The AI - both for the crabmen and for the NJ soldiers - has no clue about the likelihood of any given shot it takes. It only knows whether it can fire at a given target or not.
This creates two problems:
Human soldiers will waste their limited ammunition by taking return-fire potshots, often to little appreciable effect.
Crabmen will will potshots from halfway across the map, often shots with a chance-to-hit that no human player would take. To balance this out, they are given unlimited ammunition so that they can afford to continue taking those low-probability potshots. This gives a sense that the enemies are not playing by the same rules as the player, which a) is unsatisfying and b) goes against the spirit of Phoenix Point and its spiritual precessessors.
There is an oncoming measure to address this to some degree - the Mist, which reduces vision range for units within it. But this strikes me as a band-aid of a measure.
While I admittedly don’t know how it could be done, it would be nice if the AI could have some idea of how likely a given shot is to land, and only take shots above a certain percentage. Maybe reaction fire would only trigger against enemies that fill up a certain portion of the yellow circle?
Entirely true, but I’d honestly chalk it up to “pre-alpha syndrome”. It would be so ludicrously clumsy to have this carrying over to the finished version that it can’t be an intended final behavior.
There was a Gollop-post somewhere about the idea of player-designated “area” to where your soldier can shoot with reaction fire (shooting cone, distance, etc.), if/how it will be implemented is something I can’t know.
I think that enemies won’t shoot like now because of at least three reasons:
There will be range of vision so enemies far away wont be seeing you.
There will be AI improvement, so they will tweak how enemies react and at what chance they attack (for example only with more or equal to 50% of chance)
Enemies will also have limited amount of ammunition (do they?) so probably algorithm of AI will also take it into account (little ammo left so don’t shoot unless 75% hit chance and enemy with less than 10 HP)
EDIT:
Actually what I’m also hoping for is that every unit/vehicle/soldier/mutant/mutog/robot will have some melee attack to be able to do anything if they run out of ammunition.
Neither unit vision nor fog of war are currently implemented but will be in the future. Likewise Julian Gollop stated in another thread that they’re considering a directional control for OW that controls both the range and direction that the soldier would fire (no word on how this will work with Return Fire).
Also remember that currently we can’t control the loadouts of our soldiers. Otherwise we could give everyone even just one more magazine (IT’S NOT A CLIP AHHHHHHH!) and be fine in these pre-alpha missions.
