Phoenix Point – Starter Tips (First Playthrough)

Tips for First Playthrough

Сrеdit gоеs to Artek [General]!

IMHO you can and should cut off almost all DLCs for the first playthrough minus “Living Weapons”, maybe “Kaos Engines” and maybe “Blood and Titanium”.

The latter in particular introduces a faction that got a taste for spamming extremely armored soldiers who will quickly test your understanding of armor mechanics and how to counter them.

As for the general tips…

• You start the game with incomplete squad of, i think… 4 people? Maybe 5 if you complete the tutorial? Unsure. Anyway: get 5th and 6th soldiers ASAP to fill the spots on the plane to maximize your early game combat efficiency.
• The green naked rookies from “recruitment” tab are cheap, but weak, starting with minimal possible stats. Their primary selling points are being cheap (in a sense that you just hire them for food… but you still have to dress them) AND telling you their talents outright which allows you to find a particularly neat combo early on.

Find and hire best candidates with crazy talents early and then you can forget about those recruits after like week 2 or 3 unless desperate.

Instead you should research Haven Recruitment Protocol (its one of the first research projects you have to complete i think) and hire new soldiers from havens directly.

They come with higher stats (proportional to their level) and come already prepackaged with their own faction gear (Armor & Gun on Rookie & Veteran, only Armor on Hero and naked on Legendary).

The only downside is that they don’t tell you their talents until you already hired them. Inconvenient, but not really a problem.

• A very important mechanic one needs to understand are the Skill Points.

You see: reaching a max Level 7 with soldiers is not really a problem in this game.

The real problem is having good stats.

Skill points are not only used to unlock new abilities, but also to level up stats – including HP, WP and Speed (how far they can walk during their turn).

Your soldiers will receive a decent chunk of SPs when leveling up, but once they stop leveling up (Level 7) – the ONLY source of new skill points to increase stats further are combat deployments.

Basically: the soldiers that will see the most deployments will become your elite soldiers boosting highest HP bars, Will Points and Speed, irrelevant of their actual level.

Your very first soldiers usually will become your elites, your 2nd B-team will be decent enough, but everyone after that are just expendables.

• Multiple base facilities stack.

2 Medical Facilities at the same base will heal soldiers twice as fast. 4 Training Facilities will fill up your new recruits with EXP real fast. Faster than missions even.

Laboratories and Manufacturing Facilities stack globally.

• Get a 2nd plane ASAP. You can craft it OR you can steal it. Latter option is 1000 resources cheaper and you can do it the moment you have a full 6 man squad which will save you a week of manufacturing time.

The downside is that this will set back relationships with that faction for a while, which means you will be behind on getting new research projects from them.

• Tiamat aircraft is the worst aircraft. Its way too slow and can’t get anything time-sensitive done ever, not to mention exploration speed of molasses. The only use i’ve ever found for it is abusing its’ extreme reach capabilities to get to places my other aircraft can’t get to otherwise.
• A mechanic that the game never really mentions nor teaches you about – you can send multiple planes to the same mission and deploy a squad from combined units of those planes.

Every mission in the game allows 8 soldiers always and some extremely hard missions allow you to deploy 9. Always pay attention to that: if mission allows 9 soldiers – then you probably should take that offer. Its always story related mission too.

Vehicles Tips

Scarab

This thing is imo, the most powerful beast, especially when fully upgraded with DLC content. It only has enough ammo for 4 attacks but wow, with a Scorpio turret it can wipe out groups of enemies with ease and demolish buildings. Its also very fast moving and can carry 4 soldiers. 3 or 4 well placed salvos can shred all of a Scylla’s legs and leave it bleeding to death and immobilized. Scarab makes Spawneries easy, just locate the snail and launch long-range attacks with the Scorpio turret to pop its egg sacs and leave it bleeding to death.

Armadillo

This is the best looking vehicle and has good weapons. Nests are very quick and easy with the default weapon. The DLC fire weapons are well… fire is OP. It is also fast, tanky and can carry 4 soldiers.

Kaos Buggy

It has 2 good weapons with better than average ammo capacity for vehicles. Tanky as well with lots of HP. Interesting DLC upgrades. However, I find the visual design, sound fx, and and clunky animations to be too annoying. It can also only carry only 2 soldiers.

Aspida

Flimsy, boring weapons, dies very quickly and yet still takes up 3 slots. Can only carry 1 soldier, maybe 2 using a valuable upgrade slot? When you find one of these in a retrieve vehicle mission its like rolling a 1 and you get a consolation prize..

In General

Soldiers can pop in and out of vehicles to fire at enemies, throw grenades, use abilities, and technicians can even repair the vehicle. This keeps vehicles being very valuable even when they run out of ammo. Soldiers in vehicles are protected against many threats. One of my favourite strategies is to drive up close to an enemy, pop out a Sniper with heavy weapons proficiency and fire a Deceptor cannon point blank, not much survives a full hit to the head! Also, with a bit of creative driving you can demolish the walls of some buildings to expose enemies hiding behind them. Finally, vehicle ammo costs nothing to replenish.

Where vehicles tend to have a usage is:

• Early game when you don’t have enough solders to fill up the aircraft.
• Scavenger missions – the pop a couple of soldiers in the back and whizz from crate to crate and only using the soldiers to shoot at any Pandas who get too close. In such cases an assault with Ready for Action is good.
• Rescue Independent soldier missions are easier if you have a vehicle like the Scarab or Armadillo that can carry 3 people and then rush to where the soldiers are. The vehicles tend to have the health that they can pick up the indie soldiers and rush away without being destroyed. Worth going in with a few snipers hanging around the exit point to snipe at any Pandas.
• Retire to base defence. The default 4 shots should make taking out troublesome Pandas while acting like a meat shield if at the base with a reduced soldier roster.
• Panda Lair missions – especially with the Kaos Buggy whose mortars are useful for lobbing over the landscape to weaken up Sirens – I’d estimate about 80% of the time you can get a reasonable line of site to the spawner (once located) with each shot usually having a good chance of disabling the Egg Pods. If you get the line of site then it reduces the risk of needing to get your soldiers close to the spawner without being ambushed by Sirens.

My favourite is the Kaos Buggy as you get 16 shots compared with the 4 that others have. For the Scarab, I tend to upgrade to the 2 x 120 rockets, upgrade the Armadillo to the Fire Mortar and generally avoid the Aspida…