a way to solve this is to give an option to change the game style by the players wishes.