How to have fun playing Phoenix Point

I persisted with Phoenix Point, the alt-universe version of XCOM by the original designer, and it’s almost, mostly a good game! But most players are never able to access that goodness because, as I’ve noted before, it has some serious problems with information design. And its interface and gameplay are different from XCOM in some important ways, which it fails to tell you about… which is weird when you consider that the majority of Phoenix Point players are apparently XCOM players who are looking for similar games.

So here’s a quick guide to getting past the problems and finding the fun in PP, to keep you from having to go through 3 restarts and waste dozens of hours like I did. I’m not really offering a strategy guide – this video does a good job of that – I’m doing something more basic: letting you know about pitfalls in the basic presentation of the game. If you think it might be fun after reading this, you’ll probably have fun with it. My next post on the topic will be about the game’s world-building, which is actually quite good.

1. Disable the Festering Skies DLC. It might be because I’m running it on a Mac, or it might be a bug or a weird RNG artifact, or maybe I’m just not appreciating the fun of being stopped cold after 20 hours of play, but my experience is, it doesn’t work. And from watching videos it seems like it wouldn’t be much fun even if it did. On the downside, you’ll miss out on fighting with aircraft!!! On the upside, even when they work, the aircraft fights seem to be like a bad phone minigame. So, avoid.
2. “Cheat” in every way you can think of. The game expects it – seems, in fact, to actively encourage it. This is a design philosophy I’m familiar with from reports of how Gygax ran his D&D games – Gary expected you to listen closely to what he was saying, look for exploits (like oil flask grenades), and try to outwit him. That’s what this game is about, too. A very basic case in point: some players think it’s bad form to exploit the inventory system, which operates in a kind of no-space dimension, teleporting gear to wherever you want it, so you can strip the armor off one person in Mexico and put it on another one in India. I’m here to tell you, it’s supposed to be like that. The game is full of weird, non-naturalistic boundaries about when things are in a definite place or no-place: trust it when it offers you a crock. Moreover, its resource economy, in which you can’t build a research lab because you’re using all your materials making bullets, is balanced (to the extent it’s balanced at all) with teleporting bullets in mind. So if there’s a misprint, exploit it. And be ready to savescum around some balance issues. In particular….
3. Check if your starting position is unwinnable. You cannot trust the RNG on this, either at the individual mission level or the whole game level. Regarding individual missions, nobody gave any serious thought to ranking the enemies and balancing encounters, so when you load a level, sometimes it will have 3 boss monsters that all attack you at once, and sometimes they’ll be 3 entry-level mooks. I am giving you permission to reload (the game autosaves just before every mission, probably for exactly this reason). Regarding the whole game, if it starts you in South America, you should probably restart. In any event, before you get invested in playing the game, you should spend an hour just scouting around with your aircraft to make sure that there are representatives of all 3 NPC factions somewhere near you – and then reload so you don’t lose all that valuable early-game time. If one faction is missing, then many of the winning strategies are simply unavailable to you. You could treat that as hard mode, but the game is already hard mode.
4. Watch the interface closely, it often contains more information than it really tells you up front. If you mouse over an enemy, for instance, it shows you how far than enemy can run, or the area of effect of its attack, which is information it otherwise withholds. And double-check your troops’ loadouts – PP is just fine with sending your people out to missions without any weapons or armor.
5. Try not to rely on metaphors or what the game interface implies – the fact is, PP operates in its own universe, which only sometimes looks like ours. For instance, the ring around your airplane that contracts as you fly seems like it could be an indicator of the remaining range before you refuel. It isn’t. It does represent a sort of range, but it resets every time you pass over any Point of Interest, no matter what it is – an unknown thing, the base of an enemy you’re at war with, a thing that used to be unknown but you spent time examining it and now you know there’s nothing there. Doesn’t matter, a dot on the map resets your airplane range. Another example: after you build a Containment Facility, you can capture disease-aliens but only, only if you paralyze them – mind control doesn’t count. Or the manufacture/scrap screen – you can guns to get resources back from them, but you can’t scrap vehicles. That’s just the physics of PP, same as teleporting inventory.
6. Pay attention to what is spatially located and what isn’t. Some buildings inside your bases only serve the particular base they’re in (power gen, aircraft hangars, satellite uplinks, medical bays). Others can be anywhere and just contribute to a global counter (research labs, manufacturing facilities, archaeology labs, stores). New gear, vehicles, and recruits get auto-delivered to whichever base you state… and you have to watch the interface like a hawk because you will definitely accidentally send them to Base #1, the default, unless you’re hyper-vigilant.
7. Only build what you really need. Activating bases is expensive – broadly speaking, you should only activate them where their satellite scanning range will reach red mist zones. And every base needs power generation and a satellite uplink, but apart from that, you should limit what else you build. As a rule of thumb, a total of 4 research labs, 4 manufacturing sites, and 2 stores is enough for your worldwide empire. I also assign 2 bases to be stables for training and healing recruits – those act as squad headquarters and I put one in the Americas and another in Eurasia, to be able to respond to haven defense missions before they expire. Each stable gets 2 living quarters (repairs troop fatigue), 2 medical bays (repairs troop damage), and 2 training facilities (which give xp to recruits for whom you don’t currently have an aircraft) (those figures might not be optimal, but they’re working for me). Aircraft hangars and access lifts are irrelevant – in theory they could repair aircraft, in practice that’s never needed unless you foolishly activated Festering Skies. One more thing: you will have to go to Antarctica (which is just like any other continent – has people and farmland and so on). Some people think that means you need a base at the south end of South America, but my experience says this is not true – if you’re flying Helios aircraft, which you should be, you can get to Antarctica without building a special base for it.
8. Beware of accidental clicking. Sometimes you get a second chance (like when you’re assigning gear to troops most of the time before you go on a mission but not always) but in general, once you’ve clicked there’s no undo. I use TAB to go through any list – personnel, bases, whatever, because it’s unambiguous that I’m selecting from a menu, not choosing to do something with the current item.

