Are you guys ever going to fix overwatch?

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
62

This sounds pretty harsh and personal, but anyway …

There is no “non-critical thinking” from my side, I have always said that I don’t like especially this “stands still” behaviour when RF triggers.

Is it so bad that I get really angry because it is not as it should be in my opinion?
My answer is “no, but I would like it when they change it”.
For you my opinion is “non-critical thinking”, OK, I taket it.

Additionally, regardless of any realism discussion, I like that these RF and OW behaviours adds difficulty to the gameplay. I have more to think about how I tackle specific situations and in general this is something I like, especially in comparison to the more brainless OW behaviours in firaxcoms.

So the Pro part of RF just overcomes the Contra part and for OW I even don’t see it so flawed like some others.

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63

Everything can be better. We need to think how and have devs able to implemet it.
Until so, I am back to Sabre team on Vampire

combined with Lost patrol

from time to time I might intecept aliens, if they do dare to come :slight_smile: Glad Vampire is many times faster then plain A1200

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If you have to learn how to overcome flaws of overwatch you don’t think about tactics (at least I don’t), you think about mechanical quirks of the game. You shouldn’t care if overwatch cones overlaps or not and how. I don’t care about wasted shots, If I set 8 overwatch cones on the only doorframe leading out form a room (sounds about like a right, tactical decision), I expect the execution to be… well execution. But here, this isn’t a viable tactic because against all the logic, maybe two of my soldiers will have opportunity to shot before enemy disappear behind the corner. And more often than not, I have to deal with such bullshit. I have to remember that game design is so bad I can’t do what is supposed to be “Tactics for Dummies: Overwatch in One Afternoon”. How come you have to be even more tactical precise on such basic thing? Let me master tactics, not master bad game design quirks.

I don’t know how I couln’t respond in a personal manner if you say you agree with SG explanation and take things as they are. To me this is non-critical thinking, as I have posted you that their reasoning behind the way how OW is done is contradicion of how things are done in RF. And in my opinion both implementations are faulty. And I disagree with their vision (I don’t think they have vision in a first place).

FFS, keep realtime for one-to-one situations, simulate one-to-many. But OW doesn’t simulate anything and is realtime all the way (with sequential animations that makes OW worth shit in one-to-many), and RF simulate one-to-one and freezes one guy so the other could shoot him even if the whole thing could actually be full realtime and there is no need to freeze in place noone! I guess if it would be one-to-many RF as it used to be long time ago it would make sense to freeze a guy for the very same reason I would like to freeze a guy in OW: to simulate a simultanous actions that can’t be realtime simultanous for technical reasons.

It blows my mind how inconsistent the gameplay, regarding it being realtime or not and for what reason, is. That is why I disagree with their vision. I don’t think there is anything that remotely resembles vision behind these skills. This is just bunch of mechanics done without deeper thought about them being gameplay-wise consistent and just stiched together. I know few quite well-known gamedev studios that wouldn’t let this game off the the drawing desk in current form because this prototype is not ready to be worked on by game designers full time yet.

You like the bad RF and OW behaviour because they add difficulty and make them not brainless? Sure, just like we could keep shitty Fog of War in Nests and call it more difficult, non-brainless exploration. Yeah, convincing you reaaaly was on a table. :stuck_out_tongue:

Forgive me if I call it non-critical thinking agreement on such explanation if proof of it being false is around the corner, but if it is not I don’t know what is.

But I am done. Snapshot didn’t give a shit about communication for over year now. Discussions and convincing anyone here is pointless, because we can’t do shit about absolutely anything even if we’ll all agree to something.

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65

OK, got it, just black or white, there is no grey in the world.

I agreed on you that it is inconsistent, I agreed that RF has its flaws, but I’m still non-critical in your mind.
Let’s keep it this way, not worth to discuss this endlessly.

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67

Sure, sure. Now everything makes sense. Gray it is.

You agreed that RF has flaws and you wouldn’t mind if it was changed, but oh well, you take it as it is. :stuck_out_tongue: Maybe it is not non-critical thinking, but something like agreement of mediocrity. It is what it is, good, bad, I’m fine. No need for white, gray is good enough.

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Yes, grey is good enough for me as long as this grey is brighter as it is in other xcom-like games and still it can be improved for sure.
I can only repeat:

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Other games at least were consistent, so I can’t say they are darker. They just shine white in a different direction.

But I don’t give a shit about other titles. “It is illogical and inconsistent but at least it is better than in FXCom”, fuck, this isn’t “gray”. It is deep dark, but at least you feel happy fxcom is darker. :stuck_out_tongue: Ambitious.

