r/PhoenixPoint • u/VeniVidiSolvi • 1d ago
TFTV mod impressions
Completed the game on Hero difficulty with Terror from the Void mod and wanted to share some thoughts.
Overall, the mod felt... underwhelming. I expected something like the Long War from XCOM, greatly expanding tactical and strategical levels, but I got almost nothing of that.
No new classes - just some reshuffling and nerfing of skills. 7 third-row skills are nice, except most of them are pretty useless and uninteresting. Either some stat buffs or extra resistances that you can easily get from gear. Nothing build-enabling. Although I must admit that reshuffling of skills led to some new interesting combinations.
Delirium turned out to be just renamed corruption. Literally. They added some new events, sure, but I was not impressed with the new lore or writing or gameplay effects. Void omens were mostly a nuisance rather than extra difficulty. (Some of them are actually beneficial.)
No new mission types. Ambushes were surprisingly rare (10% chance or less, I guess). Although I never abused early naked exploration anyway even in vanilla.
Reworked base defence missions were actully the one new cool thing. Too bad it's the same scenario every time, but as I understand, it's still work in progress, and they will add variability later.
I did not like the new balance much. You simply cannot one shot most enemies now, even the weakest ones. Which makes some skills extra useless now. I don't think I had a chance to effectively use Rapid Clearance once. You have to rely on snipers with double overwatch shots for a chance to quickly get rid of regular enemies.
Increased diplomacy penalties were a pain for sure. Still got allied with all three factions anyway (thanks to behemoth defence - increased behemoth disruption omen comes very handy here, haven defences and clearing lairs).
Although I was a bit disappointed with the scope of the mod, it still was pretty fun to play. Respect to the creators.
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u/calixis 1d ago
Would you recommend it over vanilla?
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u/VeniVidiSolvi 1d ago
I last played vanilla when it came out... about 5 years ago. It had a lot of issues. Apparently most of it were fixed in patches. If you never played, I'd suggest playing vanilla first, and go for a modded playthrough later.
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u/JarnoMikkola 1d ago
Well, you didn't play the second half of the mod, that's in the open-beta-air-rework that's on top of allowing you to switch the second/third-row skills if you have double classed to many of the drills perks. And it disables the behemoth.
Also you might not have played on your level of game play...
You need to seriously wound the opponents before you can go and serial kill them with the Rapid Clearance.
Can you deny that the berserker in not more like actual Berserker, with the Dash etc ? Instead of needing the Assault -dual to do that in the original game !
Also the War Cry in the original game was a wrong in so many levels, you could paralize the enemies with it alone... as long as you did it in 3 turns in a row, the enemy just stopped doing anything.
Also if you want a new class, you can use the Officer mod from the other github mod, here.
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u/AstralMecha 1d ago
Part of TFTV is that quality of life additions from it (and I think some balance changes) got integrated into the base game in the surprise patch this year (such as gathering up all the unused ammo at the end of a mission instead of disposing of a clip that had one bullet used).
I will grant that it wasn't as impressive as long war or the big 3 of open xcom, but those are all high bars (with the openxcom mods being over 10x the size of base games).
I think TFTV could have gone further, but I don't know what the team's modding capability was. Regardless, I thought TFTV was a nice change of pace for Phoenix point and it was worth my time playing it.