You can like Firaxis Xcom more than Phoenix Point, attaching as much importance as you want to particular gameplay elements, but beyond superficial similarities the games have very little to do with each other.
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There is difference between obstacles in a path of trajectory and soldiers taking ācoverā. I dont know how to explain it more clearly.
Xcom has cover. Yes in a simplified boardgame manner with percentage shots.
PP has no cover system.
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Itās more of an obstruction than a cover.
Simplest example is a tree. Standing behind the tree gives you about 30 degrees maximum of obstruction directly in-front. In early builds it means that you get rather large arc at distance but in current game, it takes just a few tiles to get a flank on you.
Cover system in firaxom is gimmicky and based purely on some meta numbers, but at least itās capable of giving you some rough idea of what you are covered against and at which degree. There are other, better ways to do it as well, I donāt consider firaxom to be a good reference for how things can be done.
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Pretty much any game that used time units instead of action points, which means almost anything made before firaxom and Divinity. A notable example is Jazz (russian game) where game took into account that character could lean out of cover to take a shot and they where actually leaning, not stepping out how PP does it.
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I dont want to be in favor of xcom. Actually I want PP to be s superior game. Thats shy i backed it on fig Im not biased to how a TBS should be. I want good deep layered strategy games. PP fails in that to this day.
I personally think PP is fanserving people who complain about missing a 80% shot. Thats why shooting circles are so small that every rookie can do headshots, thats why cover dont work. Thats why you have super soldier abilities. Thats why this game dont work.
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Pretty much to the point.
Most of the differentiators which brought attention to this project are long gone.
Like how we are lured to try out game from the legendary designer who was one of the people who created a genre only to discover that game tries to be more like āfiraxom but without all those things you hateā. Which is a not the greatest basis for the game design and it shows.
How the game changed completely from a steamlined sim like tactical shooter into a super hero boardgame.
The cover system is not cover but obstruction, the AI still doesnāt understand properly how it works, so donāt be surprised by overwatch shots wasted on shooting obstacles.
The ballistics is a glorified dice and roll remover which ended up taking out pretty much any chance to hit by means of other systems. Only new player will be taking shots that might hit, you learn rather fast that a chance shots are not worth the bullets and you can always get 99% chance to hit just by exploiting game mechanics.
The evolution of monsters is what it is, clearly not what was imagined.
The ādynamic worldā with multiple factions is just something that leaves PP in a weird position of not having a place in this world. They are weird organization that is the both world savior and the terrorist, depends on what you do and which lore you read.
āInventory systemā, the innovation here is to have a single pool for all items so it makes everything even more trivial than firaxom, great design.
I not even going to touch the whole subject of art style and some decision like having a melee based factionā¦
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It think that depends on how close you are. The circle is a cone really. I would say that Iāve had three 99% shots miss the same target in a row in Xcom 2. If you miss with PP, itās your own fault because the chances are clear.
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OK, then we disagree with the semantic of āCoverā. For me it is explicitly an āobstacles in a path of trajectoryā that covers a soldier.
Firaxis and other games do some flat number abstractions when you stand direct adjacent to obstacles that give you some ācoverā. PP does it more as you described above and also not only when your soldier is direct adjacent to the obstacle.
According to this letās take another view:
In most TBS games with this abstracted flat number cover system a soldier that stands only one tile away from any cover has literally no cover as long there is LOS, in PP that is not the case.
I stay with my opinion: The result for me is much more reality in PP.
Iām not sure if this is the case, maybe the angles are smaller (Iām no backer, so I have no comparison to any backer builds beside some youtube vids).
However, I am very certain that the greater the distance to the target behind the tree, the more you have to move in order to get a flanking position to get comparable chances to hit.
Edit:
Iām starting to think that your problem is not so much the ācoverā system itself, but the far too high accuracy of some weapons. Iām more likely to be on your side, even if I basically think itās good if a sniper rifle is basically made for that: to hit someone who is well covered.
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The opposite is true. XCOM tells you your percentage, with PP you have to guess. But both still come down to RNG.
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This goes hand in hand, the more accurate the weapons, the shorter fight distance, the less relevant ācoverā becomes. When distances where larger, it was fine, because it was a common thing to spray and pray, while you pull your snipers and heavy guys into a good defensive position. This is not the case anymore, the distances at which fight happens right now are so small that you can outflank or run away in half a turn. In past, you could spray with assault and get a lucky limb disable, right now, that doesnāt happen by chance but by deliberately focusing fire on one body part. This means that AI in any sort of cover is just work for a sniper or you just run and gun. There is no need to prepare a kill zone or lure enemies back into your heavily defended position. The tactical depth of the game went down the drain and got replaced with mindless chaining of abilities.
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And with that explanation Iām completely with you 
Iām only disagree that the base ācoverā system is bad. For me it is completely the opposite, the most real and for this very nice system I ever saw in a TBS game, thatās all.
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You are mixing things a bit.
First of all, you can get misses in PP with 100% cursor on target by the virtue of them still moving in their animations. I donāt see how it can be a my fault when itās pretty much an impossible task to āoutrunā even a pistol bullet just by moving your limb away. I can math you this part if you donāt believe me. The whole thing with exploiting animations I find to be outrageous for the game that claims to be a tactics based and not an action game.
The second part is firaxom silly chance to hit works both ways. Meaning that I can know chances to hit against my troops, not just against the enemy. PP doesnāt have anything like this, you have no idea if someone has an angle on you or not, this is particularly awful when targets are on different high level and you are simple oblivious to the fact that enemy can headshot you.
