There's a lot of good things in the mechanics, but some are really bad and should be changed ASAP :

- Why can you break windows and not alert people around ?
- Why people on the other side of the planet can be teleported to a mission site instantaneously while the whole strategic layer is based on travel time ?
- Why using a medkit on the field prevents people from getting actually wounded and go to the infirmary afterwards ? I even had the opportunity to send my main wounded character on a mission, use a medkit on him, and he was totally healed on hist way back. It's nonsense.
- The "failed to report back" mechanic is badly implemented. There should be a mechanic where we see people report back on a talkie walkie or something, leaving us a few turns before the next report. ATM, it's just plain magic.
- The detection mechanic is also hard to apprehend. Enemy agents will pass through a field of overwatching people, with their guns out, without detecting them but if they spot a corpse afterwards, they can shoot you at will not triggering the overwatchs. When they're on half alert (failed to report back mechanic) they reveal every character on their LOS, even those in disguise with the actor perk. So they can spot an actor disguised, but not a bunch of people with guns pointed at them ?

Liking the game so far. I don't understand why these mechanics are on the game though.

Even Xcom will alert enemies if you jump through windows.

There`s more. I`ll name the main ones that bugs me.

1.Soldiers able to shoot you from halfway across the map with no chance of missing as long as they can see you- unless you maybe dodge?
2. Does cover even work? No because no one can miss.

I always have a horrible sinking feeling that my man is dead because no one ever misses him. In Xcom if enemies were at range I always knew there was a good chance they may miss if he was at least in some cover.

Yeah at first I didn't mind the "always hit" mechanic, since it's often possible to get the "minimum" damage (which doesn't help when the minimum is high). But the fact that range doesn't seem to do much (or anything?) is a pretty strange thing, unless of course you're further than the max range for the weapon.

The windows thing confused me as well - taking photos next to someone triggers them, but jumping out the window is apparently just "strolling around" or something.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. We're watching all feedback we're getting from players carefully and already working on improvements.

I'll gladly explain why the mechanics currently look the way they do. I'm not necessarily defending them, we very much believe that if players have an issue with a mechanic it's either because it actually is bad, it wasn't explained properly or it isn't visualised properly. After many versions of Infiltration we ended up with a binary stealth system in favour of simpler rules because more complicated systems were very hard to grasp and follow by the player. So every action had to fit into "will cause combat" or "won't cause combat" in the end and we decided that breaking windows belongs in the latter category in favour of allowing the player free movement throughout the maps. We were aware that that allows some absurd situations which we weren't too hapy with ourselves, it just felt like the lesser evil. Yeah, that's another one of those cases where we ended up with an abstract solution in favour of the gameplay. For a long time travel time actually was taken into account when determining which agents can participate in a mission.

The result, however, was that:
- you often had these enemy jobs that you could do nothing about, which was a super frustrating situation from the player's perspective
- the rules for whether you could launch a tactical mission and who would be available were super convoluted

So we eventually decided that assaults should be "instant". The explanation for this was that time and travel are abstract representations of something more complicated. For instance that the assault does not literally take place "right now" but very soon and is the bruteforce method that requires virtually no preparation compared to the other jobs. And that "travel" is not just physically moving through the world but includes other preparations for jobs.

In practice it probably still feels too abstract and we didn't make these rules consistent enough. You are correct. That's one of those issues we were aware of but didn't manage to fix before release. Agreed. It's sadly one of those things where making a mechanic was easy but making it look good was super expensive compared to more urgent matters. I hope we'll manage to make this work and look more convincing. Agreed. Sadly that's another one of those matters where we had to compromise realism in favour of mechanics. Originally agents actually did not reveal their guns while overwatching during Infiltration, we added this because:
- agents would not manage to kill an NPC with a silenced gun before that NPC raises the alarm (because they'd first have to pull out their gun)
- it was hard to track who was overwatching when characters weren't openly pointing their guns

I think we might be able to work around the former problem at this point (we have added the "bullet time" mechanic since then to fix timing issues), will see about the latter. Thank you, I'm very glad that in spite of these issues you are enjoying the game.

And I hope that I sensibly explained why the game currently looks the way it does. As I said, I'm not justifying the current state, just trying to explain how that's where we ended up and that we're not just dumbasses but there's a bigger story behind each one of these problems. And I promise that we're really working hard to fix everything people justifiably have issues with. True, the difference is, though, that in XCOM you can't and thus are not expected to eliminate enemies before engaging in combat. In Phantom Doctrine you must do large chunks of the mission in Infiltration if you want to stand a chance, thus we gave the player more leeway. Obviously we overdid it. Yeah, we really wanted to avoid RNG so what we were left with was dodging + damage scaling. We underestimated how that system feels to the player, especially early on (eventually you kinda get used to it). We also underestimated how open the maps would be - we expected that more of the combat would take place in closed spaces where range-related issues and accuracy are less of an issue. We're working on ways to make it seem less stupid, among others by tweaking weapon ranges. In line with my previous point cover reduces damage instead of affecting hit chances (which we do not have). Admittedly there's problems with how this is perceived by the player (we had these qualms early on but eventually got used to the fact that that's just how the game is and didn't consider it a big issue anymore). Yeah, we understand. We'll see what we can do about that.

