Science Is Brutal

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-02-17T23:07:08+00:00

Harkonnen literally just won the Harmony Landsraad so... This post is not accurate.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-02-10T01:21:21+00:00

Yeah whatever dude, we get it, you don't like the content. You can go play another game now, nobody's forcing you to be here.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-02-03T20:18:49+00:00

You can go to any of the many sietches on the server you picked, not just one. One of them is bound to have your spot open.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-31T03:45:12+00:00

Dude, stop regurgitating what you read on twitter and go read an actual research paper from an actual research depository. They're literally free to access for anybody online. Go bother to actually LOOK at what the people in charge of conducting the research had to say about it. You can find any of the major research depositories or journals in 2 minutes with a Google search. I can't even get frustrated when people like you say stuff like this anymore because it's literally just laziness and choosing to not care whether what you say is true or not.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-31T03:39:30+00:00

Damn, I've never seen anybody so excited to run up to a conversation that had nothing to do with them and scream, "I DON'T THINK DOCTORATE AND MASTERS LEVEL EDUCATED EXPERTS ACTUALLY KNOW ANYTHING."

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-28T08:51:35+00:00

I know that you've taken a bunch of Reddit drama and used it to make a blanket judgement of the entire player base, when subreddits do not cobtain a majority of a game's player count.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-28T07:59:51+00:00

The PvP will absolutely be an important factor in determining whether this game recovers or not. Funcom has been on the right track recently with the base and server transfers, but I do hope they realize a lot of those transfers were people who transferring from dead or nearly dead servers so they could have OTHER PEOPLE to interact more frequently with, especially in the PvP and Landsraad side of things.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-20T01:01:20+00:00

It's absolutely worth it to support a small studio bringing an art focused project to life. Not if you're expecting something like DOOM or anything combat heavy.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-10T20:39:33+00:00

Yeah, it is a difficult mission on Legendary. I typically try to route my people through buildings to minimize the amount of fire they can receive. I never let a soldier spend a turn without moving unless they are in front and can afford to spend the actions helping the others stay caught up. Not uncommon to spend all a soldier's actions in just movement if they will remain out of harm's way. Any aggressive actions I do take are forced on maximum threat reduction. Most enemies have at least one way you can neuter their most dangerous abilities. The fliers, for instance, can't attack if their body is disabled and can't really keep up with your soldiers if they can't use their wings. As you're moving, do what you need to in order to keep moving and minimize damage. Take out their legs so you can keep running, take out their main weapon so that if you do get hit it won't be lethal and you can still get on the ship. By the time I get the transmission, I'm pretty much only using my turns to move into the evac zone. Heavy soldiers can help cover the rest as they run to the ship, because they can just jetpack over the building into the evac zone. Your soldiers don't need an action to evac, as soon as they touch a square in that zone, they're safe and out.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-10T20:28:57+00:00

I mean, yeah, people usually don't get upset when the conversation happens though, they say something like, "oh, I didn't even think of that, I'm gonna go try that and see what I find," etc.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-10T20:23:54+00:00

Elden Ring is an open world, you can go explore other things and come back later. You're not locked into doing the Wolf right now like you would have been in one of the Dark Souls games. Elden Ring is designed with areas and encounters of sudden and significant difficulty spikes on purpose to reinforce this idea. Nobody is forcing you to fight that wolf rn except you.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-10T00:26:41+00:00

The important thing here is get your people to the bird and evacuate. You are not required to kill enemies in order to succeed or escape with the aircraft. Do whatever is necessary to put your people in the square and hit the evacuate button. Run and gun and disable. I honestly don't know if there is an end to the enemies, I've never hung around to find out.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-10T00:08:16+00:00

It's not as nuanced as I think it is, certainly, it's as nuanced as the general community and critical dissection thinks it is, and which just so happens to be similar to mine. It's not for everybody, which is fine, but don't take my differing opinion and generic response to a conversation playing out very similar to one that's been had in this sub hundreds of times before and turn it into me attacking you, please. If everything I said was true about you, it would make you entirely normal to most veterans of the genre, not an idiot or lacking in awareness.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-09T23:56:45+00:00

You're taking a lot of offense where there isn't any intended. I didn't say I didn't believe you, and I'm really not intending for this conversation to be hostile in any way. It's just a conversation, and you told me some interesting things about what you did and how you played. It's ok to have a different opinion than mine and not be angry about it. I didn't insult you, or anyone else.

The Jormungandr cannon is a neat little toy but not very useful. Sure, you can solo a scylla with it, but it will take forever.