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I can give you example of the system which is not much different but works better - Jagged Alliance 2. Mechanically it is very similar because what devs did is made a small voxel field for every tile in the game. When bullet is traveling, itās checked against all those voxel fields, so the more stuff you have in-between, the higher the chance that bullet will hit an obstacle. So while the game looks like tile based, it is in fact 3d, just not very detailed at that.
The big difference here is how distance effects accuracy of the shot and how other mechanics work. Like for example you have suppression, so even the missed shots are still contributing. At the end of the day, it becomes normal for the sides to exchange fire and donāt rush into a close range without cover, for a simple reason that even a pistol is able to engage targets at longer distance than even the fastest soldier can run. This is not the case in PP, here we can run and headshot pointblank in a single turn, pretty much any target that can harm us otherwise.
The best ācoverā I find in PP is to completely brake any line of sight and then just rush next turn. Or do exactly the opposite if you play with a team full of snipers - the distances at which they can engage enemy are so large that you donāt even have to take any cover.
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Yep, I forgot about JA2 (didnāt have the original Xcom a similar system? sooo much time I played them ā¦ but I forgot ā¦ lol).
I should say ānewer TBS games of the last yearsā 
Xenonauts 2 does it by giving you chance to hit based on how āblockedā the target is, the distance and etc. I find it to be much more reliable and easier to predict.
Not so. With a percentage you are playing with statistical odds. In xcom 2 with an assault rife which fires a burst of shots the percentage is displayed and you canāt do anything about the RNG. So each bullet hits the same spot. The odds remain the same. But with PP a probability density function (PDF) is used. That means when firing a burst from an assault rife, each bullet is subjected to the PDF.
So 50% of the bullets go in the small circle and the rest outside the small one, but inside the large one.
So if the circle small or large covers the target, you guaranteed a hit.
But if only the small circle is covering a target - a head is good round example, only half the shots are guaranteed. And if the head is only showing because of a lamppost or car, the chances are halved.
If a burst of 4 shots are made then you can risk a miss. The more you see the greater the probability of a hit.
With Xcom 2, one could miss almost indefinitely if the odds are low. You have no control. But with PP, you can move the aiming reticle to decide on the odds accordingly to the shape of the target!
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Finally get through whole topic. Jeez @Martouf82ā¦ If you canāt see advantage of Phoenix Point above FiraXCOM, then I donāt know what to say.
Ballistics in Phoenix Point made me so used to that system that I almost vomit when I see FiraXCOM aiming and hit chances. Like Ementrude said above if you canāt hit enemy in Phoenix Point it is your own fault. In FiraXCOM it was just frustrating RNG where by any reason you should not miss in many cases. BoredEngineer has some right here that too high stats make some elements of combat irrelevant, but this is just case of balancing values, and doesnāt make whole mechanic worse than anything found in FiraXCOM. If we will manage to convince devs to make some changes PP will outperform FiraXCOM in almost any way.
Even multiple projectile system of burst is superior. You can hit multiple targets just with one shot action. I wonāt mention how it looked in Firaxcom where you were shooting with machine gunsā¦
Above has great connection with destructible environment. You can spray things with gunfire to remove cover and reveal your enemies. Yes sometimes obstacles are too fragile, but that is only matter of proper values balancing - show me something like that in FiraXCOM!
Donāt argue about not existing cover, because here everything is cover. You call it obstacles, but those obstacles practically gives you that cover and in any direction and angles. If enemy has a clear sight on your soldier hugging wall wonāt help you. So your example is just a small flaw of the animation system, but whole cover system is just fantastic compared to what we can see in FiraXCOM where bullet go behind obstacles to hit with full burst even without any line of sight. So stop this ānon existing coverā blah blah blahā¦
You have even free aim. You can manually adjust where your soldiers will shoot! Show me something like that in FiraXCOM.
You have friendly fire here, so you need to pay attention to not shoot through your friendlies like in FiraXCOM.
You can perform multiple actions and in any given order, now think for a FIraXCOMā¦ Jeezā¦
Inventory and proficiency system is way better than FiraXCOM. You can give almost any item to any soldier and use it!
You have modular enemies where elimination of some parts can be crucial to your survival. In FiraXCOM you just hit or you critically hit which means some more damage. Greatā¦
You have multiple bases, multiple aircrafts, multiple fighting teams, 4 factions with different views and techs doing their job on geoscape (not some scripted sh*t), you have vehicles, you have giant monsters (only 2 are bigger but it counts), you have many status effects and groud effects which can alter battlefield and capabilites of soldiersā¦
So FiraXCOM has cutscenes and some talking charactersā¦ Oh and smoke grenades plus some weapon modifications, plus couple of nice maps. Ta DA! That is everything which I can think of better in FiraXCOM.
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Yeah these poems about āit just needs balancingā are getting old half a year after release of the game. So it boils down to talking about potential not about the actual state of the game.
It has a potential to be a great game if all mechanics would work well with each other. The reality is that no one has any idea when this could actually happen.
Some odd features, like friendly fire, to me personally has no meaning. Itās not a mechanics that you can use in a game, its simply a side effect of the algorithm.
Pretty much all of your points fall flat when compared to other games from the same genre, like Xenonauts for example. Even Gear Tactics have a number of improvements that are pretty obvious. Shall we do such comparison? At the end of the day, you are doing pretty much what devs did, market the game ālike firaxcom but everything is betterā, then fail to deliver or acknowledge that other games already did that in the past or doing it right now.
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But Iām not comparing it to any other game. Question was about FiraXCOM. And being in Council makes me aware of changes that can come to this title. I advice patience. Of course some bad stuff will stay in the game, but we will have mod community which will make all those cases straight.
Ok, so as long as it has some features that are cooler than some of the firaxcom itās a great game? What are we talking about then.