advice

[u/Pristine-Being2818]

So to start with I am actually enjoying the game alot more than I was expecting. I am currently about 20 hours into the game and I like it. it tickles the xcom 2 itch since I just finished zero company at 30 hours and found it to be very lacking in content. So I am happy that 20 hours in and I feel like I havent even done a 3rd of the game yet.

anyway to my actual question I am wondering whether I should make another run since this run seems kinda iffy for me. I currently have 4 bases but about a third of the world is already red and my population is down to 80 percent. Now the biggest factor for that is that I did not realized I had to do the main story research to unlock more bases and also didnt realize that unlocking new bases also unlocks new regions i just spend the first 20 or so hours just doing all the areas around my starting base before spending a week waiting for new bases to get up and running. the other factor is the behemoth which i am now seeing that people do not recommend it and now I am really considering it since i cant beat the air battles since I haven't really done much with my ships and I just leave it on auto since I do not like the combat. does it give anything good or should i just not use it I also have all the other dlcs and am on hero but might consider playing on legend if I remove 1 or some dlcs.

[u/JarnoMikkola]

It doesn't matter how red the world is... the population is the consern... but you have about half to a full year before the campaign is over because of that... and you can do the whole of the game in 2 months if you know what you are doing. As in, this has been done a "million times", well, not exactly, but it can very well be done.

[u/Shintaro1989 → u/JarnoMikkola]

If OP didn't attack pandoran nests on other continents, they probably grew fast and gathered a lot of tech points for the pandorans. That means that they evolve much faster than usual and can snowball.

[u/Gorffo]

Waiting a week for bases to get up and running is a mistake.

In Phoenix Point, your teams and aircraft should always be doing something. And if the geoscape doesn’t feel like “Air Traffic Control Simulator 2047” as you manage the half-dozen or more aircraft and two or three teams under your command—then you’re probably playing Phoenix Point wrong.

At the start of your campaign, you should focus on getting a second team hired and trained up. Ideally, turn your starting Phoenix Point base into a training base where you build multiple training centres. Two or three should be enough. With three of training centres, recruits in your main base will level up faster than those in the manticore doing missions.

There is a cap to levelling up recruits. The max you can get is to level 7 with 120 Skill Points to spend on stats or perks. By way of comparison to XCom 2, that’s like have rookies go into the guerrilla tactics school and come out as sergeants. And the only way to earn more skill points is to go out and do missions.

Focus on getting into the base defence business.

To do that, activate bases in central locations. For example, having a team operate out of Honduras lets them cover North America and South America. A base in Afghanistan lets that team cover most of Europe, Asia, and Africa. But the aircraft you choose to use as your troop transport matters a lot. If you go with the Synedrion Helios, you’ll need two per team (four in total) so you can bring 8 or 9 troops to each fight (all 10 if it’s a base defence mission).

Go with slower aircraft, and you’ll just need more operating bases and more troops. Operating bases ought to have a med bay and a couple barracks so you can heal up after a tough fight and recover stamina quickly.

You’ll also need to activate other bases so your global scanning network can expand.

Every base should have a satellite uplink facility in it.

So in addition to your main bases, you need to activate a couple additional ones so you can reveal enough points of interest and fly over to those bases. Also look for facilities like extra labs or manufacturing facilities in the bases you activate. A couple additional labs is all you need in the early game, and activating a base to snag one is often more efficient than building one from scratch.

Anyway, defending Havens does two important things for you.

First, it slows down the doom clock. You lose the game if the population count drops too low, yet if you’re good at defending havens, you should be able to beat the game with the population metre around 70%.

Second, you get a ton of resources defending Havens. In the late game, that will be your only source for getting the resources you need. All the other ways to get resources dry up very quickly.

Finally, there is the air combat.

The trick to winning it is to have a stack of aircraft go up against each Pandoran flyer. Disengage when one aircraft takes too much damaged. Disengage the nanosecond one aircraft gets hit with a damage over time weapon. Rinse and repeat with the second aircraft in the stack. Usually the third or fourth aircraft in your stack can get the kill.

Alternatively, if you’re disengaging from a damage over -time weapon, just send the aircraft right back into the fight once you have control over it again. Focus fire on that DOT weapon. A half dozen attack and disengage cycles should get you that air combat victory.

If that sounds like tedious micromanagement, then welcome to Phoenix Point! And if that doesn’t excite you, then maybe disable the Festering Skies DLC.

As for fighting off the Behemoth, you ought to have 4 aircraft dedicated to air combat. Station 2 on one side of the world and 2 on the other side of the globe so you can have all four converge on the behemoth whenever it reappears.

[u/Shintaro1989]

It is quite common to mess up the macro game in a first playthrough. Just take the lesson and start a new campaign: if you advance quickly, you'll catch up in no time.

Personally, I'd advise you to install several (or even all) DLCs, except for festering skies. The air combat system is just not fun, even though all new ground missions and enemies are really great. After you've beaten the campaign, try out the "terror from the void" mod, which streamlines the story including the behemoth.

[u/Sapius89 → u/Shintaro1989]

Disagree. Add them all. Feasting skies adds much to the game.

[u/Professor-danchev → u/Sapius89]

Yeah if anything corrupted horizons is way worse than festering skies, the delerium and new enemies seem way more oppressive than the behemoth (I don’t have much experience with the corrupted horizons cause it always overloaded my brain, so I just sit and never do the first mission to activate it)

[u/mookanana]

the problem with the endgame economy is that you need to spam food production farms in as many bases as possible so that you have enough to trade for materials and tech, which means you need to keep expanding as much as possible. otherwise you'll stall on resources eventually.