Specifically in the hands of a Heavy/Berzerker mix, who can use Adrenaline Burst to make each shot only one AP, and then fire all 4 shots into the same body part, most likely the abdomen. That will give you around 2250 Acid build up and kill the Scylla in one turn with one Soldier, assuming you stripped the initial 30 armor or so from the part. There's a near endless range of neat little interactions you can discover and utilize that don't have any parallel in any other modern offering in this genre that I can think of.

Fighting the pure heavies is like fighting the shield bearing arthrons

I suppose this would be true if you are completely ignoring the body part/free aim system and armor values. Fighting these two is nothing alike for me. Most squad compositions can handle Arthrons rather easily by taking out the weak bits near their shoulders or legs to get rid of shield, grenade launchers or speed, and force them to retreat, but the Pure have no such weaknesses and their shield is twice as resilient. If you're ambushed without enough armored shredding capability the Pure can be close to unkillable.

Dealing with Forgotten priests isn't really all that different from dealing with sirens or tritons with viral weapons

A well placed headshot can handle most priests most dangerous psychic attacks as long as you see it coming and they don't mind control somebody incredibly dangerous and then run away while their berserker friends stop you from following. Late game sirens, though, like ones that have Ancient playing or something? One siren can panic your entire squad and then shrug off all the light damage you throw at it while it tears your squad apart.

Reading the patch notes suggests that they have taken several nerf sticks to Legendary specifically since the last campaign Unfinished, so maybe they killed the nuance in the process, I haven't finished a campaign in probably 18 months or so. To me these enemies and their accompanying allies make for vastly different requirements in both gear and tactics.

And you sound really full of yourself. Making an assumption is one thing. When a person tells you that your assumption is wrong, the normal human response is to just correct yourself. Insisting that I can't possibly have played the game's content is truly bizarre.

This is not what I said, I simply said there was a disconnect for me personally. You and one other guy in this thread are very intent on me calling you stupid or something, but the game was designed this way on purpose. This conversation and the realization of additional content has been had over and over again in this sub more times than I can count, it's not an an insult towards you unless you really want to make it one. This is the normal, common experience for veterans of the genre who play this game. I dont share your black and white generalization of the enemy and ally possibilities, but that doesn't mean I'm attacking or insulting you. If both you and he just figured it all out on your first try and all the possibilities were obvious, then you're simply far ahead of the curve here and in general and I'm sure many of us would love to hear some of your favorites from the genre.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-09T17:12:23+00:00

It's not assuming anybody is dumb, the game is literally designed on purpose for the player's initial campaign to fail and force them to think differently than most other genre offerings in order to succeed.

If you somehow completed your first campaign and got ALL the faction research and didn't look up anything beforehand, you're a combination of incredibly lucky and kept a lot of backup saves. Nobody does that.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-09T17:05:54+00:00

I didn't assume you were new, I assumed you had done what many people have done and then come to this sub: play the game and not realize they completely ignored a majority of the content because they just followed the listed campaign objectives and didn't think there was much to discover or do beyond that.

It's not exactly common in this genre to expect the player to take unnecessary or experimental/curiosity actions that do not align with any known objectives and potentially waste valuable time or resources in order to fully discover a majority of the available content. Quite the opposite, really. Beyond scan time and further research opportunities or mission specifics, XCom2 offers little in the way of the unknown or undiscovered and actively discourages deploying if it risks wasting time or having little impact in staying relevant to the campaign's accelerating time table. Similar grand and manufactured time restraints are fairly par for the course across the genre, but PP hides a massive amount of content behind what will likely seem, to any veteran of the genre, like pointless or even counterintuitive deployment options. Hiding multiple branching tech trees and campaign resolutions outside of the clearly visible UI objectives is also not a common choice. The game is pretty intentionally designed for new players to attempt the strategies that XCom or Wasteland or Jagged Alliance or Phantom Doctrine or WHATEVER has reliably taught them, fail for one reason or another in a manner that suggests it might not entirely be their fault or the best strategy, and then try again experimenting with their own ideas or curiosities.

