(PC) - Phantom Doctrine

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Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,274
50,242
If I want my tactical missions to consist of ball-busting tedium, I'll fire Xenonauts back up. Or if I'm feeling super masochistic, Terror From the Deep.

That being said I have three different actor/survivor agents so tactical missions are trivially easy, just time consuming while I track down all the equipment and intel, and then make sure to take down the enemy agents first before i go to work on the regular soldiers.
 
  • 2Solidarity
Reactions: 1 users

Raes

Vyemm Raider
3,249
2,707
Agreed. Hard to call it a strategy game when the optimal strat is to always avoid combat. So, it's just find the loots, takedown the guards, hide the bodies, complete objective then gtfo. It makes pretty much every mission identical and just kills the replay value for me. With just a little more work they really could have improved this game. Give you more options to make missions play out differently, balance the combat better, and let you choose if you want to go full combat strike team, or stealthy covert ops or a combo of both.
 

Droigan

Trakanon Raider
2,485
1,145
Agreed. Hard to call it a strategy game when the optimal strat is to always avoid combat. So, it's just find the loots, takedown the guards, hide the bodies, complete objective then gtfo. It makes pretty much every mission identical and just kills the replay value for me. With just a little more work they really could have improved this game. Give you more options to make missions play out differently, balance the combat better, and let you choose if you want to go full combat strike team, or stealthy covert ops or a combo of both.

Yeah. Agree with the latests posts. I encountered even more bugs after the first one (they've fixed civilians now), so stopped playing. The game absolutely has potential to be good, but as it stands, playing it just makes me want to boot up Xcom 2 instead. 6+ months down the line though, I'll look it up again to see if they've patched it enough to start playing again. Positive thing about it (from dev interviews from E3) is that this seems to be somewhat of a love project for the devs, so I think they will keep working on it. If I bought this as an early access title, I would definitely add it to my steam follows to keep up with the development. It might be good later, but it doesn't take long while playing it to see too many flaws to recommend it now.
 

Vorph

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
10,945
4,642
What actually unlocks the MK Ultra program? Is it just normal research or do you have to do the MK Ultra investigation first?
 

Vorph

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
10,945
4,642
Ah, ok. I had a random dossier unlock at the end of a mission that was labeled MK Ultra, but then realized I missed something and reloaded my save. When I completed it the second time it gave me a different dossier so I wasn't sure if I had missed out on being able to get that built asap or not.
 

Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,274
50,242
Completed the CIA campaign, jimmies MEGA rustled at the ending.

So you kill Valhalla and nobody notices the nuclear holocaust that almost happens because of the Grenada invasion. Which is all fine and dandy, but then when the USSR fails anyway Deadpan speculates that someone else was may have been pulling Valhalla's strings/was keeping the dream alive. Someone remind these fucking devs that Communism didn't need help failing.
 
  • 1Worf
Reactions: 1 user

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
24,422
31,638
I held off on buying it after watching the dev stream. The one running theme with all the questions was "We ran out of money" and we'll get to fixing this or that.
 

Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,274
50,242
Extended campaign appears to be concentrated aids. I assumed they genuinely meant it had more story stuff, but it seems like it's just a marathon mode where the odds of getting files from informers is cut down to almost nothing. Spent 20-30 minutes in the geoscape and I still haven't been able to finish the Patriot file for very early in the Russian campaign. Said fuck it and gonna try the unlocked campaign in normal mode.
 

Vorph

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
10,945
4,642
They're so full of shit with the "LOS works fine, it's just that enemies can sidestep out of cover" excuse. Had a dude on the second floor of a building, several squares back from the outer wall/windows, and behind full cover get shot to shit repeatedly by enemies on the ground level. Even in normal fights on the same level it's still retarded, like not only would the enemy have to step out of cover to shoot at you, but you'd have to step out too and make an effort to catch the bullets.

I still have no idea what determines whether you deal full damage or the reduced damage number in brackets either. I know what the different colors mean, but I've done full damage instead of gimped vs. green, yellow, and red at various times. I didn't really like the Luck system in Hard West but this is much worse unless I've missed something important.
 

Gavinmad

Mr. Poopybutthole
42,274
50,242
to add insult to injury, the Mossad campaign is just a carbon copy of the CIA campaign. Chapter 1 was a bit different but after that it has been basically identical.