E3 Trailer for spy tactical XCOM-like - Phantom Doctrine!

Started by GeneralHawk, June 09, 2018, 10:16:55 AM

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Pete Dero

Phantom Doctrine v1.0.1 Patch Notes:  https://steamcommunity.com/games/559100/announcements/detail/1689300456280505216

    Fixed: placeholder lines in the Russian localization
    Fixed: disposing of bodies of enemy agents (including story characters) no longer causes a crash
    Fixed: minor corrections in other languages

Thank you for all your feedback and support! We're working on more improvements and fixes. We expect to have all other languages in order tomorrow. We're also working to explain the "shooting through walls" perception and offer alternative designs for it.

sandman2575

Quote from: W8taminute on August 16, 2018, 07:55:44 AM
Picked up the game yesterday and played through the opening tutorial mission and the first regular mission.  Also got a chance to play around the headquarters and world map.

I'm digging this game a lot.  The ai seemingly shooting through walls and windows from across the map is a valid complaint that everyone is having.  But guess what?  Your agents can do the same.  Until this problem is patched I find that if you take out as many of the guards as possible during the quiet stealth portion of the mission you won't have to deal with too many reinforcements during the live fire portion of the mission.  Remember to always check to see if your agents can get a shot off through walls and windows  before moving them and you should be fine.

The real fun of the game is during the planning stages.  On the world map you can send agents to different locations to talk to informants and get information, thwart known enemy agent activities, tail suspect enemy agents to learn more about their network, etc.  Then there are the secret files you work on.  Those files are organized into dossier folders that you go through and try to piece together clues about your enemies and their activities.  The clues are arranged about a cork board.  You 'pin' the clues to the board and then tie 'string' between two or more bits of evidence that you discover are related.  Those files that your agent takes pictures of during missions have a lot to do with obtaining these clues but you can also get clues doing other activities such as talking to informants and successfully investigating enemy activity on the world map.

For me the bottom line with this game is not having to deal with the frustration of the random chance stacked heavily in the computers favor of missing a 99.99999999% chance to hit an enemy during combat and then watching your best soldier that you spent centuries on leveling up die to a long shot from the computer that they always seem to nail.  Instead every shot you and the ai takes hits however the amount of damage dealt depends on various factors such as cover, the amount of awareness you and the ai have remaining that turn, etc.  In this way you have more control over how much damage you take and deal out.

I like this game a lot and will never go back to Xcom.


Great to get a detailed -- and positive -- assessment. Folks seem to be having pretty strong reactions to Phantom Doctrine, either really loving or really hating it. I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt that I will indeed probably love it, though I'm going to wait for them to fix the shooting through walls issue before diving in.

bbmike

I'll wait for now. I still haven't finished the new XCOM games.  :-[
"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence."
-Sherlock Holmes

"You know, just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets."
-Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

"There's a horror movie called Alien? That's really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you!"
-The Doctor

"Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth."
-Clifford D. Simak

Jarhead0331

#48
I agree with W8t...I'm just scraping the surface, but so far I really enjoy it. It has some really nice mechanics and a great cold war/spy atmosphere. The intel board is very cool. Its very rewarding to go the extra mile on tactical operations in order to collect extra intel for the board. You then get to look at the intel for clues and make connections for important locations, valuable gear or operatives, etc. Its also cool to manage the training, abilities, gear and look of your agents. The game seems really complex at first take. Hopefully, it will remain engrossing.
Grogheads Uber Alles
Semper Grog
"No beast is more alpha than JH." Gusington, 10/23/18


bbmike

"My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence."
-Sherlock Holmes

"You know, just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets."
-Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

"There's a horror movie called Alien? That's really offensive. No wonder everyone keeps invading you!"
-The Doctor

"Before Man goes to the stars he should learn how to live on Earth."
-Clifford D. Simak


Silent Disapproval Robot

Seems decent so far.  Some of the language is pretty spotty though.  Lots of grammatical errors and muddled explanations.  I had to go check the Steam community to discover what the "extended" mode was all about as the option to select it was greyed out in my game and it sounded more interesting than "normal" mode.  Turns out it's not really what is described but is only available after you beat the regular game and you can then select extended mode and play as the bad guys.

sandman2575


MikeGER

http://www.creativeforge.pl/cfg-blog/2018/8/17/the-phantom-wallhack O0

this explains very goody why it looks like a bug, but is part of the unavoidable abstraction that just came with having tiles.

my first solution would be that when the animation scenes gets generated both figurines 'move'/lean first to those sidestep tiles that had generated the positive LOS and then the bullet animation gets rendered, ...no walls hit

well, people will then complain: why did my stupid avatar and the enemy moved one tile in the open without orders just to get shot.

the answer is: even so it look like real life, the nice rendered figurines still partly remain kind of "chess pieces" in your game and there always remains a level of abstraction in a simulation.

a side note thought
if you introduce tiles, a quantification , situation gets similar to the Quantum world.
actually the figurine then became a quantum object in that tiles-structured world and its wavefunction gives the likeability it is found on a tile or the tiles around the tile it just get shown in the game visual representation -which the developer calls 'sidstep-algorithm' :dreamer:
Schrödingers Agent  :D

Ian C

Quote from: MikeGER on August 17, 2018, 03:45:18 AM
http://www.creativeforge.pl/cfg-blog/2018/8/17/the-phantom-wallhack O0

this explains very goody why it looks like a bug, but is part of the unavoidable abstraction that just came with having tiles.

my first solution would be that when the animation scenes gets generated both figurines 'move'/lean first to those sidestep tiles that had generated the positive LOS and then the bullet animation gets rendered, ...no walls hit

Perfect solution. However, they should have included this at release. Did no one on QA say " uh, guys, this looks bad?".

Rayfer

mikeger...quantum physics meets pc gaming....I love it.   :D

DoctorQuest

I saw this comment on GOG:

"A warning to anyone buying this game it has save DRM in that your saves are held off your computer and kept in another server. Which means if you save your game, lose internet and try and play this game your saves will be missing as all of your saves are not kept on your computer."

Any idea if this is really the save game mechanism?

And can you save at any point in a game or does it use "checkpoints"?
"Everything you read on the internet is true." - Benjamin Franklin

"Zero-G and I feel fine....." - John Glenn

"I reject your reality and substitute my own." - Adam Savage, inventor of the alternative fact.

Ian C

Hearts of Iron 4, Endless Space 2 (trying the Vaulters for first time), some Witcher 3.

Wrong thread. I wondered where that got to.

Tuna

Quote from: Ian C on August 17, 2018, 12:14:10 PM
Hearts of Iron 4, Endless Space 2 (trying the Vaulters for first time), some Witcher 3.

Wrong thread?

Tpek

Quote from: DoctorQuest on August 17, 2018, 11:43:48 AM
I saw this comment on GOG:

"A warning to anyone buying this game it has save DRM in that your saves are held off your computer and kept in another server. Which means if you save your game, lose internet and try and play this game your saves will be missing as all of your saves are not kept on your computer."

Any idea if this is really the save game mechanism?

And can you save at any point in a game or does it use "checkpoints"?

You can save at any point during the game, including during tactical missions.

No idea about Save-DRM, maybe the people writing it confused it with the Steam Save Cloud.