But I agree, there is no point in discussing it any longer. There is no point in discussing anything actually. :stuck_out_tongue:

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70

Yes, It is possible I have done it myself a fair couple of times. It is possible. But it is not reliable. Because predict how many overwatch the Umbra is going to trigger is just not possible, or at least not for me. I often fail, reload, do it again, change almost nothing, and then may or not may work.

You can pull it off in my experience 50% of the time, trigger 2 overwatchs is not hard, but against an umbra you need 3 for most of the game, the third… well deppending on how far is the umbra, and how is the terrain, and plain luck… Sometimes.

The point is, it is not a reliable tactic, and is easy to get frustrated by it. Granted I am probably not a great overwatcher. But one of the reasons is I could be easily punished for trying so I often didn’t. And when I did, often I had to save scum the way out of there.

Of course it is less frustrating now, that you can tell appart the umbra. but as also the flamethrowers are not as strong. I simply blow the host arms off, and hope that it runs away and not deal with it, as long as does not bleed out. Because If the umbra appears out of your line of sight is also bad.

Are you danzing around in the hive mind again?

I think we need a bit of perspective. The goal should be how to improve PP. First, we can agree on a problem (hopefully), and then we can discuss about solutions. As long as we do it in a constructive manner.

I hope we all more or less agree on that the current OW in PP, not being reliable, and being a bit too clunky, and a bit slow. It is not useless, far from it. But it is frustrating and punishing.

If you know an enemy will melee charge you from 10 tiles away next turn, but you can’t be certain it can be stopped by your full squad setting an OW trap on it, and I argued you can’t in many cases (Umbra). Then there is a problem. A problem that leads to frustration and to look for ways to cheese the game, and not use OW.

So, can the current OW be improved? of course it can. there are many ways to do it, from teaching better in game how it works, tune it to be faster and more reliable, improve the LoS to fire (so u not fire into a wall because it triggers too soon). To rethink the take turns situation.

We can’t be certain a solution will work, or will not imbalance more the game. But I think diagnosing a problem and proposing ideas is what we can do about it. When someone proposes an Idea to improve the game, and another player says I think your idea would not improve the game can be frustrating. Sometimes the criticism makes sense, sometimes you actually would not know before trying it.

I may be wrong, but I think all the propossed solutions here are interesting enough to at least worth trying.

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72

That’s not great tactics What if the mindfragger you didn’t know was there jumps through the door and eats all the OW shots, then the Arthron brute jumps out and rips you a new one? Happens all the time.

There’s a price to be paid for everyone going off at once. This is one of those playability/realism compromises that I was talking about.

Your scenario is one of the reasons I’d like the option to be able to overwatch a specific enemy. Then you could cover the enemy with some soldiers and the area with others.

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It just seems to me like you guys don’t want to take any damage. Sometimes, the enemy gets through.

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I understand, not every tactic should be used in all cases. But many tactics should be useful in some circunstances.

Sure, if a mind fragger catches my OW maybe I should have planned it better, or is a case of bad luck in the context of the battle, not bad luck with how the mechanics work.

If I plan it well, one OW triggers too son and hits a wall, and other just triggers too late and the enemy just crosses running in front of the OW of the full squad and succesfully melees one of my guys, because the game worked in a way I could not predict. Then the issue is more on the part of the game.

PS:

Funny thing, using OW against mind fraggers can be hilarious too.You shoot the OW to where the MF is, the MF jumps and because of the delay you miss the OW and shoot into the air. You are MFd. That is something that happened to me more than once.

OW worms is nice too, worm falls in front of a OW guy, the OW guy shots to the sky while the worm is about to hit the ground and misses. Then worm, slowly walks to the OW guy, now defensless and explodes.

OW doors has already been commented on.

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WTF, are you serious? :stuck_out_tongue: You have missed the whole point of what I have said. Like, the whole point. Mindfragger is irrelevant. :stuck_out_tongue:

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No, I get what you’re saying, and sure, OW can always be better. I’d like less delay between sequential OW going off. That said, you can make that happen by how you position your soldiers. If, instead of hugging high cover, you step back a square so you’re in free space, then your firing animation is much quicker.

You may object that this is not realistic, but standing slightly back from a corner so that you have more freedom of movement is tactically sound, as long as it doesn’t expose you to other shooters.

As for the Umbra 10 tiles away? Sweet Jesus, back the f up! Give yourself some space for the shots to get off. If you demand that the game conform to what you think are good tactics (which you are convincing me are not good tactics), then you will continue to be enraged.

