I previously wrote about a bunch of problems that Palworld has as an early access game, but one stands out in terms of moment to moment gameplay. That would be the constant raids/invasions of your base, which are not well balanced or set up at the moment, and only serve essentially as a “tax” on your world, with no actual benefit for successful defense. Just alleviation of harm. And guess what? You can turn them off. I’d consider doing that until much of the below is fixed by Pocket Pair.
The problems with raids are numerous:
- The raids scale to your player level, not your Pal level, where your Pals are usually lagging behind since only you get significant experience from catching wild Pals. This means if you’re level 40, you will have a bunch of 41-42 enemies storming your base, when you have 35-39 Pals on your team, most likely. And then you have a base full of all levels of Pals, many of whom will be miles under that cap. So, depending on the group of enemies, you will often see most of your Pals slaughtered (temporarily).
- Enemies like the fire-based soldiers or their Pals have the potential to burn down entire wooden structures you’ve build even if one part is set on fire.
- You can see normal costly, buildings destroyed losing you loads of materials that it took to build them.
- You will spend a good amount of costly ammo defending your base alongside your pals, and you will get absolutely nothing in return other than some small amount of gold, random ammo or Pal materials. You, your Pal team and your base Pals do not get any XP at all from killing enemies in what are legitimately the toughest fights in the game.
- Pal AI continues to be a problem for fights as well. I built machine gun nests for defense, ring the alarm bell and…no Pals go to man them, so what’s the point?
The only real benefit I’ve seen from raids is that sometimes if you are extremely lucky, you can manage to catch a high level Pal or two in the chaos for your collection. But most of the time, your base will be damaged, you may die, a bunch of your pals will be incapacitated and need to go on a full ten minute cooldown. The entire system makes me want to stay in my base as little as possible.
So, my advice, unless you are a glutton for punishment or consider this some essential “survival” game thing, is to turn off raids in the settings for the game. Pocket Pair lets you change a ton of different settings for your world, and there are some other useful ones like a faster building rate for items, which helps when the AI is being extremely stupid. And also faster XP gain.
But while those feel like “cheat codes” in some ways, I think turning off invasions is justified until there are some serious fixes made to the system. They don’t serve a purpose other than causing you to burn resources or force you to put your best workers on cooldowns. I guess some people may have fun building elaborate defenses to mitigate harm, but as of now, I don’t think it’s worth it at all. At the very least, the invasions need to give you meaningful rewards and significant XP for defense, instead of just…nothing, unless you get a lucky catch off.
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