First of all, I actually appreciate the idea of returning fire which makes combat more intense and dynamic. Also I’m fine with destructible covers.
The thing is, when my soldier takes shot from cover, I would expect them to take full advantage of what they have. For example, you can blind fire when taking cover in Gear of War, so you don’t have to expose your body during combat.
Currently the firing animation of Phoenix point is just like XCOM2: my soldier would first sidestep outside of his high cover before taking aim. It is fine in XCOM2 because you know enemies won’t punish you when you are taking shots unless they have certain skills like Covering Fire activated, which is a rare occasion.
However in Phoenix Point where returning fire is such an universal skill, the risk you take when firing on targets skyrockets. When I take aim and attack, my target is covered; but when my target retaliates my soldier is literally standing in the open. Cover becomes somewhat useless and punishes offensive actions. Furthermore, every enemy (usually out of player’s sight) would open fire on my attacking solider as well. Not to mention 80% of enemies I encounter are machinegun Crabman with returning fire skill. This is quite painful.
I would like to see my soldiers’ firing animation revised. At least don’t let them abandon their cover when firing anymore, or let them return to their cover before enemies retaliate.
I think these two are not unrelated We don’t know how common return fire actually will be in the finished game with all the various enemies and their mutations instead of the small sample you can see now.
Perception system is not yet implemented, should reduce “out of sight” return-fires for most cases (unless they have better vision than you… is standing in Mist still planned to grant vision to the virus-boyz?).
True, but depending on how they do things the Return Fire bit won’t be an issue in the final game (or later BB with more of the systems fleshed out and added in). For example they could make a tile limit to it in addition to the standard sight range limit. Or it could be that they have the mist merely let the enemy “know” where you are but not actually “see” you (important distinction in this case). Something like the EW gene-mod that would show the electrical outline of enemies even if you couldn’t see them (other side of the wall, stealthed flying octopi that try to kiss you, etc).
The more I think on it the more I think it will be more of a “knowing” bit as opposed to actual sight. Remember that in UD and TFTD if the aliens saw even one soldier the game got to cheat and see ALL your soldiers, but even with that the game still required proper range for the aliens to shoot at you. Exception being Psi attacks and Blaster/Disruptor Launchers…hence always doing Psi attacks on the weakest Psi troop and/or launching Bombs into the largest cluster of troops; but neither of these attacks required proper LoS to use.
What would be interesting to implement might be a peek feature, where you can have your soldier peek around a wall or over cover. Your aim would be worse and so it would be more beneficial to step out unless you have a whole bunch of them ready to open fire on your soldier. This way it adds another tactical option for you. So you can have them peek around a corner. I think this would be fantastic! It probably would be too hard to implement, so I’m not really holding out too much hope for this idea.
Right, I forgot about these cones of fire related to Overwatch and Return Fire.
And now my thinking outside of Overwatch and Return Fire cases.
You have good and realistic reasoning, but I think that it won’t be the case. Devs said that there won’t be set any artificial limit for shooting range. So if they see you (also know you are there) they will probably shoot you during their turn.
Instead of this ‘artificial range limit’ I think there will be just AI calculation about hit chance. If chance will be too small they won’t attack. So this will be not because they don’t see you. If there will be any ‘sniper’ alien, then he will shoot you through whole map.
Just few more animations for soldiers, and new points where cone of fire starts. So I suppose it is not so hard… But if all enemies would also use this mechanic then there would be a lot of work to do for animators and programmers. So something like that could be postponed to next DLC after full release.
It isn’t so much an artificial range limit as a visual limit. In OG XCOM the aliens still had to be within visual range to shoot at you even though they could see you from beyond that due to how the AI got to cheat.
The problem with RF not firing based on hit chance is that then there’s a decent chance they won’t fire at soldiers who are in cover even if they’re within normal firing range.
We don’t know how common return fire actually will be in the finished game with all the various enemies and their mutations instead of the small sample you can see now.
And there was a mention that there will be maps covered in mist, not just produced by queen or mist sentinel. So we are screwed.