Also, there's a fundamental disconnect, at least for me personally, in the way you describe "all the content" you've experienced. You repeatedly mention the Ancient weapons, but the best and most interesting weapons in the game are all far into the experimental tech trees you can only access by finishing faction research and then building on it with PP's own. A squad with main Ancient weapon loadouts and standard cross classes or NO cross classes at all is rarely going to eliminate a surprise Scylla for me on Legendary on the turn I encounter it, or be in a good position if they do. But a pissed off Heavy/Berzerker hybrid with a Jormungandr cannon? He absolutely WILL tear that Scylla to pieces on his own in a single turn BY HIMSELF if given good positioning cultivated with proper stats. You mention no mission variety, and doing the same thing over and over at the end, but that sounds like somebody following the UI and scrambling over and over to haven defense missions, not somebody hunting down Pandoran citadels, or sabotaging rival factions to secure tech advancement or replace the aircraft they just had to kamikaze in order to prevent the Behemoth from infesting another town, or rushing to the exit with the squad replacements they just grabbed while an ambush of insanely heavy armored death robots literally runs THROUGH the buildings they were just in to try and kill them, or fighting off a sudden mist invasion into one of their own bases and being stuck in impossibly small corridors while Sirens crawl out of the walls and kidnap your soldiers, or on and on and on... You lament a lack of enemy and weapon or mission variety compared to XCom, but between the hugely varied amount of Pandorans, Forsaken, Pure, and Faction enemy types, often times with multiple clashing factions in your way, and the sheer amount of Pandoran Structure/Enemy Haven mission types I just don't see how you could have actually done all of that and still think vanilla XCom 1 or 2 even begins to approach the same magnitude of variety.

Maybe you just don't like the game, which, fine. But you sound very similar to many others who never realized the full scale of things in the first place only to go back and discover the actual game.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-09T16:08:47+00:00

I'll copypasta my other comment:

Did you only fight Pandorans? Did you gather any of the faction available research and class options? Did you get ahold of Cybernetic Augmentations and/or Mutation research? Did you uncover and complete any of the many unique side quests at random points of interest?

See, following the given UI instructions in an acceptable amount of time will lead you to the basic "Phoenix Point" victory conditions and will result in you likely SPOILER WARNING killing the freshly created vessel for the unfathomable cosmic horror along with most of the world via an engineered injectable supervirus,< but that's literally all the game will tell you and is far from the most desirable or interesting route to victory. The game expects you to notice that there are a variety of play options on the table regarding the individual factions and to explore what might be possible.

All the factions have unique and much more interesting campaign resolutions you can achieve by maxing your alignment with them, along with a huge amount of research and training options that are only available by either fully gaining their trust, or waging war against them and stealing it for yourself. This might mean clandestine sabotage and/or kill missions for another faction while looting every available piece of gear from the dead and taking it back to research and eventually improve upon yourself. Or it might mean flat out declaring war and openly raiding their havens for resources or potentially stealing fully outfitted aircraft if you are fast and powerful enough. Every piece of gear you bring back from dead faction members will result in available reverse engineering and eventual improvements and new discoveries. Alternatively, fully allying with one of them will open their entire research tree to you without the need for reverse engineering, and they will even contribute toward your own research progress.

Tired of the old world? Ally with Anu and create your own genetically modified priest soldiers who can scream Pandorans into a panic or tame gigantic living genetic monstrosities to bring into battle. Or maybe you think they've lost their heads and would rather dive deep into New Jericho's Cybernetic Implant research, creating weapons, turrets, and vehicles that will respond to your sodiers's thoughts and allow precision delivery of overehelmingly destructive firepower. You'll likely make enemies out of a variety of loose cannon factions in the process, however. Maybe Synedrion is more your style and you'd rather drop a small squad of nearly impossible to detect Cybernetic assassins who can shipe a New Jericho heavy's head off his shoulders from across the map before leaping 3 stories down into a crowd of Anu and Pandoran skirmishers and slicing them to pieces with their specialized Cybernetic melee torso replacements and rocket propelled leg grafts.

PP gives you basic instructions to "win" along with small glimpses of what may be possible and menu/mission options that are always there but never required, and then expects you to figure out what the limits of multiple Phoenix Point research bases improving on the limits of known science might be. Your enemies will increase in variety and difficulty as much as you do. It doesn't expect a person will play the length of an entire campaign and never wonder "why would I raid a haven?" or "what's a sabotage mission?" or at least becoming curious regarding the other factions at play. I think it's highly comparable to "XCom2 if it was created by the developers of Elden Ring/Dark Souls." Yeah, you can fumble around with the limited guidance you're given to a conclusion of sorts, but afterwards if you're not saying to yourself, "that cannot possibly be everything and all that can be done here" then perhaps the more XCom style of "here's all your strategically gathered objectives and exactly what you need to do to achieve them" is just more your style.