9. (super important) The soldier advancement screen doesn’t work the way you’d expect from XCOM. It looks superficially similar, but it’s NOT QUITE.

On the left there’s your dude’s own inventory of stuff they’re carrying, and under that the no-space complete inventory window. Familiar enough. But on the right, there’s skill advancement and above that – the interface to increase your character’s Strength, Willpower, and Speed. I didn’t spot that for 40 hours, and it’s the thing you should do first.

Speed is the single most important stat for any character. Spend points on it first. Then Willpower, which is both your morale (your ability to keep fighting) and a resource you spend during fights to power your special abilities/skills. Only bother with skills once you’ve improved both Speed and Will to at least 12, and then balance stat and skill increases to maximize them all. Strength is the least important – it determines your damage with melee weapons (only important for Heavies, Berserkers, and people who have the randomly-assigned “use melee weapons” talent) and how much loot you can carry from scavenging missions. Only increase it when there’s nothing else left to spend points on.

At 4th level, every character unlocks the ability to multi-class. And every character should multi-class – but probably only after they’re 5th level in the first class, with good high stats. There are only 3 classes to start with – Sniper, Assault (runner), and Heavy (melee/jumper/heavy gunner), and the only multi-class really worth pursuing out of those is Sniper/Heavy, because you can use the Heavy’s jumpjets to reach a high sniping platform. But as you befriend the 3 NPC factions, you can unlock their classes… and then things get wild. This page explains the exploits that open up by combining different classes’ abilities, and they’re in general not obvious.

I draw your attention to the typical PP logic behind the Berserker (pictured in the example above). You first encounter berserkers as fast-running melee specialists, cracking heads for the Disciples of Anu – their heavy pistols make them annoying at close range and they will cut you to ribbons if you let them get into melee range, and they are all born with a giant hammer in one hand, so… melee troops, right? No.
“Berserkers are essentially a meta-class. There is no reason at all to use Berserker as melee fighters. It’s probably the one thing they are actually bad at, and this is neatly reflected by their skill set.”
Their first skill is Armor Break (shredding, in XCOM parlance), but “using this with a melee weapon is a very poor choice indeed.” It turns out one killer app is to multi-class berserker and sniper – the berserker can learn a skill of very limited utility – turning their 2AP melee attack into 1AP, allowing them to melee twice as often in one round at the cost of being useless the next round… but if they’re also a sniper, that turns a 3AP sniping shot into 1AP, and if they get the armored head mutation you can overcome the next-round hangover and…
…..it’s a big collection of Gygaxian crocks: exploits that lurk just below the surface that a new player sees, that completely change the balance of the system for “system masters.” And the whole game is built like that. A further crock: pay attention to your characters’ randomly-assigned talents, because if a character can buy e.g. sniper rifle talent, then you don’t necessarily need them to have the sniper class, so then you could use the skill crocks from 2 other classes with your sniper rifle. Multi-crocking, if you will.