Thanks for your reply. Not sure why you want to avoid RNG when it adds a bit of gaming tension, reflecting suspense, reality and works very well in most other games. I mean sometimes, people miss, it`s intrinsic and naturally intuitive to even the youngest of people. Can`t you just reduce the RNG effect to be less harsh (than say Xcom) rather than just removing it completely, perhaps?

It also feels really bad for the Player when the enemy always, always hits.


Anyway, thankyou for your kind response. Nice to know you care and can take constructive criticisms; it goes a long way. Look forward to seeing how it all turns out.

With the enemy AI always hitting regardless of distance, full/half cover, high awareness (your dodge ability), walls, etc...have you accidentally left player agents hit boxes set to massively huge?

The reason for this question is that your detailing of how the mechanics work suggest that the math is wrong somewhere.

Hard to grasp and follow by the player...Seriously? If alpha and beta testing players had issues figuring out that shattering a window should alert enemies, you had the wrong kind of players do the testing. This game quite frankly, feels like a beta game with a price tag. Im 1 step closer to getting a refund btw.

To make it clear: we're not categorically against RNG, personally I actually like it a lot and do not get offended when a 90% shot misses. However, many players do hate it (and there's this stupid prejudice that RNG always works to the advantage of the opponent) and we wanted to minimise its impact already during Hard West where we ended up creating the Luck system that allowed replacing RNG entirely. Most players appreciated the system and it allowed us to do stuff that that other games can't, with a combat economy revolving around that one parameter that determines hits. With the good reception for this particular feature we just decided to make that our design philosophy in Phantom Doctrine and experiment even more with it. Introducing just a tiny bit of RNG would be counterproductive because then we'd have this core designed around fair mechanics without randomness but would actually lose the feature of having a combat system without RNG.

Anyway, as I mentioned, we've been planning to add "mutators" post release, so there's a chance that there will be an optional mode with RNG sooner or later. It does, however, shots do not always hit. A dodged shot where the minimal damage is 0 is a miss.

Admittedly minimal damage seems to be more than 0 too often in the game and as a result there's probably too many graze shots, where a dodged attack still deals damage. That's the kind of stuff we're currently working on improving. I think the fact that some players feel like every single attack hits means that we've done something wrong. Yeah, we really do care and are giving it our best. Heck, it's my day off and I ended up collecting feedback, forwarding suggestions for improvements and posting replies for a few hours, that's how much I care, lol. Quite probably. Working on it.

"Breaking a window alerts enemies" has implications you wouldn't even believe. We're not idiots, we experimented a lot with different solutions for making windows behave more realistically but in far too many cases breaking a window would result in combat because it was heard by some enemy you couldn't even see before going through that window and that's what was hard to grasp: "will this particular order cause combat?" A ton of work went into making sure that this question is answered clearly for each action in the game but with windows it turned out to be exceptionally problematic. The solutions that were possible with the time constraints we had did not satisfy us (and they sure as hell would not have satisfied you) and broken windows not causing combat emerged as the lesser evil in terms of mechanics and UI.

Of course we're ourselves not satisfied with that solution and we'll try to address this in a patch.

I think just because a vocal minority hates rng to then try to remove it from a game is not very good. Besides, the same people who complain about it are the very same people who do not say a thing when shots of 50% or lower hit because OMG, that gotta get fixed, they should miss those more often or so they think.

XCOM wouldnt have been as popular without the infamous 99% shots being able to miss, its part of the appeal. Even 1% shots can be hit sometimes and it feels great doing so.

This game has a lot of potential to rise to the level of XCOMs popularity but i dont think its getting there anytime soon.

This may be an over simplification of the problem, but why not just leave the mechanics exactly as they are with regard to windows and add a new animation so that when in infiltration mode you open the window and climb through it instead of breaking through it. I will grant that it is still odd to see someone climb through a window to enter a room, but certainly less jarring (and less noisy!) than breaking through said window.

Would have absolutely loved that and I'm sure everyone on the team has thought of that at one point or another, alas, that's also the most expensive solution that would have swallowed a crapload of resources. And that's assuming that all window designs in the game even support this kind of animation (many windows currently in the game do not).

It's design-wise the simplest one but the most expensive one in terms of execution. It's the kind of suggestion that gives producers heart attacks.

Nah, I didn't mean to suggest that you implied that, I just wished to underline how there's not a single obvious solution that doesn't come with a massive catch.

The bit that confused me about the windows thing at first was that setting in options, which if set apparently ensures that agents don't go through windows by default. Does this mean the setting does nothing? If so it should be removed or clarified.

BTW is there a way to set waypoints like in XCOM/XCOM2? Because in those games breaking a window WOULD instantly break stealth (even if there was noone around), but it could be avoided by using waypoints. I'm guessing since you mentioned time constraints that waypoints was something that was dropped (or not considered)?