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77

It’s funny you should mention this, as I’m playing Necromunda miniatures atmo and the Overwatch skill is one of the things that more grief has given me (when facing it).

For me, stuff that I can do during the enemies turn always has to be approached very carefully, because if it’s too effective it can pretty much ruin the game.

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Sure, so we all agree on this. Lets then for once, ack what the issue is, and what direction the solution should go with.

Would not be better just to make firing animation quicker on OW, so you dont have to do weird things that require you to know how the animations work in game, and plan for it? I mean with OW you should be planning on the tactics of the battle not on the implementation of the game.

I think 10 tiles away is not just a bit. Chances are often an umbra host dies next to at least one of your soldiers, and you cant run further away than that. If you also want to take an action.

But, lets reflect upon this. You think an enemy being able to walk trough 10 OW tiles, is a problem of me planning wrong. Not of the game being unrelaiable. If the game was reliable I could plan for it, know how many tiles I would need. And the tiles I would need would be reasonable. I think whatever that number is, it should be less than the current one. Whatever that is, because it is not possible to know.

Also the further away you use your OW, the less reliable it is, and the more chances you have to shoot early, or to a wall. I think setting long distance OW traps, is even worse in PP than trying to set OW at a mid range.

At least we also agree that short distance OW is a deathtrap, and should not be used. Which I think is also a problem.

At least do we agree on time to fire and LoS requisites to fire being OW issues.

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Sure, but actually soldier standing by the cover is not hugging the wall at all and he has all the freedom of movement he needs. So yes, while I agree such thing would be tactically beneficial, here is nothing more but making the artificial correction because of animation duration for lean out makes it longer.

This doesn’t even resolve the issue, it just make it just a little bit less apparent. Soldiers still shot sequentially and it just makes each soldiers turn a bit quicker. Maybe slow-mo enemy to a reaaaly slug-speed (instead of freezing him in place) could be something we could agree on?

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I do not agree. If the best I can do is get 10 tiles from a spawning Umbra, then the pandas got the drop on me and I’m going to take some hits. Sometimes things don’t go your way.

The player soldiers are already powerful enough. To me, your objection seems to be that a game system prevents them from being invulnerable.

I know I’m not going to convince you. Like I said initially, I get consistently good results with OW. I rely on it, and it usually delivers for me. You can believe that or not, but I’m telling you it’s the case.

Granted, my expectations of it are probably different from yours.

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Doing the first one is very important, describing the issue in a form so you (we) all can agree on. I have some doubts that this alone is possible as we can see in the last little conversation here.

Arguing about different suggestions to solve the problem is probably not very fruitful. Everyone has its own idea and in the end the devs come with their solution that is again different, so all will be upset again.
Listing different suggestion is not bad at all, but I would not bet on any of them to get implemented.

So concentrate on the issue :slight_smile:

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Sure. I don’t like the lag time between soldiers’ OW going off. I have to wonder, though, whether the devs made it this way specifically so that pandas would have a chance of surviving the withering hail of OW fire. Efficient OW can make forward progress very difficult (as is true in real life).

Perfect realism does not always make for the best game experience. If your well-executed wall of lead/photons went off perfectly every time, others would likely complain that OW is too good and robs the game of challenge.

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I just dont think this has anything to do with what I said, with the argument, or with the OW.

I mean if you cannot use OW to stop it, then you need to run away, how does this do not support my position?

My main point was the following, OW should be a mechanic that one can plan and predict for, not a luck based unpredictable system.

I said, an enemy walking reliably safe trough 10 tiles overwatched by your squad, is a gimmick of the game, not what is reasonable to expect. You actually have no way to know how many tiles you need to reliably set an OW.

I think these are problems with the OW, and together with the peoblems of OW doors, OW worms, OW MF, firing OW to walls or without line of sight… are problems with the OW of PP.

Your answer seems to be: well, to me OW works fine, because I dont care about these problems you have.

“Sometimes things don’t go your way” is a valid response, if sometimes things don’t go your way because you make bad choices in battle, or if the enemies do something you did not expect, but should.

If sometimes things don’t go your way because the game behaves weird, then the problem is in the game.

People would and does complain about enything that makes PP less challenging, and some people would want the game being so challenging only they could play it.

A complain you dont share is pointless in the discussion. If you think a reliable OW would be OP, then argue that. If you think someone may argue that, then is a non-argument.

So you agreed on wanting the speciffic issues I mentioned improved. You actually think addresing what I said would improve the game. But also think I’m wrong and should not be done?

I’m not sure I understand your point.