On missions:

1. Forget XCOM and its move-then-shoot structure. In PP you can not only shoot-then-move, you can also split up your move action square by square, and unspent squares remain available after you’ve done anything else. So never move like you would in XCOM, where you advance to a good shooting position and stay there to shoot. No. Instead, advance just far enough that you can possibly hit an enemy (the interface shows you a line of sight if one exists), then shoot, then use your remaining movement squares after shooting to sneak back into cover before ending your turn.
2. Always, always click “free aim.” This lets you look down the gun sights and reveals several important things…
   (a) that your gun can’t see the enemy (heavy weapons are fired from knee height), therefore you won’t hit them;
   (b) that a friend is in the way, so you’ll hit them instead;
   (c) that the enemy’s waiting animation periodically exposes their head – wait for that moment, then hit “free aim,” which freezes them;
   (d) that if you moved sideways one square, you’d quadruple your chance of hitting the target.
3. Sniper rifles are like other guns but better. PP is very proud of its “realistic” shooting mechanic, which is “your bullet hits some pixel inside the gun sight.” In recompense, it doesn’t care at all about other weapon features, like e.g. having a minimum range for sniper rifles or rocket launchers. So use your sniper rifle from melee range and shoot them in the nostril. But be warned, there is one exception: Hera paralysis pistols. If you stand right next to an enemy and try to shoot them with that, the game doesn’t understand and pretends there’s no target. So leave 1 square of empty space between yourself and your Hera target.
4. Shoot them in the leg. Heads in PP control specific functions… but not life. Aliens’ heads are often purely decorative. And heads are small, therefore harder to hit. But legs are always important. Also, the best place to shoot an enemy in order to do the most damage is the place you’ve already destroyed – you’ve probably shredded the armor or other special factors off it, so all your damage goes through.
5. Everyone has 3 kinds of HP – health (shown on the health bar over their head), will (morale – never explicitly stated but you can guess a lot of the time, and it’s affected by lots of factors during a fight), and resistance to paralysis (explicitly stated after you’ve hit them with some paralyzing ray). The shortest path to victory is identifying which one of these is lowest and attacking that.

OK, so now you’re actually playing the game. How should you treat the NPCs? Where should you concentrate your efforts?

1. One of the questions I often ask of a game is, “what sort of philosophy does this game have? What’s the rewarded approach? Should I be a good, co-operative, pro-social pan-humanist or a selfish, nationalistic psychopath?” PP’s answer is, you must start as a psychopath but later switch to co-operative. This is because you cannot begin useful social relations with the NPC factions until you’ve done some crimes for them – specifically, sabotaging (not merely raiding!) the specific facility they ask for. Each wants you to sabotage another faction, so you must do the sabotage round robin and attack all 3 factions to please the others as quickly as possible. Because for some reason in the first week of game time, people get less upset with you. After that, you must be nice to them all and try to climb the ladder of their trust, which never again demands that you hurt relations with the others. It makes no sense but it’s true. You are frequently encouraged to screw the factions in various ways (steal their research, raid their bases, opine against their philosophies) but you should resist because the costs always outweigh the benefits after that first learning sabotage moment.
2. Winning is all about exploring quickly, and that takes aircraft. You start with 1 Manticore – the aircraft your own faction can make. The sooner you can get a second, the quicker you can double your exploration rate. AND your success on missions depends strongly on fielding a full squad of 8 soldiers, which (essentially) means deploying 2 aircraft to each mission. AND as your awareness of the world increases, so does your responsibility for defending faction havens, so eventually you’ll need at least 2 full squads, which is to say 4 aircraft. So build more aircraft as quickly as you can. You could steal them (it’s actually trivially easy to do so by exploiting a land vehicle) but see the costs of annoying the NPC factions in the preceding point. Players who make videos say “heist 2 Helios aircraft from Synedrion immediately, you’ll progress much faster” but (a) I’ve never had the opportunity to do so and (b) their advice might be out of date or just irrelevant, depending on where the Synedrion havens are and just how quickly the faction-annoyance costs change and… you really, really want Synedrion as a friend, so my advice is, it’s probably better to build your own aircraft and befriend Synedrion and eventually they’ll teach you to build your own Helioses. I did that, it was fine.
3. You do want Helioses, though. Aircraft speed is a very important factor in (a) how fast you can explore, (b) your ability to defend havens that are attacked by aliens. Faster aircraft = fewer squads needed, so even though Helioses are expensive, they work out cheaper because you can get away with fewer squads. Anu’s Tiamats are just bad and dumb except if you use them for the Legacy of the Ancients content, below, and New Jericho’s Thunderbirds are never better for anything. Oh, also, you might think that the greater range of the Tiamat would be important in, say, crossing the oceans. It isn’t. The only way from Eurasia to the Americas (and the only way from Antarctica to South Africa or Australia) is over the north pole. Effectively, PP is played on a Dymaxion Projection minus the sea areas, so think of that when you’re deciding where to put your stables.
4. Make friends with all the factions, like the video strategy guide linked at the top of this post says. I think the priority order is Synedrion, then Anu, then New Jericho, but really you want to be besties with all of them, because that’s how you unlock their character classes, skills, tools, research and (in the end) win conditions, all of which are better than just relying on your own organization’s inventions.
5. Exploit vehicles and the weird mechanics of how your dudes ride in vehicles. Missions to get vehicles are 100x easier with a vehicle. But mostly leave the vehicles in your bases, because they can’t level up and that means robbing your dudes of xp.
6. Don’t worry about which of your dudes kills which enemies – xp are handed out to the whole squad for mission success far more than for individual kills.
7. Trade with faction havens. You (almost) can’t avoid making a profit, and trading is built into the game’s expectations. And each faction trades one of the three resources, so keep all the factions happy and trade with them.
8. Build replacement equipment. You start with a generous package of guns and armor, but they will all get destroyed. The game doesn’t tell you this, nor does it say “oh no your equipment got destroyed,” it’s just missing one day when you go to equip it on a character. Don’t build lots of it in advance, just a couple of spares so you don’t run short. Oh, and keep your wonderful Hel II cannons to use on only the toughest enemies. You won’t get any more until you research them, which you can’t do until you’ve performed an autopsy on a late-game alien enemy, so guard those Hel II rounds.
9. Pursue the Legacy of the Ancients content, which starts with a mission called Rise by sin, by virtue fall, because it unlocks superior weapons, including the most important single weapon in the game – a sniper rifle with the damage of a heavy cannon. On paper, this weapon doesn’t look like a game changer, but (a) most alien effects have shorter ranges than the sniper rifle, (b) lots of enemies’ toughness is designed to be just outside the damage effectiveness of ordinary sniper rifles, and (c) there are various crocks that make it easier to shoot more than once a round with a sniper rifle, so… it adds up. OK, but… this content has its own interface stuff, which is the worst-explained part of a badly-explained game. So here is a walkthrough, which I hope will make things clearer:

– after you’ve done several story missions, you get the chance to build archaeology labs and archaeology probes, to look for Antediluvian Sites. And you get a string of missions to steal info about a series of weapons to research. So do the missions and research. But you can’t build any of these weapons without a bunch of new weird materials, so you also…

1. Build exactly 4 archaeology labs, anywhere in the world – it’s the cheapest and fastest way to do everything else. 5 is a waste.
2. Then build 3+ archaeology probes. You can deploy these over half the Earth’s surface, centered on whichever aircraft you have selected at the time. They show you their scan circle, so… try to optimize those circles to cover the land area efficiently. Don’t worry about the sea or isolated islands. They will do a cute pink scan-sweep for a while, then when their scans are finished they… disappear. You may or may not get a message that you’ve found something. You will not be told what you’ve found or where.
3. Despair because the interface hates you and there is no help file to tell you what’s going on. OK, fine, here’s a help file:
   
   If you’ve found something, then a new Point of Interest has been added to the Geoscape. It looks like a green eye:

i.e. almost exactly like a Synedrion haven:

so you have to scour the areas you just scanned to look for that eye. But where did you scan? The interface just hid that information! OK, go to launch another probe…. and the area you’ve already scanned will light up pink! So that’s where you look for the eye(s).

Fly out to the eye icon, click “excavate” (which starts an 8 hour counter, during which you can fly elsewhere/do other stuff) and after excavation you’ll learn it’s either:
– an orichalcum mine or forge
– a mutane gas field or refinery
– a living crystal quarry or refinery.

THEN you send a squad to do a horrifically tough mission to kill all the ancient guardian robots at the site (no, there is no option other than killing them). After THAT:
– if it’s a mine, gas field, or quarry, station an aircraft over it to slowly extract its new weird resource. The most efficient option for this is a Disciples of Anu Tiamat aircraft with one basic Muton on board (by the time you get to this content, you’ll know what all that means). This is, AFAICT, completely safe. Nothing in the game can attack that aircraft/muton (provided you’re not running Festering Skies)
– but you can’t use that resource until you have its forge/refinery. Each resource has multiple extraction sites but only one refinery.

There is no advantage to owning more than one extraction site. You can speed up extraction by stationing multiple manned aircraft over it. And you must have extraction and refinery sites for all 3 resources to make the sniper rifle. So send out probes and excavate sites exactly until you have the 6 sites you need. And only attack the sites you need – if you’ve already got an orichalcum mine and you find a second one, leave it alone.

You can use some of the resources you get to rebuild a Guardian, to help you defend the site in the future. I have been doing this and my defense missions have been comically easy… but I don’t know if that’s because I got the Guardian or not. YMMV.

So, now you should be equipped to enjoy Phoenix Point. That’s all I’ve got for now. Feel free to ask me questions – I often miss comments to this blog, so the best way to talk to me about this is to hit me up on discord, where I am richardgrenville#1863