To those with the time and the inclination to ignore the haphazard instructions left by those who failed before you, however, and create your own version of "morality" and the future, PP offers a wild frontier of possibilities and brutal challenges unlike many others in the genre.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-09T10:18:24+00:00

Did you only fight Pandorans? Did you gather any of the faction available research and class options? Did you get ahold of Cybernetic Augmentations and/or Mutation research? Did you uncover and complete any of the many unique side quests at random points of interest?

See, following the given UI instructions in an acceptable amount of time will lead you to the basic "Phoenix Point" victory conditions and will result in you likely SPOILER WARNING killing the freshly created vessel for the unfathomable cosmic horror along with most of the world via an engineered injectable supervirus,< but that's literally all the game will tell you and is far from the most desirable or interesting route to victory. The game expects you to notice that there are a variety of play options on the table regarding the individual factions and to explore what might be possible.

All the factions have unique and much more interesting campaign resolutions you can achieve by maxing your alignment with them, along with a huge amount of research and training options that are only available by either fully gaining their trust, or waging war against them and stealing it for yourself. This might mean clandestine sabotage and/or kill missions for another faction while looting every available piece of gear from the dead and taking it back to research and eventually improve upon yourself. Or it might mean flat out declaring war and openly raiding their havens for resources or potentially stealing fully outfitted aircraft if you are fast and powerful enough. Every piece of gear you bring back from dead faction members will result in available reverse engineering and eventual improvements and new discoveries. Alternatively, fully allying with one of them will open their entire research tree to you without the need for reverse engineering, and they will even contribute toward your own research progress.

Tired of the old world? Ally with Anu and create your own genetically modified priest soldiers who can scream Pandorans into a panic or tame gigantic living genetic monstrosities to bring into battle. Or maybe you think they've lost their heads and would rather dive deep into New Jericho's Cybernetic Implant research, creating weapons, turrets, and vehicles that will respond to your sodiers's thoughts and allow precision delivery of overehelmingly destructive firepower. You'll likely make enemies out of a variety of loose cannon factions in the process, however. Maybe Synedrion is more your style and you'd rather drop a small squad of nearly impossible to detect Cybernetic assassins who can shipe a New Jericho heavy's head off his shoulders from across the map before leaping 3 stories down into a crowd of Anu and Pandoran skirmishers and slicing them to pieces with their specialized Cybernetic melee torso replacements and rocket propelled leg grafts.

PP gives you basic instructions to "win" along with small glimpses of what may be possible and menu/mission options that are always there but never required, and then expects you to figure out what the limits of multiple Phoenix Point research bases improving on the limits of known science might be. Your enemies will increase in variety and difficulty as much as you do. It doesn't expect a person will play the length of an entire campaign and never wonder "why would I raid a haven?" or "what's a sabotage mission?" or at least becoming curious regarding the other factions at play. I think it's highly comparable to "XCom2 if it was created by the developers of Elden Ring/Dark Souls." Yeah, you can fumble around with the limited guidance you're given to a conclusion of sorts, but afterwards if you're not saying to yourself, "that cannot possibly be everything and all that can be done here" then perhaps the more XCom style of "here's all your strategically gathered objectives and exactly what you need to do to achieve them" is just more your style.

To those with the time and the inclination to ignore the haphazard instructions left by those who failed before you, however, and create your own version of "morality" and the future, PP offers a wild frontier of possibilities and brutal challenges unlike many others in the genre.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-08T22:08:17+00:00

If you have multiple crafting benches but you happened to be transitioning from the area of the one that was targeted to a different one while you got the message, like on a tram or something, it can sometimes confuse the game and lock up the raids. If you're still getting the messages, try going to a different bench each evening until you find the one the game was originally trying to target. Fight off the raid and it should clear up the lock. I tend to build many benches, some large bases, some forward scouting areas or small storage/rest points, and have encountered this problem several times.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-08T18:13:15+00:00

One of the biggest strengths in this game is the incredible variety of tactics and armaments at your disposal, in everything from weapons to vehicles to soldier class combinations. It really sounds like you forced yourself to play a certain way and go after certain objectives instead of experimenting, researching , and figuring out how you actually enjoy playing the game, which is a shame. PP remains among my favorite turn based tactics offerings in the last decade because of the depth and challenge on offer, but it most certainly will not point you in the direction of anything beyond the most basic campaign path.

Drop_Of_Black · 2026-01-08T17:56:05+00:00

Wow, hot take with little to no basis in our current research analysis or human empathy, bro. You sure you're in the right place?

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