Guys, you don't understand. If you don't spend a huge percentage of your time in tedious warehouse simulation, you never get that thrilling moment of gameplay tension when you forget to pack enough ammo for one of your guys and then combat starts and you have to figure out what to do about it.*
*actual Codex argument for really, truly dull game design
This is more broadly true for Codexian arguments in general. I frequently find that people on here will argue that truly atrocious design decisions are actually good because they are done for "lore reasons", or for "realism", or because they "were fun in some other context", without realising how bad they make certain games overall.
Game's difficulty and economy is obviously tuned with the assumption that you will have to craft separate gear for every character - the ability to freely change items regardless of where your characters are exist simply to not make people butthurt about having to fly their characters back to base every time they craft a new weapon, to pick it up. Devs simply didn't predict that some people will be autistic enough to just craft few sets of gear then manually switch them between all their teams every mission, since it's a ridiculously retarded way to ruin the game for yourself.
You can abuse the system to decrease your need for gear/resources 2-3x, and completely invalidate the game's economy, to be able to technically play at higher difficulty while having an experience closer to lower, at the cost of hours spend on mindless clicking, but if you choose to do that, you have no one to blame but yourself. Bitching that devs should forbid you from doing it because you can't stop yourself, is like saying that government should ban fastfood because you can't stop being a fatass.
So you're (correctly) pointing out that the game has a fundamental design problem and is very easily abusable by it's design, but are then complaining when people criticise it for being abusable and tedious? The correct response is to blame the game for being badly designed.
This is part of the reason why nuXCOM gives you unlimited copies of each weapon when you build it. This introduces it's own problems, but at least solves a lot of the tedium of bad design.
To me, this smacks of being designed "to stop casuals getting unlimited plasma guns", without actually being thought out. The mere fact that it was "more hardcore" was enough to justify it. Who cares if it makes the game more tedious?
Again, OG Xcom fixed this by limiting cargo space on each skyranger. So you could take a small stock to supply your fighters in the field with multiple loadouts, but would have to return to base to make big changes. This encouraged actually building up collections of items, rather than freely being able to exchange things, in a non-tedious way.
Phoenix Point seems like a "hardcore" Xcom clone made by someone who was frustrated by the oversimplification of many of nuXCOMs systems, but who fundamentally didn't understand WHY the original Xcom was good. So we get a hodge-podge of gameplay ideas that end up encouraging really tedious, degenerate micromanagement gameplay.
This is absolutely an issue with the game, and blaming people for "playing it the tedious way" is asinine. If a game provides an optimal strategy that provides SIGNIFICANT advantages (by your own description it basically trivialises the entire economy), and then makes that strategy tedious and boring, players have every right to complain when they have to go out of their way to be bored if they want to be efficient. That's textbook bad game design.
Any game designed around efficiency being annoying and requiring the player to fight against the game's systems in order to be effective is badly designed by definition.
If Phoenix Point wants to maintain the "everybody gets one copy of everything" gameplay design, AND wants to keep equipment teleporting in (which seems contradictory, IMO), they could very easily resolve the tedium with some proper design. Each character should remember the last item they had in each slot, and then they should add an "auto-loadout" button on the squad selection screen, which will automatically strip weapons and armour from undrafted soldiers to equip the current squad, based on what they used last. Easy peasy. Problem solved instantly. But of course they won't do this because then it will very obviously expose how broken the game's economy is, because it's badly designed, so this would require more work on the gameplay side to create an actually compelling economy that's based on strategy rather than tedium.
Phoenix Point defenders baffle me. You can't simply hand-waive away all the game's flaws by blaming players when the game encourages them to do something boring.
I have said it before in this thread and I will say it again: Don't waste your time on Phoenix Point. If you want a compelling XCOM game that isn't oversimplified garbage, try OpenXCom Extended. The original game is almost perfect with a small handful of (built-in) gameplay tweaks.
